Political ecological perspectives on an indicator-based urban water framework

Ecological control of fecal indicator bacteria in an urban stream.

Fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) have long been used as a marker of fecal pollution in surface waters subject to point source and non-point source discharges of treated or untreated human waste. In this paper, we set out to determine the source(s) of elevated FIB concentrations in Cucamonga Creek, a concrete-lined urban stream in southern California. Flow in the creek consists primarily of treate...

Staying on Topic: An Indicator of Power in Political Debates

We study the topic dynamics of interactions in political debates using the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates as data. We show that the tendency of candidates to shift topics changes over the course of the election campaign, and that it is correlated with their relative power. We also show that our topic shift features help predict candidates’ relative rankings.

A probability-based indicator of ecological condition

We introduce a new method for quantifying the ecological condition (C) of sites based on documented species’ responses to environmental stress. Preliminary research is needed to establish species-specific logistic functions, representing probabilities of finding individual species across an explicit reference gradient, ranging from maximally stressed (C = 0) to minimally stressed (C = 10) local...

Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies

Developmental and social-ecological perspectives on children, political violence, and armed conflict.

An increasing number of researchers and policymakers have been moved to study and intervene in the lives of children affected by violent conflicts (Masten, 2014). According to a United Nations Children's Fund (2009) report, over 1 billion children under the age of 18 are growing up in regions where acts of political violence and armed conflict are, as Ladds and Cairns (1996, p. 15) put it, "a c...