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Climate Change Effects on Snow Conditions and the Human Rights of Reindeer Herders
Get PDFBy ignoring the needs of indigenous livelihoods, traditional forms of land use that have long been sustainable, new forms of land use and the construction of infrastructure threaten the right of indigenous peoples to engage in traditional livelihoods. It is the aim of this article to analyze the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of primary and secondary effects of climate change. For the purposes of this paper, the term “primary effects” will be used to describe immediate effects of climate change. This includes temperatures which move around freezing instead of being solidly below freezing.
Primary effects of climate change also include the increased presence of deciduous instead of evergreen coniferous trees. The loss of leaves causes less snow to stay on top of the trees, when compared to evergreen trees, hence more snow reaches the ground, resulting in an increase in snow cover, which in turn makes it more difficult for reindeer to move around and to dig through the snow for food.
Secondary effects of climate change, for the purposes of this research, refer to increased (usually but not necessarily non-indigenous) activities in previously inaccessible areas such as Sápmi. This can include the construction of new roads, railways or other infrastructure, increased logging, mining or tourism activities, but also, for example, the construction of wind energy installations. Although the focus of the legal issue will be secondary effects, the text will first provide a look at primary effects of climate change on reindeer herding before looking at the secondary effects caused by an increase in infrastructure which has been made possible by climate change.
Because it would go beyond the scope of an article, the issue of wind energy installations will be dealt with in more detail as an example for such measures which cause secondary effects. Wind energy was chosen as an example because it remains an emerging issue in Sápmi, but one which has a lot of growth potential and which can be seen as a way to fight climate change. It is also highly relevant due to the continued uncertainty with regard to the long-term effect it has on reindeer herding.
After these practical considerations, the focus of the text will shift towards rights of indigenous peoples under international law in order to answer the question of how international law protects indigenous reindeer herders in the context of climate change
Reevaluating Wilderness Classification and Management in the Face of Climate Change: A Reconsideration of Values and Ecology
Get PDFIn recognizing that the very nature of wilderness is a human construct, the values sought to be preserved can and should be reevaluated, considering the importance of wilderness in light of climate change and global ecosystem resilience, as well as how wilderness is designated and managed. Furthermore, the values that wilderness provides us will dramatically increase as climate change proceeds. Section II of this article describes the basics of wilderness protection, including the evolution of our relationship with wilderness, the history of the Wilderness Act, and what, how, and why wilderness is protected under the Act. Section III explores how wilderness will be impacted by climate change and the debate over how to manage wilderness given these impacts. Section IV argues for passive management of wilderness areas, as it is consistent with the text and purpose of the Act and it best preserves ecological stability. Section V argues for a subtle, yet essential, loosening of the definition of wilderness and the urgent need for increased wilderness preservation to strengthen the resiliency of our global ecosystems
Black and Blue: Media Attention in Red vs. Blue States, An Analysis of Violence Against LGBT Between 2004 and 2015
Get PDFViolence against any person is unacceptable; however, there seems to be a tacit collusion with perpetrators when the media non-reports or under-reports incidents of violence in which the victims are targeted because of their actual or perceived LGBT identity. One wonders if the political and religious broad brush strokes of a state influence the response of the media within that state. Close examination of this data will determine if there are discrepancies between the two types of states regarding their portrayal of anti-LGBT attacks. How does the governmental bias of a state influence the coverage of these attacks? All states with in the United States will be examined in this research, through newspaper articles and TV and radio news reports, to determine if there are significant differences in the portrayal of anti-LGBT violence as a result of the red or blue status of the state
Keystroke Biometric Studies with Short Numeric Input on Smartphones
No full textA keystroke biometric system was developed to accommodate touchscreen keystroke features. In addition to the usual key-press and key-transition features available from mechanical keyboards, the touchscreen features also included pressure, press location, accelerometer, and gyroscope information. Short numeric input data, ten-digit numeric strings, were collected from 52 participants on identical Android smartphones. A number of user authentication biometric experiments were performed on these data to measure overall system performance and to quantify the biometric value of various feature subsets. System performance was measured using the standard biometric techniques of receiver operating characteristic curves and equal error rates. Two validation models (repeated random sub-sampling and leave-one-out cross-validation) and two distance metrics (Euclidean and Manhattan) were compared in the study. Results were compared to previous keystroke biometric studies. The touchscreen keystroke features not available on mechanical keyboards greatly outperformed the usual mechanical-keyboard-like keystroke features with an equal error rate of 3.9% to 19.7%, respectively. Additionally, the Manhattan distance metric outperformed the Euclidean distance metric, and leave-one-out cross-validation outperformed repeated random sub-sampling. Of the various touchscreen feature subsets, the gyroscope features performed best with an equal error rate of 4.3%
Food Finder Mobile Application: Reducing Food Wastage and Saving Money Through Mobile Application Technology
Get PDFFood Finder is an Android App designed to keep track of the user’s food inventory. Its notable features include, but are not limited to, a barcode scanner, e-mail sharing of data, and being language-neutral. The target audience is universal, with special emphasis on the elderly.
