Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons^™

Overpopulation And The Impact On The Environment, Doris Baus

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this research paper, the main focus is on the issue of overpopulation and its impact on the environment. The growing size of the global population is not an issue that appeared within the past couple of decades, but its origins come from the prehistoric time and extend to the very present day. Throughout the history, acknowledged scientists introduced the concept of “overpopulation” and predicted the future consequences if the world follows the same behavioral pattern. According to predictions, scientists invented the birth control pill and set population control through eugenics. Despite that, population continued to increase and fight with ...

Bioethics In The Work Of Ernest Everett Just: + Missing - Some 400 Pages, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Biology + ethics = bioethics. Here we see that Howard University biologist Ernest Everett Just (born 1883, died 1941) connected biology to ethics.

According to Just, various forms of specific biology (including especially cell biology) plus “general biology” are necessary for explaining adequately the origin of ethical behaviors. Social ethical behaviors, especially mutual aid and cooperative interactions with others and the environment, are essential to evolutionary advances among living creatures, ranging from humans to cells. Accordingly, theory of ethics (moral theory) should have roots in biology.

Also, Just wrote an unpublished book-length manuscript—“some 400 typed pages” (Just 1940)—on seeking the ...

Race, Age, And Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status In Low Birth Weight Disparities Among Adolescent Mothers: An Intersectional Inquiry, Sheryl L. Coley, Tracy R. Nichols

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Introduction: Few studies examined socioeconomic contributors to racial disparities in low birth weight outcomes between African-American and Caucasian adolescent mothers. This cross-sectional study examined the intersections of maternal racial status, age, and neighborhood socioeconomic status in explaining these disparities in low birth weight outcomes across a statewide sample of adolescent mothers.

Methods: Using data from the North Carolina State Center of Health Statistics for 2010-2011, birth cases for 16,472 adolescents were geocoded by street address and linked to census-tract information from the 2010 United States Census. Multilevel models with interaction terms were used to identify significant associations between maternal ...

Nature, Socio-Spatial Divisions And Connections: An Examination Of El Jardín De Guadalupe, Elizabeth Moreno

Theses and projects

Culture is often discussed in the content of social behavior but, how culture is spatially linked to landscapes is often overlooked. Points of social and cultural reproduction is not only tied to landscapes, but there are constantly challenged as new cultures are introduced into a space. Latino culture in the United States has, and continues to, reshape America’s landscapes. For purpose of this thesis, the reshaping of landscapes will be observed in a community. This project examines the perception that Latinos avoid participation in a community garden. This perception is not entirely true, as there was one Latina participating ...

Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat

Doctoral Dissertations

Arab American identity has not yet received the research attention and scholarship that it deserves. In this dissertation, I have qualitatively studied the narratives of young Arab American college students and recent graduates. The research questions that I explored include what makes them Arab Americans, and what are the factors that help them identify as such. By focusing on Arab Americans and their identity factors, I have presented the narratives of those women and men who self-identify as Arab American and quoted their accounts of how they navigate this undervalued, misunderstood, and stereotyped identity. I have used ethnic and racial ...

Demographic Models Of Health And Mortality At Both Extremes Of The Lifespan, Julio Enrique Romero Prieto

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first chapter proposes a model life table to investigate the human mortality at early ages. The model was estimated from the vital records, observing the experiences of 24 countries, which in some cases are at end of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century. Using few input values, the model predicts a mortality schedule for the first days, weeks, months, and years of life. Furthermore, the model is flexible to represent age patterns in conditions of either low or high mortality. Thus, the main application is as a method for indirect ...

A Global Perspective On Aging And Inequality, Nikkil Sudharsanan

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

In many developing countries, the share of the population living in the adult ages is increasing. Despite these demographic shifts, there are still many gaps in the research on aging and adult health in developing countries. My first chapter uses data on Indonesia to study socioeconomic differences in adult mortality. I find that the size of socioeconomic differences is much smaller in Indonesia than in many HICs and not explained by behavioral risk factors. My results suggest that mortality inequality in middle-income countries may follow a trajectory that is distinct from the current and historical experiences of HICs. One surprising ...

