43 research outputs found
2004 Updated Arts for All: Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education
No full textARTS FOR ALL: Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education provides guidance and an outline of how to achieve this vision. It presents a comprehensive series of policy changes, educational initiatives, and establishment of a new infrastructure to promote systemic and balanced provision of the arts, and identifies the roles of key stakeholders. The Blueprint proposes that systemic change can only occur through the cooperative participation of all stakeholders and by working to develop supportive policy and action at each level of involvement.Since 2002, when the Blueprint was adopted, much progress has been made toward achieving its vision and many new partners have been engaged in the process. Updates on pages 11 -- 17 reflect this forward movement
2002 Original Arts For All: Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education
No full textARTS FOR ALL: Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education provides guidance and an outline of how to achieve this vision. It presents a comprehensive series of policy changes, educational initiatives, and establishment of a new infrastructure to promote systemic and balanced provision of the arts, and identifies the roles of key stakeholders. The Blueprint proposes that systemic change can only occur through the cooperative participation of all stakeholders and by working to develop supportive policy and action at each level of involvement
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Student Perception of Feral Cats and Their Effects on Campus Wildlife
No full textUndergraduate thesis exploring feral cat management. In many urban areas, feral cat (Felis catus) populations are so large that they have become a nuisance. The goal of this thesis is to understand student perception of the University of North Texas Feral Cat Rescue Group (FCRG) program, a Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program on campus. In particular, the author focuses on the role that ecological information has in shaping student opinions about cats and conservation
Intervention d'Adélie Le Guen
No full textL’enseignement artistique lesbien de Terry Wolverton : prise de parole des artistes femmes et performances de genre. Vidéo bientôt en ligne!/ Video soon available! Diplômée du Master Métiers et Arts de l'exposition (Rennes 2), Adélie Le Guen a travaillé en musée et galerie. Chercheuse et critique d'art indépendante, elle s'intéresse particulièrement à l'espace intime de la chambre et de ses inscriptions sociales et politiques au sein des arts visuels, aux études de genre, théories quee..
The Human Factor: Ecological Salience in Ornithology and Ethno-Ornithology
No full textAt the heart of the interplay between names and knowledge is the relative salience of different taxa. Hunn (1999) described four, semi-overlapping, kinds of salience: phenotypic, perceptual, cultural, and ecological. Whilst the first three are well documented, Ecological Salience remains largely hypothetical in the literature. In this paper I test Hunn’s concept of Ecological Salience by reference to 3,186 recorded English folk-names of British birds. The numbers of names recorded across 57 species represented in this study range from two (Nightingale) to 180 (Grey Heron). A significant positive correlation is demonstrated between the number of recorded folk names for a species and a measure of ubiquity in the 19th Century. Using original bird census data collected by the author for other purposes in the 1990s in farmland and woodland in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, I demonstrate an overall correlation across Linnaean species between the number of names, number of monolexic names, and three measures of specific relative abundance and distribution. The percentage of names for a species that are monolexic, which is an indicator of familiarity, also correlated with the relative abundance of species in farmland, but this relationship was driven entirely by species with little recorded folklore. For those taxa with documented significance to 19th century and earlier English folk culture, which tend to carry more names than predicted by ecological ubiquity alone, there was no relationship between the extent of monolexis and the relative abundance of a species. The study suggests that Ecological Salience was a significant driver in bird naming in pre-industrial English folk culture, that more frequently encountered species were more likely to develop an associated folklore, but that an effect of acquired cultural salience operated as a driver of overall specific salience, potentially masking the effects of ecological salience
Environmental protection and optimal taxation
No full textStruck by the fact that economists did not have a plausible model for why emissions standards, and mandated technologies, play a dominant role in pollution control, the author sought answers to two questions: 1) Should one stimulate emissions reductions by firms, and households, rich and poor, in the same way? 2) How should one combine instruments that make activities cleaner, with instruments that shift the economy toward less-polluting activities? Using clean air as an example of a pure public good, he shows the role of emissions taxes, or such surrogate instruments, as emissions standards, and presumptive Pigouvian taxes. To illustrate the combination of demand management, and technical controls, he computes a marginal cost curve for emissions reductions in the form of cleaner cars, and fuels. And he estimates a demand model for cars, and driving. The result: under the assumption that revenue, and re-distributive transfers bear no premia, the cost of reducing pollution in Mexico City increases forty four percent if an emissions standards program is used, and the presumptive Pigouvian tax on gasoline is not. The important finding, as costly redistribution, and revenue generation are introduced, is that this influences the general scheme of taxation (in well-known ways), and it influences the conditions for optimal environmental quality in accordance with Pigou's conjecture. However, it does not change, or invalidate the rankings of technologies, and interventions on the control cost curve, nor does it change the role of demand management in environmental protection.Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy and Environment,Pollution Management&Control,Economic Theory&Research,Carbon Policy and Trading
The Two-Part Instrument in a Second-Best World
No full textThe views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, although the research described in this paper may have been funded entirely or in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it has not been subjected to the Agency's required peer and policy review. No official Agency endorsement should be inferred
How late can you update gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays without detection?
