Building Today’s World

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-187
Author(s):  
Lesley Newson ◽  
Peter J. Richerson

Once they were equipped with the social tools that allowed them to maintain greater connectedness, there was no looking back for our ancestors. They evolved much more complex cultures. Once the planet started to warm up and ice started to melt, humans could start to inhabit more of the land surface. As climate variability diminished and stable vegetation zones and habitats began to form, humans started to settle and become expert at exploiting a certain territory. If a group of families developed the knowledge and skills that allowed them to exploit a territory, there was no benefit in sharing that information with people outside the group. So instead of maintaining connections and sharing, people became tribal and, in many cases, territorial. Over thousands of years, families and tribes interacted and formed alliances, and their alliances broke down. But the general trend was for greater connectedness, increasingly complex cultures, and greater success. The human population grew.

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
V.K. YADAV ◽  
SONAM SHARMA ◽  
A.K. SRIVASTAVA ◽  
P.K. KHARE

Ponds are an important fresh water critical ecosystem for plants and animals providing goods and services including food, fodder, fish, irrigation, hydrological cycle, shelter, medicine, culture, aesthetic and recreation. Ponds cover less than 2 percent of worlds land surface. Ponds are important source of fresh water for human use. These are threatened by urbanization, industrialization, over exploitation, fragmentation, habitat destruction, pollution, illegal capturing of land and climate changes. These above factors have been destroying ponds very rapidly putting them in danger of extinction of a great number of local biodiversity. It is necessary to formulate a correct conservation strategy for pond restoration in order to meet the growing needs of fresh water by increasing the human population. Some measures have been compiled and proposed in the present review.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Norlina Mohamed Noor ◽  
Raja Munirah Raja Mustapha

Knowledge and skills have become the most crucial resource capital which enables organizations to survive in the ever changing business environment. One of the common strategies for organizations to increase their performance and productivity is through training and the main role of human resource development is to fulfil the needs of the organizations by providing employees with up to date expertise, information, knowledge and skills. Since huge financial investments and enormous time are allocated for training, organizations hope that the training will lead to the desired workoutcomes. However, this does not always happen. There is only a small percentage of training programs which had successfully shown lasting transferability to the workplace and this indicates thatunderstanding and improving the training transfer process is still a major concern for training researchers and practitioners. As training transfer is influenced by several variables at different levels of analysis, this study attempts to investigate the relationship between training transfer determinants, the involvement of different stakeholders and training activities in the training process. Specifically, this study investigates the influence of training transfer determinants on goal setting amongst small businesswomen. In addition, it will emphasize the roles of primary stakeholders in the social networkat different times during the training process towards achieving training transfer. Therefore, the framework postulates social networks as a moderating variable in enhancing training transfer andgoal setting amongst small businesswomen. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Divjak ◽  
Natalia Levshina ◽  
Jane Klavan

AbstractSince its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sayed Salahuddin Ahmed ◽  
Abdulkhaleq Q. A. Hassan

s not it deplorable that in a country that tops in the entire world in using several social media sites does not utilize the same media in acquiring knowledge and skills? In Saudi Arabia, undergraduate students spend a significant amount of time on social media every day, but they are reluctant (or not motivated enough) to use the same media for educational purposes. This study was carried out on the undergraduate English majors of King Khalid University in Muhayil Asir in Saudi Arabia. In the English department, every student carries at least one smart phone with Internet connection, and they are found occupied with their phones on the campus, sometimes even in classrooms, but they are weak both in subject knowledge and skills of English language. The teachers-cum-researchers were baffled with students’ competence because regular users of Internet and social media are supposed to be updated with the subject knowledge as well as confident in using English language. The researchers designed an empirical study to explore students’ rationale of using the social media and their language preference. The study concludes with gloomy findings that students use the media mainly for entertainment and ineffective communication in English language. The worst fact is: they are not motivated enough to use the social media for educational purposes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 7685-7719 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Broich ◽  
A. Huete ◽  
M. G. Tulbure ◽  
X. Ma ◽  
Q. Xin ◽  
...  

