202 research outputs found
Jere Nash Interview with Buddy Medlin
No full textInterview conducted by author Jere Nash with capitol lobbyist Buddy Medlin in the process of writing Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006. Topics covered include 1989 gaming legislation in the Mississippi legislature; lottery legislation; Brad Dye; ending prohibition in Mississippi; John Bell Williams; Medlin campaigning for a Mississippi House seat; Ellis Bodron; Charlie Sullivan; and James O. Eastland
User Validation of an Empathic Virtual Buddy against Cyberbullying
No full textPeople are able to comfort others by talking about their problems. In our research, we are exploring whether computers can provide social support in a similar manner. Recently, we proposed a design for an empathic virtual buddy that supports victims of cyberbullying. To validate our approach in providing social support and to gather feedback from potential users, we performed an experiment (N = 30) to compare interaction with the buddy to reading a text. Both the buddy and the text received high scores; scores for the buddy were consistently higher. The difference was significant for the extent to which feelings were taken into account. These results indicate that participants liked to interact with the buddy and that they recognized the emotional cues emitted by the buddy, thus validating our approach in comforting users.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen
Structured Student Interactions In Online Distance Learning: Exploring The Study Buddy Activity
No full textThis mixed methods study explored the characteristics of a cooperative learning activity, the “Study Buddy”, implemented in a graduate-level online
course in instructional design. The study explored whether students (n=25) who participated in the Study Buddy activity took deeper approaches to their learning
than those who did not participate (n=6), what value students received from participating in the activity, and whether the structure of the activity was
appropriate to support deeper approaches to learning. Quantitative and qualitative results were merged to form conclusions that suggest that participants could be encouraged to take deeper approaches by faculty providing sample questions for students to use to evaluate their partners’ work. Results suggest that the study buddy activity can be used to encourage social connections and to provide participants with opportunities to consider alternate opinions. Findings related to the ideal structure of the activity were inconclusive.Peer reviewedThesi
Structured student interactions in online distance learning: Exploring the study buddy activity
No full textThis mixed methods study explored the characteristics of a cooperative learning activity, the “Study Buddy”, implemented in a graduate-level online course in instructional design. The study explored whether students (n=25) who participated in the Study Buddy activity took deeper approaches to their learning than those who did not participate (n=6), what value students received from participating in the activity, and whether the structure of the activity was appropriate to support deeper approaches to learning. Quantitative and qualitative results were merged to form conclusions that suggest that participants could be encouraged to take deeper approaches by faculty providing sample questions for students to use to evaluate their partners’ work. Results suggest that the study buddy activity can be used to encourage social connections and to provide participants with opportunities to consider alternate opinions. Findings related to the ideal structure of the activity were inconclusive.Peer reviewedThesi
Structured Student Interactions In Online Distance Learning: Exploring The Study Buddy Activity
No full textThis mixed methods study explored the characteristics of a cooperative learning activity, the “Study Buddy”, implemented in a graduate-level online course in instructional design. The study explored whether students (n=25) who participated in the Study Buddy activity took deeper approaches to their learning
than those who did not participate (n=6), what value students received from participating in the activity, and whether the structure of the activity was
appropriate to support deeper approaches to learning. Quantitative and qualitative results were merged to form conclusions that suggest that participants could be encouraged to take deeper approaches by faculty providing sample questions for students to use to evaluate their partners’ work. Results suggest that the study buddy activity can be used to encourage social connections and to provide participants with opportunities to consider alternate opinions. Findings related to the ideal structure of the activity were inconclusive.Peer reviewedThesi
Structured student interactions in online distance learning: Exploring the study buddy activity
No full textThis mixed methods study explored the characteristics of a cooperative learning activity, the “Study Buddy”, implemented in a graduate-level online course in instructional design. The study explored whether students (n=25) who participated in the Study Buddy activity took deeper approaches to their learning
than those who did not participate (n=6), what value students received from participating in the activity, and whether the structure of the activity was
appropriate to support deeper approaches to learning. Quantitative and qualitative results were merged to form conclusions that suggest that participants could be encouraged to take deeper approaches by faculty providing sample questions for students to use to evaluate their partners’ work. Results suggest that the study buddy activity can be used to encourage social connections and to provide participants with opportunities to consider alternate opinions. Findings related to the ideal structure of the activity were inconclusive.Peer reviewedThesi
An Empathic Virtual Buddy for Social Support
