Flaveria Research Articles

Potential for Applying Intergenerational Practice to Protected Area Management in Mountainous Regions

One way of preserving the natural and cultural diversity of mountain areas and supporting their sustainable development is the establishment of protected areas. The scientific literature acknowledges the importance of participation by local stakeholders and of considering social cohesion in protected area management. Intergenerational practice has been shown to enhance participation and improve social cohesion; however, its potential role in natural resource management has not been considered by the research community. This paper explores the potential for integrating intergenerational practice into protected area management in mountainous regions, guided by 3 research questions: What challenges of protected area management could benefit from intergenerational practice? How can intergenerational practice help to address these challenges? And how could intergenerational practice be more strongly integrated into current protected area management? The paper focuses on selected management challenges, mostly related to the development function of protected areas, and suggests intergenerational practice solution pathways for each challenge, derived from qualitative content analysis of the literature, interviews with protected area and regional development experts, and participation in the project Big Foot: Crossing Generations, Crossing Mountains, which tested intergenerational learning approaches in 3 rural municipalities—one each in Bulgaria, Greece, and Italy. Recommendations are proposed for integrating intergenerational practice into protected area management policy and practice at the global, regional, and local levels.

Traveling Companions: Narrative Diffusion of <em>Floire et Blancheflor</em> in Medieval Miscellany, 1325–1400

All models are wrong, but some are useful.-George BoxThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.-Mark TwainIntroductionIdentifying how a narrative travels from one place and time to another, and hence from one culture or community to another, remains a persistent problem in both folklore studies and literary history. Often, the movement of narratives must be triangulated and approximated from the surviving evidence. For the medieval period, such evidence is often scant and difffijicult to evaluate-of the narratives that survive in written material at all, many of those survive in only a handful of manuscripts. This article contends that when the manuscript corpus of a medieval narrative is found largely in a specifijic type of manuscript-the vernacular anthology or miscellany-one can use the increased context provided by the anthology to trace the geographic and temporal difffusion of a narrative across literary communities and to see what companion narratives travel with a given story. Using the foundational European tale of Floire and Blancheflor, I explore what a narrative's traveling companions across its surviving corpus can tell us about the narrative cultures through which it traveled.Floire and Blancheflor fijirst appears in the written record as the twelfth-century Old French romance Floire et Blancheflor. It possesses a moderate number of manuscript witnesses, but so many or so few as to render it an outlier among surviving Old French narratives. Further, the manuscript witnesses appear across a wide swath of geographic and linguistic areas, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Ultimately, I suggest four iterations of traveling companions for the tale: (1) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Mainete; (2) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Claris and Laris; (3) Floire and Blancheflor, Amadas and Ydoine, and Partonopeus of Blois, and (4) Floire and Blancheflor, Blancandin and Orgeuilleuse d'Amour, and Partonopeus of Blois. Viewing Floire and Blancheflor as fundamentally tied to these sets of stories in a given narrative community changes our understanding of the narrative's reception in its time.With the rapidly increasing commercialization of manuscript production over the thirteenth century, bespoke vernacular manuscripts were increasingly available to the wealthy, secular public. While some of these codices contained only a single text, many were what are now referred to as vernacular literary anthologies. It now appears that a great deal of the so-called miscellany manuscripts are, in fact, organized according to principles ranging from rudimentary groupings of thematically related texts to an elaborate overall design (Huot 11). Who, exactly, was doing that organizing is open to question; however, it would have necessitated a complex interaction between bookseller, scribe, and patron. As the written trace of a complex narrative culture, manuscripts were assembled not casually but deliberately, as a result of someone's decision that it should exist, as a result of common or group decision that it should be made in this fashion and another (Rouse and Rouse 3). This intentionality does discount the possibility that such seemingly random collections of texts simply existed for the sake of convenience, or so that the reader would have more than one story at hand. However, when patterns of association between individual narratives crop up repeatedly across multiple such manuscripts, we can make begin to hypothesize about the potential thematic, cultural, or historic connections between them.New Codicology1 values the codex as an object of inquiry rather than the corpus, treating each codex as a living artifact rich with multiple sites of meaning (material, textual, and historical). In this scenario, each book is an idiosyncratic individual, capable of being parsed only when confronted as a whole. …

American carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890

As the year 1890 wound to a close, a band of more than three hundred Lakota Sioux Indians led by Chief Big Foot made their way toward South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation to join other Lakotas seeking peace. Fearing that Big Foot's band was headed instead to join hostile Lakotas, U.S. troops surrounded the group on Wounded Knee Creek. Tensions mounted, and on the morning of December 29, as the Lakotas prepared to give up their arms, disaster struck. Accounts vary on what triggered the violence as Indians and soldiers unleashed thunderous gunfire at each other, but the consequences were horrific: some 200 innocent Lakota men, women, and children were slaughtered. American Carnage - the first comprehensive account of Wounded Knee to appear in more than fifty years - explores the complex events preceding the tragedy, the killings, and their troubled legacy. In this gripping tale, Jerome A. Greene - renowned specialist on the Indian wars - explores why the bloody engagement happened and demonstrates how it became a brutal massacre. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including previously unknown testimonies, Greene examines the events from both Native and non-Native perspectives, explaining the significance of treaties, white settlement, political disputes, and the Ghost Dance as influential factors in what eventually took place. He addresses controversial questions: Was the action premeditated? Was the Seventh Cavalry motivated by revenge after its humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Should soldiers have received Medals of Honor? He also recounts the futile efforts of Lakota survivors and their descendants to gain recognition for their terrible losses. Epic in scope and poignant in its recounting of human suffering, American Carnage presents the reality - and denial - of our nation's last frontier massacre. It will leave an indelible mark on our understanding of American history.

Using Water with Oil Immersion Lens to Detect Malaria Parasite in Blood Film and Making a Comparison between Oil and Water Method

Background: Oil immersion lens it is one of the microscope lenses that used in medical laboratory filed. It is used to magnify the smallest things and for detection of some important infectious diseases such as bacteria, parasite, anemia’s and bone marrow films, but uses lens alone without oil makes the image imperfect and unclear, so to make a better image scientists were used oil with these lenses (immersion oils lens) to avoid bending of light . Objectives: The main aim of this study is to be used distill water with oil immersion lens instead of synthetic oil to detect malaria parasite to low cost of using synthetic oil especially in faraway places due to difficulties of paying synthetic oil and also to be arrived to rural area, and so on to be used with other tests, beside avoiding using impurity oil due to the comment of D/ Fahad Awad (National Coordinator for Malaria Program), against using sesame oil especially in some laboratories at Al Gedaraf State, see Aray Alaam newspaper 5th December, 2013. Methodology: In this study a total of 200 subjects were included. A 3 drops from capillary blood samples were collected in clean dry dust free slides after disinfectant the 3ed or 4th finger for adult and the big toe hand or foot for child with 70% alcohol to make a thick blood films, or Aliquots of 2.5 ml of venous blood were collected by venous puncture after disinfectant the site of collection and the collected blood was drawn into EDITA containers to make thick blood films as above. The films were lets to dry by air, staining with Giemsa stain for 10 minute and then examined for the first times with DW with objective lens and for the second times with synthetic oil. Results: There were no differences between using oil or distill water (DW) for detection of malaria parasite by both techniques (100%), unless the high quality of oil image (100%), when comparing with distill water (DW) image (90%), due to variation in numerical aperture (NA) between both techniques. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study we can used distill water (DW) but with caution to detect malaria parasite by 90% when compared with oil 100% in case of poverty areas to low cost of using synthetic oil, and so on the image quality can arrives (99.5%) if do it in proper way.

Reconstruction of Bottom Surface of Shoe Last Based on Foot Pressure Distribution

The thesis presents a reconstruction of bottom surface of shoe last based on foot pressure distribution in order to relieve the influence caused by plantar pressure concentration. First, in order to match the plantar pressure data and the shoe last data, the shoe last data is processed to locate the center location of the heel, the sole and the big feet thumb. Then the pressure data is also processed to extract the corresponding data which is interpolated and fitted of the area of the heel, the sole and the big feet thumb. and then the establish area of bottom surface is determined depending on the pressure data of three area. Finally, based on the extracted pressure data and the convex-concave coefficient of pressure data, the reconstruction of bottom surface of shoe last is achieved.

Big Foot: Sustainable Regional Development through Intergenerational Learning

Elderly citizens living in remote mountain areas are a vulnerable group that face social and economic marginalization. Young people from these same remote areas are migrating to urban centers for i...

