Geography Commons^™

Dpal-Bert: A Faster And Lighter Question Answering Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Zhuohang Cai, Siyu Lu, Ruiyang Wang, Ahmed Alsanad, Salman A. Alqahtani, Xiaobing Chen, Zhengtong Yin, Xiaolu Li, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

Recent advancements in natural language processing have given rise to numerous pre-training language models in question-answering systems. However, with the constant evolution of algorithms, data, and computing power, the increasing size and complexity of these models have led to increased training costs and reduced efficiency. This study aims to minimize the inference time of such models while maintaining computational performance. It also proposes a novel Distillation model for PAL-BERT (DPAL-BERT), specifically, employs knowledge distillation, using the PAL-BERT model as the teacher model to train two student models: DPAL-BERT-Bi and DPAL-BERT-C. This research enhances the dataset through techniques such as masking, …

Convolution-Transformer For Image Feature Extraction, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Siyu Lu, Ruiyang Wang, Youshuai Yang, Bo Yang, Shan Liu, Ahmed Alsanad, Salman A. Alqahtani, Zhengtong Yin, Xiaolu Li, Xiaobing Chen, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

This study addresses the limitations of Transformer models in image feature extraction, particularly their lack of inductive bias for visual structures. Compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the Transformers are more sensitive to different hyperparameters of optimizers, which leads to a lack of stability and slow convergence. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Convolution-based Efficient Transformer Image Feature Extraction Network (CEFormer) as an enhancement of the Transformer architecture. Our model incorporates E-Attention, depthwise separable convolution, and dilated convolution to introduce crucial inductive biases, such as translation invariance, locality, and scale invariance, into the Transformer framework. Additionally, we implement a …

Afbnet: A Lightweight Adaptive Feature Fusion Module For Super-Resolution Algorithms, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Siyu Lu, Ruiyang Wang, Haitao Ren, Ahmed Alsanad, Salman A. Alqahtani, Zhengtong Yin, Xiaolu Li, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

At present, super-resolution algorithms are employed to tackle the challenge of low image resolution, but it is difficult to extract differentiated feature details based on various inputs, resulting in poor generalization ability. Given this situation, this study first analyzes the features of some feature extraction modules of the current super-resolution algorithm and then proposes an adaptive feature fusion block (AFB) for feature extraction. This module mainly comprises dynamic convolution, attention mechanism, and pixel-based gating mechanism. Combined with dynamic convolution with scale information, the network can extract more differentiated feature information. The introduction of a channel spatial attention mechanism combined with …

Mind, Body, And Farmland: The Agricultural Revolution Of Regenerative Agriculture And The Social Construction Of Sustainability., Amanda C. Pennett

Honors Theses

An agricultural revolution has begun to take place in light of the growing awareness of environmental issues that impact crop production on farms. In the beginning of the fall of 2022, I began to study the culture of regenerative agriculture in rural Pennsylvania using anthropological methods, including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, working alongside local farmers. I was also interested in uncovering the flaws in our current industrial agricultural system and how farming could be reimagined to benefit farmers’ mental health, soils, and ecosystems while privileging the voices of those farmers committed to regenerative farming. The ongoing evolution of regenerative farming …

Late Holocene Fire History Reconstruction Of Beaver Lake In The Northwest Lowlands Of The Olympic Peninsula, Grace Mckenney

All Master's Theses

Fire is an essential component of the landscapes and forests of the Pacific Northwest, including the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. Previous fire history reconstructions from the peninsula show that fire return intervals varied throughout the postglacial period, primarily in response to climatic changes and corresponding shifts in vegetation. However, much less is known about the fire history of the low-elevation forests of the Olympic Peninsula and the role of cultural fire regimes in these environments. The purpose of this study was to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental history of a low-elevation study site, Beaver Lake, located in the northwestern part …

Foodways: An Ethnographic Analysis Of Cwu International Students’ Perception Of The Role Of Culturally Relevant Food In Their Sense Of Belonging, Joy Ihuka

