Music is an essential piece of the culture of south Louisiana. Three genres -- Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop -- grew up in this region. The genres developed as separate cultures, primarily Cajun and Creole, developed and blended before entering a period of cultural assimilation in the early twentieth century. The music, and the social dancing that accompanies it, took place at weekly gatherings in rural residences in the eighteenth century. Commercial dance halls began to appear in the state around 1900 and have evolved throughout the century. The evolution of dance halls and their use follows a cultural evolution from relative isolation to assimilation and eventually cultural awareness and promotion as tourism blossomed in the state. Despite their significant place in the region's history, dance halls are not yet recognized in any official capacity, including the National Register of Historic Places. The Center for Louisiana Studies is collecting information about the extant and demolished buildings to advocate for preservation of dance hall culture and extant buildings. I am contributing to this advocacy effort with a National Register of Historic Places Multiple-Property Documentation Form for extant historic dance halls. The form will discuss the historic contexts of Cajun, Zydeco, and Swamp Pop music and establish typical and variable characteristics, both physical and associative, for dance hall buildings. Registration requirements based on significance and integrity will establish criteria for eligibility of extant buildings for the National Register of Historic Places. / text

Children transform different spaces into their own special places by interacting with the physical and social environment (Hart, 1979; Rasmussen, 2004; Sobel, 1993/2002). Special place research has focused largely on children’s place–making in neighbourhoods, including the process of finding and constructing forts, playhouses and dens in outdoor environments (Benson, 2009; Hart, 1979; Kylin, 2003; Sobel, 1993/2002). The significant presence of schools in children’s everyday lives (Rasmussen, 2004), however, has encouraged some researchers to investigate what environmental conditions foster learning (Derr, 2006; Maxwell, 2006; O’Dell, 2011; Upitis, 2007), as well as how children use and experience social and physical aspects of these places (Einarsdottir, 2005; Peterson, 2009; Rathunde, 2003). Although researchers recognize that learning environments have the potential to enhance learning by the presence of specific design elements, little is known about what constitutes places that elementary students characterize as special, and to which they become attached. Some schools, including Montessori, claim to offer a uniquely prepared learning environment that enhances students’ development, though empirical studies that involve Montessori elementary programs predominantly use academic standardized test scores to compare them to other programs (Baines & Snortum, 1973; Lopata, Wallace, & Finn, 2005). The purpose of this study was to explore places at school that students characterized as special and to describe what aspects made them special. This study used photo elicitation interviews, walking tours, and focus groups to explore 11 Grade 2 students’ special places in two Ontario learning environments: a privately funded, not-for-profit Montessori school and a publicly funded school. Results demonstrated that Grade 2 students in both schools identified special places, both indoors and outdoors, for developing a sense of placeness; engaging in types of play; fostering and engaging in friendships; and having solititude and tranquility. Further analysis revealed two underlying themes: places were special because they afforded students opportunities to be interdependent or independent. Future research is necessary to determine the long-term significance of students’ special places in different learning environments. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2012-05-30 19:43:33.982

No description available.

This is a report on the development of a free open-source framework. The framework is meant to be used to mainly black-box test and/or scrape information from a geographic service like Google Places, Facebook Places or Foursquare. In reality any service that is based on geographic coordinates can be used with the framewok. Amongst others, the framework offers functionalities like visualisation on-the-fly and logging of different aspects of the service. There are a few similar tools scattered on the world-wide web, but they usually are hard to find and if they are found, they either are not open-source, free or they lack in functionality. Another major drawback is that the available solutions are very generic, and thus limiting their capabilities. The work described here is an attempt for a concise, easy to use, extendible framework solely focused on geographic services. In this report, the technologies used are demonstrated, while at the same time the reasons are given as to why a specific technology was selected in each case. Some documentation is also presented and a few references to the actual code-base in case someone wants to extend Geoexplorer or use it at their organization.

Something Like Wilderness: A Journey into the Heart of the Tundra is a work of creative non-fiction that chronicles Jennifer Kingsley’s 54-day canoe expedition down Nunavut’s Back River in the summer of 2005. This manuscript explores the themes of wilderness and belonging, and it investigates the notion of intersecting journeys. Something Like Wilderness seeks to engage readers with a compelling story while articulating some of the ideas we have about wild places. / Graduate / 10000-01-01

In this thesis, we give two simple and effective methods for constructing Kummer extensions of algebraic function fields over finite fields with many rational places. Some explicit examples are obtained after a practical search. We also study fibre products of Kummer extensions over a finite field and determine the exact number of rational places. We obtain explicit examples with many rational places by a practical search. We have a record (i.e the lower bound is improved) and a new entry for the table of van der Geer and van der Vlugt.

