This paper proposes an examination of Creative Commons (CC) licensing and considerations for adoption or non adoption among musicians. According to the Creative Commons Web site, the licenses were created to work alongside current copyright law allowing rights holders a “some rights reserved” copyright (“What is CC?”, Creative Commons, 2010). However, despite its current uptick in adoption, many remain hesitant and refuse to adopt the licenses to protect their work. Moreover, for those who have adopted the licenses, little is known about why they chose to adopt the licenses. Thus, the study answers the need for further research in understanding why musicians choose to use or not to use CC licenses. The study attempts to answer the following question: What considerations determine whether musicians adopt CC licenses for their work? In the pages that follow, I survey the historic and current position of copyright law. Specifically, the paper begins by problematizing current copyright law by demonstrating its economic and social inefficiencies in light of new advancements in technology. In other words, current copyright favors incumbent cultural industries who demand increased economic incentives at the expense of the public’s right to access these works. Moreover, it favors existing content holders who insist on creating laws that retain maximum control over their property. It then questions whether Creative Commons licenses can successfully reconcile these inefficiencies. Moreover, the overarching goal of this research is to examine the perceived viability of these licenses and to consider whether current advocacy efforts adequately address concerns of potential adopters. It analyze information gathered from multiple in-depth interviews of musicians who have and have not adopted the licenses. It will also examine advocacy efforts. The study hopes to contribute qualitative data that will shape future discussions on copyright, culture and new technologies by considering adequacies and or inadequacies of current licenses & advocacy efforts. / text

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Despite growing concerns for environmental crisis and the recent economic downturns, worldwide appetite for luxury goods has remained stable and has even grown dramatically in some countries. Luxury goods implicitly convey certain meanings and norms. What are psychological and behavioural consequences of exposure to luxuries? In this proposal, I argue that exposure to luxury goods increases cognitive accessibility of constructs relate to self-interest and subsequently affects social judgments and behaviour. I aim to establish a theoretical conjunction between (a) anthropology’s study of material culture, which focuses on material evidence in attributing human cultures, and (b) psychology’s priming technique, which examines the effects of activated cognitive representations on psychological responding. Accordingly, three studies were conducted to investigate the implicit link of luxury and self-interest. The results showed that exposure to luxury primes automatically activated mental associations relate to self-interest and subsequently increased one’s propensity to allocate more resources to oneself relative to another person (study 1), caused some harvesters to defect in a multi-stage N-person commons dilemma (study 2), but did not necessarily induce unethical behaviour aimed to harm others (study 3). Research about the psychological effects of luxury goods are important because luxuries are implicitly embedded in institutional settings and organizational environments in which negotiations are typically conducted and resource allocation decisions are made. / Graduate / 0621 / 0623 / 0451 / angelch@uvic.ca

Canada’s emissions are nearly 30 per cent above its Kyoto target. Kathryn Harrison is looking to understand why some countries are leading the way and why others are falling short.

This thesis investigates marginalisation in small-scale fishing communities in Chilika Lagoon engaged in customary capture fisheries. However, the Lagoon has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades, impacting the social, cultural, economic, political and environmental life, and resulting in fishers’ disconnection and marginalisation. The study explores what marginalisation looks like from the fishers’ point of view, and attempts to explain the processes and drivers responsible for change in Chilika social-ecological system, and the implications of this change, with four areas for analysis: 1) historical and political background to the processes of change in Chilika Lagoon fisheries; 2) the challenges from external drivers to fishery commons and the need to understand commons as a process; 3) impacts of social-ecological change from a livelihood perspective, including how the fishers dealt with livelihood crisis through various strategies; 4) institutional processes and their implications for fishers’ marginalization. Using evidence collected through household- and village-level surveys, combined with various qualitative and participatory research methods over 28 months, the study shows that there are two major driving forces or drivers of marginalisation: (1) the role of aquaculture development in the loss of resource access rights and the decline of local institutions, and (2) the ecological displacement and livelihood loss brought about by the opening of a new “sea mouth” connecting the Lagoon and the Bay of Bengal. There exist a paradox of the official account and fishers’ own view of marginalisation. Chilika is a clear case in which government policies have encouraged de facto privatisation. The dynamic nature and fluctuations associated with commons development make it imperative to understand commons as a process that includes commonisation and decommonisation. Out-migration has emerged as a key livelihood strategy resulting in occupational displacement for one-third of the adult fishers, and such livelihood strategies have led to their disconnection and marginalisation. The fishers’ point of view presents a more complex, multidimensional concept of marginalisation, not simply as a state of being but as a process over time, impacting social and economic conditions, political standing, and environmental health.

