My dissertation examines how environmental change affected cultural transformation. It investigates the manner in which the mobile, isolated boat people adapted to a boat-dwelling lifestyle and created innovative religious practices and beliefs in order to maintain their relationships with spirits and ancestors, as well as dispersed lineage members, given that they had no fixed base on land to build temples, ancestral shrines or tombs. The subjects of the study are the boat-dwelling people who frequently moved back and forth within the Grand Canal basin between southwest Shandong and north Jiangsu in late imperial and modern China. These boat dwellers were displaced from their land-based estates and became environmental refugees during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The isolation of the boat people protected their unique religious activities from the anti-religious campaigns of the twentieth century. Their ritual tradition Duangu Ceremony was granted the status of National Intangible Cultural Heritage by the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China in 2011. I argue that despite the distinctive lifestyle and religious culture of the floating community, some significant elements of religious belief and practice of boat people remained unchanged, transcending differences in occupation, social status, and environment for centuries. With the assistance of ritualists within the floating community, these boat people endeavored to continue their genealogies and maintain ancestor worship, practices that were equally important to farmers. These shared components can help us rethink core elements of Chinese popular culture, previously based on farmers' experiences, and discern which features are the most significant in Chinese popular religion and how and why they play such vital roles. More importantly, core cultural elements have been resilient and resistant to environmental change.

To compensate for the scarcity of historical sources, I conducted fieldwork in a fishing community in the Weishan Lakes of Shandong, to document their lifestyle and the complete process of religious ceremonies during 2008-2010. This project not only contributes to our knowledge of Chinese popular religion, previously limited to the farming population, but it also opens up our understanding of voiceless boat people and environmental refugees as subalterns of the past. The lessons learned can be taken forward into possible crises of rising sea levels associated with global warming, which may create more environmental refugees. Learning about ways boat-dwelling changed lifestyle and culture in the past may help us prepare better for the future.

Purpose: To determine the degree of adherence to a cervical spine (c-spine) clearance protocol by pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel by both self-assessment and receiving hospital assessment, to describe deviations from the protocol, and to determine if the rate of compliance by paramedic self-assessment differed from receiving hospital assessment.

Methods: A retrospective sample of pre-hospital (consecutive series) and receiving hospital (convenience sample) assessments of the compliance with and appropriateness of c-spine immobilization. The c-spine clearance protocol was implemented for Orange County EMS just prior to the April-November 1999 data collection period.

Results: We collected 396 pre-hospital and 162 receiving hospital data forms. From the pre-hospital data sheet. the percentage deviation from the protocol was 4.096 (16/396). Only one out of 16 cases that did not comply with the protocol was due to over immobilization (0.2%). The remaining 15 cases were under immobilized, according to protocol. Nine of the under immobilized cases (66%) that should have been placed in c-spine precautions met physical assessment criteria in the protocol, while the other five cases met mechanism of injury criteria. The rate of deviations from protocol did not differ over time. The receiving hospital identified 8.0% (13/162; 6/16 over immobilized, 7/16 under immobilized) of patients with deviations from the protocol; none was determined to have actual c-spine injury.

Conclusion: The implementation of a pre-hospital c-spine clearance protocol in Orange County was associated with a moderate overall adherence rate (96% from the pre-hospital perspective, and 92% from the hospital perspective, p=.08 for the two evaluation methods). Most patients who deviated from protocol were under immobilized, but no c-spine injuries were missed. The rate of over immobilization was better than previously reported, implying a saving of resources.

We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 96 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast, has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact. By comparing two closely matched places with huge contrasts in actual execution but no differences in homicide trends, we have generated a unique test of the exuberant claims of deterrence that have been produced over the past decade in the U.S.