Object Recognition System in Remote Controlled Weapon Station using SIFT and SURF Methods

Object recognition system using computer vision that is implemented on Remote Controlled Weapon Station (RCWS) is discussed. This system will make it easier to identify and shoot targeted object automatically. Algorithm was created to recognize real time multiple objects using two methods i.e. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) combined with K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) for verification. The algorithm is designed to improve object detection to be more robust and to minimize the processing time required. Objects are registered on the system consisting of the armored personnel carrier, tanks, bus, sedan, big foot, and police jeep. In addition, object selection can use mouse to shoot another object that has not been registered on the system. Kinect™ is used to capture RGB images and to find the coordinates x, y, and z of the object. The programming language used is C with visual studio IDE 2010 and opencv libraries. Object recognition program is divided into three parts: 1) reading image from kinect™ and simulation results, 2) object recognition process, and 3) transfer of the object data to the ballistic computer. Communication between programs is performed using shared memory. The detected object data is sent to the ballistic computer via Local Area Network (LAN) using winsock for ballistic calculation, and then the motor control system moves the direction of the weapon model to the desired object. The experimental results show that the SIFT method is more suitable because more accurate and faster than SURF with the average processing time to detect one object is 430.2 ms, two object is 618.4 ms, three objects is 682.4 ms, and four objects is 756.2 ms. Object recognition program is able to recognize multi-objects and the data of the identified object can be processed by the ballistic computer in realtime.

Dry Tree Semisubmersibles: The Next Deepwater Option

Dry Tree Semisubmersibles To commercialize some of the world’s most challenging deepwater fields, offshore engineering companies are developing a new class of drilling and production platform known as the dry tree semisubmersible (DTS). The challenge involves taking existing technologies and lessons learned from previous floater designs to create an alternative platform for waters too deep to cost-justify the use of tension-leg platforms (TLPs) and fields too large for spar platforms. Dry trees, also known as Christmas trees, are wellhead devices installed during the completion stage of a well’s life and give the operator control over production. Used on onshore wells, dry trees have been used extensively on shallow water fixed platforms, TLPs, and spars, but never on a deepwater semisubmersible because that platform’s motions are too extreme to support a dry tree system. As the DTS concept awaits introduction into the deepwater market, multiple designs are under evaluation by major off-shore oil companies and the Norwegian classification society Det Norske Veritas (DNV). The chief advantages of using a DTS are that opera-tors can drill, complete, and carry out intervention operations on multiple wells from the same platform in depths below 6,000 ft. This saves the operator significant resources that otherwise would be spent over the life of the field on contracting mobile offshore drilling units or purpose-built, well-intervention semisubmersibles. Going Deeper With a DTS A TLP typically uses four columns to support a large topside facility and is secured to the seafloor with mooring lines that allow the floating platform to move from side to side, but not up and down. Operating at a water depth of 4,674 ft, ConocoPhillips’ Magnolia TLP in the US Gulf of Mexico (GOM) is the deepest structure of its kind in the world. Next year, Chevron hopes to begin first production from its Big Foot TLP, also to be located in the GOM, at a depth of approximately 5,200 ft. Beyond 6,000 ft, TLPs become impractical because of the amount of steel needed for the tendons that moor the platform to the ocean bottom.

Quantitative estimation of the state of vault feet gymnasts on the different stages of the long-term training

The analysis of the vaults given about the state is conducted feet gymnasts on the different stages of the long-term training. 93 sportswomen of different qualification took part in research. The system of Big foot was used. It is set that on the early stages of the long-term training for gymnasts observed flattening heights of unevenness of navicular bone above the floor. With growth of qualification of sportswomen to avoid development of pathological changes of vaults feet actually not possibly. It is conditioned the rules of competitions to complication of competition compositions and technique of execution of elements of calisthenics. It is marked that appearance of flattening feet requires: corrections in the system of training; introduction of the specially developed methods on the removal of existent deformations; prophylaxis of flat-footedness; strengthening of musculoskeletal system feet.

Why Do the Karo Batak Prefer Women with Big Feet?

Men may find women with small feet relative to body size more attractive because foot size reliably indexes nubility-i.e., age and parity. I collected judgments of attractiveness in response to drawings of women with varying foot sizes from a sample of 159 Karo Batak respondents from North Sumatra, Indonesia, as part of a collaborative project on foot size and attractiveness. The data revealed a contrarian preference among the Karo Batak for women with big feet. The judgments were compared with the results of an existing cross-cultural study that found a preference for women with small feet in aggregate, but a mix of small- and large-foot preferences in the societies taken individually. Using contingency table analysis, I found that ecology and less exposure to Western media were associated with a preference for women with big feet; patriarchal values were not. The findings suggest that human mating preferences may arise in response to local ecological conditions, and may persist and spread via cultural transmission. This has implications for the concept of universality espoused in some versions of evolutionary psychology.