All Master's Theses

International students face unique challenges adjusting to new academic environments, including developing a sense of homesickness and lack of belonging. Studies have shown that consuming culturally relevant food helps international students relieve homesickness, fostering a sense of belonging. Curiously, nonetheless, literature on student belonging rarely focuses on food. Within this gap, this thesis explores the significance of culturally relevant food in fostering a sense of belonging among international students at Central Washington University. Using ethnographic interviews, this research examines how culturally relevant food (including how food is prepared) or lack thereof may influence international students’ perceptions of belonging. This study …

Recovering The Nium Trail: A Journey Through Collaboration And Multidisciplinary Mapping, Crystal West

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study explores and maps an ancient, historic, and contemporary travel corridor that follows the San Joaquin River in the Central Sierra Nevada of California. It is called the Nium or People’s Trail by the North Fork Mono Tribe, the French Trail in historic archives, and the Mammoth Trail on contemporary US Forest Service maps. When I agreed to the request by Chairman Ron Goode of the North Fork Mono Tribe to map the Nium Trail, I was saying yes to a different, more broad and inclusive approach than I had previously taken as an archaeologist documenting archaeological sites and …

Climate Change And Critical Agrarian Studies, Ian Scoones, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Amita Baviskar, Marc Edelman, Nancy Peluso, Wendy Wolford

Publications and Research

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the …

Editors' Note, Nirupama Devaraj, Bharath Ganesh Babu

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Mission And Editorial Policy

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Statement From The Indiana Academy Of The Social Sciences And Board Of Directors

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Reviewers And Referees

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Author Biographical Notes

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Submission Guidelines

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Volume 26, Full Contents

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

African Bovid Tribe Classification Using Transfer Learning And Computer Vision, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Juliet Brophy, Gregory J. Mathews, Marcos Pizarro-Monzo, Enrique Baquedano

Faculty Publications

Objective analytical identification methods are still a minority in the praxis of paleobiological sciences. Subjective interpretation of fossils and their modifications remains a nonreplicable expert endeavor. Identification of African bovids is a crucial element in the reconstruction of paleo-landscapes, ungulate paleoecology, and, eventually, hominin adaptation and ecosystemic reconstruction. Recent analytical efforts drawing on Fourier functional analysis and discrimination methods applied to occlusal surfaces of teeth have provided a highly accurate framework to correctly classify African bovid tribes and taxa. Artificial intelligence tools, like computer vision, have also shown their potential to be objectively more accurate in the identification of taphonomic …

Multiscale Analysis Of Spatial Accessibility To Acute Hospitals In Carinthia, Austria, Changzhen Wang, Michael Leitner, Gernot Paulus

Faculty Publications

Health care accessibility studies are well established in the US but lacking in Austria, even though both experience high costs and have hospital care as the largest contributor to health care spending. This study aims to examine multiscale spatial accessibility to acute hospitals in Carinthia, Austria. Using the most recent data at census block and 250 meter grid levels, we refine proximity and generalized two-step floating catchment area (G2SFCA) methods while accounting for the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) and edge effects. For census blocks and 250 meter grids, the mean travel times to the nearest acute hospitals are 16 …

Into An Interference Zone: Childbirth And Care Among Mehinako People, Aline Regitano

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article addresses issues of care and corporeality during gestation, childbirth, the postpartum period, and childcare through a case study conducted with Mehinako people. Among this Amazonian people, care forms the person, having an elementary function in the daily construction of kinship relations through means of affection. A recent trend has caused expressive transformations in the way women experience corporeality and the making of a person: the displacement of birth from the home to hospitals, motivated by women’s fear, desire, and curiosity. In the city, Indigenous women transit through medical institutions, which I propose may be read as interference zones …

Jean E. Jackson: A Pioneering Ethnographer In The Colombian Amazon, Patience Epps, Danilo Paiva Ramos, Flora Dias Cabalzar

