Effects of Simulated Grazing on Fire-Treated Mine Tailings for Restoration

The alterations caused to the landscape while mining operations extract necessary materials are unavoidable but not completely permanent changes. Through dedication to the communities they border, mining companies have progressed the science of reclamation and are beginning to restore once wild places to more natural looking environments. In the early days of reclamation, aggressive agronomic vegetative species were used to establish vegetation cover to prevent erosion and act as the framework for eventual succession to a more natural pre-disturbed state. In practice on some sites, these agronomic species are becoming monocultures which are utilized by small mammals and ungulates but are not being displaced by planted native grasses to fully reclaim an area to its natural form. The use of prescribed burning to bring disturbance to a landscape and provide space for native grasses has had some positive results but more might be done to help these grasses become established more permanently. Herbicide works to reduce competition for nutrients and water uptake but without removing the dead material the leftover litter layer would still prevent small native grasses from obtaining light. I intend to look at the possibility of using simulated cattle grazing as a means of added disturbance to provide space for seeded native species to grow and eventually lead to early successional change to re-establish a pre-disturbed natural state on a dry tailing storage facility

Training students as interprofessional learning facilitators: An exploratory study highlighting the need to build confidence

Interprofessional learning (IPL) aims to equip students for future interprofessional and collaborative practice. Involving students as IPL facilitators is becoming increasingly commonplace as an attempt to catalyse the necessary transformation of our workforce needed to deliver truly integrated and person-centred care. Evidence in the literature highlights the key role of trained facilitators in reaching successful IPL outcomes. Some guidelines are available as to how we train staff facilitators, but little evidence is available that describes how to appropriately prepare student IPL facilitators. The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate whether student IPL facilitators felt that they were sufficiently prepared for their role. Data in the form of open-ended text-based responses from student facilitators (n = 9) were collated after an intervention where student facilitators had been given the role of supporting IPL. Data were analysed using principles of thematic analysis. Three main themes emerged: i) building confidence; ii) purpose of IPL; iii) learning moments. Student IPL facilitators who took part in this study felt that they were adequately prepared for their role. Findings show that preparing students for IPL facilitation has similar, yet unique, components compared to the training staff. In particular, this study highlighted a need for student facilitators to receive further preparation to help build their confidence. Involving students as IPL facilitators has great potential in staff and students joining forces to equip students for future interprofessional and collaborative practice that can deliver high-quality care

On the Topic of Pseudoclefts

This paper presents arguments in favor of a pseudocleft analysis of a certain class of sentences in Malagasy, despite the lack of an overt wh-element. It is shown that voice morphology on the verb creates an operator-variable relationship much like the one created by wh-movement in free relatives in English and other languages. The bulk of the paper argues in favor of an inversion analysis of specificational pseudoclefts in Malagasy: a predicate DP is fronted to a topic position from within a small clause constituent. Moreover, it is shown that the same inversion occurs in equative and specificational sentences in Malagasy, which suggests that these types of sentences share the same syntactic structure. The proposed analysis also provides support for the view that specificational pseudoclefts have a topic \u3e focus structure, where the wh-clause has been overtly topicalized

Keeping it Real : An Evaluation Audit of Five Years of Youth-led Program Evaluation

Youth are increasingly seen as competent in participating in research and program evaluation, two activities previously reserved for adults. This paper is a report of the findings from an evaluation audit of Stand Up! Help Out!, a participatory action after-school youth leadership development program for disadvantaged urban youth that utilized youth evaluations to develop a best practices service model. The youths’ feedback assisted providers in improving services so that youth engagement in the program was 99% (by comparison with national highs of 79%). Here, we describe an important aspect of the process of youth-led program evaluation leading to such high youth engagement: How youth interviewed each other so as to optimize the authenticity of their program evaluations and contributions to program design. Drawing from over five years of program evaluation data collected by youth, the authors report on the youths’ experiences as informants and co-researchers, consider strategies used to help youth best describe their experiences in the program, and describe implications for other settings looking to incorporate youth-led program evaluation. Youth-led program evaluation has considerable promise for helping service providers make programs more meaningful for disadvantaged youth

The 3--D ionization structure of NGC 6818: a Planetary Nebula threatened by recombination

