North American Humanitarian Response Initiative: DRR and Response Preparedness

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 131-133
Author(s):  
Kirsten Nakjavani Bookmiller
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Humanitarian Response ◽  
The North ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Project Lead

It is a privilege to be with you today here at ASIL, in my current capacity as a Project Lead with the North American Humanitarian Response Initiative (NAHRI). At the heart of my comments today are essentially two main themes. First, all of our Initiative efforts over the past twenty-four months remain deeply intertwined with the ethic of Sendai and continue to be so. Second, while I hesitate to use the word “law” when I am working within the project—it can make those who are not in law a bit nervous—you will see with regard to NAHRI that the fundamental challenges that we have been attempting to work through are in fact legal challenges, and in the end I believe the solutions are also legally based. It is within this spirit that I will give my presentation.

scholarly journals A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Kilroy-Marac
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
North American ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Hoarding Disorder ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Dsm V ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
Domestic Variety

Within the past decade, material disorder—especially that of the domestic variety—has come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, and potential cause of mental disorder in the North American popular and psychiatric imagination. Sources ranging from the newly defined Hoarding Disorder diagnosis in the DSM-V, to popular media, to agents of the burgeoning clutter-management industry describe disorder in terms of an irrational attachment, closeness, or overidentification with objects. At the same time, these sources imagine order to result from the cool distance and controlled passion a person is able to maintain toward his or her possessions. Drawing on more than twenty interviews and numerous fieldwork encounters with professional organizers (POs) in Toronto between 2014 and 2015, this article describes how POs aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively to relieve the disorder they report in their lives. Here, I argue, POs emerge as a species of late capitalist healer whose interventions are animated by a paradoxical double movement. For just as POs act to loosen the object attachments and disrupt the “secret sympathy” their clients share with their possessions, they operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client’s possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind.

The Decline of the Africanists' Africa and the Rise of New Africas

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-26
Author(s):  
William Martin ◽  
Michael West
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
North American ◽  
African Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North

Our thesis may be simply stated: There is a specter hanging over African studies: the specter of irrelevance both within and outside the academy. Indeed, African studies, as constructed in the North American academy over the past four decades, is dying.

Is Your Power Plant Headed for a HILP? How to Avoid, Detect or Mitigate High Impact–Low Probability (HILP) Events

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Richwine ◽  
G. Scott Stallard ◽  
G. Michael Curley
Keyword(s):  
Power Plant ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
High Impact ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Sufficient Detail ◽  
Low Probability

In recent years some power companies have instituted programs aimed at reducing or eliminating their power plants’ unreliability caused by abnormal events that occur infrequently but result in extended unplanned outages when they do occur, i.e. High Impact–Low Probability events (HILPs). HILPs include catastrophic events such as turbine water induction, boiler explosions, generator winding failures, etc. Many of these successful programs have relied on the detailed reliability data contained in the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) Generating Availability Data System (GADS) that contains data collected over the past 25 years from 5000+ generating units in North America. Using this data, these companies have been able to 1) benchmark their fleet’s unreliability due to HILPs against their North American peers, 2) prioritize their peer group’s susceptibility to various HILP modes and 3) use root cause data contained within the NERC-GADS data base to help identify and evaluate ways to proactively prevent, detect and/or mitigate the consequences of HILP events. This paper will describe the methods used in these successful programs in sufficient detail to enable others to adopt the techniques for application at their own generating plants.

Jean Gerson after Constance: ‘Via Media et Regia’ as a Revision of the Ockhamist Covenant

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-481
Author(s):  
Mark S. Burrows
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

Few issues have received as much attention and achieved as little consensus among historians of late medieval theology during the past several generations as the debate over the character of “nominalism.” One thrust of the research from this debate has focused on the theological dimensions of this scholastic tradition: building on the work of Erich Hochstetter, Paul Vignaux, and others, Heiko Oberman discussed this development in the North American arena of scholarship by describing theological concerns as “the inner core of nominalism.”1

Towards a Biogeography of North American Charophytes

1999 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Mann ◽  
Vernon W. Proctor ◽  
Alberto S. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
North American ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
South American ◽  
Lake Titicaca ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Stability

