Publishing in Academic Journals: Tips to Help You Succeed

Invited keynote presented at ICSSR sponsored National Workshop on Research Methodology for social science at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, India by virtual mode. PowerPoint presentation made available to conference organizers and participants, presented virtually via Skype and followed by question and answer session via Skype.

Food for Pollinators: Quantifying the Nectar and Pollen Resources of Urban Flower Meadows

Planted meadows are increasingly used to improve the biodiversity and aesthetic amenity value of urban areas. Although many ‘pollinator-friendly’ seed mixes are available, the floral resources these provide to flower-visiting insects, and how these change through time, are largely unknown. Such data are necessary to compare the resources provided by alternative meadow seed mixes to each other and to other flowering habitats. We used quantitative surveys of over 2 million flowers to estimate the nectar and pollen resources offered by two exemplar commercial seed mixes (one annual, one perennial) and associated weeds grown as 300m2 meadows across four UK cities, sampled at six time points between May and September 2013. Nectar sugar and pollen rewards per flower varied widely across 65 species surveyed, with native British weed species (including dandelion, Taraxacum agg.) contributing the top five nectar producers and two of the top ten pollen producers. Seed mix species yielding the highest rewards per flower included Leontodon hispidus, Centaurea cyanus and C. nigra for nectar, and Papaver rhoeas, Eschscholzia californica and Malva moschata for pollen. Perennial meadows produced up to 20x more nectar and up to 6x more pollen than annual meadows, which in turn produced far more than amenity grassland controls. Perennial meadows produced resources earlier in the year than annual meadows, but both seed mixes delivered very low resource levels early in the year and these were provided almost entirely by native weeds. Pollen volume per flower is well predicted statistically by floral morphology, and nectar sugar mass and pollen volume per unit area are correlated with flower counts, raising the possibility that resource levels can be estimated for species or habitats where they cannot be measured directly. Our approach does not incorporate resource quality information (for example, pollen protein or essential amino acid content), but can easily do so when suitable data exist. Our approach should inform the design of new seed mixes to ensure continuity in floral resource availability throughout the year, and to identify suitable species to fill resource gaps in established mixes.

Still Playing Together(?): A Recall to Physical Education and Sport History Intersections.

As academic disciplines, Physical Education and Sport History share interests in performance, participation, physique and the politics of corporeal praxis. Engendering unity between the two disciplines, however, has not been without concern. Scholars working within (and across) both fields have highlighted how the potential for shared knowledge production and meaning making has been, to a degree, stymied by epistemological and methodological criticism and trepidation. Issues over contextualization, rigour, narrative schemas, conceptualizations of the body, and notions of agency and power still, in particular, constrain our current educational and historical readings and renderings of physical culture(s). Scholarly schisms and methodological differences can be overcome, however, and need not prohibit disciplinary collaborations that might better address prevailing ethical questions and affect political cause; vis-à-vis the body, the physical and sport. This brief piece is, consequently, recourse to the scholarly symbiosis between Physical Education and Sport History and echoes the encouragement of our earlier colleagues to play, inquire, create and produce together.