Under The Hood: Revealing Patterns Of Motor Vehicle Fatalities In The United States, Monica King

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Over the past Century, the car has become an integral part of American society. While automobiles allowed people to travel with unprecedented mobility and independence, they also became a major source of health hazard. Despite large declines in recent decades, motor vehicle deaths still remain significant and are understudied in the discipline of demography. This dissertation looks “under the hood” to reveal and explain patterns of motor vehicle fatalities at the population-level. In the first chapter, I examine why higher unemployment rate is associated with lower motor vehicle death rate. Using state-level data from 2003 to 2013, I find that ...

Three Essays On Early Childhood Development In Chile, Alejandra Abufhele Milad

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Early childhood development literature has emphasized the role that parental investment and early life conditions play on human capital formation. Still, there is little evidence on the mechanisms driving such dependence. This dissertation examines potential mechanisms explaining the relationship between parental investments, early life conditions and children’s outcomes. The first chapter exploits a plausibly exogenous variation on the timing at which a maternity leave extension reform was implemented to estimate the causal effect of additional weeks of maternity leave on breastfeeding duration in Chile. By using data from the Chilean Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood (ELPI), I find that ...

What A Polygon Can't Tell You: Shifting From Area-Level To Point-Level Investigation Of Residential Segregation Patterns, Ross William Fineman

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

The study of segregation is essential for understanding how place influences life outcomes. However, traditional segregation indices rely heavily on the use of areal units for calculation, which risks introducing both measurement and interpretation error. Researchers suggest that individual-level data avoids many of the problems facing traditional area-level indices. In this Dissertation, I use the recent release of the complete 1940 Census to investigate the potential problems with measuring segregation with areal units and develop a new method for measuring segregation at the individual level. In Chapter 1, I investigate the potential impact the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) may ...

Three Essays In Population Process, Romeo Jacky Gansey

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation addresses multiple topics of current population processes, including an impact evaluation of malaria control on child mortality in Tanzania, a study of living arrangements among the foreign-born in the United States, and an investigation of selectivity and the choice of migration destination among African emigrants. The dissertation follows a three-chapter format. The chapters are related to one another by their common focus on policy relevant topics for the health and wellbeing of populations. The first chapter investigates the specific contribution of malaria control to improvements in the health of children under five in mainland Tanzania by exploiting the ...

Mapping The Quality Of Life In Nebraska: The Geographic Distribution Of Poverty, Grant Daily, Rodrigo Cantarero, Maria Rosario De Guzman, Soo-Young Hong, Sarah Taylor, Aileen Garcia, Jeong-Kyun Choi, Yan Ruth Xia

Mapping the Quality of Life in Nebraska

Headings:

What is poverty?

Federal definitions of poverty: the poverty line

General poverty and poverty brackets

Poverty and vulnerable populations

Child poverty (under 18 years)

Young child poverty (0 - 5 years)

School age poverty (6 - 17 years)

Elderly poverty (65+)

Comparing child, adult, and elderly poverty

Minority poverty

Key points

Nebraska vs. United States

Geographic distribution

Poverty in children and the elderly

Poverty rates for racial/ethnic minorities

References

Public Perception Of Environmental Programs In The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, Landa De Matamoros, Queretaro, Mexico, Danielle Marie Salisbury

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Biological or ecological corridors have recently been sought out as a solution to biodiversity loss due to habitat fragmentation. In eastern Mexico, the Mexican and German governments are collaborating to connect fragmented landscapes and Natural Protected Areas (NPAs) over five states across a Madrean Pine-Oak biodiversity hotspot through the implementation of the Ecological Corridor of the Sierra Madre Oriental (CESMO). One of the ways the CESMO is accomplishing its conservation goals is by extending environmental programs that are currently in place within NPAs to other areas within the corridor, but outside of NPA borders. However, the success of the corridor ...