Food Finder was designed to be simple and straightforward to navigate. The user can add items either by keying them in or by scanning the item bar code; items are organized by location, with tabs for refrigerator, freezer, and pantry, as well as a tab for items that they need. The “share” feature allows users to send grocery lists to relatives and friends via email. Food Finder uses the phone’s keyboard language settings to save food in the user’s native language.
Most food goes to waste quickly and people should be aware of their food stock to avoid overspending at the grocery store. People also constantly forget what food they have and do not have at home. Using Android Studio, we coded Food Finder to enable people to efficiently manage their food stock, thereby increasing productivity in their daily life
UN Environment Guide for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Laws
Get PDFThis Guide is written as a sequel to the 2007 UN Environment Programme Handbook for Legal Draftsmen on Environmentally Sound Management of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Resources.
This Guide, as the Handbook, is written in response to needs expressed, particularly by energy efficiency and renewable energy project initiators, government officials, energy managers, project developers and particularly developing country energy legal draftsmen, asking for assistance in drafting legislative provisions for promotion and implementation of sound energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
The Guide describes the key legal issues associated with efficiency and renewable energy resource development, and presents legislative options from both developed and developing countries for dealing with them, including sample excerpts from legislation. A new section is included describing available mechanisms for financing energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. Another section has been added providing case studies analysing the laws of a variety of countries, namely from Colombia, the Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa, Ghana and Korea.
The Guide is designed to be user-friendly. Accordingly, it has been written as a stand-alone document, not requiring back and forth reference between the Guide and the Handbook. As was stated in the Handbook, “the focus here is on national legislation, but encompasses national constitutional provisions, regulations and state and local laws where they are the key determinants of the promotion of efficiency and renewable resources. Emphasis is placed on adaptation to local country needs and conditions.”
The Guide is divided into seven sections. Section One, Issues of General Application, contains legislative information on issues pertinent to all energy efficiency and renewable energy applications. Section Two, Energy Options, describes the choices to made evaluating energy efficiency and renewable energy in the context of the other available energy resources. Section Three, Project Financing, describes a range of financing methods and resources that have been used successfully
\u27And Ain\u27t I a Woman?\u27: Feminism, Immigrant Caregivers, and New Frontiers for Equality
Get PDFThis Article argues that feminist and other critical legal theories can address the profound inequalities that immigrant workers face. Part I draws from a body of feminist, political, and social science theories regarding social reproduction to assess the situation of immigrant domestic workers and their recent efforts to claim inclusion in workplace laws and protections. It locates the increasingly carceral dynamics that are expressed in the law and in state infrastructure and continuously undermine immigrant women\u27s economic and social stability, as explained in further detail in Parts L.A and I.B.2, infra. Unbeknownst to many, the present period is the most dangerous for an undocumented immigrant worker in history. Deportations have crescendoed to record highs after a decade-long investment in sophisticated detection, detention, and deportation apparatuses by two Presidential administrations. Conversely, statutory rights - e.g., the right to minimum and overtime wages, the right to organize, and the right to be free from sexual abuse or harassment-are largely unenforced as a result of ongoing contradictions in our labor and immigration laws, the currently irremediable power dynamics between non-citizen workers and their employers, and the low societal priority for allocating resources to combat these abuses.
