Evaluating the use of multimedia authoring with dyslexic learners: a case study

This paper reports on the findings of a case study set up to explore the possible benefits that dyslexic learners might have when engaging in the creation of their own multimedia project. Two children with specific learning difficulties worked with the author to develop a multimedia presentation. The children developed authoring skills (such as planning and drafting, composition, revision and reflection, proof reading and presentation) and became active, motivated learners. It is believed that the open-ended character of a multimedia authoring package can encourage creative thinking and interest for content and style of presentation.

The implications of the 2003 Common Agricultural Policy reforms for land use and landscape quality in England

The assessment of the potential landscape impacts of the latest Common Agricultural Policy reforms constitutes a challenge for policy makers and it requires the development of models that can reliably project the likely spatial distribution of land uses. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of 2003 CAP reforms to land uses and rural landscapes across England. For this purpose we modified an existing economic model of agriculture, the Land-Use Allocation Model (LUAM) to provide outputs at a scale appropriate for informing a semi-quantitative landscape assessment at the level of ‘Joint Character Areas’ (JCAs). Overall a decline in the cereal and oilseed production area is projected but intensive arable production will persist in specific locations (East of England, East Midlands and South East), having ongoing negative effects on the character of many JCAs. The impacts of de-coupling will be far more profound on the livestock sector; extensification of production will occur in traditional mixed farming regions (e.g. the South West), a partial displacement of cattle by sheep in the upland regions and an increase in the sheep numbers is expected in the lowlands (South East, Eastern and East Midlands). This extensification process will affect positively those JCAs of mixed farming conditions, but it will have negative impacts on the JCAs of historically low intensity farming (e.g. the uplands of north-west) because they will suffer from under-management and land idling. Our analysis shows that the territorialisation between intensively and extensively agricultural landscapes will continue.

The use of public participation and economic appraisal for public involvement in large-scale hydropower projects: Case study of the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project

Gaining public acceptance is one of the main issues with large-scale low-carbon projects such as hydropower development. It has been recommended by the World Commission on Dams that to gain public acceptance, publicinvolvement is necessary in the decision-making process (WCD, 2000). As financially-significant actors in the planning and implementation of large-scale hydropowerprojects in developing country contexts, the paper examines the ways in which publicinvolvement may be influenced by international financial institutions. Using the casestudy of the NamTheun2HydropowerProject in Laos, the paper analyses how publicinvolvement facilitated by the Asian Development Bank had a bearing on procedural and distributional justice. The paper analyses the extent of publicparticipation and the assessment of full social and environmental costs of the project in the Cost-Benefit Analysis conducted during the projectappraisal stage. It is argued that while efforts were made to involve the public, there were several factors that influenced procedural and distributional justice: the late contribution of the Asian Development Bank in the projectappraisal stage; and the issue of non-market values and discount rate to calculate the full social and environmental costs.

'In practice it doesn't always work out like that.' Undergraduate experiences in a research community of practice

This paper examines the extent to which a structured undergraduate research intervention, UROP, permits undergraduate students early access to legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in a research community of practice. Accounts of placement experiences suggest that UROP affords rich possibilities for engagement with research practice. Undergraduates tread a path of gaining access to mature practice while also building their own independence, participating in work that they see matters to the community and making gains in use of a shared research repertoire. Students place UROP experiences in a contrasting frame to research exercises experienced during degree programmes; their sense of the authenticity of the research experienced through UROP emerges as a key element of these accounts. The data generate the interesting question that the degree of engagement with mature practice may account for more of the gain from UROP than simply the quantity of contact other researchers.

The embodied use of the material home: an affordance approach

This paper examines the relationship between embodied individuals and the home that they inhabit. Although there has been some work on both the embodied practices in the home and on the material nature of the home itself, this has not been integrated with the majority of research on home which has focused on meaning. It is argued that there is a lack of a unifying framework that can incorporate both use and meaning elements of home. A way of incorporating these elements through adoption of the concept of affordances is put forward. However, the affordance approach needs to be developed to achieve this. The paper does this first by incorporating the concept of intentionality of actions and then through the use of the concept of well‐being. Debates about housing for people with a physical disability and the practical help provided to this group of people are used to illustrate how the approach could work.

Exploring homeless people’s use of outreach services: applying a social psychological perspective

A number of critiques have been published drawing attention to the gaps in research methods applied to issues surrounding homelessness and service utilisation in Britain. This paper discusses the use of social identity, a theory drawn from the field of applied social psychology, and synthesises it with the pathways model, thereby providing a framework to further explore service utilisation. The synthesised framework was used to predict the uptake of outreach services in a prospective study of 121 homeless people in a major UK city. In general, homeless people's use of intervention services was affected by the extent to which they identified with the support services themselves. The study demonstrates the central role of social identity in understanding service utilisation patterns, and shows the importance of applying fresh techniques to fine-tune our understanding of uptake in the long term.