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This essay celebrates the work of Jean E. Jackson, a pioneering female ethnographer who devoted most of her fifty-year career to the Indigenous peoples of Colombia. Her research, represented in an extensive set of publications from the early 1970s to the present, engages with themes of identity, stigma, and social inequality, manifested across a range of contexts. Jackson’s ethnographic contributions include her ground-breaking early work on Indigenous Tukanoan society in the Colombian Vaupés, focusing on the practice of linguistic exogamy (obligatory marriage across language groups) among the Bará people. Later, she expanded her focus to address Indigenous experiences in the …

The Age Of The Onanya - Regarding The Spread Of Ayahuasca Use Throughout The Ucayali Basin, Carlos Suárez-Álvarez

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The spread of ayahuasca shamanism throughout the Upper Amazon has become a matter of debate among scholars since, in 1994, anthropologist Peter Gow formulated the controversial suggestion that it could be a recent phenomenon in the Ucayali basin, usually considered the stronghold of a millenary tradition. Following Gow, Brabec de Mori argued that the Shipibo-Conibo people, a paradigmatic example of the antique practice of ayahuasca shamanism, adopted both the brew and the associated shamanic practices in a “relatively recent” past. Gow and Brabec pointed at the Maynas missions as the origin of this shamanic complex, and the mestizo and Cocama …

The Way Of Warriors: Annotated Narratives Of The Mebengokre (Kayapo) In Brazil, By Gustaaf Verswijver, John Hemming

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This is a review of The Way of Warriors: Annotated Narratives of the Mebengokre (Kayapó) in Brazil, by Gustaaf Verswijver. Turuti Books: Almería, Spain.

Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

By focusing on ordinary conversational language, relying on a notion of “group” derived from unilineal descent theory, and neglecting mythology and ritual, studies of Vaupés Tukanoan multilingualism have inadvertently tended to reproduce a Western ideology of language as marking national identity and concerned with conveying meaning. This paper suggests that attention to musical, ritual, and shamanic contexts reveals multilingualism in a different light, with ritual speech acts as constitutive of social groups, names as vehicles of reproduction, and breath as a substance-like bodily element and source of vitality. The more esoteric, rhetorical, musical, or visual ornamentation is given to breath, …

Clever Animals: Naturalcultural Interactions In Karitiana Hunting Practices (Rondônia, Brazil), Felipe Vander Velden

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article addresses hunting practices and human-animal relations among the Karitiana, a Tupi-Arikém-speaking indigenous people in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, asserting that if humans can learn from animals in long-lasting hunting experiences in the forest, animals can also learn how to deal with their human predators as well as their knowledge and techniques. Furthermore, animals must be understood here as species and individuals. This is an almost natural conclusion drawn from Amazonian ethnography, which suggests that distinctions between humans and the nonhumans that we call animals are not classified according to a categorization in which human beings have resourcefulness and …

Ethnicity, Identity, And Conceptualizing Community In Indian Ocean East Africa, Daren E. Ray

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

This volume explores how the people of littoral East Africa imagined and reimagined their communities over two millennia of engagement with Indian Ocean transformations—from the settlement of Bantu speakers near the coast around the first century CE to their participation in transoceanic commerce, imperial rivalries, colonial projects, and decolonization movements in the mid-twentieth century. Like other histories of the Indian Ocean, it emphasizes the circulation of people and ideas, but its cis-oceanic approach demonstrates how these littoral communities continued to integrate strategies from those in Africa’s interior as well as from people who traveled the ocean.