The great bulk of the world’s charophyte literature of the past 100 years or more suffers from several major limitations. Much is entirely descriptive with but few attempts to ascribe any functionality to the features under consideration, or how they adapt such species to their respective ecological niches. Charophyte distributions have been attributed almost entirely to physical parameters with virtually no consideration given to the role of aquatic herbivores or other biotic environmental factors. Furthermore, most workers have focused on relatively restricted areas with little or no reference to others either near or far removed. That there is much to be gained from a wider focus (both spatially and conceptually) that incorporates greater conjecture as well as enhanced collaboration is here suggested. How are the charophyte floras of one region similar to, or different from, those of another, and, of particular significance, ‘Why?’ The authors, being North American, focus on that continent but with the firm conviction that most generalities applicable there hold equally true for other landmasses, and have done so for the previous 10, if not 100, million years. This account focuses first, if somewhat superficially, on 14 widely distinct North American charophyte communities (plus South American Lake Titicaca) and then in greater detail on four of those. Among other issues considered are how species richness relates to latitude; why some geographical entities support more charophyte species than do others; the extent to which charophyte floras reflect the availability of different habitats; the contributions of herbivory to the preceding; the stability of the North American charophyte flora; the ecological considerations most often reflected by charophyte zonation and how–or to what extent–range extensions reflect niche preferences or requirements. While the authors well appreciate just how minimal their efforts may appear a century hence, at least they hope to have placed on the table some considerations with which colleagues from other landmasses may agree, disagree or suggest modifications.

scholarly journals Suburban Innovations

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-140
Author(s):  
Pierre Filion
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Development Pattern ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmentally Sensitive

This commentary addresses the evolution of the North American suburb over the last 70 years, a period over which it adopted a development pattern marking a radical break from prior forms of urban settlement. Early in this period, the emerging suburban form constituted perhaps the sharpest transition in the history of urbanism in terms of urban form and transportation. This suburban form rapidly came to dominate North American metropolitan regions and spread to other parts of the world. In this commentary, I propose a brief history of the North American suburb since the late 1940s seen through the lens of the contributions it made to the evolution of urbanism across the continent. I contend that while suburbs are often associated with urban stasis, because perceived as an impediment to the emergence of new environmentally sensitive and socially and functionally integrated urban formulas relying on public transit and walking, they have played a major transformative role in the past and may be the source of further urban transitions in the future. North American suburbs have also undergone deep social changes over the last decades. However, I question the claim, made by some researchers, that we are entering a post-suburban era; but at the same time, I acknowledge the possibility of major future innovations within present suburban configurations.

scholarly journals Sixty-six million years along the road of mammalian ecomorphological specialization

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (26) ◽  
pp. 12698-12703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Borja Figueirido ◽  
Paul Palmqvist ◽  
Juan A. Pérez-Claros ◽  
Christine M. Janis
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Potential Influence ◽  
Vegetation Shifts ◽  
The Road ◽  
Terrestrial Mammals ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Long Term Trend

The fossil record of the large terrestrial mammals of the North American Cenozoic has previously been quantitatively summarized in six sequential episodes of faunal associations—“evolutionary faunas”—that correspond well with previously proposed qualitative “Chronofaunas.” Here, we investigate the ecological spectrum of these faunas by classifying their major taxonomic components into discrete ecomorphological categories of diet, locomotion, and body size. To specifically address the potential influence of long-term climatic shifts on the ecomorphological composition of these faunas, we analyze via contingency tables and detrended correspondence analyses the frequency distribution of ecomorph types within faunas. We show that each evolutionary fauna has a unique, nonrandom association of ecomorphs, and we identify a long-term trend toward greater ecomorphological specialization over successive faunas during the past 66 My. Major vegetation shifts induced by climatic changes appear to underlie the ecomorphological dynamics of these six temporal associations that summarize Cenozoic North American mammalian evolutionary history.

scholarly journals Climate and wildfires in the North American boreal forest

2007 ◽  
Vol 363 (1501) ◽  
pp. 2315-2327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Macias Fauria ◽  
E.A Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Boreal Forest ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
North American ◽  
Southern Oscillation ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Large Fire ◽  
Area Burned ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North

The area burned in the North American boreal forest is controlled by the frequency of mid-tropospheric blocking highs that cause rapid fuel drying. Climate controls the area burned through changing the dynamics of large-scale teleconnection patterns (Pacific Decadal Oscillation/El Niño Southern Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation, PDO/ENSO and AO) that control the frequency of blocking highs over the continent at different time scales. Changes in these teleconnections may be caused by the current global warming. Thus, an increase in temperature alone need not be associated with an increase in area burned in the North American boreal forest. Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the climate has been unusually moist and variable: large fire years have occurred in unusual years, fire frequency has decreased and fire–climate relationships have occurred at interannual to decadal time scales. Prolonged and severe droughts were common in the past and were partly associated with changes in the PDO/ENSO system. Under these conditions, large fire years become common, fire frequency increases and fire–climate relationships occur at decadal to centennial time scales. A suggested return to the drier climate regimes of the past would imply major changes in the temporal dynamics of fire–climate relationships and in area burned, a reduction in the mean age of the forest, and changes in species composition of the North American boreal forest.

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