481,668 research outputs found
Modification of nektonic fish distribution by piers and pile fields in an urban estuary
No full textLarge urban piers degrade habitat value for several estuarine benthic fish species by shading, but their effects on mobile nektonic species is less well understood due to sampling challenges. Dual Frequency Identification Sonar (DIDSON) allowed equal access to sampling in the water column of structured shaded and unshaded vs. open environments in both dark and light conditions by methods similar to video but without light. Sampling (n = 228, 5-minute transects) occurred under and around four large municipal piers of varying dimensions in the Hudson River estuary during day and night from summer and fall in 2007 - 2009. The distribution of small (5 - 25 cm in length) and large (25 – 850 cm) fishes were analyzed separately in recognition of functional guild differences. Small fishes occupied open water, shaded under-pier, and un-decked relict piling habitats, but were significantly more abundant during the day in open unshaded water than under adjacent piers or in piling habitats.. Small fish occurred under 3 of 4 piers of varying size and configuration at 10 - 20% of the median abundances of adjacent open water. However, while schools were rare under piers they could be very large, so that abundance greatly exceeded mean open water abundance variance so as to preclude confidence in differences among piers. The differences among habitats was not significant at night, and the difference among piers was also not significant at night. School membership for small fish appeared to mitigate adverse effects of shading and may influence scaling of their response to shading and could therefore influence pier design. Large (>25 cm) predatory fish were uncommon but responded similarly to habitat effects as did small fish. Habitats did not segregate fish by guild as small forage fish co-occurred in 65.8% of samples with large piscivores. Studies that provide species-specific and mechanistic interpretation of dynamic habitat use as well as further quantification of scaling effects could improve our understanding of how fishes respond to piers and other structures on urban shorelines.Peer reviewed
Durum wheat for the future: challenges, research and prospects in the 21st Century
No full textSpecial Issue
ForwardJason Able, Mike Sisson
Measure beyond Pleasure: Evaluating the Impact on Learning of Out-of-School Programmes for Able and Gifted Pupils in England
No full textFirst published in International Journal of Learning, Volume 10, 2003School-education in England is replete with new projects and initiatives of various kinds. Many require formal evaluation of their impact and effectiveness, often carried out by researchers from higher education. One of these initiatives has been the development in recent years of ‘Advanced Learning Centres’ – out-of-school programmes for school-pupils. The author of this paper is now undertaking a three-year national evaluation of the impact on learning of pupils’ attendance at these Centres. This paper presents and analyses some of the issues and obstacles of doing this evaluation. These include facing the ‘Hawthorne effect’ of initial enthusiasm, the need to identify the historical context of out-of-school learning for able pupils, the difficulties of measuring against goals and intended outcomes, and tensions between the need for measurement and the ethos of the Centres themselves. The paper identifies ways forward for the evaluation process and relates this to evaluation of other similar projects elsewhere
A longitudinal study exploring the educational experiences and perceptions of students who have been identified as able in the context of a challenging school
No full textThe aim of this study was to explore perceptions of educational experiences held by a group of students identified as able in the context of a challenging school. The study was conducted over a four year period, with a focus on the end of KS3, during KS4, and the end of KS4. The study has explored the notion of ‘ability’, in particular the term gifted. I believe that ‘ability’ is a construct as opposed to the traditional essentialist view -and I have critiqued the mainstream perspective of giftedness and ‘disability/ability’, before considering an alternative, more inclusive approach.
The study involved ten students from ‘‘Greengate’’; a small urban school, located in a relatively deprived area of a northern English city. I interviewed each student four times over a period of four years, having set out to rectify an imbalance I had noted in traditional educational research whereby the students were theorized about or represented, rather than asked directly. I chose to give prominence to student voice, and my post-modern method of working with the data, and presenting my findings is partly as a consequence of my wish to avoid the pitfalls of representation.
I believe that the method I have used here to present the fragmentary and shifting nature of the truth as it appears to a person over time, complements the philosophy expressed throughout my study, namely that meaning shifts, and there is not one essential truth.
