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Catch the King Tide 2024: All King Tide Data
No full text"Catch the King" is a community science GPS flood extent mapping effort centered in Tidewater Virginia, USA, that seeks to map the King Tide's maximum inundation extent with the goal of validating and improving inundation prediction models like the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Tidewatch Map (https://cmap2.vims.edu/SCHISM/TidewatchViewer.html). This 36-hour storm tide inundation forecast model is based on the Center for Coastal Resources Management’s open-source SCHISM hydrodynamic model’s operational outputs, updated every 12 hours at noon and midnight (EST). Timestamped GPS-reported high water marks were collected by volunteers to effectively trace the high water line by pressing the 'Save Data' button in the free Sea Level Rise mobile app (available on iOS and Android) in regular intervals along the water's edge. Catch the King was founded as a collaborative effort to give members of the public an opportunity to engage personally in climate change adaptation. While the development of the Sea Level Rise app was led by Wetlands Watch and local tech company, Open Health Innovations (formerly Concursive), the idea for creating a statewide program stems from the creative minds of Wetlands Watch’s former Executive Director, Skip Stiles, retired Virginian-Pilot reporter, Dave Mayfield, and Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) assistant professor, Dr. Derek Loftis. Throughout the year, trained tidal flood mappers use the free Sea Level Rise mobile application (iOS / Android) developed by Wetlands Watch and Open Health Innovations (formerly Concursive) to walk the high water lines in public spaces near them to digitally trace GPS contours of the maximum extent of tidal flood waters. These data are shared publicly after the end of the mapping event and used as a public annual tidal calibration for the forecast predictions generated from VIMS' Tidewatch Map. Annually, a live tidal calibration of the forecasts driven from the Center for Coastal Resources Management's SCHISM hydrodynamic model (developed by Dr. Joseph Zhang) is conducted by the trained participatory scientists engaged with Catch the King, and analyzed by Dr. Loftis at VIMS. Catch the King 2024 took take place on the weekend of October 17-20, 2024, during some of the highest astronomical tides of the year, which were harmonically forecasted to be 3.58-3.66 ft. above MLLW at Sewells Point in Norfolk, VA. The king tide took place at many different times and occurred at different peak amplitudes throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia's coastal region, yet each was forecasted to be the highest tides of the year for those areas. Catch the King 2024 had 187 volunteers map 22,845 high water marks using Wetlands Watch's Sea Level Rise App during the king tides on October 17-20. The volunteer breakdown for Catch the King in 2024 revealed that Norfolk, VA collected 5,082 GPS-recorded high water marks among 46 volunteers. Many of our community scientists in this region are Master Naturalists and Master Gardeners, so a special thank you goes out to these groups of diligent volunteers who helped collect data in unique places in rural tidewater VA. 44 volunteers in Virginia Beach came in second by collecting 3,505 high water marks. We had 9 different regions collect over 1,000 high water marks throughout the king tide weekend, so a big thank you goes out to our dedicated volunteers for their help in mapping the king tide this year! Here is a daily breakdown of data collected during the 2024 Catch the King Tide Weekend: 55 people on Thursday, October 17, mapped 3,916 GPS maximum flood extents and captured 112 time stamped geotagged pictures 53 people on Friday, October 18, mapped 3,838 GPS maximum flood extents and captured 123 time stamped geotagged pictures 101 people on Saturday, October 19, mapped 10,183 GPS maximum flood extents and captured 277 time stamped geotagged pictures 67 people on Sunday, October 20, mapped 4,908 GPS maximum flood extents and captured 105 time stamped geotagged picturesVirginia Institute of Marine ScienceCenter for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM
Navigating resistance in leadership training
No full textThis article offers an introduction to leadership training contexts, what resistance is, how resistance can show up in leadership training contexts, stories of resistance in leadership, and what practices might address resistance in these training contexts. Resistance can be described as a critically conscious act, whether verbal, cognitive, or physical, in which the act is in opposition to either someone or something. It is essential to understand the context in which the resistance is happening, as well as what is being resisted and who is involved in the act of resistance.Educatio
Social Souls / Faith, Culture, And Cognition
