Payment for Ecosystem Services: Rewarding the Landowner Who Conserves the Public Good

It has been said that money doesn’t grow on trees, but any forest landowner or manager will tell you that’s not exactly true— especially when observing a harvesting operation or managing dues from your hunting lease. While timber production and recreation are the most frequently monetized services provided by forests, what about the other goods and services they provide on a continuing basis? Are you or other forest landowners in your area being monetarily rewarded for soil stability, flood control, water filtration, air quality, and the other critical services—known as ecosystem services—provided by forests

Comparing the Cataloguing of Indigenous Scholarships: First Steps and Findings

This paper provides an analysis of data collected on the continued prevalence of outdated, marginalizing terms in contemporary cataloguing practices, stemming from the Library of Congress Subject Heading term “Indians” and all its related terms. Using Manitoba Archival Information Network’s (MAIN) list of current LCSH and recommended alternatives as a foundation, we built a dataset from titles published in the last five years. MAIN’s list contains 1,091 LCSH relating to Indigenous Peoples, ranging from demographic descriptors (e.g. Ojibwa Indians.) to broader concepts such as legal matters and literature (e.g. Ojibwa philosophy.). This dataset shows a wide distribution of LCSH used to catalogue fiction and non-fiction, with outdated but recognized terms like “Indians of North America—History.” appearing the most frequently and ambiguous and offensive terms like “Indian gays.” appearing throughout the dataset. This paper discusses two primary problems with the continued use of current LCSH terms: they are ambiguous and limit the effectiveness of an institution’s catalog, and these terms do not reflect the way Indigenous Peoples, Nations, and communities in North America prefer to represent themselves as individuals and collectives. These findings support those of parallel scholarship on the effects of knowledge organization practices on works on Indigenous topics and provide a foundation for further work. The initial findings of our research suggest that these terms have continued to be used heavily across North America in the last five years, regardless of evolving scholarship and increased representation of Indigenous authors in both popular and scholarly publishin

Thesaurus construction for community-centered metadata

Community-engaged approaches to resource access require metadata practices that surface attributes relevant to local information needs and use terminology that reflects local language. This paper details the iterative and ongoing metadata work involved in facilitating access to aggregated items through the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal. The challenges and strategies we describe here build upon and are relevant to knowledge organization projects seeking to repair issues of inaccurate and stigmatizing descriptive metadata for universal and local collections. After contextualizing the collection and the community, we describe our process in assessing areas of subject terminology in need of major repair, sources consulted for thesaurus terminology, and the approach we have taken to build a stand-alone thesaurus for this project, including our exploration and attempts at meaningful and respectful input into terms and term relationships

Controlled trial of lovastatin combined with an open-label treatment of a parent-implemented language intervention in youth with fragile X syndrome.

BackgroundThe purpose of this study was to conduct a 20-week controlled trial of lovastatin (10 to 40 mg/day) in youth with fragile X syndrome (FXS) ages 10 to 17 years, combined with an open-label treatment of a parent-implemented language intervention (PILI), delivered via distance video teleconferencing to both treatment groups, lovastatin and placebo.MethodA randomized, double-blind trial was conducted at one site in the Sacramento, California, metropolitan area. Fourteen participants were assigned to the lovastatin group; two participants terminated early from the study. Sixteen participants were assigned to the placebo group. Lovastatin or placebo was administered orally in a capsule form, starting at 10 mg and increasing weekly or as tolerated by 10 mg increments, up to a maximum dose of 40 mg daily. A PILI was delivered to both groups for 12 weeks, with 4 activities per week, through video teleconferencing by an American Speech-Language Association-certified Speech-Language Pathologist, in collaboration with a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst. Parents were taught to use a set of language facilitation strategies while interacting with their children during a shared storytelling activity. The main outcome measures included absolute change from baseline to final visit in the means for youth total number of story-related utterances, youth number of different word roots, and parent total number of story-related utterances.ResultsSignificant increases in all primary outcome measures were observed in both treatment groups. Significant improvements were also observed in parent reports of the severity of spoken language and social impairments in both treatment groups. In all cases, the amount of change observed did not differ across the two treatment groups. Although gains in parental use of the PILI-targeted intervention strategies were observed in both treatment groups, parental use of the PILI strategies was correlated with youth gains in the placebo group and not in the lovastatin group.ConclusionParticipants in both groups demonstrated significant changes in the primary outcome measures. The magnitude of change observed across the two groups was comparable, providing additional support for the efficacy of the use of PILI in youth with FXS.Trial registrationUS National Institutes of Health (ClinicalTrials.gov), NCT02642653. Registered 12/30/2015

