6,245 research outputs found
Contributors to the May Issue/Notes
No full textNotes by William B. Lawless, Timothy M. Green, Thomas J. Mitchell, John D. Ryan, Charles Boynton, John R. Baty, and Theodore P. Frericks
Pretesting boosts item but not source memory
No full textTwo experiments examined the effect of pretesting on target recognition and source memory. In an initial encoding phase, participants attempted to learn the common English definitions of rare English words. For each rare word, the participants either guessed the definition of the rare English word before it was revealed (Pretest condition) or just studied the complete word pair without first guessing the definition (Read-only condition). To manipulate source information, the targets were either presented in different colours (Experiment 1) or lists (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the participants correctly recognised more targets from Pretest trials than Read-only trials, but showed no difference in source memory. Pretesting, therefore, appears to improve target recognition memory, but not memory for contextual information. The results are discussed in relation to semantic and episodic theories of the pretesting effect
George J. Mitchell: Maine\u27s Environmental Senator
No full textThe State of Maine is blessed with a history of impressive and respected politicians. Among others, the list includes James Blaine, Margaret Chase Smith, and Edmund S. Muskie. The State now must add the name of George J. Mitchell to these ranks. A native son of Waterville, Maine, he attended Bowdoin College, Georgetown University Law Center, and eventually catapulted himself into one of the most powerful political positions in the United States government when he was elected as majority leader of the United States Senate. During his tenure as majority leader, he helped to redefine the position through his strong work ethic, sense of fairness, and orientation toward results in the Senate. This Comment summarizes some of those results through an environmental lens, focusing on Mitchell\u27s contributions to federal environmental legislation in the late 1980s. As Mitchell served in the Senate for fourteen years, six as the majority leader, he sponsored or cosponsored countless pieces of legislation. Environmental protection, however, always was a focus of his public service. In that vein, this Comment canvasses Senator Mitchell\u27s influence on the provisions of the Water Quality Act of 1987, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, three major legislative accomplishments aimed at protecting the environment. This Comment analyzes those provisions of each Act for which Senator Mitchell fought most ardently and discusses the different tactics and strategies he employed to secure passage of each of these important bills. Finally, this Comment is a tribute to a Maine native who dedicated his life to public service. This Author recognizes that no one Senator could be solely responsible for any of these three pieces of environmental legislation. Nonetheless, only a few Senators held the key to passage of each of these acts. George J. Mitchell was one of the those Senators. Senator Mitchell\u27s contributions to environmental law can be understood only by viewing his Senate career in context. First, Mitchell served as a Federal District Court Judge for the District of Maine
Feasibility and design of a tertiary education entitlement in Australia
No full textOverview: This report to the Mitchell Institute presents the outcomes of modelling the potential costs of an income contingent loan (ICL) that would form a core element of a tertiary education entitlement, as proposed in the February 2015 Mitchell Institute paper Financing tertiary education in Australia – the reform imperative and rethinking student entitlements by Mitchell Professorial Fellow Peter Noonan and Mitchell Policy Analyst Sarah Pilcher.
This report, Feasibility and design of a tertiary education entitlement in Australia: Modelling and costing a universal income contingent loan, models the costs of a single income contingent loans scheme for higher education and vocational education and training (VET) students. It seeks to quantify the largely hidden subsidies involved in income contingent loans through unpaid debt and the difference between the rate at which debt is indexed and the costs to government of borrowing to finance student debt.
Feasibility and design of a tertiary education entitlement in Australia: Modelling and costing a universal income contingent loan has been prepared by Dr Timothy Higgins and Professor Bruce Chapman, two of Australia’s leading experts on the design of income contingent loans.
Background
Feasibility and design of a tertiary education entitlement in Australia presents the outcomes of various financial modelling of the potential costs of applying an income contingent loan scheme to include all tertiary education students in Australia. The modelling maps students’ projected incomes by qualification level, finding significant variation in lifetime incomes across VET and higher education qualifications.
At present, there are a range of different income contingent loan schemes operating in Australia’s higher education and VET sectors. Under such schemes, students are not required to pay the upfront cost of their course. Instead, they are able to take out a loan with the government and repay the loan through the taxation system once they enter the workforce and their incomes reach a certain threshold.
But these loans are not available to all students. In the VET system, those studying for Certificate III and most Certificate IV VET courses, for example, early childhood education, aged care, and hospitality, do not have access to an income contingent loan. These students must pay the cost of their course upfront – a potential barrier as fees for many of these courses are increasing.
