Arts in the City Downtown Revitalization Strategies for Mid-Sized Cities

Bringing life back into the centre of smaller cities is possible through community-led arts and culture events. This study of community and artist-led events in Barrie, Kitchener and Hamilton in Ontario suggests that these types of place-making events should be supported by smaller cities as important catalysts to downtown revitalization. In recent decades, cities of all sizes have attempted to revitalize the downtown via a myriad of approaches and strategies. Large cities are typically more successful in downtown revitalization in comparison to smaller urban centres. This research examines downtown revitalization strategies and determines that place-making approaches that emphasize arts and culture are best suited for smaller city centres. The City of Barrie served as the primary case study for this research. A proposal for the City of Barrie was drafted to assist in downtown revitalization efforts (see Appendix C). In order to understand the options available for the City of Barrie, the City of Kitchener and the City of Hamilton were examined and served as methods of best practice. The lessons learned from the City of Kitchener and the City of Hamilton have been considered in my proposal for the City of Barrie. This research has revealed that smaller cities should employ place-making strategies that emphasize the arts and culture sector in order to enhance the urban fabric. Based on comparable precedents, small scaled and strategic projects prove to be more economically feasible in comparison to costly large scaled projects. Place-making strategies result in greater economic spin-offs, facilitate community engagement, foster civic pride and advance the city's prosperity

Boston Hospitality Review: Summer 2015

Boston, the Booth Brothers, and the Parker House by Susan Wilson -- Airports Hotels: Laying the Foundation for a Synergistic Relationship by Allison Fogarty -- The Pricing Effects of Heritage at an Iconic Hotel by Bradford Hudson -- The Customer is Always Right, Right? A Look at How Yelp Has Taken Hold of the Boston Restaurant Industry by Rachel DeSimone -- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Financial & Competitive Advantages of an Effective Hotel SEM Strategy by Leora Lanz and Jovanna Fazzin

From Theory to Action: Developing and Evaluating Learning Analyticsfor Learning Design

Producción CientíficaThe effectiveness of using learning analytics for learning design primarily depends upon two concepts: grounding and alignment. This is the primary conjecture for the study described in this paper. In our design-based research study, we design, test, and evaluate teacher-facing learning analytics for an online inquiry science unit on global climate change. We design our learning analytics in accordance with a socioconstructivism-based pedagogical framework, called Knowledge Integration, and the principles of learning analytics Implementation Design. Our methodology for the design process draws upon the principle of the Orchestrating for Learning Analytics framework to engage stakeholders (i.e. teachers, researchers, and developers). The resulting learning analytics were aligned to unit activities that engaged students in key aspects of the knowledge integration process. They provided teachers with actionable insight into their students' understanding at critical junctures in the learning process. We demonstrate the efficacy of the learning analytics in supporting the optimization of the unit's learning design. We conclude by synthesizing the principles that guided our design process into a framework for developing and evaluating learning analytics for learning design.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Project TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R)Junta de Castilla y León (project VA257P18) by the European Commission under project grant 588438-EPP-1-2017-1-EL-EPPKA2-KA

Decreased mass specific respiration under experimental warming is robust to the microbial biomass method employed

Hartley et al. question whether reduction in Rmass, under experimental warming, arises because of the biomass method. We show the method they treat as independent yields the same result. We describe why the substrate-depletion hypothesis may not solely explain observed responses, and urge caution in interpretation of the seasonal data. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/CNRS

Contrasting watershed-scale trends in runoff and sediment yield complicate rangeland water resources planning

Rangelands cover a large portion of the earth's land surface and are undergoing dramatic landscape changes. At the same time, these ecosystems face increasing expectations to meet growing water supply needs. To address major gaps in our understanding of rangeland hydrologic function, we investigated historical watershed-scale runoff and sediment yield in a dynamic landscape in central Texas, USA. We quantified the relationship between precipitation and runoff and analyzed reservoir sediment cores dated using cesium-137 and lead-210 radioisotopes. Local rainfall and streamflow showed no directional trend over a period of 85 years, resulting in a rainfall–runoff ratio that has been resilient to watershed changes. Reservoir sedimentation rates generally were higher before 1963, but have been much lower and very stable since that time. Our findings suggest that (1) rangeland water yields may be stable over long periods despite dramatic landscape changes while (2) these same landscape changes influence sediment yields that impact downstream reservoir storage. Relying on rangelands to meet water needs demands an understanding of how these dynamic landscapes function and a quantification of the physical processes at work

Decreased mass specific respiration under experimental warming is robust to the microbial biomass method employed

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Blackwell for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ecology Letters 12 (2009): E15-E18, doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01332.x.Hartley et al. question whether reduction in Rmass, under experimental warming, arises because of the biomass method. We show the method they treat as independent yields the same result. We describe why the substrate-depletion hypothesis cannot alone explain observed responses, and urge caution in the interpretation of the seasonal data.This research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), U.S. Department of Energy, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and U.S. National Science Foundation grants to the Coweeta LTER program

Simultaneous Measurements of Star Formation and Supermassive Black Hole Growth in Galaxies

Galaxies grow their supermassive black holes in concert with their stars, although the relationship between these major galactic components is poorly understood. Observations of the cosmic growth of stars and black holes in galaxies suffer from disjoint samples and the strong effects of dust attenuation. The thermal infrared holds incredible potential for simultaneously measuring both the star formation and black hole accretion rates in large samples of galaxies covering a wide range of physical conditions. Spitzer demonstrated this potential at low redshift, and by observing some of the most luminous galaxies at z~2. JWST will apply these methods to normal galaxies at these epochs, but will not be able to generate large spectroscopic samples or access the thermal infrared at high-redshift. An order of magnitude gap in our wavelength coverage will persist between JWST and ALMA. A large, cold infrared telescope can fill this gap to determine when (in cosmic time), and where (within the cosmic web), stars and black holes co-evolve, by measuring these processes simultaneously in statistically complete and unbiased samples of galaxies to z>8. A next-generation radio interferometer will have the resolution and sensitivity to measure star-formation and nuclear accretion in even the dustiest galaxies. Together, the thermal infrared and radio can uniquely determine how stars and supermassive blackholes co-evolve in galaxies over cosmic time

Theoretical study of lepton events in the atmospheric neutrino experiments at SuperK

Super-Kamiokande has reported the results for the lepton events in the atmospheric neutrino experiment. These results have been presented for a 22.5kT water fiducial mass on an exposure of 1489 days, and the events are divided into sub-GeV, multi-GeV and PC events. We present a study of nuclear medium effects in the sub-GeV energy region of atmospheric neutrino events for the quasielastic scattering, incoherent and coherent pion production processes, as they give the most dominant contribution to the lepton events in this energy region. We have used the atmospheric neutrino flux given by Honda et al. These calculations have been done in the local density approximation. We take into account the effect of Pauli blocking, Fermi motion, Coulomb effect, renormalization of weak transition strengths in the nuclear medium in the case of the quasielastic reactions. The inelastic reactions leading to production of leptons along with pions is calculated in a $\Delta$- dominance model by taking into account the renormalization of $\Delta$ properties in the nuclear medium and the final state interaction effects of the outgoing pions with the residual nucleus. We present the results for the lepton events obtained in our model with and without nuclear medium effects, and compare them with the Monte Carlo predictions used in the simulation and the experimentally observed events reported by the Super-Kamiokande collaboration.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure