African American voices in Atlanta

Survey research in Atlanta suggests that the usual national generalizations about race and language need to be examined in the light of local evidence. The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States preserves recordings of interviews with a number of African Americans from the 1970s, to set a historical baseline for the community. A contemporary random-sample study of African Americans in Atlanta showed that our speakers were highly variable in their vowel production. They not only did not match national generalizations, but appeared to have more of Labov's "Southern Shift" than the local non-African-American speakers who were supposed to be characterized by it. Only a minority of speakers show “mean” behavior for the whole set of vowels. Still, black/white speech relations in the Atlanta metro area create perceptions such that a child from a historic African American neighborhood in Roswell had to "learn how to talk hood" to fit in with children from the Atlanta public schools. And Atlanta, with its central place in the hip-hop community alongside New York and Los Angeles, maintains an identity on the national scene with roots in local speech. History and contemporary evidence combine to show that African American voices in Atlanta belong to a complex system in which speakers can be themselves in their neighborhoods, while at the same time they participate in historical and national trends

City and Countryside Revisited. Comparative rent movements in London and the South-East, 1580-1914

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has suggested that 'the city drove the countryside, not the reverse'. This paper assembles new serial data on urban and agricultural rent movements in Kent, Essex and London, from 1580-1914, which enables us to provide a tentative estimate of the strength of the urban variable and the productivity of land across the rural-urban continuum. Our initial findings support the revisionist view, and throw new light on London's position within the wider metropolitan region. Comparative rent movements suggests a greater continuity between town and countryside than has often been assumed, with sharp increases in rental values occurring on the rural-urban fringes of London and the lower Medway valley

Database of historic ports and coastal sailing routes in England and Wales

This data paper presents a reconstruction of historical ports and coastal routes in England and Wales during the age of the sailing ship, ending at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dataset was created by an amalgamation of twenty different sources,including geographical data, primary sources and secondary literature. Ports found in historical documents were listed by year of appearance and georeferenced. Ports that appear in multiple sour-ces were listed only once. Coastal routes between ports were drawn based on navigation charts and bathymetry data, distinguishing five categories with different characteristics. Visibility from the coast was deduced from elevation rasters and lighthouse locations. Subsequently both ports and coastal routes were checked using topo-logical rules to ensure the connectivity of the network. The data is provided in shapefile format with all the attributes and can be analysed using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for different types of geographical and historical studies

Project-based Learning Practices in Computer Science Education

The EPCoS project (Effective Projectwork in Computer Science) is working to map the range of project-based learning practices in UK higher education and to generate insights into what characterizes the contexts in which particular techniques are effective. In assembling a body of authentic examples, EPCoS aims to provide a resource that enables extrapolation and synthesis of new techniques. To allow educators and researchers to mine this material, EPCoS is systematizing it within a template-based catalogue, augmented with indexing and abstracting devices. Moreover, EPCoS is examining the process by which practices are transferred between institutional contexts, with a view to identifying effective models of the transfer process. Three key elements of transfer are the identification of appropriate practices, the selection of a practice for a purpose, and the integration of a chosen practice into the existing culture. Structured resources and process models are essential tools for supporting responsiveness in the current climate of continual change: the rapid development of computer technology is demanding new range and flexibility in project work, and EPCoS's mapping of project-based teaching allows practitioners to respond to these changes. This is one context in which educational research into how projects work can generalize to professional practice

Climatologically significant effects of space-time averaging in the North Atlantic sea - air heat flux fields

Differences between “classical” and “sampling” estimates of mean climatological heat fluxes and their seasonal and interannual variability are considered on the basis of individual marine observations from the Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set. Calculations of fluxes were done for intramonthly averaging and for 1°–5° spatial averaging. Sampling estimates give in general 10% to 60% higher values of fluxes than do classical estimates. Spatial averaging has a larger effect than temporal averaging in the Tropics and subtropics, and temporal averaging is more effective than spatial averaging in midlatitudes. The largest absolute differences between sampling and classical estimates of fluxes are observed in middle latitudes, where they are 15 to 20 W m−2 for sensible heat flux and 50 to 70 W m−2 for latent heat flux. Differences between sampling and classical estimates can change the annual cycle of sea–air fluxes. There is a secular tendency of increasing “sampling- to-classical” ratios of 1% to 5% decade−1 over the North Atlantic. Relationships between sampling-to-classical ratios and parameters of the sea–air interface, the number of observations, and the spatial arrangement of samples are considered. Climatologically significant differences between sampling and classical estimates are analyzed in terms of the contribution from different covariances between individual variables. The influence of different parameterizations of the transfer coefficients on sampling minus classical differences is considered. Parameterizations that indicate growing transfer coefficients with wind speed give the larger sampling minus classical differences in comparison with those based on either constant or decreasing with wind coefficients. Nevertheless, over the North Atlantic midlatitudes, all parameterizations indicate significant sampling minus classical differences of about several tens of watts per square meter. The importance of differences between sampling and classical estimates for the evaluation of meridional heat transport shows that differences between sampling and classical estimates can lead to 0.5–1-PW differences in meridional heat transport estimates

The Rainbow Site, An Unusual Syrup Mill in Gregg County, Texas

The Rainbow site is a historic archaeological site that was recorded during a cultural resources survey of a proposed Wal-Mart SuperCenter site in Longview, Texas. It was first interpreted as the location of an illegal whiskey still, but testing revealed that the furnace had been part of a sugar cane syrup mill. The early 1900s furnace is unusual when compared to other reported furnaces in that the firebox had been constructed below the original ground level and the flue/pan area had walls that were barely 1.5 ft. above the surrounding ground, whereas most furnaces were constructed on level ground and had waist-high walls where workers could stand upright when processing syrup. In addition, a brick vault had been constructed over the north end of the firebox and no other examples of such a feature have been reported from syrup mill furnaces

