Food Preferences of the Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula)

The common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) has been reported to eat vegetation, fruit, invertebrates, and occasionally fungi, eggs and meat. The relative preference between food types found in the wild, however, has not been investigated systematically in a controlled laboratory study. This research investigated captive possums’ food choice using two different methods of preference assessment. The first experiment involved a single stimulus assessment of possums’ (n = 20) consumption of individually presented food items. More than 75% of possums consumed berries, locusts and mushrooms but fewer than 50% of possums consumed fivefinger, raw chicken and eggs. The second experiment that used a paired stimulus assessment to establish relative preference for those foods revealed that no single food was preferred by all possums. Overall locusts were the most preferred food, followed in order of preference by berries, egg, mushrooms, chicken and foliage. The single stimulus preference assessment confirmed the palatability of foods. The paired stimulus assessment provided a rank order of food preferences

How convincing is alternative assessment for use in higher education?

The current preference for alternative assessment has been partly stimulated by recent evidence on learning which points to the importance of students' active engagement in the learning process. While alternative assessment may well fulfil the aims of formative assessment, its value in the summative assessment required in higher education is more problematic. If alternative assessment devices are to be used for summative purposes, the validity of alternative assessment has to be considered. The paper argues that task specification and marking consistency in alternative assessment can make comparability of performance difficult to effect, thereby leaving alternative assessment a less than convincing form for use in higher educatio

Choice Experiments in Enviromental Impact Assessment: The Toro 3 Hydroelectric Project and the Recreo Verde Tourist Center in Costa Rica

Choice experiments, a stated preference valuation method, are proposed as a tool to assign monetary values to environmental externalities during the ex-ante stages of environmental impact assessment. This case study looks at the impacts of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity’s Toro 3 hydroelectric project and its affects on the Recreo Verde tourism center in San Carlos, Costa Rica. Compared to other valuation methods (e.g., travel cost and contingent valuation), choice experiments can create hypothetical but realistic scenarios for consumers and generate restoration alternatives for the affected good. Although they have limitations that must be taken into account in environmental impact assessments, incorporating economic parameters—especially resource constraints and tradeoffs—can substantially enrich the assessment process.stated-preference, economic valuation, choice experiments, hydropower, tourism, Costa Rica

Don\u27t Count Them Out Just Yet: Toward the Plausible Use of Race-Preference Student Assignment Plans

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court\u27s recent decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 11 could serve to broaden the permissible use of race beyond the boundaries presently permitted by the Court. In this highly fractionalized decision, five justices ultimately agreed that the race-based student assignment plans before their review could not withstand judicial scrutiny. One of these justices, Justice Kennedy, agreed with the plurality\u27s conclusion, but rejected the plurality\u27s assessment that it is never permissible to use race-preference student assignment plans absent evidence of de jure segregation. His concurrence, when read together with the reasoning of the Court\u27s four dissenting justices, offers a plausible scenario under which future courts could find precedential support to uphold challenged race-preference student assignment plans as constitutionally permissible

A colour preference technique to evaluate acrylamide-induced toxicity in zebrafish

The zebrafish has become a commonly used vertebrate model for toxicity assessment, of particular relevance to the study of toxic effects on the visual system because of the structural similarities shared by zebrafish and human retinae. In this article we present a colour preference-based technique that, by assessing the functionality of photoreceptors, can be used to evaluate the effects of toxicity on behaviour. A digital camera was used to record the locomotor behaviour of individual zebrafish swimming in a water tank consisting of two compartments separated by an opaque perforated wall through which the fish could pass. The colour of the lighting in each compartment could be altered independently (producing distinct but connected environments of white, red or blue) to allow association of the zebrafish's swimming behaviour with its colour preference. The functionality of the photoreceptors was evaluated based on the ability of the zebrafish to sense the different colours and to swim between the compartments. The zebrafish tracking was carried out using our algorithm developed with MATLAB. We found that zebrafish preferred blue illumination to white, and white illumination to red. Acute treatment with acrylamide (2 mM for 36 h) resulted in a marked reduction in locomotion and a concomitant loss of colour-preferential swimming behaviour. Histopathological examination of acrylamide-treated zebrafish eyes showed that acrylamide exposure had caused retinal damage. The colour preference tracking technique has applications in the assessment of neurodegenerative disorders, as a method for preclinical appraisal of drug efficacy and for behavioural evaluation of toxicity

Assessing the cervical range of motion in infants with positional plagiocephaly

Purpose: To determine if infants with positional plagiocephaly have limitations of active and passive cervical range of motion measured with simple and reliable methods. Methods: The examiners assessed bilateral active and passive cervical rotations and passive cervical lateral flexion. Cervical assessment was performed twice by 2 different physicians to assess intertester reliability. To assess intratester reliability the first investigator performed a second examination 48 hours after the first one. Results: One-hundred nine subjects were analyzed; 70.7% of the sample had head positional preference on the right, while 29.3% had head positional preference on the left (x2 35.52, P <0.001). Cervical rotations and lateral flexion showed reliable levels of agreement for intra and intertester reliability. Conclusions: The most limited range of motion in infants with positional plagiocephaly was cervical active rotation which affected more than 90% of patients. Passive cervical rotations and lateral flexion were limited in more than 60% of patient

Exploring the relationship between two health state classification systems and happiness using a large patient data set

The economic evaluation of health care technologies employs a standard economic approach based on preferences to provide utility information. This paper investigates an alternative approach that uses happiness to weight the health states of two preference-based measures (EQ-5D and SF-6D) in a follow-up of a large hospital patient sample (N=15,184). Logit models relating the health state classifications of these two measures to happiness suggests a different weighting across dimensions to that from preference elicitation techniques such as time trade-off. While mental health (depression and anxiety), vitality and social functioning were found to have a large significant association to a patient’s own happiness assessment, pain was less so and physical health had none. The implications of these results for health policy are discussed

Empirical welfare analysis in random utility models of labour supply

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. On the basis of microdata from the Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) for married couples in Germany, we provide empirical evidence about the sensitivity of the welfare orderings to different normative principles embodied in these measures. We retrieve individual and household specific preference heterogeneity, by estimating a structural discrete choice labor supply model. We use this preference information to construct welfare orderings of households according to the different metrics, each embodying different ethical choices concerning the preference heterogeneity in the consumption-leisure space. We then discuss how sensitive the assessment of a hypothetical tax reform is to the choice of metric. The chosen tax reform is similar to a subsidy of social security contributions.

Preference erosion and multilateral trade liberalization

Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate into worsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences have proven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization. The authors examine the actual scope for preference erosion, including an econometric assessment of the actual utilization and the scope for erosion estimated by modeling full elimination of OECD tariffs, and hence full most-favored-nation liberalization-based preference erosion. Preferences are underutilized due to administrative burden-estimated to be at least 4 percent on average-reducing the magnitude of erosion costs significantly. For those products where preferences are used (are of value), the primary negative impact follows from erosion of EU preferences. This suggests the erosion problem is primarily bilateral rather than a WTO-based concern.Free Trade,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Trade and Regional Integration,Rules of Origin