The role of efficacy and well-being in guiding the use of education and training services by young homeless mothers

This paper builds on previous work applying the concept of well-being to the field of housing. It uses the concepts of self-esteem, efficacy and social identity to explore the situations of a group of young homeless mothers. In particular, it focuses on the impact of well-being factors, among others, in understanding the uptake of education and training services. The paper concludes by arguing that well-being issues are crucial for housing agencies and others who want to engage with young homeless people.

The determination of total nitrogen and total phosphorus concentrations in freshwaters from land use, stock headage and population data: testing of a model for use in conservation and water quality management

1. Nutrient concentrations (particularly N and P) determine the extent to which water bodies are or may become eutrophic. Direct determination of nutrient content on a wide scale is labour intensive but the main sources of N and P are well known. This paper describes and tests an export coefficient model for prediction of total N and total P from: (i) land use, stock headage and human population; (ii) the export rates of N and P from these sources; and (iii) the river discharge. Such a model might be used to forecast the effects of changes in land use in the future and to hindcast past water quality to establish comparative or baseline states for the monitoring of change. 2. The model has been calibrated against observed data for 1988 and validated against sets of observed data for a sequence of earlier years in ten British catchments varying from uplands through rolling, fertile lowlands to the flat topography of East Anglia. 3. The model predicted total N and total P concentrations with high precision (95% of the variance in observed data explained). It has been used in two forms: the first on a specific catchment basis; the second for a larger natural region which contains the catchment with the assumption that all catchments within that region will be similar. Both models gave similar results with little loss of precision in the latter case. This implies that it will be possible to describe the overall pattern of nutrient export in the UK with only a fraction of the effort needed to carry out the calculations for each individual water body. 4. Comparison between land use, stock headage, population numbers and nutrient export for the ten catchments in the pre-war year of 1931, and for 1970 and 1988 show that there has been a substantial loss of rough grazing to fertilized temporary and permanent grasslands, an increase in the hectarage devoted to arable, consistent increases in the stocking of cattle and sheep and a marked movement of humans to these rural catchments. 5. All of these trends have increased the flows of nutrients with more than a doubling of both total N and total P loads during the period. On average in these rural catchments, stock wastes have been the greatest contributors to both N and P exports, with cultivation the next most important source of N and people of P. Ratios of N to P were high in 1931 and remain little changed so that, in these catchments, phosphorus continues to be the nutrient most likely to control algal crops in standing waters supplied by the rivers studied.

Knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language

This special issue of JFLS focuses on what learners know about French words, on how they use that knowledge and on how it can be investigated and assessed. In many ways, it is a sequel to the special issue on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language edited by Myles and Towell that appeared in JFLS in 2004. While articles on the L2 acquisition of the French lexicon have appeared in a variety of journals, including JFLS, this special issue (SI) is the first volume which specifically focuses on lexical knowledge and use among learners of French as a second language. The issue is timely, because of the growing importance of vocabulary in the SLA research agenda, but also because research into vocabulary acquisition appears at the top of a list of areas in which teachers of Modern Foreign Languages are most interested.

The use of risk registers by project managers

The construction industry is widely recognised as being inherent with risk and uncertainty. This necessitates the need for effective project risk management to achieve the project objectives of time, cost and quality. A popular tool employed in projects to aid in the management of risk is a risk register. This tool documents the project risks and is often employed by the Project Manager (PM) to manage the associated risks on a project. This research aims to ascertain how widely risk registers are used by Project Managers as part of their risk management practices. To achieve this aim entailed interviewing ten PMs, to discuss their use of the risk register as a risk management tool. The results from these interviews indicated the prevalent use of this document and recognised its effectiveness in the management of project risks. The findings identified the front end and feasibility phases of a project as crucial stages for using risk registers, noting it as a vital ingredient in the risk response planning of the decision making process. Moreover, the composition of the risk register was also understood, with an insight into how PMs produce and develop this tool also ascertained. In conclusion, this research signifies the extensive use of the risk register by PMs. A majority of PMs were of the view that risk registers constitute an essential component of their project risk management practices. This suggests a need for further research on the extent to which risk registers actually help PMs to control the risks in a construction project, particularly residual risks, and how this can be improved to minimize deviations from expected outcomes.

Beliefs, cultures, proliferation and use of nuclear weapons

This article demonstrates the centrality of mentality, culture, beliefs and historical lessons for nuclear prolifertion. Using the historical casestudies of Britain, France, and West Germany, it encourages researchers to look at the mentality/culture of potential proliferators rather than apply a culture-less "Realist" IR theory approach that assumes that desicion-makers the world over think like Bismarck.

