Browsing by Subject "North America"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Alcoholic Liver Disease in Asia, Europe, and North America
    (Elsevier, 2016-06) Liangpunsakul, Suthat; Haber, Paul; McCaughan, Geoffrey W.; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Alcoholic liver diseases comprise a spectrum of clinical disorders and changes in liver tissue that can be detected by pathology analysis. These range from steatosis to more severe signs and symptoms of liver disease associated with inflammation, such as those observed in patients with alcoholic hepatitis or cirrhosis. Although the relationship between alcohol consumption and liver disease is well established, severe alcohol-related morbidities develop in only a minority of people who consume alcohol in excess. Inter-individual differences in susceptibility to the toxic effects of alcohol have been studied extensively-they include pattern of alcohol consumption, sex, environmental factors (such as diet), and genetic factors, which vary widely among different parts of the world. Alcoholic liver disease is becoming more common in many parts of Asia, but is decreasing in Western Europe. Treatment approaches, including availability of medications, models of care, and approach to transplantation, differ among regions.
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    Comparing Formal and Informal Institutions with the Institutional Grammar Tool
    (2010) Siddiki, Saba; Basurto, Xavier; Weible, Christopher
    "While the role of formal and informal institutions has been long recognized among common-pool resources scholars working under the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD), not much attention has been devoted to disentangling the relative influence of each one on social behavior. We explore this issue through the application of the grammar of institutions, semi-structured interviews, and Q-sort methods. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, the paper seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the interplay between formal and informal institutions on policy compliance. We do so in the context of aquaculture policies in the State of Colorado, USA. Second, this paper seeks to continue to develop Crawford and Ostrom’s grammar of institutions as an analytical tool for systematic institutional analysis. The results from the case study are mixed. We found some respondents reporting strong alignment between informal and the formal institutions but others reporting weak alignment. Additionally, feelings of personal guilt or shame and fear of social disapproval, together, were cited as being more influential in shaping individuals’ decision making regarding compliance with formal institutions than was fear of monetary sanctioning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the unexpected relationships among different syntactic elements of the grammar thereby deepening the understanding of how the grammar of institutions can help in the examination of policy documents and explain human behavior."
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    Using sediment accumulation rates in floodplain paleochannel lakes to reconstruct climate-flood relationships on the lower Ohio River
    (Elsevier, 2022-12-15) Gibson , Derek K.; Bird, Broxton W.; Pollard, Harvie J.; Nealy, Cameron A.; Barr, Robert C.; Escobar, Jaime; Earth and Environmental Sciences, School of Science
    Late Holocene flood frequencies on the lower Ohio River were investigated using 14C-based sedimentation rates from three floodplain lakes located in Illinois (Avery Lake), Kentucky (Grassy Pond), and Indiana (Goose Pond). Changes in sediment accumulation rates were attributed to variability in the delivery of overbank sediment to each site as controlled by the frequency of Ohio River flooding. Sedimentation rates reached their lowest values in all three lakes between 400 and 1230 CE, indicating a regional reduction in flood frequencies on the lower Ohio River during a period that included the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; ca. 950–1250 CE). Sedimentation rates increased after ca. 1230 CE and remained moderately high through the Little Ice Age (LIA; 1350–1820 CE) until the onset of extensive land clearance during the early 1800s CE. After 1820 CE, sedimentation rates increased further and were higher than any other time during the late Holocene. A comparison of regional paleoclimatic proxies with the above floodplain sedimentation records shows that Ohio River flooding during the late Holocene was responsive to mean-state changes in atmospheric circulation. During the MCA, when clockwise mean-state atmospheric circulation advected southerly moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into the Ohio River Valley primarily in the form of convective rainstorms, flooding on the Ohio River was least frequent. During the LIA, meridional mean-state atmospheric circulation increased the proportion of midcontinental moisture that was sourced from the northern Pacific and Arctic and delivered as snowfall, hence increasing flooding on the Ohio River. We attribute the increase in Ohio River flooding during the LIA to an increase in snowpack volume across the Ohio River Valley and the watershed-scale integration of runoff during spring snowmelt. Following Euro-American land clearance in the early 1800s, flood frequencies decoupled from this relationship and the lower Ohio River became susceptible to frequent flooding, despite a return to southerly and clockwise synoptic atmospheric conditions. These modern climate-flood dynamics are fundamentally different than those of the paleo-record and suggest that land-use changes – such as deforestation, tile draining, and landscape conversion to intensive row crop agriculture – have fundamentally altered the modern Midwestern hydrologic cycle.