Through the eyes of instructors: a phenomenographic investigation of student success

Kinnunen, P., McCartney, R., Murphy, L., and Thomas, L. 2007. Through the eyes of instructors: a phenomenographic investigation of student success. In Proceedings of the Third international Workshop on Computing Education Research (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, September 15 - 16, 2007). ICER '07. ACM, New York, NY, 61-72.

The Welsh Language Act 1993 - A Measure of Success?

Huws, C., The Welsh Language Act 1993 - A Measure of Success?, Language Policy, 5(2) pp.141-160 RAE2008

Randomised, prospective and cross-over comparison of Buseriline by intranasal spray versus D-triptoreline by intramuscular injection in long protocol, in in vitro fertilisation

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Resources, experience and perseverance in entrepreneurs' perceived likelihood of success in an emerging economy

This paper introduces new results obtained from a statistical investigation into a 3071-observation data set collected from a Vietnamese nationwide entrepreneurship survey. From established relationships, such factors as preparedness, financial resources and participation in social networks are confirmed to have significant effects on entrepreneurial decisions. Entrepreneurs, both financially constrained and unconstrained, who have a business plan tend to start their entrepreneurial ventures earlier. Also, financial constraints have a profound impact on the entrepreneurial decisions. When perceiving the likelihood of success to be high, an entrepreneur shows the tendency for prompt action on business ideas. But when seeing the risk of prolonging the waiting time to first revenue, a prospective entrepreneur would be more likely to wait for more favorable conditions despite the vagueness of "favorable". Additionally, empirical computations indicate that there is a 41.3% probability that an extant entrepreneur who is generating revenue sees high chance of success. Past work and entrepreneurial experiences also have positive impacts on both the entrepreneurial decisions and perceived chance of success.

Technical improvements possibly linked to higher success rate with intracytoplasmic single sperm injection

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

'Adoption success': the reality of adoptive placements today

In order to make adoption a true success story for adoptive parents and their children the number of adoptive placements that disrupt needs to become a key target. At present approximately 20 per cent of all adoptive placements breakdown. This paper discusses the issues and difficulties facing adoptive families, using literature and personal experience, and suggests strategies and interventions that social workers need to be implementing if the disruption rate is to decrease.

Encounter success of free-ranging marine predator movements across a dynamic prey landscape

Movements of wide-ranging top predators can now be studied effectively using satellite and archival telemetry. However, the motivations underlying movements remain difficult to determine because trajectories are seldom related to key biological gradients, such as changing prey distributions. Here, we use a dynamic prey landscape of zooplankton biomass in the north-east Atlantic Ocean to examine active habitat selection in the plankton-feeding basking shark Cetorhinus maximus. The relative success of shark searches across this landscape was examined by comparing prey biomass encountered by sharks with encounters by random-walk simulations of ‘model’ sharks. Movements of transmitter-tagged sharks monitored for 964 days (16754km estimated minimum distance) were concentrated on the European continental shelf in areas characterized by high seasonal productivity and complex prey distributions. We show movements by adult and sub-adult sharks yielded consistently higher prey encounter rates than 90% of random-walk simulations. Behavioural patterns were consistent with basking sharks using search tactics structured across multiple scales to exploit the richest prey areas available in preferred habitats. Simple behavioural rules based on learned responses to previously encountered prey distributions may explain the high performances. This study highlights how dynamic prey landscapes enable active habitat selection in large predators to be investigated from a trophic perspective, an approach that may inform conservation by identifying critical habitat of vulnerable species.

Foraging success of biological Levy flights recorded in situ

It is an open question how animals find food in dynamic natural environments where they possess little or no knowledge of where resources are located. Foraging theory predicts that in environments with sparsely distributed target resources, where forager knowledge about resources’ locations is incomplete, Lévy flight movements optimize the success of random searches. However, the putative success of Lévy foraging has been demonstrated only in model simulations. Here, we use high-temporal-resolution Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking of wandering (Diomedea exulans) and black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys) with simultaneous recording of prey captures, to show that both species exhibit Lévy and Brownian movement patterns. We find that total prey masses captured by wandering albatrosses during Lévy movements exceed daily energy requirements by nearly fourfold, and approached yields by Brownian movements in other habitats. These results, together with our reanalysis of previously published albatross data, overturn the notion that albatrosses do not exhibit Lévy patterns during foraging, and demonstrate that Lévy flights of predators in dynamic natural environments present a beneficial alternative strategy to simple, spatially intensive behaviors. Our findings add support to the possibility that biological Lévy flight may have naturally evolved as a search strategy in response to sparse resources and scant information.