Cognitive estimation:Performance of patients with focal frontal and posterior lesions

The Cognitive Estimation Test (CET) is a widely used test to investigate estimation abilities requiring complex processes such as reasoning, the development and application of appropriate strategies, response plausibility checking as well as general knowledge and numeracy (e.g., Shallice and Evans, 1978; MacPherson et al., 2014). Thus far, it remains unknown whether the CET is both sensitive and specific to frontal lobe dysfunction. Neuroimaging techniques may not represent a useful methodology for answering this question since the complex processes involved are likely to be associated with a large network of brain regions, some of which are not functionally necessary to successfully carry out the CET. Instead, neuropsychological studies may represent a more promising investigation tool for identifying the brain areas necessary for CET performance. We recently developed two new versions of the CET (CET-A and CET-B; MacPherson et al., 2014). We investigated the overall performance and conducted an error analysis on CET-A in patients with focal, unilateral, frontal (n= 38) or posterior (n= 22) lesions and healthy controls (n=39). We found that frontal patients' performance was impaired compared to healthy controls on CET demonstrating that our CET-A is affected by frontal lobe damage. We also found that frontal patients generated significantly poorer estimates than posterior patients on CET-A. This could not be explained by impairments in fluid intelligence. The error analyses suggested that for CET-A, extreme and very extreme responses are impaired following frontal lobe damage. However, only very extreme responses are significantly more impaired following frontal lobe than posterior damage and so represent a measure restricted to frontal "executive" impairment, in addition to overall CET performance

How many segments are there in an orange? Normative data for the new Cognitive Estimation Task in an Italian population

The Cognitive Estimation Test (CET) is widely used by clinicians to assess frontal executive dysfunction. In the present work, the Italian standardization of a new version of the CET is provided. This version consists of two 9-item parallel forms (A and B) that were administered to two hundred and twenty-seven healthy Italian male and female participants aged between 19 and 91 years with 5-24 years of full-time education. Performance on the CET was not related to age or level of education; both forms showed a male CET advantage. The new CET is a useful tool for clinicians and researchers to administer the CET more than once without practice effects, which is considered important when assessing frontal executive abilities

The ABC130 barrel module prototyping programme for the ATLAS strip tracker

For the Phase-II Upgrade of the ATLAS Detector, its Inner Detector, consisting of silicon pixel, silicon strip and transition radiation sub-detectors, will be replaced with an all new 100 % silicon tracker, composed of a pixel tracker at inner radii and a strip tracker at outer radii. The future ATLAS strip tracker will include 11,000 silicon sensor modules in the central region (barrel) and 7,000 modules in the forward region (end-caps), which are foreseen to be constructed over a period of 3.5 years. The construction of each module consists of a series of assembly and quality control steps, which were engineered to be identical for all production sites. In order to develop the tooling and procedures for assembly and testing of these modules, two series of major prototyping programs were conducted: an early program using readout chips designed using a 250 nm fabrication process (ABCN-25) and a subsequent program using a follow-up chip set made using 130 nm processing (ABC130 and HCC130 chips). This second generation of readout chips was used for an extensive prototyping program that produced around 100 barrel-type modules and contributed significantly to the development of the final module layout. This paper gives an overview of the components used in ABC130 barrel modules, their assembly procedure and findings resulting from their tests.Comment: 82 pages, 66 figure