Whilst not having a conventional ‘findings’ section, a key strand running through the study is the issue of how and why, able students from lower working-class backgrounds do not tend to take up Higher Education pathways, as was shown with the ten able students in this study, who despite their substantial enrichment provision, and subsequent high attainment have not, yet, (with two exceptions) attended university
Appendix A Study Methods: Field Equipment, Sampling and Methods
No full textThis appendix aims to provide an overview of the sampling methods that are used to assess and monitor fish assemblages in estuaries based on best practice and standardised approaches. It focuses specifically on sampling for scientific purposes, by using methods developed ad hoc to target specific components of the fish assemblage, or shared with commercial sampling. Given that estuarine fish communities comprise a diversity of species, body morphologies, life stages, functional groups and life strategies (e.g. Whitfield et al. 2022), there is not one-size- fits- all method that is able to provide a representative sample of the whole community, and the use of several different complementary methods is required to capture all components of a fish assemblage. In general, most of the extensive spatial and temporal information gathered on fish populations in estuaries and nearshore areas is required either for deriving assessments of environmental or ecological quality, or for fisheries management. The assessments may be for particular stressors or impacts caused by human activities such as effluent disposal, land-claim schemes or dredging, thus focusing on a localised geographic scale, targeting individual populations, a specific site of interest or a specific area where the activity occurs. Wider scale, coordinated monitoring is also carried out to obtain data on species distributions and trends to assess the structural and functional characteristics and dynamics of natural populations, their response to anthropogenic pressures, or relate to management measures that are implemented (Elliott & Hemingway 2000). Such monitoring, especially long term, provides the evidence support for regional assessments required for estuarine and marine ecosystem protection and the management of fisheries resources (Ducklow et al. 2009, Sukotin & Berger 2013) as, for example, has been conducted on the east coast of the USA (Morson et al. 2019). The latter may relate to commercial stocks within the area studied, or those outside the estuarine area but which are dependent, to some extent, on the success of the estuary in supporting young stages
Who Should Bear The Risk? The Party Least Able To Refuse Or The Party Best Able To Manage The Risk?
No full textThe outsourcing of human services by governments to the nonprofit sector has been accompanied by a transfer of legal liability risks. Human service providers are often required to indemnify the government for adverse consequences of service delivery and to acquire contract specified insurances. The civil liability crisis caused by a recent hard insurance market has exacerbated problems for nonprofit organisations in managing the government’s transfer of risk of human service outsourcing.\ud
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This paper identifies and examines the risk shifting clauses contained in human service agreements across a range of Queensland government departments. It argues that it is in the interests of all parties of the risk to be allocated to the party best able to mange the risk rather than imposed by the party with the strongest negotiating power. It is argues that the prudent risk managemnt6 on the aport government may be to retain the risks so it can mange them itsel
Dr. Duane M. Jackson, Morehouse College, July 2011
No full textThis video is a conversation with Dr. Duane M. Jackson. Dr. Jackson talks about his paper, "Recall and the Serial Position Effect: The Role of Primacy and Recency on Accounting Students' Performance." Jackie Daniel, AUC Woodruff Library, is the interviewer
"Reflections on the subject of Emigration from Europe with a view to Settlement in the United States" By M. Carey.
No full text"Reflections on the subject of Emigration from Europe with a view to Settlement in the United States: containing bried sketches of the moral and political character of those states.
By M. Carey, member of the American philosophical, and of the American Antiquarian Society, and author of The Olive Branch, Cindiciae Hibernicae, essays on banking, on political economy, and on internal improvement.
To which are now added the English editor's comments on the subject; together with Important Advice to Emigrants, and Cautions Against Impositions Practiced in the Outports
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Dr. Glendon Swarthout
No full textHosted by Roger M. Busfield, MSU Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater, Meet the Author is designed to introduce a general audience to a contemporary author and their work through in-depth interviews. This episode features a conversation between Dr. Glendon Swarthout, prolific author and English professor at MSU, and assistant professors Sam S. Baskett and Theodore B. Strandness
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