No full textThe first paper, "Social Souls: Three Quaker Women Navigate Self and Society at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century," explores the lives of three Quaker women, each of whom traveled in the itinerant ministry throughout the British Atlantic between 1690 and 1740. In telling the interconnected stories of Elizabeth Webb, Jane Fenn, and Elizabeth Ashbridge, this paper explores how these women balanced their individual identities and spiritual callings with their roles within the Quaker community and broader society. Through analysis of their writings and actions, this paper uses three women as examples for exploring broader questions about the relationship between individuals and communities as well as the interplay between self and society in Christian context. It argues that although community was essential to Quaker identity, the risks and paradoxes of these women’s behavior reveal that the Quaker self was not entirely constructed in relation to social factors, but also was characterized by a strong intrinsic element of faith often overlooked by historians. The second paper, "Faith, Culture, and Cognition: Experimental Methods in Historical Analysis of Indigenous Christians in Seventeenth-Century New England," examines the relationship between religion and culture in the context of seventeenth-century Martha's Vineyard, focusing on the indigenous Wampanoag community's encounter with Puritan Christianity. Central to the analysis are the stories of several Wampanoag Christian individuals including Wuttununohkomkooh, Hiacoomes, and Japheth Hannit, which serve to illustrate the paradoxical relationship between cultural practices and spiritual beliefs. The paper argues that while religion is embedded within culture and shapes individuals' lifestyles and worldviews, it also possesses a transcendent aspect that surpasses cultural boundaries. By exploring this duality, the paper sheds light on the broader implications for understanding religious faith and the historical discipline's methodological challenges. This analysis moves beyond traditional historical methodology and explores insights from interdisciplinary cognitive cultural studies in order to understand experiences of faith with a paradoxical relationship to culture. The research emphasizes the need to consider both the cultural expression of faith and its intrinsic, extra-cultural component to fully appreciate the nature of religious experiences and the indigenous response to colonial missions.HistoryMaster of Arts (M.A.
The road to sovereignty: How the Karuk people fight for Indigenous sovereignty in a colonial environment
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Old Series: Volume 4, Number 1 (February 1995)
Get PDFWe don’t read alone. You might consider this a rallying cry of at least a significant sub-group of the Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network. We read with. “Ehyeh imach,” says God to Moses out of the Burning Bush, “I will be with you”; and being-with is a postmodern theme, in three senses: We don’t read alone. This means, first, that the text we read is not a naked text whose meaning displays itself to anyone who would see it. It is a text that speaks in certain ways to certain groups of people. We read with-others as part of some group. That is a rabbinic rule of reading that is being repossessed by postmodern scholars. A second meaning is that, even when reading individually, we read-with. As shown by late modern analysts of interpretation theory, we read with presuppositions. A text doesn’t simply mean something, but means something with respect to the beliefs and pre-understandings we bring to the text. Postmodern reading may be distinguished from modern reading, however, by its assumption that there is an ultimate presupposition without which reading is not the reading we have in mind: namely, that we are reading with-God (even if Jewish readers are not accustomed to encunciating this partnership so explicitly.) This third meaning, we might say, is the biblical assumption recovered by postmodern readers. We read with others, we read with our assumptions, and we read with God’s presence. By postmodern reading, we mean simply whatever reading comes after modern reading (and we expect there will be many more kinds yet to come!). By modern reading, we mean a reading that witholds assent to inherited traditions of reading until certain questions about them can be answered satisfactorily to suspend commitment to inherited forms of reading for fear that those readings may carry with them some germ of error or illusion or imperialism and, striking out on its own says, “we have ourselves, alone, to rely on. Let us make use of whatever faculties we have of ourselves alone our reason and our feelings to erect for ourselves some criterion against which to judge the validity of our ancient texts.” To say we are “postmodern readers,” then, means that we are disillusioned with this modern stance, having found that it breeds irreconcilable oppositions between merely rationalist and merely emotivist rules of reading. We fancy ourselves, at least, to inhabit a third stance. This is not a climactic one, to be sure; ours is too sad a posture to claim for itself any triumphalism. Seeking to resume some of the reading that modernity interrupted, we attempt to listen once again to inherited traditions, while also acknowledging our own modernity and, with it, the gap of uncertainty and ignorance that now separates us from these traditions. As for who we are, specifically, within this NETWORK. Speaking for at least one sub-group of NETWORK members (and others will speak for themselves on these pages!), I’d conclude that, as gathered here, we are scholars trained in a variety of modern discourses: historical-critical, literary, social-scientific, philosophic. At once proficient in these discourses and suspicious of their inadequacies, we bring them to the classical texts of our traditions to read texts in ways we have not done before. The texts of primary interest to us are biblical and rabbinic (talmudic, midrashic) as well as kabbalistic, medieval-philosophic, and, of more recent vintage, Jewish-American, -European and Israeli literatures. In this early stage of the group’s practice, study of Talmudic texts serves as a prototypical introduction to the three modes of reading-with I mentioned earlier. Unlike traditional and modern readers, we do not presume to recognize before the fact of reading the behavioral authority of the specific texts we read nor the optimal method for uncovering what the texts have to offer us. We come with various, strong hypotheses about what this authority and this method may be, but the matter is to be resolved only through our interactive dialogues with the texts and with each other. This open-endedness might be daunting were it not for our faith in the guiding power of the corpus of texts to be addressed and of our emergent community itself
Faculty Matter: A Case Study Of Rural Community College Faculty Involvement In Vertical Transfer
Get PDFThe community college has one of its missions to provide access for students who intend to transfer to a 4-year university using a vertical transfer pathway. As potential advocates for students in the transfer process, faculty who work in community colleges need to recognize the importance of supporting transfer students and help to improve the transfer pathways. Yet, little is known about the role faculty have in promoting transfer. The purpose of this dissertation study was to investigate the role of community college faculty in the vertical transfer process. The study addressed two research questions: How do community college faculty perceive their role in the transfer process? and How do community college faculty interact with potential vertical transfer students? A case study of a rural community college in Virginia with a high percentage of its students transferring and a dedicated transfer center served as the research site. Data analysis used the theoretical framework of momentum. Faculty perceived their role as a connector for transfer students and interacted with aspiring transfer students both in and outside the classroom. The community college faculty worked with content area faculty at the local 4-year schools and collaborated with the college’s transfer center to inform students of transfer resources. In particular, a faculty member was highlighted as a role model in advocating vertical transfer and bridging academics and advising. This advocacy role helps extend the understanding of the momentum theory. The study contributes to new insights into faculty’s essential role in building transfer students’ momentum toward a successful transfer and showcasing rural community college faculty involvement in vertical transfer to inspire higher education institutions to engage faculty in achieving institutional transfer mission, supporting transfer students, and fostering more equitable transfer pathways.EducationDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
Mercury causes degradation of spatial cognition in a model songbird species.
No full textMercury is a widespread pollutant of increasing global concern that exhibits a broad range of deleterious effects on organisms, including birds. Because the developing brain is well-known to be particularly vulnerable to the neurotoxic insults of mercury, many studies have focused on developmental effects such as on the embryonic brain and resulting behavioral impairment in adults. It is not well understood how the timing of exposure, for example exclusively in ovo versus throughout life, influences the impact of mercury. Using dietary exposure to environmentally relevant methylmercury concentrations, we examined the role that timing and duration of exposure play on spatial learning and memory in a model songbird species, the domesticated zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis). We hypothesized that developmental exposure was both necessary and sufficient to disrupt spatial memory in adult finches. We documented profound disruption of memory for locations of hidden food at two spatial scales, cage- and room-sized enclosures, but found that both developmental and ongoing adult exposure were required to exhibit this behavioral impairment. Methylmercury-exposed birds made more mistakes before mastering the spatial task, because they revisited unrewarded locations repeatedly even after discovering the rewarded location. Contrary to our prediction, hippocampal volume was not affected in birds exposed to methylmercury over their lifetimes. The disruption of spatial cognition that we detected is severe and would likely have implications for survival and reproduction in wild birds; however, it appears that individuals that disperse or migrate from a contaminated site might recover later in life if no longer exposed to the toxicant
