The Arctic is receving global attention as climate change transforms the region. With increased interest in natural resources and sovereignty issues, the security discourse in the Arctic is also changing. This Taskforce report seeks to understand Arctic security as the capacity for communities and states to build sustainable and resilient systems and to assert a representative voice, in arenas of diplomacy and negotiating power. The Taskforce group spent one week in Quebec City and Ottawa, Canada gathering research with scholars, government officials, and Inuit leaders. This report combines relevant literature with these engagements to understand the evolution of Arctic security. Aspects of security discussed include: the Northwest Passage, devolution of resources, Quebec’s Arctic policy, tourism, food security, biodiversity, homelessness, education, the Arctic Council, and China’s role in the Arctic. Each chapter provides specific policy options that together form a model for building capacity for communities.

The levantamientos of 1990 and ’92 in Ecuador demonstrate the incredible ability of indigenous political organizations to present local concerns at the national level. After 500 years of resistance and oppression, the government was forced into serious political negotiations. I hope to add to an ongoing conversation regarding indigenous political organization in Latin America by studying the specific case of Ecuadorian indigenous peoples of the Oriente, and the construction of political voice in response to government policy, the actions of private companies, and the involvement of international lending organizations that led to years of unfettered, destructive practices of extraction and colonization in the last half of the 20th century. Through an analysis of documentary film, academic writing, and media coverage, this project looks to show that this struggle has been wrought with contradictions and unintended consequences and characterized by a high level of coordination at the local and national level. Emphasizing contradictions in the construction of political voice is appropriate in a discussion of political representation of historically marginalized or excluded peoples, who more than ever occupy an uncertain borderland space. I think it is crucial to understand that, in the construction of indigenous political voice, contradictions reinforce the borderlands they seek to escape, or the dominant power structures.

Governments can manipulate reports of the inflation rate to hide economic problems, and to generate revenues from the hidden depreciation of their liabilities valued in domestic currency. However, such practices are unpopular and generally short-lived because citizens soon recognize the loss in their purchasing power. Previously, I constructed an alternative price index for 2006 to 2008 and found that the National Statistics and Censuses Institute underreported the official inflation rate since February 2007. My data, used in conjunction with other alternative indexes, showed that the reported Consumer Price Index (CPI) only accounted for between a half and a third of the real inflation rate. This project explores effects of underreporting inflation in Argentina, and provides further evidence to support the existence of manipulation in the official statistics reports. Using the alternative price indexes, I estimated government gains from domestic bonds and the social security system due to the misreported inflation rates since the manipulation began. By reporting a CPI that is lower than the real one, the government was able to finance its expenditures at a decreasing real cost, at the expense of private investors and citizens. My preliminary results show that the Argentinian government profited in real terms from issuing bonds, and maintained a moderately low budget deficit despite increasing the number of social security beneficiaries. I also studied the national accounts and central bank publications of the last decade and observed a surprisingly high rate of nominal growth beginning in 2007. I will demonstrate that this unexpected rise can be explained by the discrepancy between the reported and the real inflation rate. Since 2009, the Argentinian government has actively censored independent domestic studies on the official CPI, so for the time being, it is essential for foreign scholars to research and keep track of Argentina’s deteriorating statistics.

Among the limited powers that the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress, the power to regulate commerce among the states is one of the most important. Over the past one hundred years, Congress has sought to use this power to pass a wider and wider range of legislation, from labor laws to drug laws. The members of the Supreme Court have had to use the power of judicial review to determine the limits of the commerce power, but have disagreed about where to place them. The two major approaches to judicial review in commerce clause cases came to a head in United States v. Lopez (1995), in which the Court overturned a law on Commerce Clause grounds for the first time since the New Deal era. Through an examination of all six opinions written for this case, I argue that those of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Kennedy respond to the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional approaches to judicial review. In doing so, Rehnquist and Kennedy’s opinions are the only ones to take on the task of judicial review as it was originally envisioned in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Promiscuity and casual sex are points of contention within many societies, especially when discussing the concept that men are allowed to engage in casual sex while women are not (the sexual double standard). Although the media may be showing that perhaps this stigma against women is diminishing, there is evidence that people hold biases against women who engage in promiscuity. Our objective was to study the relationship between promiscuity and likability in a social, platonic context. We used the Reyson Likability Scale to measure perception of one of 6 profiles, one male and one female, each with 3 levels of promiscuity (high, low, or none). In the online survey, a link randomizer directed the participant to one of the profiles. We also asked for the gender and age of the participant. We collected 103 responses and found that although there is not a statistically significant difference between the promiscuous profiles and the non-promiscuous profiles (p=0.688), there is a significant difference in reported likability between the two genders (p=0.039) in favor of men. Men received a mean likability score of 51.28 (SD=8.45), while women averaged a score of 45.39 (SD=13.56). Because both profiles were identical in information and presentation, and all mentioned "hooking up" as the promiscuity indicator, women may have received lower scores because the mere mentioning of hooking up is negative in the social perception of women. Upon investigation of respondents' open-ended feedback on the good and bad characteristics of the profiles, many people mentioned hooking up as unfavorable. Theories of biological anthropology can provide a possible explanation of this behavior through the evolution of the different reproductive goals of men and women. Further research could use a similar method but conducted with the addition of another profile without any mention of hooking up at all.

The goal of our research is to understand mechanisms of the earthworm immune system responsible for distinguishing symbionts from potential pathogens. The Hygiene hypothesis, proposed by David Strachan and published in British Medical Journal in 1989, fundamentally expanded our view on microorganisms and natural development of immune system. The hypothesis states that early childhood exposure to microorganisms is essential for acquiring healthy immunity. Studies in mice showing that host-specific bacteria in the gut are required for full maturation and function of the immune system support this hypothesis. Although numerous symbioses of beneficial bacteria with animals have been studied, the role of symbionts in the development of host immunity remains uncertain. Additional models are needed to study the roles and regulation of the immune responses to host-specific beneficial bacteria. The earthworm offers a tractable system in which to study immune system development and responses to both beneficial symbionts and potential pathogens. Eisenia fetida, a common composting worm, has an effective immune system that eliminates bacteria from the coelom. E. fetida also harbors specific bacterial symbionts in the excretory organs (nephridia) that process coelomic fluid, thus potentially exposing the bacteria to immune elements in the fluid. We hypothesize that the immune system adapts to the symbiotic bacteria in order to avoid eliminating them, or cause unnecessary inflammation in the nephridial tissue. Therefore, we investigated the contribution of the bacterial symbiont Verminephrobacter eiseniae to the development of immune system responses in E. fetida. Coelomocytes were extracted from symbiont-containing earthworms and symbiont-free earthworms, and were examined for differences in their binding and engulfment responses to V. eiseniae and non-symbionts. We believe further studies of the role of immunity in symbiont recruitment mechanisms in the earthworm would help us understand more about the co-evolution of beneficial microbiota and the host organisms in other species.