Estimating egg mass-body mass relationships in birds

Abstract The mass of a bird’s egg is a critical attribute of the species’ life history and represents a fundamental component of reproductive effort. Indeed, the tradeoff between the number of eggs in a clutch and clutch mass lies at the heart of understanding how environmental attributes such as nest predation or adult mortality influence reproductive investment. However, egg masses have not been reported for the majority of avian species. We capitalized on the strong allometric relationship between avian body mass and egg mass to produce egg mass estimates for over 5,500 species previously lacking such information. These estimates are accompanied by measures of the robustness of the regressions used to produce them (e.g., sample size, root mean square error [RMSE] of estimation, coefficient of determination, and degree of extrapolation), thus allowing independent evaluation of the suitability of any estimate to address a particular research question relating to avian life history. Most estimates (~5,000) were based on family-level egg mass–body mass regressions, with the remainder derived from other relationships such as ordinal regressions. We compared estimating regressions based on adult vs. female body masses and, after finding little difference between the 2, based our final estimates on adult masses as those were more numerous in the literature. What small differences between adult- and female-based regressions that did occur were not related to sexual size dimorphism across families. These new estimates, coupled with ~5,000 egg masses reported in the literature, provide a foundation of over 10,000 species for wider investigations assessing variation in reproductive effort in birds over a broad array of ecological and evolutionary contexts

Editorial: Non-themed issue: 2010

The decision to have regular non-themed issues of English Teaching: Practice and Critique was made by way of Board consultation some time ago. As a Board, we believe that the policy of having a panel of guest editors taking control of a “themed” issue has worked well. In many cases, guess editors have worked together for the first time in a common enterprise. In all cases, having panels of guest editors has expanded the reach of the journal, increasing its subscriber base and the number of distinct educational constituencies who view the journal as a desirable target for contributions. It has facilited the journal’s aim of providing “a place where authors from a range of backgrounds can identify matters of common concern and thereby foster professional communities and networks”

Boston Hospitality Review: Spring 2013

Lodging Update: Providence, Rhode Island by Rachel Roginsky and Matthew Arrants -- Brand Heritage and Heritage Tourism by Bradford Hudson -- Te Front Desks of Boston by Michael Oshins -- Defining the New Luxury: Perspectives from Industry Leaders by Chekitan S. Dev -- The Ethic of Hospitality by Christopher Muller -- Buffet-Américain by Peter Szend

Evaluating Research Activity:Impact Factor vs. Research Factor

The Impact Factor (IF) “has moved ... from an obscure bibliometric indicator to become the chief quantitative measure of the quality of a journal, its research papers, the researchers who wrote those papers, and even the institution they work in” ([2], p. 1). However, the use of this index for evaluating individual scientists is dubious. The present work compares the ranking of research units generated by the Research Factor (RF) index with that associated with the popular IF. The former, originally introduced in [38], reflects article and book publications and a host of other activities categorized as coordination activities (e.g., conference organization, research group coordination), dissemination activities (e.g., conference and seminar presentations, participation in research group), editorial activities (e.g., journal editor, associate editor, referee) and functional activities (e.g., Head of Department). The main conclusion is that by replacing the IF with the RF in hiring, tenure decisions and awarding of grants would greatly increase the number of topics investigated and the number and quality of long run projects.scientific research assessment, Impact Factor, bibliometric indices, feasible Research Factor