The book also clarifies …

Interrogating Households In Anticipation Of Disasters: The Feminization Of Preparedness, Chika Watanabe, Celie Hanson

Critical Disaster Studies

It is now a maxim among scholars and policy-makers alike that disaster preparedness needs to involve community-based approaches in order to be effective. These include preparedness strategies in the household. But how do disaster preparedness policies and public discourses define “the household” in the first place? In this article, we explore how particular gendered notions of the household are reproduced in disaster preparedness policies and activities in Japan and the UK. Drawing on historical and cross-cultural analyses, we suggest that household preparedness efforts place the burden of labor on people coded as women—a phenomenon we call “the feminization of preparedness.” …

Programa De La Conferencia Segundo Congreso Internacional De Iconografía Precolombina

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Barcelona, 2023.

Victòria Solanilla, organizador

17 al 20 de octubre de 2023.

En el Museu de Cultures del Món de Barcelona. Calle Montcada, nº12-14, 08003, Barcelona.

Y en el Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Calle del Carme, nº 47, 08001, Barcelona.

Organizado por el GRUP d'ESTUDIS PRECOLOMBINS· con el apoyo del MUSEU ETNOLÒGIC I DE CULTURES DEL MÓN· INSTITUT D'ESTUDIS CATALANS· SOCIETAT CATALANA D'ESTUDIS HISTÒRICS

Spatial And Wavelet Analysis Of Precipitation And River Discharge During Operation Of The Three Gorges Dam, China, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Barry D. Keim, Kory Konsoer, Zhengtong Yin, Mingzhe Liu, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

The Three Gorges Dam and Reservoir on the Yangtze River is one of the world's largest dams. After the dam's construction in 1997, the reservoir started filling up, expanding to a size of over 600 km2. Therefore, its possible influence on maintaining the size and water level of this waterbody is significant and concerning. This research utilized wavelet coherence analysis to examine the temporal correlation and phase coherence among various datasets, including dam injection (1998–2018) and discharge (2003–2018) data, ground station precipitation data along the Yangtze River (1998–2020), and river discharge raster maps 1998–2018. The analysis revealed a strong coherence …

Deficiency Of Healthcare Accessibility Of Elderly People Exposed To Future Extreme Coastal Floods: A Case Study Of Shanghai, China, Xinmeng Shan, Paolo Scussolini, Jun Wang, Mengya Li, Jiahong Wen, Lei Wang

Faculty Publications

Socioeconomic development, subsidence, and climate change have led to high flood risks in coastal cities, making the vulnerable, especially elderly people, more prone to floods. However, we mostly do not know how the accessibility of life-saving public resources for the elderly population will change under future scenarios. Using Shanghai as a case, this study introduced a new analytical framework to fill this gap. We integrated for the first time models of coastal flooding, local population growth, and medical resource supply-demand estimation. The results show that under an extreme scenario of coastal flooding in the year 2050, in the absence of …

U-Net-Lstm: Time Series-Enhanced Lake Boundary Prediction Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Tingqiao Li, Siyu Lu, Jiawei Tian, Zhengtong Yin, Xiaolu Li, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

Change detection of natural lake boundaries is one of the important tasks in remote sensing image interpretation. In an ordinary fully connected network, or CNN, the signal of neurons in each layer can only be propagated to the upper layer, and the processing of samples is independent at each moment. However, for time-series data with transferability, the learned change information needs to be recorded and utilized. To solve the above problems, we propose a lake boundary change prediction model combining U-Net and LSTM. The ensemble of LSTMs helps to improve the overall accuracy and robustness of the model by capturing …

Yolov4_Cspbi: Enhanced Land Target Detection Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Jianqiang Li, Siyu Lu, Jiawei Tian, Zhengtong Yin, Shan Liu, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

The identification of small land targets in remote sensing imagery has emerged as a significant research objective. Despite significant advancements in object detection strategies based on deep learning for visible remote sensing images, the performance of detecting a small and densely distributed number of small targets remains suboptimal. To address this issue, this study introduces an improved model named YOLOV4_CPSBi, based on the YOLOV4 architecture, specifically designed to enhance the detection capability of small land targets in remote sensing imagery. The proposed model enhances the traditional CSPNet by redefining its channel partitioning and integrating this enhanced structure into the neck …