No full textRecent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as companions or coaches. These roles are typically performed by humans and require exhibiting certain social behaviors, such as providing social support. For interactions between users and coaching or companion ECAs to become truly social, providing social support is one of the tasks these agents should be able to perform. Social support can be defined as alleviating the emotional distress of another person. This thesis proposes a design for an 'empathic virtual buddy' that provides social support to victims of cyberbullying. It presents the underlying principles and an architecture for a prototype system, and provides both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the support conveyed by the empathic virtual buddy prototype.Infrastructure Systems & ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen
Distal 'buddy-in-jail' technique: A complementary 'Jail with stent' method for stent delivery
No full textDelivery of coronary stents can be challenging, but the use of a second or 'buddy' wire helps the progression of equipment through tortuous and rigid vessels. We successfully positioned a coronary stent in a distal lesion, intentionally jailing the buddy wire during stent delivery. The jailed wire was then used to proceed further with proximal coronary stenting. We report 10 cases using either the jailed or the non-jailed wire for this modified 'buddy-in-jail' technique. © The Author(s)
The PNG Midwifery Leadership Buddy Program: An evaluation
No full textProblem: Papua New Guinea (PNG) has a high rate of preventable maternal and neonatal deaths. Background: Developing midwifery leadership is vital to addressing the current deficits in health outcomes for women and their babies. The PNG Midwifery Leadership Buddy Program responds to this need through leadership training and partnering of midwives across PNG and Australia. Participants in the program undertake a workshop in Port Moresby and commit to a 12-month peer support relationship with a midwife ‘buddy’. Aim: To evaluate participants’ experiences of the Buddy Program and the impact of the program on leadership skills. Methods: All 23 midwives who had completed the program were invited to participate in the evaluation. The study used a concurrent mixed methods approach. Qualitative data were collected via interviews and then thematically analysed. Quantitative data were collected via a survey and analysed with descriptive statistics, then findings were triangulated. Findings: Participants reported increased confidence for leadership, action and advocacy. Numerous quality improvement projects were implemented in health services in PNG. Challenges to the success of the program included technological limitations, cultural differences and the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussion: Participants reported the PNG Midwifery Leadership Buddy Program was successful in increasing their leadership skills and collaborative opportunities, as well as strengthening midwifery more broadly. While there were barriers, most participants valued the experience and believed it benefited them professionally and personally Conclusion: The Buddy Program provides a practical model for building midwifery leadership capacity that may be transferrable to other contexts. © 2023 The Author
Buddy Huffaker
No full textMark Madison speaks with Buddy Huffaker at the Sc3 at the NCTC in Shepherdstown, WV. Buddy is the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where he works on a variety of land management issues, including the integration of agriculture and conservation, technical and financial assistance programs, and the ethics of land ownership.MARK MADISON: Hi. Today's June 28, 2010, and this is Mark Madison and Emily Jenkins from the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and this week we're having, and this week, we're having the second annual Student Conservation and Climate Congress, and we have a number invited experts, speakers, who have been addressing the students, and we're with one today, Buddy Huffaker, who is the Executive Director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
Welcome, Buddy. Thanks for agreeing to do this.
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Great to be here. It's always good to be at the National Conservation Training Center.
MARK MADISON: And, Buddy, you're executive of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. What does the Foundation do?
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Well, the Foundation was created by the children of Aldo Leopold in response to growing interest in his work and ideas as articulated in "A Sand County Almanac." When they created the Foundation, they entrusted the Foundation with the rights to Aldo's published and unpublished rights and then the property along the Wisconsin River just outside of Baraboo, Wisconsin, which was the landscape that kind of most directly informed and inspired Leopold to write his book, "A Sand County Almanac." So we serve as executor of his literary estate, and we kind of describe ourselves as interpreters and advocates for his ideas as articulated through his term "a land ethic." And so just try to help people understand that people are a part of the biological community as opposed to apart from the biological community, and begin kind of a conversation about what does that mean and what would our society look like if we fully recognized that and recognized our responsibility to the natural world.
MARK MADISON: Great. And also joining us is Emily Jenkins, a Shepherd
University student who is working at NCTC this summer, and, Emily, do you have some questions for Buddy?
EMILY JENKINS: Sure. Buddy, what do you find inspirational about Aldo Leopold?
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Well, as the director of the Leopold Foundation, I find lots of things inspiring about Leopold, but I think what's most compelling to me is how influential his work has become again mainly as author of "A Sand County Almanac." The book has now translated into 11 different languages. So including English, is in 12 languages. And I think what is powerful about that is that he was so eloquent at articulating feelings and values that many of us have about the natural world but is able to do it so much better than the kind of layperson like myself who just have not kind of had the opportunity or had the practice to hone one's writing skills. And so he provides us kind of with a vocabulary that allows us to talk about why the natural world is important, what it means to us, and what we will do individually and collectively to take care of it.
