Implementation of Project-based Learning to Entrepreneurship at International Preparatory in Buffalo: Its Effect on Learners’ Desire to Become Entrepreneurs and Impact on the Practice of 21st Century Skills

To extract the evidence of the effect of project-based learning in the teaching of entrepreneurship at International Preparatory in the City of Buffalo, the researcher will work with two groups of students. One group of students hereinafter called Group A will be exposed to the course of entrepreneurship using the project-based learning golden standards and teaching practices recommended by the Buck Institute of Education and the second group, hereinafter called Group B will not include project-based learning as a teaching strategy. Of special interest is the notable effect on the students’ desire to want to open and operate a business as an entrepreneur. In addition, the paper seeks to identify ways in which the students in Group A apply 21st Century skills of critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication as an integral part of using project-based learning. The paper will consist of a literature review to find out what the experts in the field have proven through research and experience in regard to the use of project-based learning as a strategy for the teaching of entrepreneurship. Curriculum content will be designed to cover a period of one semester, three units, namely, entrepreneurship, principles of marketing and sales. This content will be presented using project based learning from the beginning of the semester during which the students in Group A will be asked to work on the challenging question of what good or service they want to create or provide for sale to potential customers. Students in this group will proceed during the first few weeks of the semester with a sustained inquiry until they come up with the product or service they will create or obtain from an established supplier. Implementation of project-based learning to the teaching of entrepreneurship will consist of providing students the opportunities to identify their product or service and move forward to the selection of effective modes of packaging, promotion, advertising, sale and distribution of the product or service. The students will also create a written business plan which will outline how their business will be organized and operated. The students will then be directed to work on their final presentations which will be revised, improved, and critiqued for continuous improvement. The research design will continue with a comparative statistical analysis of the two groups: Group A and Group B. Group A will be the group that will be using project-based learning in the teaching and learning about entrepreneurship, while Group B will be the group that will be doing the course without project-based learning. The purpose of studying the two groups is to establish whether there is a connection between the desire to want to become entrepreneurs when project based learning is implemented to the course content and to observe the 21st Century skills as the learners work on creating or providing a good or a service to customers. Finally, the research design will allow for data to be gathered from the students of Group A to conclude which aspect of the curriculum content they found to be most helpful. The purpose for doing this is to establish which segment helped the students the most and to establish the need for emphasis on that segment for future experiments of this nature

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Data & Code for Moore et al. 2023: "Temperate species underfill their tropical thermal potentials on land"

Files included here are:Moore-et-al-2023_MinimumDataset.xlsA minimum dataset needed to reproduce the main analyses in "Temperate species underfill their tropical thermal potentials on land" (Moore et al. 2023)living-up-to-thermal-potentials.zipAn archived version of the Github repository at the time of publication, including code and data needed to reproduce analyseslarge-filesA folder of large source and intermediate data files needed to reproduce all analyses using code published in the Zenodo Github archive</ol

Soft Law as a New Mode of Governance: A Legal Perspective

After a brief review of the history and typology of soft law in public international law, we approach the concept deductively. We reject the binary view and subscribe to the continuum view. Building on the idea of graduated normativity and on the prototype theory of concepts, we submit that soft law is in the penumbra of law. It can be distinguished from purely political documents more or less readily, depending on its closeness to the prototype of law. Insights gained by the study of public international soft law are relevant to EC and EU soft law despite some differences between those legal orders. European soft law is created by institutions, Member States, and private actors. The legal effects of soft law acts can be clustered according to their relation to hard law. Both practical and normative considerations motivate reliance on soft law. An examination of the soft legal consequences of a disregard of soft law shows that compliance control mechanisms for hard and soft international law are converging. Moreover, some factors of compliance are independent of the theoretical hardness or softness of a given norm. In a legal policy perspective, the proliferation of soft law carries both dangers and benefits. Especially soft acts with a lawplus function do not weaken the respective regimes, but perfect them

TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access

10.1111/gcb.14904GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY261119-18