Robustness of geography as an instrument to assess impact of climate change on agriculture

The empirical literature on climate change and agriculture does not adequately address the issue of potential endogeneity between climatic variables and agriculture which makes their estimates unreliable. This study is designed to investigate the relationships between climate change and agriculture and test the potential reverse causality and endogeneity of climatic variables to agriculture. This study introduces a geographical instrument, longitude and latitude, for temperature to assess the impact of climate change on agriculture by estimating regression using IV-2SLS method over annual panel data for 60 countries for the period 1999-2011. The Identification and F-statistic tests are used to choose and exclude the instrument. The inclusion of some control variables is supposed to reduce the omitted variable bias. The study finds a negative relationship between temperature and agriculture. Surprisingly the magnitude of the coefficient on temperature is mild, at least 20%, as compared to previous studies may be due to the use of the instrumental variable which is also supported by an alternative robust measure when estimated across different regions. The study provides strong implications for the policy makers to confront climate change that is an impending danger to agriculture. In designing effective policies and strategies policy makers should focus not only on crop production but also on other agricultural activities such as livestock production and fisheries, in addition to national and international socio-economic and geopolitical dynamics. This paper contributes to the growing literature in at least four aspects. First, empirical settings introduce an innovative geographical instrument, Second, it includes a wider set of control variables in the analysis. Third, improves over previous researches by using agriculture value addition and finally, the effects of temperature and precipitation on a single aggregate measure, agriculture value addition are separately investigated

Exploring Participatory Design Methods to Engage with Arab Communities

ArabHCI is an initiative inaugurated in CHI17 SIG Meeting that brought together 45+ HCI Arab and non-Arab researchers/practitioners who are conducting/interested in HCI within Arab communities. The goal of this workshop is to start dialogs that leverage our "insider" understanding of HCI research in the Arab context and assert our culture identity in design in order to explore challenges and opportunities for future research. In this workshop, we focus on one of the themes that derived our community discussions in most of the held events. We explore the extent to which participatory approaches in the Arab context are culturally and methodologically challenged. Our goal is to bring researchers/practitioners with success and failure stories while designing with Arab communities to discuss methods, share experiences and learned lessons. We plan to share the results of our discussions and research agenda with the wider CHI community through different social and scholarly channels

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

OA Week Panel Opening Remarks

These remarks were delivered as an introduction to the UNLV University Libraries 2018 Open Access Panel on The Intersection of Scholarly Publishing and Open Access with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/oaweek_2018/1004/thumbnail.jp

A classification system for teachers’ motivational behaviors recommended in self-determination theory interventions.

Teachers’ behavior is a key factor that influences students’ motivation. Many theoretical models have tried to explain this influence, with one of the most thoroughly researched being self-determination theory (SDT). We used a Delphi method to create a classification of teacher behaviors consistent with SDT. This is useful because SDT-based interventions have been widely used to improve educational outcomes. However, these interventions contain many components. Reliably classifying and labeling those components is essential for implementation, reproducibility, and evidence synthesis.We used an international expert panel (N = 34) to develop this classification system. We started by identifying behaviors from existing literature, then refined labels, descriptions, and examples using the Delphi panel’s input. Next, the panel of experts iteratively rated the relevance of each behavior to SDT, the psychological need that each behavior influenced, and its likely effect on motivation. To create a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of behaviors, experts nominated overlapping behaviors that were redundant, and suggested new ones missing from the classification. After three rounds, the expert panel agreed upon 57 teacher motivational behaviors (TMBs) that were consistent with SDT. For most behaviors (77%), experts reached consensus on both the most relevant psychological need and influence on motivation. Our classification system provides a comprehensive list of TMBs and consistent terminology in how those behaviors are labeled. Researchers and practitioners designing interventions could use these behaviors to design interventions, to reproduce interventions, to assess whether these behaviors moderate intervention effects, and could focus new research on areas where experts disagreed