103 research outputs found
Combining national surveys with composite calibration to improve the precision of estimates from the UK’s Living Costs and Food Survey
No full textThe United Kingdom's Living Costs and Food (LCF) Survey has a relatively small sample size but produces estimates which are widely used, notably as a key input to the calculation of weights for consumer price indices. There has been a recent call for the use of additional data sources to improve the estimates from the LCF. Since some LCF variables are shared with the much larger Labour Force Survey (LFS), we investigate combining data from these surveys using composite calibration to improve the precision of estimates from the LCF. We undertake model selection to choose a suitable set of common variables for the composite calibration using the effect on the estimated variances for national and regional totals of important LCF variables. The variances of estimates for common variables are reduced to around 5 percent of their original size. Variances of national estimates are reduced (across several quarters) by around 10 percent for expenditure and 25 percent for income; these are the variables of primary interest in the LCF. Reductions in the variances of regional estimates vary more but are mostly large when using common variables at the regional level in the composite calibration. The composite calibration also makes the LCF estimates for employment status almost consistent with the outputs of the LFS, which is an important property for users of the statistics. A novel alternative method for variance estimation, using stored information produced by the composite calibration, is also presented.</p
A Conversation with James Fallows
No full textGary Eichten, Minnesota Public Radio news editor-at-large and retired host, leads a conversation with James Fallows, author, national correspondent for The Atlantic and commentator for National Public Radio, at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, in Pellegrene Auditorium, Saint John\u27s University.
The conversation is co-sponsored at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John\u27s University by the University Chair in Critical Thinking, the Center for Global Education and the Asian Studies Program.
Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has lived in Seattle; Berkeley, Calif.; Austin, Texas; Tokyo; Kuala Lumpur; Shanghai and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, Calif., received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
In addition to working for The Atlantic, he spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of U.S. News & World Report and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He also holds the chair in U.S. media at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.
Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once. He has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a New York Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in 2012
Simultaneous interplanetary scintillation and Heliospheric Imager observations of a coronal mass ejection
No full textWe describe simultaneous Interplanetary Scintillation (IPS) and STEREO Heliospheric Imager (HI) observations of a coronal mass ejection (CME) on 16 May 2007. Strong CME signatures were present throughout the IPS observation. The IPS raypath lay within the field-of-view of HI-1 on STEREO-A and comparison of the observations shows that the IPS measurements came from a region within a faint CME front observed by HI-1A. This front may represent the merging of two converging CMEs. Plane-of-sky velocity estimates based on time-height plots of the two converging CME structures were 325 kms?1 and 550 kms?1 for the leading and trailing fronts respectively. The plane-of-sky velocities determined from IPS ranged from 420 ± 10 kms?1 to 520 ± 20 kms?1. IPS results reveal the presence of micro-structure within the CME front which may represent interaction between the two separate CME events. This is the first time that it has been possible to interpret IPS observations of small-scale structure within an interplanetary CME in terms of the global structure of the event
James Fallows - National orrespondent for The Atlantic and Award Winning Writer
No full textPostcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
A national correspondent for The Atlantic, James Fallows is one of America’s most respected journalists. Whether writing about politics, national security, the economy, or foreign policy, Fallows strives to do one thing: “Make the important interesting.” For his always-perceptive, sometimes-prescient writing, he has won the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times, winning once. Writing from China since 2006, he is now chronicling that country’s explosive growth and its staggering ramifications for America and the world.
Fallows has covered the major foreign policy stories of our time—from Iraq to North Korea to Iran to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and beyond. In his lectures, he delivers an unsparing look at the challenges to American foreign policy posed by our actions in various regions, how other countries perceive us, and how upheavals overseas will impact us.
In his more than 25 years working for The Atlantic, Fallows has been based in Washington, DC, Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and now Beijing. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and as a program designer at Microsoft. He received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford.
In addition to his latest book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, Fallows is also the author of Breaking the News, about the crisis facing contemporary news media, and Blind into Baghdad, about the lead-up to the War in Iraq (now required reading in many military programs).
