Seeing 'REDD'?: Forests, Climate Change Mitigation and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Examines proposals for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) and their failure to protect indigenous peoples' rights or to address forest governance problems. Calls for talks to include civil society and indigenous peoples

Understanding Educator Beliefs in Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills: An Examination within the Malaysian Public Higher Education Sector

Higher education plays a significant role in determining the growth and income of a country through the development of graduates with discipline-specific technical skills. However, employers consider graduates who have developed generic skills, or soft skills, as most employable. To address this, the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) established the soft skills development module for the advancement of soft skills in higher education with the aim of producing the work-ready graduates demanded by employers. The module is flexible and provides for the development of seven soft skills: communication; critical thinking and problem solving; teamwork; lifelong learning and information management; entrepreneurship; moral and professional ethics; and leadership. Despite this innovative policy-level approach, little is yet known about the experiences of individual educators within the Malaysian higher education system in delivering and assessing soft skills. A mixed methods approach was used in this study in order to gain a better understanding of educator experiences. An in-depth qualitative phenomenological approach was followed by a quantitative study to explore educator perceptions. The outcomes of this research highlight educator personal beliefs as a significant antecedent to perceptions of teaching and assessing soft skills. The varied and interdependent role of the educator as teacher, facilitator and consultant is also a central theme of this research, which recognises the central role of educators in the development by students of soft skills via formal, non-formal and informal modes with a student-learning focus. Results across the two phases of this study have been integrated, leading to the development of two frameworks. The first enables a better understanding of educator perceptions about their role, and specifically “individual responsibility” in developing soft skills. The second guides the teaching and assessing of soft skills. These frameworks have implications for teaching and learning strategies associated with soft skills development, and have applicability across the higher education sector

111th Congress

This report explains the process for filling positions to which the President makes appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate (also referred to as PAS positions). It also identifies, for the 111th Congress, all nominations to full-time positions requiring Senate confirmation in the 15 executive departments

2013 SEAFDEC/AQD highlights

The SEAFDEC Aquaculture Department is mandated to: 1) conduct scientific research to generate aquaculture technologies appropriate for Southeast Asia; 2) develop managerial, technical and skilled manpower for the aquaculture sector; and, 3) disseminate and exchange aquaculture information. The Aquaculture Department in the Philippines maintains 4 stations: the Tigbauan Main Station and Dumangas Brackishwater Station in Iloilo; the Igang Marine Station in Guimaras; and, the Binangonan Freshwater Station in Rizal. Highlights are provided of the seven research programmes and activities conducted by the department during the year 2013

NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures

Intellectual Property Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: A Handbook of Best Practices, Vol. 1

Prepared by and for policy-makers, leaders of public sector research establishments, technology transfer professionals, licensing executives, and scientists, this online resource offers up-to-date information and strategies for utilizing the power of both intellectual property and the public domain. Emphasis is placed on advancing innovation in health and agriculture, though many of the principles outlined here are broadly applicable across technology fields. Eschewing ideological debates and general proclamations, the authors always keep their eye on the practical side of IP management. The site is based on a comprehensive Handbook and Executive Guide that provide substantive discussions and analysis of the opportunities awaiting anyone in the field who wants to put intellectual property to work. This multi-volume work contains 153 chapters on a full range of IP topics and over 50 case studies, composed by over 200 authors from North, South, East, and West. If you are a policymaker, a senior administrator, a technology transfer manager, or a scientist, we invite you to use the companion site guide available at http://www.iphandbook.org/index.html The site guide distills the key points of each IP topic covered by the Handbook into simple language and places it in the context of evolving best practices specific to your professional role within the overall picture of IP management

A Robust and Optimal Multidisciplinary Approach For Space Systems Conceptual Design

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Supporting Multiple Stakeholders in Agile Development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing and modeling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders —- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE) —- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modeling, implementation, and verification is counter-productive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modeled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Practices and technological change: The unintended consequences of low energy dwelling design

There is an urgent need to reduce domestic energy consumption, particularly due to climate change. Domestic energy policies and research have been dominated by the assumption that technological provision will linearly save energy. Conventional attempts to move away from this approach have not gone far enough, tending to still assume that technological usage is a linear outcome of an individual’s rational decision-making. This thesis takes a significantly different approach by drawing on social practice theory and focusing on how everyday life is performed. Specifically, a Passivhaus housing development is adopted as a case study in investigating the everyday consequences of advancing dwelling design. Passivhaus is a German energy efficiency building standard, employing very different technologies relative to conventional UK housing. Specific attention is given to how unfamiliar technologies influence domestic practices more generally, as well as appliance-using practices and designing and constructing practices more specifically. This thesis has significant empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions. Empirically, everyday examples illustrate the unintended consequences of new technologies, providing insight on how such technologies could change practices in the future. Methodologically, by treating quantitative consumption-related data (e.g. building monitoring, appliance ownership, construction data) as by-products of performing practices, an innovative mixed methods approach provides unique insights on everyday practices. Theoretically, the potential usefulness of a practices approach is emphasised; in particular, in developing a detailed and contextual understanding of how everyday life is constructed and how it is open to change (often in unexpected ways). This thesis reiterates that research and policy should focus on practices, rather than technological performance or what individuals think about technologies. It concludes by: discussing a re-framing of policy expectations; outlining how energy saving interventions could target domestic practices and its influencing elements; and providing a series of new research ideas that have been generated by this thesis