scholarly journals How storms affect fishers’ decisions about going to sea

Author(s):  
Lisa Pfeiffer

Abstract Fishermen are known to try to avoid fishing in stormy weather, as storms pose a physical threat to fishers, their vessels, and their gear. In this article, a dataset and methods are developed to investigate the degree to which fishers avoid storms, estimate storm aversion parameters, and explore how this response varies across vessel characteristics and across regions of the United States. The data consist of vessel-level trip-taking decisions from six federal fisheries across the United States combined with marine storm warning data from the National Weather Service. The estimates of storm aversion can be used to parameterize predictive models. Fishers’ aversion to storms decreases with increasing vessel size and increases with the severity of the storm warning. This information contributes to our understanding of the risk-to-revenue trade-off that fishers evaluate every time they consider going to sea, and of the propensity of fishers to take adaptive actions to avoid facing additional physical risk.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Attila Pohlmann

The demand for ever-accelerating fast fashion is unprecedented, while its supply chain burdens environmental systems. Hedonic fashion consumption is generally unfettered by sustainability concerns, but evidence suggests that island geographies–with dense boundaries between the built and the natural environment–have a heightening effect on eco-consciousness. A framework based on the contemporary condition of hyperconsumption is proposed: island geography heightens sustainability awareness; consequently, fashion consumers located on islands trade-off perceived hedonic benefits of fashion consumption against perceived moral benefits of connection with nature. The framework is supported by visual evidence collected on the Galápagos island Santa Cruz, indicating that male fashion consumers express connection with nature by means of tattoos, slogans on clothing and choice of eco-friendly materials. Quantitative tests with survey data from the United States and Ecuador show that residents in Hawaiʻi and the Galápagos have higher levels of connection with nature compared to residents on the associated continental areas. This effect is mediated by decreased perceived rewards of hedonic fashion consumption, but the effect is overall weaker in Ecuador compared to the United States due to differences in purchasing power and attitudes towards consumerism. Because of the stereotype that eco-friendly is unmanly, men are generally less likely to embrace environmentally friendly products and the findings of this research point to avenues to overcome this barrier.


The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 55-95
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle

Chapter 3 argues that drones undermine the legal and ethical prohibitions on assassination and extrajudicial violence outside of wartime. It traces the emergence of the practice of targeted killing from its origin to its embrace by the United States after the September 11 attacks. It shows how the United States adopted the use of drones alongside the practice of targeted killing to control risks as it fought a new war against al Qaeda, but found itself gradually drifting into more conflict zones and fighting new enemies. While the United States used drones to protect its pilots from physical risk, it altered the nature of the risks they faced and created new ones for the population who live under the drones. Drones also subtly changed how the United States wages its wars, making it more willing to countenance killing people outside of active battlefields. It concludes by discussing how more countries are now experimenting with targeting killings.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe E. Reinhardt

Throughout the post-World War II decades, the United States has wrestled in its own unique style with a problem that is shared by all modern societies: how to achieve a reasonably equitable distribution of health care, without losing control of total spending on health care, and without suffocating the delivery system with controls and regulations that inhibit technical progress.Because an equitable distribution of health care inevitably requires at least some government regulation, and because government regulations tend to impose rigidity on any system, it is widely believed in the United States (and elsewhere) that a trade-off actually exists between fairness in the distribution of care and the health system’s ability to innovate. This troublesome trade-off bedevils American policy makers to this day.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-120
Author(s):  
Brian S Krueger ◽  
Samuel J. Best ◽  
Kristin Johnson

The trade-off between security and liberty has been a leading frame for understanding public opinion about domestic surveillance policies. Most of the empirical work explicitly examining whether individuals meet the trade-off framework’s core attitudinal assumptions comes from European studies. This study uses a survey of US residents to assess the veracity of the assumptions embedded in the trade-off framework, namely whether domestic counterterrorism policies are simultaneously viewed as improving security and decreasing liberty. We find that the vast majority of US respondents do not meet the basic attitudinal assumptions of the trade-off frame. Next, we evaluate the source of these attitudes with a focus on whether attitudes toward surveillance policies merely relate to core political values or whether they also depend on the messages from political leaders. We find that both political values and opinion leadership shape these attitudes. Finally, because general attitudes towards surveillance and privacy often fail to have practical implications, we assess whether these attitudes matter for understanding the structure of policy support. Our results show that heightened terrorism threat positively associates with increased support for counterterrorism policies only when people believe these policies are effective security tools.