New local state power through administrative restructuring – A case study of post-Mao China county-level urban entrepreneurialism in Kunshan

By focusing on Kunshan, an economically advanced county-level city in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper aims to answer how, why, and under what circumstances the territorial power of Chinese urban entrepreneurial states is created in response to the dynamics of spatial economic development in the context of market transition and globalization. Although Kunshan is merely a county-level authority administratively, its economic performance in 2011 was better than that of several poor provinces, such as Hainan, Tibet, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Kunshan’s successful urban entrepreneurialism presents a unique ‘mismatch’ between ‘low’ administrative rank and ‘great’ economic performance (a big foot in a small shoe, dajiao chuan xiaoxie). I argue that Kunshan has developed several new local state powers through flexible administrative restructuring that explains the ‘mismatch’ puzzle and includes the following characteristics: (1) reclassification of Kunshan from county to county-level city, (2) relational adjustment by officially or informally raising Kunshan’s place rank and the cadre rank, and (3) boundary revision by virtual enclave enlargement. I conclude that the Chinese party-state system plays a role in Chinese county-level urban entrepreneurialism.

Antioxidant activity of Flaveria trinervia (Sprengel) C. Mohr

Considering the important role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of several neurological diseases, and the growing evidence of the presence of compounds with antioxidant properties in plant extracts, the aim of the present study was to investigate the antioxidant capacity of Flaveria trinervia. Leaves of F. trinervia were subjected to cold extration with petroleum ether, chloroform, methanol and ethanol solvents, and chloroform extraction showed effective antioxidant property. The results showed potent antioxidant properties against nitric oxide radical with IC50 values of 640±1.2 µg/ml and diphenylpicrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical with IC50 values of 125±4.4 µg/ml. Key words: Chloroform extract, diphenylpicrylhydrazyl (DPPH), nitric oxide, free radical antioxidant activity.

The Big Feet Aesthetic and the Art of Survival

AbstractThe ancient tradition of foot binding in China sacrificed the function of rustic ‘big feet’ in the name of gentrification and beauty. Kongjian Yu espouses an approach to landscape design that celebrates the aesthetic of high‐performing, low‐cost, healthy feet. Through his description of three projects, located in very different regions of China, he explains how working, adaptive landscapes based on farming techniques can provide an environment with a self‐sustaining identity.

Three new species of Grylloblatta Walker (Insecta: Grylloblattodea: Grylloblattidae), from southern Oregon and northern California

Grylloblatta oregonensis new species, Grylloblatta siskiyouensis new species, and Grylloblatta marmoreus new speciesare described from the Klamath Mountains region of Oregon and California, U.S.A. Two species were found at OregonCaves National Monument, with G. oregonensis inhabiting the dark zone of caves and G. siskiyouensis inhabiting surfacehabitat and the twilight zone of caves. The third species, G. marmoreus, is known from Big Foot Cave and Planetary DairyCave, Marble Mountains, California. These three species are recognized on the basis of morphological characters anddistinguished from nearby Grylloblatta species. Analysis of genetic data from the cytochrome oxidase subunit II genesupports the morphological diagnosis of these three species as unique lineages and confirms their genetic divergence from other ice-crawler populations found in Oregon and California.

Tracking the man-beasts: Sasquatch, vampires, zombies, and more

Tracking the man-beasts: Sasquatch, vampires, zombies, and more

Host location behaviour in the desert caterpillar, Heliothis punctifera

The host location behaviour of foraging caterpillars has received little attention, despite the wealth of theoretical and empirical studies that have been directed at this behavioural trait in adult Lepidoptera. Here, we study caterpillars of the moth Heliothis punctifera Walker (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), which inhabits the arid inland desert areas of Australia. Caterpillars of this species consume many flowerheads before completing development and can be observed moving across the sand in search of new hosts. Consequently, if host location behaviour favours attraction to certain plant species, it might be expected to influence the distribution and abundance of caterpillars in the field. We present field data showing that H. punctifera caterpillars are unevenly distributed throughout mixed patches of two of its host species, with a higher abundance on Senecio gregorii F. Muell., the annual yellow top, compared to Myriocephalus stuartii (F. Muell. & Sond.) Benth., the poached egg daisy (both Asteraceae). Using laboratory studies, we test whether this distribution may, in part, be due to host location behaviour of caterpillars. Our results show that caterpillars exhibit a preference for locating S. gregorii in their pre- and post-contact foraging behaviour. In addition, our results provide evidence that feeding history plays a role in host location behaviour in this insect. We propose that key features of the desert environment and the ecology of H. punctifera would favour adaptations to host location behaviour by immatures.