Part II examines the importance of immigrant women workers in the United States and their disproportionate share in the feminization of low wage work at a time when society\u27s critical social-reproductive work has been shifted to them. Over the past decade, immigrant women workers have organized state-by-state campaigns to improve the domestic work industry, and have steadily built political power by allying with labor unions. In 2013, intense lobbying by the same organizers brought about the first-ever inclusion of an immigrant visa for caregivers of the elderly and disabled in S.744, the last major immigration reform bill to pass the Senate. But those workers, who are predominantly in-home employees and overwhelmingly female, have been denied minimum wage and overtime protections for more than seventy-five years; newly enacted regulations to bring them within those protections were halted before they were to take effect in 2015, in a power play by the $90 billion caregiver industry. Employers today continue to marginalize, devalue, and capitalize upon the labor of immigrant women in ways similar to those previously used for women\u27s labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Part Ill analyzes the resurgent organizing of immigrant and minority caregivers nationwide for rights, respect, and recognition, with the understanding that including immigrant women in the body politic is critical to challenging the increasingly harsh policies that impair their safety daily. A feminist practice supporting socially just laws and practices for all women cannot remain apathetic to the role of the state and its laws in subordinating entire populations of women in the workforce, or selectively support neoliberal policies such as proposals to import female immigrant caregivers from abroad simply because they can do this work for us. To do so denies the status-, race-, class-, and gender-based devaluation of social reproductive work, with privileged U.S. women desiring the labor but not the lives of other women. Because our nation\u27s immigration system is now inextricably bound up with carceral forces, including detention, deportation, and local law enforcement, feminist analysis must broaden its reach beyond traditional assumptions of citizenship and the legal status quo. While this Article is far from a comprehensive account of immigration status as a dimension of experience, by analyzing domestic workers and caregivers as a case study, I suggest a new role for feminist legal theory and critical legal studies to elevate the discourse surrounding immigrants\u27 rights in future rounds of the immigration reform debate. Just as Sojourner Truth challenged women and men by asking, And ain\u27t I a woman? to connect the abolitionist and feminist causes in 1851, we must today situate feminism to include those that are not white and not privileged 15 and address issues of immigration and citizenship. Immigrant caregivers\u27 growing campaign for rights, respect and recognition invite feminists to engage in a twenty-first century discussion about non-citizen women\u27s rights
The Relationship Between Internal Parental Representations and Psychopathology
No full textAttachment theory provides information about the way in which an infant connects to their caregiver and can inform future relationships. Most measurements of attachment focus on the parent\u27s description of their attachment history and how they relate to their infants. The Hart Inventory of Parental Representations (1992) accounts for the child\u27s description of his or her attachment to both caregivers. It combines psychoanalytic theory, object-relations theory and attachment theory and it can explain the child\u27s thoughts about the self and others (Hart, 1992). It is a self-report measure that is easy to administer. It saves time in that there is no need for extensive interviews to administer and score. The use of the IPR in this study provided a deeper understanding of how children internalize their parental figures and how this impacts their well-being. The IPR was validated as a measure of internal parental representations with both high school and college students (Hart, 1992; Soliman, 2006). The following research study explored the association between attachment, psychopathology, and experiences in close relationships. While doing so, it further analyzed the structure of the Inventory of Parental Representations as a means of measuring more distinct scales of insecure attachment in a clinical population. The scale of facilitating individuation was removed as well as many items that did not load heavily on one construct. The research gathered from this study informs clinicians about attachment theory and its association with psychopathology in individuals within a clinical setting. It was found that the more insecure internal parental relationships were associated with depression, anxiety, borderline features, and other disorders but not with drug problems and aggression. This information informs treatment on how to use attachment-based approaches in creating a secure base so that the individual can integrate positive internal parental representations and symptomology can improve as a result
Zoning’s Centennial: A Complete Account of the Evolution of Zoning into a Robust System of Land Use Law—1916-2016 (Part I)
Get PDF2016 is the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the first citywide comprehensive zoning law. Its original purpose was to create districts that separated incompatible land uses and building types in order to protect property values and promote the health, safety, and welfare of the community. 100 years later, zoning is used to achieve an impressive number of public objectives such as permitting transit oriented development, creating green infrastructure, preserving habitat, species, and wetlands, promoting renewable energy facilities, reducing vehicle miles traveled, and preserving the sequestering landscape
The Lautenberg Act: Chemical Safety Overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act
Get PDFOn June 22, 2016, President Obama signed the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (Lautenberg Act), a landmark bipartisan compromise legislation designed to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The Lautenberg Act makes it easier for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate toxic substances while providing the chemical industry with regulatory clarity and certainty. Law Librarians, practicing lawyers, and academics have taken note of this groundbreaking law that most likely will set the template for the next generation of environmental reform by tackling issues such as preemption of state law, protection of vulnerable populations, and the balance between industry’s need to protect confidential business information and the EPA’s need to access this information to evaluate chemicals