Biophilia's Queer Remnants

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 18-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney O'Dell-Chaib
Keyword(s):  
Healthy Animal ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Evolutionary Biologist ◽  
Ecological Degradation ◽  
Biophilia Hypothesis ◽  
Ethical Investments ◽  
Affective Dimensions

Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, that humans have a genetically influenced emotional affiliation with life and life-like processes, for some time has invigorated a prominent strain of scholarship within religion and ecology that taps into the affective dimensions of our evolutionary histories. Our biophilic tendencies coupled with the awe, wonder, and reverence evoked by these religiously resonant cosmologies, they argue, provide occasions for cultivating ethical investments rooted in genetic kinship. However, much of this work that adopts biophilia assumes a “healthy” animal-other and rarely affiliates with the ill, disabled, and mutated creatures impacted by ecological degradation. In conversation with Donovan Schaefer’s provocative new book Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power and his engagement with biophilia, this paper considers possibilities for addressing aversion to animals impacted by ecological collapse through Schaefer’s understanding of affects as not merely adaptive, but embedded within complex economies of embodiment and power.

The effect of repetition differentiates the sensory and affective dimensions of perceived breathlessness during Read's rebreathing test

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Li ◽  
M. Louwet ◽  
I. Van Diest ◽  
S. De Peuter ◽  
K. Bogaerts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Affective Dimensions

The Anthropocene blues: Notes from Mississippi

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110015
Author(s):  
Jason Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Ecological Degradation ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Black Political Thought

This article argues for the importance of integrating histories of enslaved Africans and their descendants—including histories of resistance to racialized power structures—within narratives about the Anthropocene. It suggests that the Black Studies Scholar Clyde Wood’s concept of the “blues epistemology” offers conceptual tools for considering how Black political and intellectual traditions have strived to imagine and create a more livable world amid the entangled crises of racial injustice and ecological degradation. I argue that locating Black political thought within broader narratives of environmental change and economic development illuminates the racial dimensions of current global ecological crises and orients scholarship and political practice toward the spaces in which such thought is being animated today in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals Ecological Degradation of the Yangtze and Nile Delta-Estuaries in Response to Dam Construction with Special Reference to Monsoonal and Arid Climate Settings

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1145
Author(s):  
Zhongyuan Chen ◽  
Hao Xu ◽  
Yanna Wang
Keyword(s):  
Regime Shift ◽  
Yangtze Estuary ◽  
Anthropogenic Sources ◽  
Arid Climate ◽  
Dam Construction ◽  
Nutrient Inputs ◽  
The Yangtze Estuary ◽  
Ecological Degradation ◽  
Phytoplankton Communities

This study reviews the monsoonal Yangtze and the arid Nile deltas with the objective of understanding how the process–response between river-basin modifications and delta-estuary ecological degradation are interrelated under contrasting hydroclimate dynamics. Our analysis shows that the Yangtze River had a long-term stepwise reduction in sediment and silicate fluxes to estuary due to dam construction since the 1960s, especially after the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) closed in 2003. By contrast, the Nile had a drastic reduction of sediment, freshwater, and silicate fluxes immediately after the construction of the Aswan High Dam (AHD) in 1964. Seasonal rainfall in the mid-lower Yangtze basin (below TGD) complemented riverine materials to its estuary, but little was available to the Nile coast below the AHD in the hyper-arid climate setting. Nitrogen (N) and phosphate (P) fluxes in both river basins have increased because of the overuse of N- and P-fertilizer, land-use changes, urbanization, and industrialization. Nutrient ratios (N:P:Si) in both delta-estuaries was greatly altered, i.e., Yangtze case: 75:1:946 (1960s–1970s), 86:1:272 (1980s–1990s) and 102:1:75 (2000s–2010s); and Nile case: 6:1:32 (1960s–1970s), 8:1:9 (1980s–1990s), and 45:1:22 (2013), in the context of the optimum of Redfield ratio (N:P:Si = 16:1:16). This led to an ecological regime shift evidenced by a long-term change in phytoplankton communities in the Yangtze estuary, where silicious algae tended to lose dominance since the end of the 1990s, when more toxic dinoflagellates began to emerge. In the Nile estuary, such a regime shift was indicated by the post-dam dramatic reduction in zooplankton standing crop and fish landings until the early 2000s when biological recovery occurred due to nutrient inputs from anthropogenic sources. Although the Yangtze had higher human impacts than the Nile in terms of population, industrialization, and fertilizer application, N concentrations in the Nile estuarine waters surpassed the Yangtze in recent decades. However, eutrophication in the Yangtze estuary is much more intensive than in the Nile, leading to the likelihood of its estuarine water becoming more acidic than ever before. Therefore, ecological degradation in both delta-estuaries does not follow a linear trajectory, due not only to different climate dynamics but also to human forcings. The comparative insights of this study should be incorporated into future integrated coastal management of these two important systems.

