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A World Climate Change Convention: Exploring the Science and Economics of Climate Change
No full textOn October 16th 2018, a fictitious Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in my Masters of Environmental Economics and Management graduate course. Dr. Lauchlan Fraser’s graduate class from the Masters of Science in Environmental Science program joined to simulate the mock- UN climate negotiation role –playing simulation developed by professors from MIT’s Management Sloan School and played all over the world. Results from the simulation illustrates the difficulty associate with keeping temperature anomaly below 2 °C increase relative to pre-industrial levels as most representatives selected a climate-ramp up policy instead of aggressive cuts with no delay. Given the pledges, temperature anomaly increased to 2.5 °C by 2100. This is significantly below the business as usual predicted warming of 4.2 °C and lower than the level predicted by the promises made from the Paris Agreement. Damages are lower relative to business as usual but not eliminated. Developing regions suffer the most from the warming of the planet. As a result converge of standard of living across regions did not materialize by 2100. Students’ feedback showed strong engagement and active learning taking place. In this session, I will present the game and some of results from the trial
Determination of Octanol-water Partition Coefficient for Indolicidin45 using Vesicular Electrokinetic Chromatography (VEKC)
No full textAntibiotic resistant bacteria (superbugs) are becoming an increasingly significant problem. There are new bacteria emerging that are completely resistant to the pharmaceutical industry\u27s conventional antibiotics such as penicillin, cephalexin, etc. These superbugs are extremely dangerous as there is essentially no way to kill them, and many sicknesses have fatal results. In recent years, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have begun to garner interest. Bacteria have a very difficult time developing resistance to AMPs because they are very fast-acting. AMPs show a lot of potential to becoming a solution for the antimicrobial resistant pandemic that the future could hold. The AMP, indol45, an analog of indolicidin which has had the 4th and 5th tryptophan residues replaced with alanine, has shown increased antimicrobial activity along with reduced hemolytic activity when compared to indolicidin, making it a more viable candidate as an antimicrobial agent. The antibacterial properties of this peptide are still unknown. It is important to discover whether the bacteria are killed via lyses of its membrane or if the AMP enters the cell and kills it by a different mechanism. The aim of this research is to discover the answer through VEKC. VEKC is a variation of Micellar Electrokinetic Chromatography (MEKC), but is more adapted for larger molecules such as indolicidin45, and is therefore the ideal method. By determining the octanol-water partition coefficient, the ability of the drugs to pass through the membrane of bacteria can be determined. Determining the partition coefficient will help us establish the mode of action of indol45 and its derivative indolicidin’s antibacterial properties, clarifying its potential ability as a therapeutic antimicrobial agent
The Influence of Spatial Scale on the Quantitative Importance of Stemflow
No full textForests and other vegetation communities can play an important role in the volumetric importance and spatial distribution of rainfall that reaches the soil surface to partake in the terrestrial portion of the hydrologic cycle. Vegetation canopies can intercept and store rainfall, evaporating it back to the atmosphere (interception loss). That portion of rainfall not partitioned into interception loss does not reach the ground in a spatially uniform manner. Instead, the drainage of rainfall can take the form of throughfall – passing directly through canopy gaps or dripping/splashing from the canopy, or stemflow – flowing down the boles of trees and stems of other plants. Historically, much interest was placed on the amount of rainfall that was partitioned into interception loss as it may represent a sizable fraction of rainfall not available for tree growth or streamflow. Interception loss is estimated as the difference between rainfall incident on the canopy and the sum of throughfall and stemflow, with interception estimates typically made at the forest plot-scale and extrapolated to the watershed-scale. As such, the volume of stemflow is artificially distributed over these larger areas even though stemflow is confined to a relatively small region around the base of trees and stems of other plants. We apply recently advocated for stemflow metrics to previously published stemflow data from around the globe to show that, when viewed from the appropriate scale, the depth of stemflow reaching the soil in the proximal area of the base of trees and other plants is far from inconsequential
Gibson Assembly of PCR-Produced DNA Fragments
No full textIn molecular biology, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a tool that allows for the selective amplification of any specific target DNA sequence and is widely used in the construction of recombinant DNA molecules. Joining together PCR-produced DNA fragments to form such molecules is often a difficult process, as PCR amplification produces DNA with blunt ends; this causes the classical method of using DNA ligase alone to become unreliable as the DNA fragments lack the complementary (or sticky ) ends that bond spontaneously in solution and increase the efficacy of DNA ligase significantly. This project plans to explore the use of a newer method of joining blunt-ended fragments known as Gibson assembly, which uses DNA ligase in conjunction with DNA polymerase and exonuclease in an isothermal sequence of reactions to assemble fragments. The only additional requirement of Gibson assembly is that the fragments must have overlapping sequences at the end where they join, as this results in sticky ends when the ends of the five-prime strands undergo degradation by the exonuclease in the first reaction. The exonuclease then denatures from the heat, and the degradation in the now-annealed strands is repaired by DNA polymerase. DNA ligase can then join the adjacent ends of the strands. In theory, Gibson assembly accomplishes in an hour what would otherwise take days or weeks using classical methods; the aim of this project is to directly compare the results of Gibson assembly to traditional methods of ligating PCR-produced DNA fragments
The Advantages of Gay Parents: Examining the Outcomes of Children of Same and Different-Sex Parents