The Mitchell Institute will draw on the Higgins and Chapman report to finalise its proposal for an integrated tertiary education funding system in Australia
The benefits of impossible tests: assessing the role of error-correction in the pretesting effect
No full textRelative to studying alone, guessing the meanings of unknown words can improve later recognition of their meanings, even if those guesses were incorrect - the pretesting effect (PTE). The error-correction hypothesis suggests that incorrect guesses produce error signals that promote memory for the meanings when they are revealed. The current research sought to test the error-correction explanation of the PTE. In three experiments, participants studied unfamiliar Finnish-English word pairs by either studying each complete pair, or by guessing the English translation before its presentation. In the latter case, the participants also guessed which of two categories the word belonged to. Hence, guesses from the correct category were semantically closer to the true translation than guesses from the incorrect category. In Experiment 1, guessing increased subsequent recognition of the English translations, especially for translations that were presented on trials in which the participants’ guesses were from the correct category. Experiment 2 replicated these target recognition effects while also demonstrating that they do not extend to associative recognition performance. Experiment 3 again replicated the target recognition pattern, while also examining participants’ metacognitive recognition judgments. Participants correctly judged that their memory would be better after small than after large errors, but incorrectly believed that making any errors would be detrimental, relative to study-only. Overall, the data are inconsistent with the error-correction hypothesis; small, within-category errors produced better recognition than large, cross-category errors. Alternative theories, based on elaborative encoding and motivated learning, are considered
Substrate Influences Turtle Nest Temperature, Incubation Period, and Offspring Sex Ratio in the Field
No full textTemperature-dependent sex determination, where egg incubation temperature irreversibly determines offspring sex, is a common sex-determining mechanism in reptiles. Weather is the primary determinant of temperature in reptile nests, yet the effects of weather are mediated through the nest microhabitat selected by the mother (e.g., overstory canopy cover). One potentially important aspect of the nest microhabitat is the physical substrate used for nesting. However, the influence of substrate type on nest temperature and offspring sex determination has never been experimentally assessed in the field. We incubated eggs of Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta) in three substrate types similar to those commonly selected for nesting within our study population. Within a single study site, we constructed pits, which we refilled with loam, sand, or gravel. Then, we created artificial nests in each substrate type, and randomly assigned eggs to a substrate treatment. Substrate type influenced nest temperature and soil moisture, and affected incubation duration, but no other phenotype measured beyond offspring sex ratios. The cooler loam yielded the most male-biased outcome. This finding illustrates the potential importance of nesting substrate as a component of nest-site choice and as a factor in modeling future nest temperature scenarios.This is a manuscript of an article published as Mitchell, Timothy S., and Fredric J. Janzen. "Substrate Influences Turtle Nest Temperature, Incubation Period, and Offspring Sex Ratio in the Field." Herpetologica 75, no. 1 (2019): 57-62. doi: 10.1655/0018-0831-75.1.57. Posted with permission.</p
Extinction patterns, delta(18) O trends, and magnetostratigraphy from a southern high-latitude Cretaceous-Paleogene section: links with Deccan volcanism
No full textAbstract not availableThomas S. Tobin, Peter D. Ward, Eric J. Steig, Eduardo B. Olivero, Isaac A. Hilburn, Ross N. Mitchell, Matthew R. Diamond, Timothy D. Raub, Joseph L. Kirschvin
Learning from failure:Errorful generation improves memory for items, not associations
No full textPotts and Shanks (2014) recently reported that making mistakes improved the encoding of novel information compared with simply studying. This benefit of generating errors is counterintuitive, since it resulted in less study time and more opportunity for proactive interference. Five experiments examined the effect of generating errors versus studying on item recognition, cued recall, associative recognition, two-alternative forced choice and multiple-choice performance. Following Potts and Shanks (2014), participants first attempted to learn the English definitions of either very rare English words or Euskara nouns. During encoding, participants either guessed the definition (and almost always made an error) before the correct definition was revealed, or simply studied the words for an equivalent period. Experiments 1–4 used rare English words. In these experiments, generating errors led to better subsequent recognition of both the cues and targets compared with studying (Experiments 1 and 3). Tests of cued recall and associative recognition, by contrast, revealed no significant benefit of generating errors over studying (Experiments 1–3). Generating errors during encoding also improved performance on a two-alternative forced choice test when the correct target was presented with a novel foil, but not when the familiarity of the target and the foil was matched (Experiment 4). In Experiment 5, a different set of materials – Euskara nouns – and a different (intermixed) encoding procedure was adopted. Here, guessing improved target recognition (performance was improved on a multiple-choice test with unfamiliar foils), but impaired cued recall performance. These results suggest that, when learning word pairs that do not have a pre-existing semantic association, generating errors strengthens the cues and targets in isolation, but does not strengthen the cue-target associations.</p
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No full textClassic
Heterolepisma Escherich 1905
No full textHeterolepisma Escherich, 1905 Heterolepisma Escherich, 1905: 63. Type species: Lepisma pampeana Silvestri, 1902 by subsequent designation (Paclt, 1967: 25). Isolepisma Escherich, 1905: 61. Notolepisma Tillyard, 1924: 241.Published as part of Smith, Graeme B., Mitchell, Andrew, Lee, Timothy R. C. & Espinasa, Luis, 2019, DNA Barcoding and Integrative Taxonomy of the Heterolepisma sclerophylla species complex (Zygentoma: Lepismatidae: Heterolepismatinae) and the Description of Two New Species, pp. 1-32 in Records of the Australian Museum 71 (1) on page 14, DOI: 10.3853/j.2201-4349.71.2019.1677, http://zenodo.org/record/383797
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