4,035 research outputs found
Oral History with Ms. Paulette Ferguson
No full textOral History interview with Ms. Paulette Ferguson conducted at Mississippi State University on October 17, 2021 as part of the Cultural Research & Engagement Fellows (CREF) Program. Topics include Ms. Ferguson\u27s childhood in Eupora, Mississippi; her parents and family; gardening, cooking, and foraging; her time working and living in St. Louis, Missouri; her move back to Mississippi; and her current role as the Chair of the United Community Agriculture Cooperative Food Policy Council
In Honour of Brian MacWhinney: A Personal Account
No full textWhile this volume and the writings have made it amply clear what significant contributions Professor Brian MacWhinney has made to the field at large, in this afterword, we begin with a senior member of our author team (Ping Li, PL) followed by a mid-career member (Helen Zhao, HZ) and an early career member (Zhe Gao, ZG), to provide our personal accounts of Brian not only as a leading scholar but also as a role model who touches and changes people’s lives
Response statistics of stochastic built-up structures
No full textCollections of essentially identical manufactured built-up structures display natural variations in their response. These variations arise from many sources including variability in the manufacturing process, variations in the response measurement process and environmental variations. Current techniques for response prediction focus on estimating the response of an ’ideal’ or nominal realisation of the structure. Further understanding is required into the statistics of the response of collections of mass produced structures. An appreciation of the distribution of response enables a cost effective design process with improved knowledge of worst-case behaviour and failure modes. Relevant measures include mean and variance, together with their statistical distributions. This paper considers response statistics in various situations. First, an idealised situation is considered and possible methods of analysis discussed. Then some existing measured response data from industrial products is examined. The availability of such data is extremely limited. Various statistical distributions are fitted to the data and compared using chi-squared tests
Shaping up to improve health: the strategic leadership role of the new Health Authority
No full textThe latest return to service planning in the NHS, while harnessing the perceived benefits of previous market approaches, nevertheless signals a radical change in the long-term role of the Health Authority. It is timely to examine the actual objectives of Health Authorities in view of their envisaged strategic leadership role. The emphasis on improving health and ironing out unacceptable local inequalities places the ‘quality’ agenda at the forefront of Health Authority policies. Notwithstanding the role of Regional Offices, Health Authorities will in effect become the overseer of clinical governance arrangements, including the implementation of a more evidencebased approach to service delivery and organisation. The new all-inclusive Health Improvement Programmes represent the raison d’Ltre of the Health Authority of the future. It is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to the legal framework required to support prioritisation decisions for which Health Authorities and PCGs will be held accountable. Available case law suggests that the extent to which central guidance has been followed will be critical in reviewing commissioning decisions. Given the trend towards National Service Frameworks and the development of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the question arises of what incentives exist for Health Authorities to pursue the evidence-based approach to its natural conclusion (i.e. as one means of rationing scarce resources). Perhaps the key objective of commissioners will in fact be to avoid adverse publicity in the face of increasingly complex (and open) rationing decisions. In addition, the implication that national guidelines on clinical and cost-effectiveness will have to be adhered to sits somewhat uneasily with recent government assurances regarding clinical freedom and professional self-regulation. Attention is given to equity considerations, the difficulty of identifying common objectives and maintaining productive relationships across organisations, and barriers to changing clinical practice. Conflicting incentives are likely in applying different dimensions of the National Performance Assessment Framework, making the Health Authority’s long-term role (regulator of resource use, quality and service configuration?) a particularly difficult balancing act in ensuring administrative, clinical and political accountability in health care.Health Authorities
GUBERNATORIAL COATTAIL EFFECTS IN STATE LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS: A REEXAMINATION
No full textMargret R. Ferguson Ph.D
The value and character of political science: report on the member's survey, September 2014
No full textIn the lead-up to the 2014 APSA Conference, the APSA Executive agreed to a proposal by the president, Brian Head, to conduct a rapid survey of members’ opinions on the nature and future of political science.
Background
The focus on research impact reflects contemporary trends in higher education and research funding policies in a number of countries. There are sound moral, ethical and financial arguments that publicly-funded academics should use their training and activities for the good of society. Concepts of academic impact and quality have been continuously refined and measured, mainly in terms of high-status publications in journals with higher citation counts. Reliance on such ‘ivory tower’ measures of impact have been increasingly contested over recent years. Thus, in the United Kingdom and Australia, there have been increasing expectations that publicly-funded research should have ‘impact’ beyond academia, and should yield demonstrable economic, environmental and social benefits. These expectations, and an accompanying focus on encouraging research engagement and collaboration, have underpinned the external‘ impact agenda’. In 2013 the Australian Research Council (ARC) defined research impact as ‘the demonstrable contribution that research makes to the economy, society, culture, national security, public policy or services, health, the environment, or quality of life, beyond contributions to academia.
The focus on measuring the economic and societal benefits from research has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and complex research assessment mechanisms, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise, and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). While the 2015 round of the ERA does not currently include an impact assessment component, the language of impact is explicit in ARC grant applications and reporting mechanisms, and impact trials were conducted in Australia in2011–12 (Australian Technology Network of Universities and Group of Eight 2013)
‘Through the unknown, remembered gate’: the Brian Nettleton lecture – Outdoors Victoria conference, 2022
No full textThis paper is an adapted version of the Brian Nettleton Lecture given at the Outdoors Victoria Conference, 2022. It explores how the last two decades have seen an ever-accelerating Digital Revolution which has impacted on almost every aspect of human experience to the point that it is now omnipresent. Life is now mediated through the screen. As a result, children and young people have become hyper-vigilant, overly anxious, experience a sense of climate trauma, and have decreasing access to, and time spent in, the outdoors. In addition, children have just experienced two years of isolation as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and evidence suggests that they are already experiencing significant mental health issues as a result. This paper considers the implications of this for Outdoors Victoria and Outdoor Education. © The Author(s) 2023
Japan’s New Basic Energy Plan
No full textAuthor accepted manuscript version of an article published in:
John S. Duffield and Brian Woodall, “Japan’s New Basic Energy Plan,” Energy Policy 39, no. 6 (June 2011): 3741-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2011.04.00
Vibration response statistics of fibre composite panels from optical translucence
No full textTypically, there is variability in the properties of fibre-reinforced composites – material content, thickness, stiffness etc. – and this variability is often spatially correlated. Finite element (FE) or numerical models can predict the response of such panels, but the spatially correlated nature of the variability must be represented in the model. However, characterising the variability, and especially the spatial correlation, is problematical. In this study the data is first generated by an automated optical process: light transmissibility measurements are taken of a dry chopped strand mat. The intensity of the consequent image is post-processed to describe the fibre density as a random field using Karhunen-Loeve decomposition. Previous measurements have shown a strong correlation between the density of the mat and the tensile modulus, so the information is then used to infer the statistics of the stiffness matrix in the FE model. Subsequent realisations of the random field are then used, in a Monte Carlo simulation, to predict the statistics of the natural frequencies and frequency responses. The method provides an automated approach to the characterisation of spatial variability and hence the prediction of the statistics of the vibrational response
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