Research evidence suggests that engaging with nature can promote health by reducing stress, improving cognition, fostering social connectivity, and supporting healthy behaviours such as physical activity, healthy eating, and pro-environmental practices. Yet there are empirical data gaps about how community members engage with nature in their local context, what facilitates or inhibits access to outdoor places , and how health practitioners and decision-makers use evidence on the linkages between health and nature to inform their work. Using a participatory, community-based research design and adapting photographic methods from the fields of ecological restoration and health care, this dissertation study addressed these critical gaps. The study was conducted in rural Nova Scotia, a site that offered considerable access to natural environments. In phase one, an aggregate group of parents with young children (n=8) participated in photo narration and photo elicitation interviews and focus groups to explore how they engage with nature to promote their individual and family health. In phase two, local practitioners and decision-makers (n=16) engaged in photo elicitation focus groups to discuss and expand the analytic themes from phase one and to examine how they use evidence on the health benefits of engaging with nature to design community-based health promotion interventions. Critical analytic themes emerged from the dialectical analysis of data from both phases and offered insight into the value of restorative places and experiences in nature, the barriers and facilitators to connecting with the natural world, the ties between engaging with nature and ecological citizenship, and the proposed shifts in practice and policy norms and governance processes needed across sectors and citizen groups to simultaneously promote and protect the health of people and the natural world. The findings provided a unique view of ecologically-sound everyday access to restorative outdoor places as critical to the promotion of health. This paper-based dissertation details study findings and implications for research, practice, and policy through five manuscripts that together confer conceptual, evidence-informed, and analytic views of nature-based health promotion and provide insight into rigorous participatory photographic research methods for community engagement in mutual generation and exchange of knowledge.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>This paper deals with the relations between landscape rooms and monuments in an area north of Mönsterås in Kalmar län. After archaeological excavations had been carried out in the area 1991, an article promote it to the “Bronze Age district of Mönsterås” (Källström 1993). There are two main problems that I deal with in this paper. First: The relations between the natural places and the monuments or memorials. Secondly: The patterns with respect to the spread of certain monuments in the landscapes. My studies starts from the British landscape archaeology of Christopher Tilley and Richard Bradley, but also from a Scandinavian point of view with Terje Gansum et al.</p>

Stemming from a 2011 incident inside of a Facebook data facility in which hyper-cooled air formed a literal (if somewhat transient) rain cloud in the stacks, It was raining in the data center examines ideas of non-places and supermodernity applied to contemporary network infrastructure. It was raining in the data center argues that the problem of the rain cloud is as much a problem of psychology as it is a problem of engineering. Although humidity-management is a predictable snag for any data center, the cloud was a surprise; a self-inflicted side-effect of a strategy of distance. The rain cloud was a result of the same rhetoric of ephemerality that makes it easy to imagine the inside of a data center to be both everywhere and nowhere. This conceit of internet data being placeless shares roots with Marc Augé’s idea of non-places (airports, highways, malls), which are predicated on the qualities of excess and movement. Without long-term inhabitants, these places fail to tether themselves to their locations, instead existing as a markers of everywhere. Such a premise allows the internet to exist as an other-space that is not conceptually beholden to the demands of energy and landscape. It also liberates the idea of ‘the network’ from a similar history of industry. However, the network is deeply rooted in place, as well as in industry and transit. Examining the prevalence of network overlap in American fiber-optic cabling, it becomes easy to trace routes of cables along major US freight train lines and the US interstate highway system. The historical origin of this network technology is in weaponization and defense, from highways as a nuclear-readiness response to ARPANET’s Pentagon-based funding. Such a linkage with the military continues today, with data centers likely to be situated near military installations— sharing similar needs electricity, network connectivity, fair climate, space, and invisibility. We see the repetition of militarized tropes across data structures. Fiber-optic network locations are kept secret; servers are housed in cold-war bunkers; data centers nest next to military black-sites. Similarly, Augé reminds us that non-places are a particular target of terrorism, populated as they are with cars, trains, drugs and planes that turn into weapons. When the network itself is at threat of weaponization, the effect is an ambient and ephemeral fear; a paranoia made of over-connection.