Abstract. Land surface phenological cycles of vegetation greening and browning are influenced by variability in climatic forcing. Quantitative information on phenological cycles and their variability is important for agricultural applications, wildfire fuel accumulation, land management, land surface modeling, and climate change studies. Most phenology studies have focused on temperature-driven Northern Hemisphere systems, where phenology shows annually reoccurring patterns. Yet, precipitation-driven non-annual phenology of arid and semi-arid systems (i.e. drylands) received much less attention, despite the fact that they cover more than 30% of the global land surface. Here we focused on Australia, the driest inhabited continent with one of the most variable rainfall climates in the world and vast areas of dryland systems. Detailed and internally consistent studies investigating phenological cycles and their response to climate variability across the entire continent designed specifically for Australian dryland conditions are missing. To fill this knowledge gap and to advance phenological research, we used existing methods more effectively to study geographic and climate-driven variability in phenology over Australia. We linked derived phenological metrics with rainfall and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). We based our analysis on Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) data from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from 2000 to 2013, which included extreme drought and wet years. We conducted a continent-wide investigation of the link between phenology and climate variability and a more detailed investigation over the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), the primary agricultural area and largest river catchment of Australia. Results showed high inter- and intra-annual variability in phenological cycles. Phenological cycle peaks occurred not only during the austral summer but at any time of the year, and their timing varied by more than a month in the interior of the continent. The phenological cycle peak magnitude and integrated greenness were most significantly correlated with monthly SOI within the preceding 12 months. Correlation patterns occurred primarily over north-eastern Australia and within the MDB predominantly over natural land cover and particularly in floodplain and wetland areas. Integrated greenness of the phenological cycles (surrogate of productivity) showed positive anomalies of more than two standard deviations over most of eastern Australia in 2009–2010, which coincided with the transition between the El Niño induced decadal droughts to flooding caused by La Niña. The quantified spatial-temporal variability in phenology across Australia in response to climate variability presented here provides important information for land management and climate change studies and applications.


Author(s):  
D.A. BRADING

This chapter demonstrates that while Spain had a clear vision of what the conquered Aztec city should be, the city of the conquistadors was relatively short for it was soon transformed by its Creole inhabitants who made their own identity pronounced on its building and culture. For 300 years, the city of Mexico was the capital of viceroyalty. It was the capital of New Spain and was the seat of the metropolitan archbishopric of Mexico. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, a generation of young Creoles entered the secular priesthood and the religious orders. They challenged the predominance of European Spaniards, affirmed their talents and identity, and started looking back to the glorious past the conquistadors had destroyed. However, the development of the city was constrained and limited by the city’s status as the viceregal capital of New Spain. Its status hence meant that the city depended on the political decisions and cultural influences emanating from the Spanish. Out of this tension, a creative process of change emerged in which different ethnic groups and cultures intermingled and conflicted to ensure that the social composition and character of Mexico City would be different from the other cities in Spanish America. However, these changes were not brought without due loss. Due to the conquest and the Old World diseases the Mexico population fell to the near brink of oblivion. These epidemics and natural calamities continued to afflict the city throughout the colonial period.


Author(s):  
Emily Klancher Merchant

Chapter 2 documents the establishment of demography, the social science of human population dynamics, in the United States during the 1930s. It contends that this interdisciplinary field was able to build an institutional structure because of support from eugenicist Frederick Osborn, who saw in demography an ally for the creation of a postracial democratic version of eugenics. Osborn’s new brand of eugenics emphasized birth control rather than sterilization and worked through the private sector rather than the public sector. He fused birth control advocacy with eugenics in a strategy he termed “family planning,” which signaled reproductive autonomy in the context of social control. Osborn secured patronage for demography from the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Carnegie Corporation, and an audience for demographic research in the New Deal welfare state. He leveraged his influence to focus demography’s research program on producing support for his family planning–based eugenic project.


2012 ◽  
Vol 487 ◽  
pp. 387-391
Author(s):  
Min Yang

The development of human history is inseparable from the living environment of their own planning and mapping, hand-drawn renderings show the form and content but also with other subjects of mutual interdependence and common development with; students in professional knowledge and skills into the process of talent learn to draw renderings interest and enthusiasm alone is not enough, go out the introduction, is the study guide students to establish a correct view of the employment outlook is the best way. The success of hand-drawn renderings to No, it is not the designer's will, the social acceptance and market testing it is the only standard. City can not do without decoration hand-drawn renderings, the process of building new countryside also need hand-drawn renderings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt B. Waldman ◽  
Noemi Vergopolan ◽  
Shahzeen Z. Attari ◽  
Justin Sheffield ◽  
Lyndon D. Estes ◽  
...  

Abstract Given the varying manifestations of climate change over time and the influence of climate perceptions on adaptation, it is important to understand whether farmer perceptions match patterns of environmental change from observational data. We use a combination of social and environmental data to understand farmer perceptions related to rainy season onset. Household surveys were conducted with 1171 farmers across Zambia at the end of the 2015/16 growing season eliciting their perceptions of historic changes in rainy season onset and their heuristics about when rain onset occurs. We compare farmers’ perceptions with satellite-gauge-derived rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station dataset and hyper-resolution soil moisture estimates from the HydroBlocks land surface model. We find evidence of a cognitive bias, where farmers perceive the rains to be arriving later, although the physical data do not wholly support this. We also find that farmers’ heuristics about rainy season onset influence maize planting dates, a key determinant of maize yield and food security in sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings suggest that policy makers should focus more on current climate variability than future climate change.


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