Geosciences ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger W. Bachmann ◽  
Sapna Sharma ◽  
Daniel E. Canfield ◽  
Vincent Lecours

The goals of the study were: (i) To describe the distribution of summer near-surface water temperatures in lakes of the coterminous United States and southern Canada (ii) to determine the geographic, meteorological and limnological factors related to summer water temperatures and (iii) to develop and test predictive models for summer near-surface water temperatures. We used data from the United States National Lakes Assessments of 2007 and 2012 as well as data collected from several different studies of Canadian lakes. Using multiple regressions, we quantified the general observations that summer water temperatures decreased when going from south to north, from east to west, and from lower elevations to higher elevations. Our empirical model using 8-day average air temperatures, latitude, longitude, elevations and month was able to predict water temperatures in individual lakes on individual summer days with a standard deviation of 1.7 °C for United States lakes and 2.3 °C for lakes in the southern regions of Canada.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 863-880 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph T. Ripberger ◽  
Makenzie J. Krocak ◽  
Wesley W. Wehde ◽  
Jinan N. Allan ◽  
Carol Silva ◽  
...  

Abstract Social criteria are important to achieving the mission of the National Weather Service. Accordingly, researchers and administrators at the NWS increasingly recognize a need to supplement verification statistics with complementary data about society in performance management and evaluation. This will require significant development of new capacities to both conceptualize relevant criteria and measure them using consistent, transparent, replicable, and reliable measures that permit generalizable inference to populations of interest. In this study, we contribute to this development by suggesting three criteria that require measurement (forecast and warning reception, comprehension, and response) and demonstrating a methodology that allows us to measure these concepts in a single information domain—tornado warnings. The methodology we employ improves upon previous research in multiple ways. It provides a more generalizable approach to measurement using a temporally consistent set of survey questions that are applicable across the United States; it relies on a more robust set of psychometric tests to analytically demonstrate the reliability of the measures; and it is more transparent and replicable than previous research because the data and methods (source code) are publicly available. In addition to describing and assessing the reliability of the measures, we explore the sensitivity of the measures to geographic and demographic variation to identify significant differences that require attention in measurement. We close by discussing the implications of this study and the next steps toward development and use of social criteria in performance management and evaluation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micheal Hicks ◽  
Belay Demoz ◽  
Kevin Vermeesch ◽  
Dennis Atkinson

AbstractA network of automated weather stations (AWS) with ceilometers can be used to detect sky conditions, aerosol dispersion, and mixing layer heights, in addition to the routine surface meteorological parameters (temperature, pressure, humidity, etc.). Currently, a dense network of AWSs that observe all of these parameters does not exist in the United States even though networks of them with ceilometers exist. These networks normally use ceilometers for determining only sky conditions. Updating AWS networks to obtain those nonstandard observations with ceilometers, especially mixing layer height, across the United States would provide valuable information for validating and improving weather/climate forecast models. In this respect, an aerosol-based mixing layer height detection method, called the combined-hybrid method, is developed and evaluated for its uncertainty characteristics for application in the United States. Four years of ceilometer data from the National Weather Service Ceilometer Proof of Concept Project taken in temperate, maritime polar, and hot/arid climate regimes are utilized in this evaluation. Overall, the method proved to be a strong candidate for estimating mixing layer heights with ceilometer data, with averaged uncertainties of 237 ± 398 m in all tested climate regimes and 69 ± 250 m when excluding the hot/arid climate regime.


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