Global analysis of night marine air temperature and its uncertainty since 1880: the HadNMAT2 Dataset

An updated version of the Met Office Hadley Centre’s monthly night marine air temperature dataset is presented. It is available on a 5? latitude-longitude grid from 1880 as anomalies relative to 1961-1990 calendar-monthly climatological average night marine air temperature (NMAT). Adjustments are made for changes in observation height; these depend on estimates of the stability of the near surface atmospheric boundary layer. In previous versions of the dataset, ad hoc adjustments were also made for three periods and regions where poor observational practice was prevalent. These adjustments are re-examined. Estimates of uncertainty are calculated for every grid box and result from: measurement errors; uncertainty in adjustments applied to the observations; uncertainty in the measurement height and under-sampling. The new dataset is a clear improvement over previous versions in terms of coverage because of the recent digitization of historical observations from ships' logbooks. However, the periods prior to about 1890 and around World War 2 remain particularly uncertain and sampling is still sparse in some regions in other periods. A further improvement is the availability of uncertainty estimates for every grid box and every month. Previous versions required adjustments that were dependent on contemporary measurements of sea surface temperature (SST); to avoid these, the new dataset starts in 1880 rather than 1856. Overall agreement with variations of SST is better for the updated dataset than for previous versions, maintaining existing estimates of global warming and increasing confidence in the global record of temperature variability and change

Variability of the winter wind waves and swell in the North Atlantic and North Pacific as revealed by the Voluntary Observing Ship data

This paper analyses secular changes and interannual variability in the wind wave, swell, and significant wave height (SWH) characteristics over the North Atlantic and North Pacific on the basis of wind wave climatology derived from the visual wave observations of voluntary observing ship (VOS) officers. These data are available from the International Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) collection of surface meteorological observations for 1958–2002, but require much more complicated preprocessing than standard meteorological variables such as sea level pressure, temperature, and wind. Visual VOS data allow for separate analysis of changes in wind sea and swell, as well as in significant wave height, which has been derived from wind sea and swell estimates. In both North Atlantic and North Pacific midlatitudes winter significant wave height shows a secular increase from 10 to 40 cm decade−1 during the last 45 yr. However, in the North Atlantic the patterns of trend changes for wind sea and swell are quite different from each other, showing opposite signs of changes in the northeast Atlantic. Trend patterns of wind sea, swell, and SWH in the North Pacific are more consistent with each other. Qualitatively the same conclusions hold for the analysis of interannual variability whose leading modes demonstrate noticeable differences for wind sea and swell. Statistical analysis shows that variability in wind sea is closely associated with the local wind speed, while swell changes can be driven by the variations in the cyclone counts, implying the importance of forcing frequency for the resulting changes in significant wave height. This mechanism of differences in variability patterns of wind sea and swell is likely more realistic than the northeastward propagation of swells from the regions from which the wind sea signal originates

Readmission rates in not-for-profit vs. proprietary hospitals before and after the hospital readmission reduction program implementation.

BACKGROUND: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act established the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) to penalize hospitals with excessive 30-day hospital readmissions of Medicare enrollees for specific conditions. This policy was aimed at increasing the quality of care delivered to patients and decreasing the amount of money paid for potentially preventable hospital readmissions. While it has been established that the number of 30-day hospital readmissions decreased after program implementation, it is unknown whether this effect occurred equally between not-for-profit and proprietary hospitals. The aim of this study was to determine whether or not the HRRP decreased readmission rates equally between not-for-profit and proprietary hospitals between 2010 and 2012. METHODS: Data on readmissions came from the Dartmouth Atlas and hospital ownership data came from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Data were joined using the Medicare provider number. Using a difference-in-differences approach, bivariate and regression analyses were conducted to compare readmission rates between not-for-profit and proprietary hospitals between 2010 and 2012 and were adjusted for hospital characteristics. RESULTS: In 2010, prior to program implementation, unadjusted readmission rates for proprietary and not-for-profit hospitals were 16.16% and 15.78%, respectively. In 2012, following program implementation, 30-day readmission rates dropped to 15.76% and 15.29% for proprietary and not-for-profit hospitals. The data suggest that the implementation of the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program had similar effects on not-for-profit and proprietary hospitals with respect to readmission rates, even after adjusting for confounders. CONCLUSIONS: Although not-for-profit hospitals had lower 30-day readmission rates than proprietary hospitals in both 2010 and 2012, they both decreased after the implementation of the HRRP and the decreases were not statistically significantly different. Thus, this study suggests that the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program was equally effective in reducing readmission rates, despite ownership status

UPDATED GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTIONS OF MICHIGAN HERPETOFAUNA:: A SYNTHESIS OF OLD AND NEW SOURCES

Recently a comprehensive overview of reptiles and amphibians in Michigan was published. Unfortunately, the distributions of the species represented were compiled before widespread accessibility to technological tools providing greater access to museum and historical records as well as citizen science efforts. To update the known ranges of Michigan herpetofauna, published literature, museum collections, and photographic vouchers submitted to an online database were examined and 339 new county and island records were added, updating the maps for 48 of Michigan’s 55 known species of reptiles and amphibians. I also present the first published list of Michigan amphibians that includes two new plethodontid salamanders, the Northern Dusky Salamander (Desmognathus fuscus) and Southern Two-lined Salamander (Eurycea cirrigera). This paper serves as an example of the wealth of information available to scientists that may have previously been unobtainable, and can be used for the distribution of herpetofauna elsewhere