Measurement and Modeling of Topographically Trapped Waves Along the Sigsbee Escarpment

This article, written by Assistant Technology Editor Karen Bybee, contains highlights of paper OTC 20694, ’Measurements and Modeling of Topographically Trapped Waves Along the Sigsbee Escarpment,’ by Steven L. Morey and Dmitry S. Dukhovskoy, Florida State University, and Cortis Cooper, Chevron Energy Technology Company, originally prepared for the 2010 Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, 3-6 May. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Observations of strong currents with wave-like behavior have been documented from specific sites near the seafloor along the Sigsbee escarpment (SE) in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM). These currents tend to occur when the Loop Current (LC) or its separated eddies are in the vicinity, typically to the east of the SE. Observational and numerical-modeling efforts were funded in 2008 to understand these events and their dynamics better. The full-length paper summarizes the observations, numerical-model hind-casts, and process studies. Introduction The SE runs through the Walker Ridge and Atwater Valley blocks where many new discoveries are being made and developed [e.g., Jack/St. Malo, Big Foot (BF), and Atlantis]. While these cover a relatively small number of blocks, pipe-lines of blocks developed farther south can be affected by flow dynamics along the SE. Strong near-bottom currents, with instantaneous speeds exceeding 100 cm/s, have been observed along the SE. Such strong currents can cause costly delays in drilling and present major engineering challenges to the design of production risers and pipelines. Despite their importance, only a few strong (greater than 50 cm/s) events have been measured to date, and no well-validated numerical model has been developed. To help fill this gap, DeepStar (DS) funded two efforts in 2008—deployment off four moorings for 1 year along the SE and development of a numerical model. In addition to the DS measurements, Fig. 1 shows the bathymetry of the GOM-model domain (left) with detail of the SE-model domain (right). Locations of the Minerals Management Service I2 and I1 moorings, the DS moorings, and the BF site are shown on the right. Observations along the upper portion of the SE beginning in September 1999 showed strong currents with fluctuations resembling those associated with topographic Rossby waves (TRWs), near the 2000-m bottom, with speeds estimated from the low-pass filtered time series at greater than 85 cm/s. It is interesting that each of the documented strong events occurred when a strong LC eddy (LCE) or meander of the LC was in the vicinity, particularly with the SE near its western edge. During the early months of 2009, the LC had extended far to the northwest and formed the Eddy Darwin. Several events of moderately strong currents were observed near the bottom during this time.

P03-47 - Somatoparaphrenia in a patient with schizophrenia

The term somatoparaphrenia was firstly used by Gerstmann to describe a form of asomatognosia in which unawareness of ownership is accompanied by delusional misidentification and/or confabulation. This is a rare phenomenon and the few published case reports showed an association of this psychopathological entity with brain-damage. We present a patient with schizophrenia who believed his right arm and right foot were not his own. According to his delusion of foreign ownership, his foot didn’t belong to him because it was a “big foot only suited for work” and his right arm belonged to Maria, a woman from his neighbourhood. Remarkably, no organic causes were found to exist. To our knowledge, this is one of the rare cases of schizophrenia in which somatoparaphrenia can be identified. We further elaborate on the phenomenology of this particular patient.

New Capitols of Capital

New Capitols of Capital

Biological characters and integrated control of the alien invasive weed <I>Flaveria bidentis</I>

Yellow-top weed,Flaveria bidentis,is an important alien invasive plant recorded in 2001 in China and has been spreading rapidly since then.It is now widely distributed in Tianjin city and Henan province.The present paper reviews the achievements of studies in biology and ecology of yellow-top weed,including its classification,morphology,growth and reproduction,photosynthesis,genetics,allelopathic effects and integrated control.The weed can grow under relatively high temperature,light and humidity conditions and soil barrenness.The seeds of the weed are easily transmitted by wind,animals(insects etc.) and by long distance transportation or exchange of crop products infested with the weed seeds.It is expected that the distribution of yellow-top weed will be expanded to greater area(Beijing,Henan and Shandong province) in the next one or two decades in China.Greater attention will be paid to yellow-top weed studies by weed scientists and more effective and economical strategies will be available for uses in yellow-top weed control.