<p>Historically, the wind has functioned in multiple capacities, both physically and symbolically. The following study explores the ways in which natural history, myth and folklore, craft knowledge, and religion contributed to a growing body of knowledge about the wind at a moment in British history when wind knowledge assumed unprecedented political and economic significance. How did people come to know the wind and to narrate and communicate wind knowledge in the seventeenth century? What work did these complex and competing narrations perform? And what do they make visible? In pursuing these lines of inquiry, my work brings together three principle bodies of knowledge: Environmental History, History of Science, and British Imperial history; and it draws upon documents that include scientific treatises, written records of oral anecdotes and weather wising, religious sermons, travel narratives, fictional novels, and imperial correspondence. I argue that because the wind and wind knowledge were ubiquitous to the emerging success and identity of the British empire, a great variety of historical actors sought to control and narrate what wind knowledge was, where it came from, and what political work it should do. These efforts were unequivocally rooted in first hand experience and observation of the wind--maker's knowledge--and created what I call an intellectual commons that enabled commoners as well as elites to shape and briefly control the contours of wind knowledge in early Modern Britain and its expanding empire.</p> / Dissertation

Existing research shows that plants produce less root when growing alone than when growing in competition with other plants. When plants under root competition over-allocate resources to roots at the cost of reproduction, it represents a Tragedy of the Commons. I constructed simulation models to determine the circumstances likely to give rise to a Tragedy of the Commons, and explore mechanisms by which plants may solve it. I grew plants in nutrient-rich transparent gel, allowing me to quantify root growth and development without destructive sampling. My plants responded positively to additional space and the presence of a competitor at full nutrient treatment levels, and negatively to those same conditions between low phosphorus treatment levels, demonstrating nutrient mediation of the direction of plant response to an added competitor with additional space. This effect may feature self / non-self recognition by roots. Since the hard barrier in these studies blocks nutrients, roots, and root signaling compounds from passing between the plants in the barrier treatment level, existing studies cannot tease apart the effects on plant development of these individual factors. I add a semi-permeable membrane treatment level, which allows nutrients and signaling compounds to pass while preventing root growth between sides.

Image indexing research today is either conducted on a visual attribute level or on a higher semantic level, forming a semantic gap between the two. There is much to gain if research progress from the two fields is combined. Image retrieval using access points in both visual and semantic significations could improve retrieval and bridge the gap. In social media today, images are often the primary communication agent and the number of images on the web is increasing in an uncontrolled way. New and efficient ways to index and retrieve the images are needed.The purpose of this study is to examine if emotions could be a semantic access point for image retrieval and if folksonomy indexing is useful when searching for images that represent emotions. Images are retrieved from Flickr and Sara Shatford’s matrix for image indexing is used to classify image tags into categories.The result shows that for some emotions it is useful and there is a clear pattern in the retrieved relevant images. For other emotions there are a lot of images that have been tagged on a cluster of images and all images in the cluster is not relevant. Therefore the search result is ambiguous.An interesting observation is that index words expressing abstractions and feelings are more common in folksonomies compared to professional indexers. For specific web image collections where searches could be conducted on feelings, folksonomies is a successful method for the indexing and retrieval of images.

This thesis investigates marginalisation in small-scale fishing communities in Chilika Lagoon engaged in customary capture fisheries. However, the Lagoon has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades, impacting the social, cultural, economic, political and environmental life, and resulting in fishers’ disconnection and marginalisation. The study explores what marginalisation looks like from the fishers’ point of view, and attempts to explain the processes and drivers responsible for change in Chilika social-ecological system, and the implications of this change, with four areas for analysis: 1) historical and political background to the processes of change in Chilika Lagoon fisheries; 2) the challenges from external drivers to fishery commons and the need to understand commons as a process; 3) impacts of social-ecological change from a livelihood perspective, including how the fishers dealt with livelihood crisis through various strategies; 4) institutional processes and their implications for fishers’ marginalization. Using evidence collected through household- and village-level surveys, combined with various qualitative and participatory research methods over 28 months, the study shows that there are two major driving forces or drivers of marginalisation: (1) the role of aquaculture development in the loss of resource access rights and the decline of local institutions, and (2) the ecological displacement and livelihood loss brought about by the opening of a new “sea mouth” connecting the Lagoon and the Bay of Bengal. There exist a paradox of the official account and fishers’ own view of marginalisation. Chilika is a clear case in which government policies have encouraged de facto privatisation. The dynamic nature and fluctuations associated with commons development make it imperative to understand commons as a process that includes commonisation and decommonisation. Out-migration has emerged as a key livelihood strategy resulting in occupational displacement for one-third of the adult fishers, and such livelihood strategies have led to their disconnection and marginalisation. The fishers’ point of view presents a more complex, multidimensional concept of marginalisation, not simply as a state of being but as a process over time, impacting social and economic conditions, political standing, and environmental health.

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