scholarly journals To BAN or Not to BAN: Bayesian Attention Networks for Reliable Hate Speech Detection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Miok ◽  
Blaž Škrlj ◽  
Daniela Zaharie ◽  
Marko Robnik-Šikonja
Keyword(s):  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Classification Performance ◽  
Reliability Estimation ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Speech Detection ◽  
Attention Networks ◽  
Reliability Estimates ◽  
Viable Mechanism ◽  
Affective Dimensions

AbstractHate speech is an important problem in the management of user-generated content. To remove offensive content or ban misbehaving users, content moderators need reliable hate speech detectors. Recently, deep neural networks based on the transformer architecture, such as the (multilingual) BERT model, have achieved superior performance in many natural language classification tasks, including hate speech detection. So far, these methods have not been able to quantify their output in terms of reliability. We propose a Bayesian method using Monte Carlo dropout within the attention layers of the transformer models to provide well-calibrated reliability estimates. We evaluate and visualize the results of the proposed approach on hate speech detection problems in several languages. Additionally, we test whether affective dimensions can enhance the information extracted by the BERT model in hate speech classification. Our experiments show that Monte Carlo dropout provides a viable mechanism for reliability estimation in transformer networks. Used within the BERT model, it offers state-of-the-art classification performance and can detect less trusted predictions.

The Fractured “I”: An Autoethnographic Account of a Part-Time Doctoral Student’s Experience With Scholarly Identity Formation

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042091889
Author(s):  
Erin Leach
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Doctoral Socialization ◽  
Scholarly Identity ◽  
Part Time ◽  
The University ◽  
Affective Dimensions ◽  
Poetry Collection

This autoethnographic poetry collection provides an entry into the socialization of part-time doctoral students by centering the lived experience of the author, a part-time doctoral student employed full-time at the university where she studies. In the writing of this poetry collection, the author sought to enter into conversation with the doctoral socialization literature and to uncover the various parts of her fractured identity. Through an examination of her own fractured identity, the author engages with the places where scholarly identity formation is stalled in part-time doctoral students especially in comparison with their full-time peers and considers affective dimensions of the work of scholarly identity formation.

Are gilts ethical investments?

1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-43
Author(s):  
Terry Arthur
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Investments

scholarly journals Application of the Conditional Nonlinear Optimal Perturbations Method in the Shallow Lake Ecological Degradation and Restoration

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Wang ◽  
Qianqian Qi
Keyword(s):  
Shallow Lake ◽  
Sediment Resuspension ◽  
Finite Amplitude ◽  
Water Transparency ◽  
Lake Ecosystem ◽  
Lake Ecosystems ◽  
Ecological Degradation ◽  
Parameter Condition ◽  
Restoration Model ◽  
Simple Combination

In the shallow lake ecosystems, the recovery of the aquatic macrophytes and the increase in the water transparency have been the main contents of the ecological restoration. Using the shallow lake ecological degradation and restoration model, CNOP method is adopted to discuss the instability and sensitivity of the ecosystem to the finite-amplitude perturbations related to the initial condition and the parameter condition. Results show that the linearly stable clear (turbid) water states can be nonlinearly unstable with the finite-amplitude perturbations, which represent the nature factors and the human activities such as the excessive harvest of the macrophytes and the sediment resuspension caused by artificially dynamic actions on the ecosystems. The results also support the viewpoint of Scheffer et al., whose emphasis is that the facilitation interactions between the submerged macrophytes and the water transparency are the main trigger for an occasional shift from a turbid to a clear state. Also, by the comparison with CNOP-I, CNOP-P, CNOP, and (CNOP-I, CNOP-P), results demonstrate that CNOP, which is not a simple combination of CNOP-I and CNOP-P, could induce the shallow lake ecosystem larger departure from the same ground state rather than CNOP-I, CNOP-P, and (CNOP-I, CNOP-P).

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