Long-slit NTT+EMMI echellograms of NGC 6818 (the Little Gem) at nine equally spaced position angles, reduced according to the 3-D methodology introduced by Sabbadin et al. (2000a,b), allowed us to derive: the expansion law, the diagnostics and ionic radial profiles, the distance and the central star parameters, the nebular photo-ionization model, the 3-D reconstruction in He II, [O III] and [N II], the multicolor projection and a series of movies. The Little Gem results to be a young (3500 years), optically thin (quasi-thin in some directions) double shell (Mion~0.13 Msun) at a distance of 1.7 kpc, seen almost equatorial on: a tenuous and patchy spherical envelope (r~0.090 pc) encircles a dense and inhomogeneous tri-axial ellipsoid (a/2~0.077 pc, a/b~1.25, b/c~1.15) characterized by a hole along the major axis and a pair of equatorial, thick moustaches. NGC 6818 is at the start of the recombination phase following the luminosity decline of the 0.625 Msun central star, which has recently exhausted the hydrogen shell nuclear burning and is rapidly moving toward the white dwarf domain (log T*~5.22 K; log(L*/Lsun)~3.1). The nebula is destined to become thicker and thicker, with an increasing fraction of neutral, dusty gas in the outermost layers. Only over some hundreds of years the plasma rarefaction due to the expansion will prevail against the slower and slower stellar decline, leading to a gradual re-growing of the ionization front. The exciting star of NGC 6818 (mV~17.06) is a visual binary: a faint, red companion (mV~17.73) appears at 0.09 arcsec in PA=190deg, corresponding to a separation >=150 AU and to an orbital period >=1500 yearsComment: 23 pages, 18 figures, A&A accepted. 12 movies of NGC 6818 are available at http://web.pd.astro.it/sabbadin The paper may also be retrivied at http://web.pd.astro.it/supern/preprints.htm

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

The 3-D ionization structure of the planetary nebula NGC6565

A detailed study of the planetary nebula NGC6565 has been carried out on long-slit echellograms at six, equally spaced position angles. The expansion velocity field, the c(Hbeta) distribution and the radial profile of the physical conditions (electron temperature and density) are obtained. The distance, radius, mass and filling factor of the nebula and the temperature and luminosity of the central star are derived. The radial ionization structure is analyzed using both the classical method and the photo-ionization code CLOUDY. Moreover, we present the spatial structure in a series of images from different directions. NGC6565 is a young (2000--2500 years), patchy, optically thick triaxial ellipsoid projected almost pole-on. The matter close to major axis was swept-up by some accelerating agent forming two faint and asymmetric polar cups. A large cocoon of almost neutral gas completely embeds the ionized nebula. NGC6565 is in a recombination phase. The stellar decline started about 1000 years ago, but the main nebula remained optically thin for other 600 years before the recombination phase occurred. In the near future the ionization front will re-grow, since the dilution factor due to the expansion will prevail on the slower and slower stellar decline. NGC6565 is at a distance of 2.0(+-0.5) Kpc and can be divided into three radial zones: the ``fully ionized'' one, extending up to 0.029--0.035 pc at the equator (0.050 pc at the poles), the ``transition'' one, up to 0.048--0.054 pc (0.080 pc), the ``halo'', detectable up to 0.110 pc. The ionized mass (~0.03 Modot) is only a fraction of the total mass (> 0.15 Modot), which has been ejected by an equatorial enhanced superwind of 4(+-2)x10^(-5) Modot/yr lasted for 4(+-2)x10^3 years.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures included + 10 JPEG figures, A&A accepted, postscript available at http://merlino.pd.astro.it/~supern/ps/ngc6565.p

HLA Genes, Islet Autoantibodies and Residual C-Peptide at the Clinical Onset of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus and the Risk of Retinopathy 15 Years Later

HLA genes, islet autoantibodies and residual C-peptide were studied to determine the independent association of each exposure with diabetic retinopathy (DR), 15 years after the clinical onset of type 1 diabetes in 15-34 year old individuals.The cohort was identified in 1992 and 1993 by the Diabetes Incidence Study in Sweden (DISS), which investigates incident cases of diabetes for patients between 15 and 34 years of age. Blood samples at diagnosis were analyzed to determine HLA genotype, islet autoantibodies and serum C-peptide. In 2009, fundus photographs were obtained from patient records. Study measures were supplemented with data from the Swedish National Diabetes Registry.The prevalence of DR was 60.2% (148/246). Autoantibodies against the 65 kD isoform of glutamate decarboxylase (GADA) at the onset of clinical diabetes increased the risk of DR 15 years later, relative risk 1.12 for each 100 WHO units/ml, [95% CI 1.02 to 1.23]. This equates to risk estimates of 1.27, [95% CI 1.04 to 1.62] and 1.43, [95% CI 1.06 to 1.94] for participants in the highest 25(th) (GADA>233 WHO units/ml) and 5(th) percentile (GADA>319 WHO units/ml) of GADA, respectively. These were adjusted for duration of diabetes, HbA(1c), treated hypertension, sex, age at diagnosis, HLA and C-peptide. Islet cell autoantibodies, insulinoma-antigen 2 autoantibodies, residual C-peptide and the type 1 diabetes associated haplotypes DQ2, DQ8 and DQ6 were not associated with DR.Increased levels of GADA at the onset of type 1 diabetes were associated with DR 15 years later. These results, if confirmed, could provide additional insights into the pathogenesis of the most common microvascular complication of diabetes and lead to better risk stratification for both patient screenings and DR treatment trials