Get PDFIn Canada, approximately 0.8% of couples are of the same sex, and there are approximately 10,000 children living with a same-sex couple (Statistics Canada 2015). At this time, there are no Canadian studies examining outcomes of children raised by same-sex parents compared with their peers raised by different-sex parents. Given that mental health, physical health, and educational outcomes among children from Western nations are generally comparable, it follows that data from multiple American, European, and Australian studies may be expected to predict trends for outcomes in Canadian children. A remarkable number of studies on the topic have emerged in recent years in the United States, Europe, and Australia. This paper reviews international studies on various outcomes of children of same-sex parents, and seeks to apply the findings in a Canadian context. Specifically, this paper will review outcomes of children with same-sex versus different-sex parents on measures related to three broad categories: psychological well-being, physical health, and education. After adjusting for socioeconomic factors such as income and education, no significant differences are discernible in health and development between children of same-sex couples versus children of different-sex couples. Additionally, some scholars have noted that children of same-sex couples outperform their peers on matters of education and civic engagement. Perceived differences between the two groups are more likely attributable to secondary factors such as parental income, level of education, and parental engagement with their children. Reference: Statistics Canada. 2015. Same-sex couples and sexual orientation... by the numbers. Retrieved from: https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/dai/smr08/2015/smr08_203_201
SESSION 1.2: Teaching BC Literature: Ecocriticism, Eco-grief, and Rage
Get PDFEcocriticism’s potential to unsettle literary studies and English departments, through instruments as various as climate change anxiety, animal ethics, and the love of nature, has been a regular theme of field-surveying overviews. From Cheryl Glotfelty’s introduction to the 1996 Ecocriticism Reader, through Ella Soper and Nick Bradley’s to their 2013 Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, such overviews provide ecocritics with ready solace and strength for their potentially transformative missions as green researchers, writers, and teachers. This potential, however, remains unrealized. While such principled statements are enabling and empowering, ecocriticism remains to some extent a liberal fantasy and neoliberal distraction. Such, at least, has been my recent experience with a variable-content environmental humanities course I’ve taught regularly over the last decade, which this year featured Rita Wong’s undercurrent, Theresa Kishkan’s Winter Wren and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu. And yet I remain convinced, as do my students, that a peculiar potency resides within place-attentive literature from and of a place where a course is running. In this paper, which will draw heavily on my students’ contributions, I will describe how we managed to open up to and about our eco-grief and rage, in reading these three literary works and through successive encounters with key ecocritical texts (notably Wong’s “Decolonizasian”). The act of placing our intellectual and emotional responses to environmental crisis helped us, as one student put it, to “bring everything we’ve ever learned, to bear on everything we’re doing”: to productively unsettle ourselves and our studies
SESSION 3.2: Where Is the Internet? Judicial Responses in British Columbia
No full textThe onset of the internet age spurred debate among legal scholars over how territorial principles might apply (if at all) to cyberspace. Could a Canadian be prosecuted in Germany for posting hate speech? What if a Canadian’s private information is stolen by a hacker in Japan? With little in the way of international internet governance agreements, courts have been left to wrestle with this problem on their own. My presentation uses defamation law to examine judicial responses in British Columbia. I argue that BC courts have treated the internet as a place with a dual geography: one overlapping with the geography of the real world, and one unique to cyberspace. This approach offers one model for thinking about how the internet works, and how its law might be reformed
SESSION 1.1: Roughing it on Colonial Vancouver Island: The Misadventures of Henry Trent and Friends, 1862-63
No full textDespite the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and youth, the latter term remains somewhat nebulous as far as age-range is concerned. Thus, historians of nineteenth-century manhood have applied the term “youth” to describe the transitional period between middle-class boyhood and manhood, the life-stage they associate primarily with marriage. Yet the average North American male did not marry until his mid-twenties when he was well past the dependent stage generally associated with youth. In fact, the central subject of my study, Henry Trent, did not marry until the age of thirty-eight in 1864 when his wandering days in search of a middle-class livelihood finally ended. Borrowing from the “emerging adulthood” concept of psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, I refer to Trent’s transitional years during his twenties and thirties as his period of emerging manhood. As Arnett states, this term is more fitting than “young manhood” which implies that full manhood has already been reached. My paper relies largely upon the diary Trent kept during his long and arduous expedition from London, England to Victoria during the Cariboo gold rush in 1862, as well as during the ensuing two years when he and his young middle-class associates worked at various low-paid jobs on Vancouver Island. The diary makes it clear that they were less motivated by gold fever than by the desire to experience an adventure that would test their independent manhood. And they were not alone in that respect, for much the same can be said for the surprising number of young Englishmen who produced memoirs of their harrowing experiences travelling to and from the Cariboo during the gold rush
SESSION 2.1: A Landfill of Mutual Benefit : Solid Waste Management within Delta and Vancouver, 1958-1966
No full textHistorical studies of individual landfills remains a critical lacuna, even within the subfields of discard studies, environmental history, and urban history. In response, the author\u27s thesis examines the history of Vancouver\u27s landfill, situated in Delta since 1966. This presentation, centred upon the first chapter, traces how and why the Delta landfill came to be. The timeline will thus address Vancouver\u27s and Delta\u27s waste disposal practices from 1958 to 1966, the conception of the Delta landfill in 1960, the negotiations leading to the 1962 bylaw agreement between Delta and Vancouver, and Vancouver\u27s immediate, and unsurprising, mismanagement of the site from its opening in 1966. The 1962 bylaw agreement between the municipalities was grounded in one key concept, mutual benefit. As much as scholars and laypersons alike tend to characterize landfills as toxic products of consumerism, Delta\u27s residents had a myriad of reasons - economic, political, and technical - for not just consenting to the landfill, but desiring it. By focusing on practices in relation to promises, it is clear that the situation cannot be summarized as the residents of Delta were ignorant and the City of Vancouver\u27s landfill was an exploitative, high modernist solution to Vancouver\u27s own garbage problem. It is hoped that such a study will contribute to scholarly understandings of high modernism