The use of land-sea warming contrast under climate change to improve impact metrics

A favoured method of assimilating information from state-of-the-art climate models into integrated assessment models of climate impacts is to use the transient climate response (TCR) of the climate models as an input, sometimes accompanied by a pattern matching approach to provide spatial information. More recent approaches to the problem use TCR with another independent piece of climate model output: the land-sea surface warming ratio (φ). In this paper we show why the use of φ in addition to TCR has such utility. Multiple linear regressions of surface temperature change onto TCR and φ in 22 climate models from the CMIP3 multi-model database show that the inclusion of φ explains a much greater fraction of the inter-model variance than using TCR alone. The improvement is particularly pronounced in North America and Eurasia in the boreal summer season, and in the Amazon all year round. The use of φ as the second metric is beneficial for three reasons: firstly it is uncorrelated with TCR in state-of-the-art climate models and can therefore be considered as an independent metric; secondly, because of its projected time-invariance, the magnitude of φ is better constrained than TCR in the immediate future; thirdly, the use of two variables is much simpler than approaches such as pattern scaling from climate models. Finally we show how using the latest estimates of φ from climate models with a mean value of 1.6—as opposed to previously reported values of 1.4—can significantly increase the mean time-integrated discounted damage projections in a state-of-the-art integrated assessment model by about 15 %. When compared to damages calculated without the inclusion of the land-sea warming ratio, this figure rises to 65 %, equivalent to almost 200 trillion dollars over 200 years.

On the use of a time sequence of surface pressures in four-dimensional data assimilation

The possibility of using a time sequence of surface pressure observations in four-dimensional data assimilation is being investigated. It is shown that a linear multilevel quasi-geostrophic model can be updated successfully with surface data alone, provided the number of time levels are at least as many as the number of vertical levels. It is further demonstrated that current statistical analysis procedures are very inefficient to assimilate surface observations, and it is shown by numerical experiments that the vertical interpolation must be carried out using the structure of the most dominating baroclinic mode in order to obtain a satisfactory updating. Different possible ways towards finding a practical solution are being discussed.

Use of nutritional complete supplements in older adults with dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical outcomes

Background & Aims: Malnutrition is prevalent in people diagnosed with dementia however ensuring adequate oral intake within this group is often problematic. It is important to determine whether providing nutritionally complete oral nutritional supplements (ONS) drinks is an effective way of improving clinical outcomes for older people with dementia. This paper systematically reviewed clinical, wellbeing and nutritional outcomes in people with long-term cognitive impairment. Methods: The CINAHL, Medline and EMBASE databases were searched from their inception until January 2012. Reference lists of the included papers, foreign language papers and review articles obtained were manually searched. Results: Twelve articles were included in the review containing 1076 people in the supplement groups (intervention) and 748 people in the control groups. Meta-analysis shows there was a significant improvement in weight (p=<0.0001), Body Mass Index (BMI) (p=<0.0001) and cognition at 6.5+/-3.9 month follow up (p=0.002) when supplements were given compared to the control group. Conclusions: Providing ONS drinks has a positive effect on weight gain and cognition at follow up in older people with dementia. Additional research is required in both comparing nutritional supplements to vitamin/mineral tablets and high protein/calorie shots and clinical outcomes relevant to hospitalised people with dementia.

The European Flood Alert System and the communication, perception, and use of ensemble predictions for operational flood risk management

Although ensemble prediction systems (EPS) are increasingly promoted as the scientific state-of-the-art for operational flood forecasting, the communication, perception, and use of the resulting alerts have received much less attention. Using a variety of qualitative research methods, including direct user feedback at training workshops, participant observation during site visits to 25 forecasting centres across Europe, and in-depth interviews with 69 forecasters, civil protection officials, and policy makers involved in operational flood risk management in 17 European countries, this article discusses the perception, communication, and use of European Flood Alert System (EFAS) alerts in operational flood management. In particular, this article describes how the design of EFAS alerts has evolved in response to user feedback and desires for a hydrographic-like way of visualizing EFAS outputs. It also documents a variety of forecaster perceptions about the value and skill of EFAS forecasts and the best way of using them to inform operational decision making. EFAS flood alerts were generally welcomed by flood forecasters as a sort of ‘pre-alert’ to spur greater internal vigilance. In most cases, however, they did not lead, by themselves, to further preparatory action or to earlier warnings to the public or emergency services. Their hesitancy to act in response to medium-term, probabilistic alerts highlights some wider institutional obstacles to the hopes in the research community that EPS will be readily embraced by operational forecasters and lead to immediate improvements in flood incident management. The EFAS experience offers lessons for other hydrological services seeking to implement EPS operationally for flood forecasting and warning. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.