No full textThis study investigated perceptual disruptions in gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays (GCMRDs) due to delays in updating the center of highest resolution after an eye movement. GCMRDs can be used to save processing resources and transmission bandwidth in many types of single-user display applications such as virtual reality, video-telephony, simulators, and remote piloting. The current study found that image update delays as late as 60 ms after an eye movement did not significantly increase the detectability of image blur and/or motion transients due to the update. This is good news for designers of GCMRDs, since 60 ms is ample time to update many GCMRDs after an eye movement without disrupting perception. The study also found that longer eye movements led to greater blur and/or transient detection, due to moving the eyes further into the low-resolution periphery, effectively reducing the image resolution at fixation prior to the update. In GCMRD applications where longer saccades are more likely (e.g., displays with relatively large distances between objects), this problem could be overcome by increasing the size of the region of highest resolution
Conditions for Creativity: Lessons for Lesbians in the Lives of Romaine Brooks and Terry Wolverton
No full textOil Industry Megaprojects: Our Recent Track Record
No full textUpstream Megaprojects Revisited: What Is the Problem?
Abstract
In a recent major study of industrial megaprojects, the author finds that E&P megaprojects fared very poorly. By contrast, earlier studies showed that the results of E&P megaprojects were about the same as megaprojects from other industrial sectors. With this much larger and more recent set of megaprojects, we find that upstream megaprojects are more fragile than their non-E&P cousins. The author attributes this finding to the poor functional integration that characterizes upstream project organizations, which makes these complex projects much more sensitive to poor preparation, schedule aggressiveness, and loss of continuity in the project leadership.
Introduction
Projects throughout the process industries—petroleum, chemicals, minerals—have been getting significantly larger and more complex over the past decade or so. The underlying reasons for increasing project size and difficulty are understood: We are developing natural resources in progressively more difficult circumstances simply because we have to. Moreover, the choice of E&P developments is influenced by the decisions of some large resource-holding countries to restrict or delay the development of some more easily accessible reservoirs.
Eight years ago at OTC, I reported on a distressing pattern we were seeing in offshore projects: Success, measured by how well we meet promises made at the time of the financial investment decision (FID), declines rapidly with project size (OTC03). While projects in the 600 million range were largely successful (OTC03), the success rate for the megaprojects—defined as over $1 billion measured in constant start of 2003 term—was about 50 percent. Interestingly, megaprojects in other industrial sectors, such as downstream, minerals, and chemicals, had about the same rates of success and failure.
This year, with a much larger sample of both upstream and other process industry megaprojects, our conclusion is quite different. While non-petroleum development projects increased in size and difficulty, they maintained a success rate of about 50 percent. The rate of success is certainly not good, but at least it had not declined despite the much more difficult projects market. Meanwhile, performance in petroleum development megaprojects collapsed; only 22 percent of upstream megaprojects could reasonably be called successful. The successful projects were spectacularly successful. The other 78 percent are a sorry lot indeed: 33 percent real cost overruns, cost indices that averaged 1.37, execution schedule slip of 30 percent, and a disappointing 64 percent of projects that experienced serious and enduring production attainment problems in the first 2 years after first oil or gas.
What explains this nose-dive in relative performance? Why did the success rate tumble for E&P while holding steady in the same market environment for other industrial megaprojects? What is it about upstream projects—or the approach used to execute them—that made them more fragile than other megaprojects during this period?
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