So I think it's his eloquence, it's his ideas, it's his articulation of values that are shared. And one of the things that's just been amazing to me is the whole cross section of our society that can find something in Leopold that means something to them. So whether you're a hunter or an animal rights activist, both read "A Sand County Almanac" and find something in there that talks to them, and so it provides us a place to have a conversation and begin to talk about the things we share in common rather than our points of disagreement where our discourse often breaks down.
MARK MADISON: Now, the Sc3 Conference is approximately 100 high school students from around the country learning more about the conservation field as a possible career or vocation for them. Is there anything in Leopold's life or writing, do you think, that would be particularly inspiring to young people?
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Well, I think, while Leopold is most known as the author of "A Sand County Almanac" because of its ability to kind of transcend time and now languages, if you bury-- or dig into Leopold and his life, he has a fascinating life story, and really was thinking critically about these issues at the same time young people that are gathered here at the Sc3 Conference are, and so you can actually go back to his letters while he was in prep school or at Yale and see the ideas that he was thinking about, the issues that were of concern to him that he would write back in letters to his family or in class projects. Things like the future of our forests he was already writing about when he was in late high school or early college years. And so one great collection is called "The River of the Mother of God," and it's a collection of essays that are arranged chronologically from the time he was a young boy until basically the last essay that he wrote in his life. And you can see the evolution of his thinking, his writing skills. And so that beyond "A Sand County Almanac," that's probably the next place I'd go to see Leopold's own writing and some of the things he was thinking about when he was a young adult and then over the course of his career. And there are some wonderful biographies. Kurt Meine's "Aldo Leopold Life and Times" if you want to dig into his personal life story, which again is quite compelling and fascinating. And then "A Fierce Green Fire" is a little bit shorter read that also will give you some biographical information on him.
So, you know, there's just lots of places to go with him. He was thinking about things like green labeling in the 1930s that we now have with organic certification and certified wood products. All these things were things he was kind of thinking about some 40, 50, 60 years before they finally came to pass.
MARK MADISON: You also have a pretty extra ordinary headquarters out there, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. Do you want to tell us a little about that?
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Yeah. I welcome everybody to come visit us at the Leopold Center. You can see when it was built it was the world's greenest building. We've now gotten knocked off a couple of pegs, which is great, as the building community and green building environment continues to advance. You can also visit the shack and the farm that was the inspiration for his seminal work.
But the Center itself, I think probably the most compelling part of the story is that it was actually built out of trees that Aldo and his family planted in the 1930s and '40s, and I just always love to say when people come to visit us, you know, Leopold was anticipating your arrival. He planted these trees 75 years ago just so that we could build a building for you to come visit and learn more about his ideas.
But, you know, all joking aside, I think it really is one of the most amazing aspects of his life that when he was thinking about these very big and compelling and daunting issues about people's relationship to land, what did he do? He planted trees. He took action where he could. And it was just such an honor and privilege to be part of the process that recognized that the forest health was in decline and that we needed to remove some of the less healthy trees and leave the best ones and that we were going to be able to use those for building materials in the new Center. And so now Leopold's trees literally hold the roof up over his land ethic, we like to say.
And so we have interpretive exhibits about him and his life. We have meeting spaces for classes and conferences. We have people come literally from all over the world to come see the place that inspired Leopold to write "A Sand County Almanac."
The other big thing we were trying to do was produce as much energy as we consume over the course of a year, and after three years of data, unfortunately, we can't say we've hit that target, but we can say we're at about 90%. Of all the energy it takes to run this facility over the course of a year, we produce 90% of it right on site through photovoltaics, geothermal and some sustainable wood harvesting for a few wood stoves in the facility.
So it's gotten a lot of attention because of its contribution, kind of setting the bar at a new level for green building, and so what's kind of interesting is this new dynamic we have where we have lots of people come to the facility who are from the architecture and engineering community and have never heard of Aldo Leopold but have heard of our building and want to come see it. And then we get to introduce them to the larger conservation movement and this kind of shared heritage that we have that really it's not a clear thread but really does provide the foundation for the new kind of green building movement, if you can trace that well enough.
And then we have other people who are die-hard conservationists who have known Leopold for decades and come and get introduced to this new world of green building and what they can do in their homes or in their places of work to create more sustainable built environments.
So, it's a really neat conversation that we get to have in our new facility.
MARK MADISON: Sounds great. Buddy, if people wanted to come visit you, you're in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Is there a web site or something they could check out?
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Absolutely. www.aldoleopold.org.
MARK MADISON: Well, thank you very much. We've been talking about Buddy Huffaker, the Executive Director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and we hope you all get a chance to visit the Center.
BUDDY HUFFAKER: Thank you, and thanks to the National Conservation Training Center. This is a wonderful place
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