Please also join us on Wednesday, February 17, for the Wright State University Honors Institute Symposium on Connecting with China.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/archives_presidential_lecture_series/1036/thumbnail.jp
Is exercise training safe and effective for ALL heart failure patients: A retrospective service evaluation of a hospital based cardiac rehabilitation programme
No full textThe main purpose of this study was to investigate whether exercise training is safe and effective for all classifications of heart failure, female and elderly (70 years and above) heart failure patients and also those heart failure patients with significant co-morbidity. Much of the research into exercise training and heart failure has been carried out on middle aged men in NYHA II-III classification of heart failure who have no other significant co-existing conditions. This is not reflective of the population of heart failure patients in general. The cardiac rehabilitation records (n=1000) of heart failure patients who had attended an exercise programme at a hospital based NHS service over a period of ten years were retrospectively evaluated to investigate the safety and efficacy of exercise training. Analysis of baseline statistics and repeated outcome measures were used to investigate the significance of the service and to ascertain where similarities and differences lay with the research. 74% were male, the age range was 17-90 years and 52% of patients had one or more significant co-morbidity. The acute event incidence was recorded at four per 1000 patients. NYHA I patients, female, elderly heart failure patients and those with significant co-morbidity showed significant improvements in functional capacity and quality of life measures with exercise training (p< 0.05). However no conclusion on the effectiveness of exercise could be drawn for NYHA IV heart failure patients due to insufficient recorded data and reduced adherence to exercise sessions for this group. A hospital based exercise programme, therefore may not be the most appropriate setting for the NYHA IV patient. This study supports previous research of the benefit of exercise training in heart failure but broadens it further to show that exercise is safe for all heart failure patients and is also effective for all heart failure patients with the exception of NYHA IV patients where further investigation is needed
Decadal and centennial scale stable soil organic carbon : insights from long term bare fallows
No full textInternational audienceUnderstanding and predicting the residence time of soil organic carbon is a major issue in the context of climate change. A fraction of soil organic matter persists over decades and centuries, but no method allows, so far, its quantification and isolation. We proposed to use bare fallows plots, kept free of plants for decades, in which almost all C inputs have been stopped. They provide a unique opportunity to monitor the decay of soil organic C by mineralization under natural conditions and to quantify and isolate stable soil C. We set a network of long-term bare fallows (>30 yrs), covering a range of soil types and climate conditions, located at Askov (Denmark), Grignon and Versailles (France), Kursk (Russia), Rothamsted (UK) and Ultuna (Sweden). Using freshly sampled or archived soil samples, we quantified the centennial scale stable organic carbon pool and investigated the processes responsible of its persistence. We found in particular that persistent OM has a low energy content. Using this exceptional set of archived samples we demonstrated that the mineralisation of persistent organic carbon is more sensitive to temperature than labile organic carbon pools, adding strong arguments to a lively debate in the scientific community.Bare fallows, usually references in long-term agricultural experiments, are powerful tools to study soil organic matter dynamics, with a special emphasis on decadal and centennial scale persistent carbon pools. Long-term agricultural experiments may then allow to answer scientific questions for which they were not initially created for, which adds to their value for the scientific community
Decadal and centennial scale stable soil organic carbon : insights from long term bare fallows
No full textInternational audienceUnderstanding and predicting the residence time of soil organic carbon is a major issue in the context of climate change. A fraction of soil organic matter persists over decades and centuries, but no method allows, so far, its quantification and isolation. We proposed to use bare fallows plots, kept free of plants for decades, in which almost all C inputs have been stopped. They provide a unique opportunity to monitor the decay of soil organic C by mineralization under natural conditions and to quantify and isolate stable soil C. We set a network of long-term bare fallows (>30 yrs), covering a range of soil types and climate conditions, located at Askov (Denmark), Grignon and Versailles (France), Kursk (Russia), Rothamsted (UK) and Ultuna (Sweden). Using freshly sampled or archived soil samples, we quantified the centennial scale stable organic carbon pool and investigated the processes responsible of its persistence. We found in particular that persistent OM has a low energy content. Using this exceptional set of archived samples we demonstrated that the mineralisation of persistent organic carbon is more sensitive to temperature than labile organic carbon pools, adding strong arguments to a lively debate in the scientific community.Bare fallows, usually references in long-term agricultural experiments, are powerful tools to study soil organic matter dynamics, with a special emphasis on decadal and centennial scale persistent carbon pools. Long-term agricultural experiments may then allow to answer scientific questions for which they were not initially created for, which adds to their value for the scientific community
Identifying grass-legume bicultures to increase above and belowground biomass production and improve traditional fallows in crop rotations of the Andean Highlands
No full text2021 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.In the high Andes of Peru, intensification of crop rotation and agricultural land-use is reducing the practice and duration of traditional fallow (based on natural establishment of native vegetation). These fallows represent one of the main traditional soil management practices to sustain long-term productivity, while also providing key forage resources in these mixed crop-livestock systems. Improved forage-based fallows, with the intentional seeding of more productive annual and perennial forages, offer great potential for producing forage and contributing to soil restoration under intensified contexts; however, there remains a gap in knowledge about which plant species can best optimize tradeoffs between forage production and belowground inputs to support long-term soil fertility and contribute to the multifunctionality of Andean agroecosystems. To address this issue, a pot study was conducted with two contrasting soils to evaluate the above and belowground productivity of all possible grass-legume pairs involving five grasses (oat (Avena sativa), ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum), festulolium (Lolium x Festuca genera), brome grass (Bromus catharticus), and orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata), and four legumes (vetch (Vicia dasycarpa ), red clover (Trifolium pratense), black medic (Medicago lupulina), and alfalfa (Medicago sativa)) in comparison to the performance of each species in monoculture. Grass-legume bicultures resulted in significant overyielding, producing 65% and 28% more total dry biomass and total N uptake on average than species in monoculture, respectively. Grass-legume shoot biomass production yielded 67% more compared to monocultures, while root biomass was on average 58% higher in bicultures than in monocultures. For aboveground biomass, production differences between grass-legume bicultures were significantly influenced by the species of legume present, while belowground biomass was more affected by the grass species present in the bicultures. Roughly 80% of the mixtures achieved a mean land equivalent ratio (LER) > 1.0. When examining total biomass production, the most successful bicultures were oat-vetch (LER=1.87), vetch-festulolium (LER=2.31), vetch-orchardgrass (LER=1.87), oat-red clover (LER=1.62), and red clover-ryegrass (LER=1.46). When examining partial LERs (the component of the LER attributed to each species), we found that overyielding in bicultures was mainly driven by increases in the biomass of the component grass species. Our findings suggest that mixtures of key functional species (e.g. grass and legume, annual and perennial species) offer greater promise in improved fallows compared to monocultures of the respective species. Additionally, I suggest that strategically designed improved fallow mixtures, with emphasis on perennial species that support long-term root inputs, can best support soil health and the multifunctionality of Andean agroecosystems
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