‘Think Aloud’: Towards a framework to facilitate reflective practice amongst rugby league coaches.

This study aimed to design, implement and evaluate a protocol encompassing Think Aloud (TA) as a technique to facilitate reflection-in-action and delayed reflection-on-action to aid coach learning. Six British, male rugby league coaches, who reported little previous exposure to reflective practice, consented to participate. Participants were: (a) instructed on how to engage in TA; (b) observed in practice using TA; (c) provided with individual support on delayed reflective practice on their first coaching session and use of TA; (d) observed in practice using TA a second time; and (e) engaged in a social validation interview regarding their experiences of TA. Analysis of in-action verbalizations revealed a shift from descriptive verbalizations to a deeper level of reflection. Both immediate and post eight week social validation interviews revealed that coaches developed an increased awareness, enhanced communication, and pedagogical development. The participants also recommended that TA can be a valuable tool for: (a) collecting in-event data during a coaching session; and (b) developing and evidencing reflection for coaches. Future recommendations were also provided by the participants and consequently, this study offers a unique technique to reflective practice that has the potential to meet the learning development needs of coaches

Smoothing effect and delocalization of interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in random potentials

We theoretically investigate the physics of interacting Bose-Einstein condensates at equilibrium in a weak (possibly random) potential. We develop a perturbation approach to derive the condensate wavefunction for an amplitude of the potential smaller than the chemical potential of the condensate and for an arbitrary spatial variation scale of the potential. Applying this theory to disordered potentials, we find in particular that, if the healing length is smaller than the correlation length of the disorder, the condensate assumes a delocalized Thomas-Fermi profile. In the opposite situation where the correlation length is smaller than the healing length, we show that the random potential can be significantly smoothed and, in the meanfield regime, the condensate wavefunction can remain delocalized, even for very small correlation lengths of the disorder.Comment: The word "screening" has been changed to "smoothing" to avoid confusions with other effects discussed in the literature. This does not affect the content of paper, nor the results, nor the physical discussio

Molecular footprints of the Holocene retreat of dwarf birch in Britain

© 2014 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Subject preferences of fifth-grade children.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University N.B.:Pages 155 and 309 are missing from original thesis

Fast and flexible Bayesian species distribution modelling using Gaussian processes

1. Species distribution modelling (SDM) is widely used in ecology, and predictions of species distributions inform both policy and ecological debates. Therefore, methods with high predictive accuracy and those that enable biological interpretation are preferable. Gaussian processes (GPs) are a highly flexible approach to statistical modelling and have recently been proposed for SDM. GP models fit smooth, but potentially complex response functions that can account for high-dimensional interactions between predictors. We propose fitting GP SDMs using deterministic numerical approximations, rather than Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in order to make GPs more computationally efficient and easy to use. 2. We introduce GP models and their application to SDM, illustrate how ecological knowledge can be incorporated into GP SDMs via Bayesian priors and formulate a simple GP SDM that can be fitted efficiently. This model can be fitted either by learning the hyperparameters or by using a fixed approximation to them. Using a subset of the North American Breeding Bird Survey data set, we compare the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of these models with several commonly used SDM approaches for both presence/absence and presence-only data. 3. Predictive accuracy of GP SDMs fitted by Laplace approximation was greater than boosted regression trees, generalized additive models (GAMs) and logistic regression when trained on presence/absence data and greater than all of these models plus MaxEnt when trained on presence-only data. GP SDMs fitted using a fixed approximation to hyperparameters were no less accurate than those with MAP estimation and on average 70 times faster, equivalent in speed to GAMs. 4. As well as having strong predictive power for this data set, GP SDMs offer a convenient method for incorporating prior knowledge of the species' ecology. By fitting these methods using efficient numerical approximations, they may easily be applied to large data sets and automatically for many species. An r package, GRaF, is provided to enable SDM users to fit GP models

Climatic Disequilibrium Threatens Conservation Priority Forests

AcceptedArticle in PressThis is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley Open Access via the DOI in this record.© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.We test the hypothesis that climatic changes since 1800 have resulted in unrealized potential vegetation changes that represent a "climatic debt" for many ecosystems. Caledonian pinewoods, an EU priority forest type, are used as a model system to explore potential impacts of two centuries of climatic change upon sites of conservation importance and surrounding landscapes. Using methods that estimate topographic microclimate, current and preindustrial climates were estimated for 50 m grid cells and simulations made using a dynamic vegetation model. Core Caledonian pinewood areas are now less suitable for growth of pine and more favorable for oak than in 1800, whereas landscapes as a whole are on average more favorable for both. The most favorable areas for pine are now mainly outside areas designated to conserve historical pinewoods. A paradigm shift is needed in formulating conservation strategies to avoid catastrophic losses of this habitat, and of many others globally with trees or other long-lived perennials as keystone species.Natural Environment Research Council. Grant Number: NE/I011234/

A Bayesian palaeoenvironmental transfer function model for acidified lakes

A Bayesian approach to palaeoecological environmental reconstruction deriving from the unimodal responses generally exhibited by organisms to an environmental gradient is described. The approach uses Bayesian model selection to calculate a collection of probability-weighted, species-specific response curves (SRCs) for each taxon within a training set, with an explicit treatment for zero abundances. These SRCs are used to reconstruct the environmental variable from sub-fossilised assemblages. The approach enables a substantial increase in computational efficiency (several orders of magnitude) over existing Bayesian methodologies. The model is developed from the Surface Water Acidification Programme (SWAP) training set and is demonstrated to exhibit comparable predictive power to existing Weighted Averaging and Maximum Likelihood methodologies, though with improvements in bias; the additional explanatory power of the Bayesian approach lies in an explicit calculation of uncertainty for each individual reconstruction. The model is applied to reconstruct the Holocene acidification history of the Round Loch of Glenhead, including a reconstruction of recent recovery derived from sediment trap data.The Bayesian reconstructions display similar trends to conventional (Weighted Averaging Partial Least Squares) reconstructions but provide a better reconstruction of extreme pH and are more sensitive to small changes in diatom assemblages. The validity of the posteriors as an apparently meaningful representation of assemblage-specific uncertainty and the high computational efficiency of the approach open up the possibility of highly constrained multiproxy reconstructions

Exact Solution of an Evolutionary Model without Ageing

We introduce an age-structured asexual population model containing all the relevant features of evolutionary ageing theories. Beneficial as well as deleterious mutations, heredity and arbitrary fecundity are present and managed by natural selection. An exact solution without ageing is found. We show that fertility is associated with generalized forms of the Fibonacci sequence, while mutations and natural selection are merged into an integral equation which is solved by Fourier series. Average survival probabilities and Malthusian growth exponents are calculated indicating that the system may exhibit mutational meltdown. The relevance of the model in the context of fissile reproduction groups as many protozoa and coelenterates is discussed.Comment: LaTeX file, 15 pages, 2 ps figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.