Small Landholders Battle The Leaf Folder: Improving Livelihoods In The Solomon Islands, Dalia Tayseer Najjar

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Sweet Potato is an important staple food crop grown by subsistence farmers in the Solomon Islands. It plays an important food security role and a major source of nutrition and livelihood in the rural areas as well as urban areas in the country. However, the spread of agricultural pests, in particular, the green leaf folder pest (Psara hipponalis), has significantly increased in recent years leaving many smallholder farmers with reduced yields and food insecurity. In this thesis, I reviewed the literature on the common mechanisms used to evaluate the drivers of pest presence and identified the major factors correlated with ...

Growing Portland: Not Whether, But How, Richard Barringer Phd, Joseph Mcdonnell Phd

Muskie School of Public Service

In the 400 years since European settlement, Portland has survived the ravages of war, invasion, pestilence, conflagration, and economic depression and recession. Once a renowned manufacturing, trade, and shipping center, it now enjoys what might be called a post-industrial renaissance as a vibrant center for the arts, education, entertainment, and banking, legal, and medical services; and is frequently cited as one of America’s best small cities. As a result, Portland is growing today and is positioned for more growth.

The question, then, is not whether Portland will grow, but how well it will grow; or, how best to manage ...

Social Change, Alexander Sandeen

Veritas

What do you think of when you hear “mid-western town”? According to the U.S. Census in 2016, the average Midwest town would be predominately white (76%) and its citizens would only be capable of speaking a single language, that being English (89%).

Racial, Socioeconomic Status, And Age Distribution Over Time In The U.S.: Trajectories Of Neighborhood Segregation In 1970-2010, William Rawson Bredemeyer

Geography Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Segregation has been the subject of extensive study in the U.S., yet we know relatively little about its change from one generation to the next and how closely individual characteristics align with the neighborhood, especially in periods of neighborhood change. Segregation theories, including spatial assimilation and place stratification, have mostly been analyzed through ecological data or intragenerational analysis, making their applicability across generations less certain. In this study, I use a neighborhood classification technique to establish racial, socioeconomic status, and age segregation conditions in 1970-2010 for census tracts inside of metropolitan and micropolitan areas. I use transition matrices and ...

Money Vs. Morality: The Transition To Composting In Denver, Co, Charles Metz

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the factors of existing municipal compost programs and analyzes them from the perspective of urban residents in Denver, Colorado. Research to this point suggests economic and environmental concerns are the two most pertinent when it comes to conservation action participation. My ideal goal was to determine if appealing to an urban society’s environmental or economic ethic is most effective for transitioning residents toward more composting. The timing of the compost “rise” has presented a unique opportunity to study what type of incentives could be most influential for shifting toward environmentally conscious lifestyles. Public education campaigns are ...

Happiness In Communities: How Neighborhoods, Cities And States Use Subjective Well-Being Metrics, Laura Musikanski, Carl Polley, Scott Cloutier, Erica Berejnoi, Julia Colbert

Journal of Social Change

This essay, the fourth and last of a series published by the Journal of Social Change, is intended as a tool for community organizers, local policy makers, researchers, students and others to incorporate subjective well-being indicators into their measurements and management of happiness and well-being in their communities, for policy purposes, for research and for other purposes. It provides case studies of community-based efforts in five different regions (São Paulo, Brazil; Bristol, United Kingdom; Melbourne, Australia; Creston, British Columbia, Canada; and Vermont, United States) that either developed their own subjective well-being index or used the Happiness Alliance’s survey instrument ...

Visions For Waterville's Future: Perceptions Of Its Residents, Alex Wolansky

Honors Theses

Mills and factories in the United States have steadily been closing down as industry is outsourced in the globalized economy. Cities that were once prosperous face decay and often have no hopeful future outlook. Post-industrial towns face major unemployment and poverty and are not typically places for re-investment. But Rust Belt cities like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis are not the only post- industrial hubs that are struggling. Many small towns in rural areas once thrived from manufacturing and are becoming forgotten. Local governments, policy makers, urban planners, developers and scholars are working to figure ...