Regulating work and care relationships in a time of austerity: a legal perspective

Recent austerity measures have led to labour market deregulation alongside cuts to welfare provision. Such reforms have resulted in reduced protection for the large numbers of women workers who combine low paid, precarious work with high levels of care-giving. Furthermore, cuts to public services risk upsetting the finely-tuned arrangements on which those who provide care alongside paid work depend. This chapter considers the impact of austerity on the legal and policy framework surrounding the reconciliation of paid employment and unpaid care. The chapter aims to explore the relationship between gender and care in order to identify the limits of the current framework for addressing the needs of those who provide unpaid informal care alongside paid work

Managing Scarce Resources in Training Projects

Every training organization has a limited amount of people, time and/or money available to complete a project, and this limited resource availability undoubtedly will affect the scope and success of projects the organization undertakes. Busby and Goldsmith discuss the knowledge and skills thing in the instructional design field will need to successfully address these circumstances. The authors begin the chapter by defining what they mean by resources and resource scarcity, and then go on to describe how resource availability and the scope of a project affect one another. They then discuss such basic economic concepts as supply and demand and the economic cycle, factors that have a profound influence on resource availability. The authors then conclude by providing strategies a training manager can adopt to address the problems presented by resource scarcity

Disturbance, Pollinator Predictability, and Pollination Success Among Costa Rican Cloud Forest Plants

Cloud forest at Monteverde, Costa Rica experiences frequent natural disturbance. To determine whether species interactions vary spatially due to physical heterogeneity produced by disturbance, we examined relationships between 22 plant species and 11 nectar—feeding bird species in 14 study plots distributed among three patch types: larger landslide—like gaps (hand—cleared areas along a trail), small gaps (formed by recent treefalls), and understory of closed—canopy forest. Species we describe here flowered in two or three patch types. The aspects of pollination we examined varied little with patch type. Mean frequency of pollinator visits varied with patch type in a few plant species but not in most, and there was no significant trend across species. Pollen loads carried by 314 mist—netted hummingbirds did not vary significantly with patch type, either in total number of grains or number of species represented. Cumulative pollen loads that hummingbirds deposited on stigmas of two species of Acanthaceae (Razisea spicata and Hansteinia blepharorachis) did not vary consistently with patch type, except that Hansteinia flowers in treefall gaps received fewer heterospecific pollen grains than flowers in the other two patch types. Frequency of fruit set varied significantly with patch type in three of the four species examined, but the direction of variation in one of these was opposite to the direction of the other two. The absolute frequency with which flowers were pierced by nectar—robbing hummingbirds did not vary significantly with patch type, although the frequency of piercing relative to legitimate pollinator visits did increase in the large gaps. We attribute the latter result to aggregation of the hummingbird Eupherusa eximia, a chronic nectar robber, at dense clumps of long—flowered plant species that occurred in large gaps. Only one feature we examined suggested that patch type might directly affect the nature of species interactions: in two different analyses, the level of variation in frequency of hummingbird visits to flowers declined from large gaps to small gaps to forest. Results suggest that, unless the disturbance initiating a patch is unusually severe or widespread, interactions between the plants and hummingbirds examined are insensitive to patch type. Such species, existing in naturally dynamic forests throughout their recent evolutionary histories, presumably have become accommodated to frequent small—scale disturbance. Results also suggest that those habitat—related contrasts in plant reproductive traits and plant—pollinator interactions documented in other studies, which compare habitats initiated by anthropogenic disturbances with undisturbed patches, may be artifacts to some extent. Anthropogenically generated disturbance mosaics may promote the spread of species whose reproductive traits evolved under very different circumstances from mosaics generated by natural disturbances

Finishing Beef Cattle on Grass Supplemented with Self-fed By-Products

Consumers are showing increasing interest in beef from cattle that are finished or fattened on grass rather than in a conventional feedlot. Also recently, Iowa has had a proliferation of plants that produce ethanol from corn. The by-product of this process is distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS). The objective of this study was to feed beef cattle to market weight (or as near as possible) by grazing them on cool-season grass supplemented with self-fed byproduct pellets

Effects of Corn Crop Residue Grazing on Soil Physical Properties and Subsequent Soybean Production in a Corn–Soybean Crop Rotation (A Progress Report)

Beginning in 1999, two locations in Iowa (Chariton, Atlantic) were used to study the effects of corn residue grazing by beef cows on soil characteristics and soybean yields the following growing season. Cows were allowed to graze inside selected paddocks at monthly periods throughout the fall and winter. For a grazed and ungrazed comparison, grazing exclosures were used inside the grazed paddocks, while one paddock was left ungrazed for a control. Also, the following year, equal portions of the fields went to no-tillage and disked soil prior to soybean planting so that effects of corn residue grazing on tillage treatments could be compared. The use of this design was to determine whether grazing had adverse effects on soil characteristics and, if so, at what date and weather conditions they occurred. Soil was analyzed for soil bulk density, moisture, penetration resistance, roughness, texture, and type. Corn crop residues were collected for yield, cover, and composition. Precipitation and soil temperature also were recorded throughout the grazing season. The following year, soybeans were harvested using a combine equipped with a yield monitor and global positioning system (GPS). After two years of study at both locations, some grazing fields with corn crop residue have shown effects on soil and crop residue characteristics. Organic matter (OM) yield of crop residue generally decreases at the faster rate in grazed fields than organic matter of ungrazed fields. However, corn crop residue composition was the same in grazed and ungrazed fields except for the 1999-2000 season at Chariton where crude protein decreased but acid detergent insoluble nitrogen (ADIN) increased with no difference in fiber content between grazed and ungrazed paddocks. Corn crop residue cover and soil roughness both can be greatly affected by the interaction of grazing and weather conditions. When the temperature is above freezing and precipitation is adequate, cattle traffic can cause roughness, while reducing residue cover by working it into the soil. Even though grazing corn residue by cattle can increase the surface roughness, it has not yet caused any increase in bulk density measurements or any reduction in soybean yields. Penetration resistance ratios have shown some significant difference between grazed and ungrazed paddocks, but the reason is unclear

Mixed Support for Spatial Heterogeneity in Species Interactions: Hummingbirds in a Tropical Disturbance Mosaic

Many natural landscapes experience frequent disturbance on a small scale. Disturbance loosens or disrupts relations between species, or between species and resources, characteristic of intact communities. One result is the release of previously scarce resources, leading to increased productivity and increased intensity of species interactions in disturbed patches as compared with undisturbed patches. Additionally, populations in disturbed sites may exploit resources in a more haphazard and opportunistic fashion than populations in undisturbed sites. The altered ecological conditions of disturbed sites may favor species different from those occupying undisturbed sites, leading to spatial heterogeneity in community composition. Nectar-feeding birds (mainly hummingbirds) inhabiting the natural disturbance mosaic of a Costa Rican cloud forest responded to habitat heterogeneity in complex ways. Whereas most ecological traits of hummingbird assemblages varied among patch types (understory of canopied forest; treefall gaps; large, landslide-like gaps), the direction of variation differed for different traits. Density of hummingbird food (nectar) was highest in treefall gaps, and some characteristics of hummingbirds (e.g., species diversity) reflected this enrichment. Variables that involve collective foraging by the entire hummingbird assemblage (e.g., intensity of interspecific competition) suggest that species interactions in the forest are the least haphazard, those in treefall gaps more haphazard, and those in large gaps the most haphazard. Even the largest gaps examined, however, were rarely invaded by hummingbird "weeds" available in the regional species pool, and interactions in these gaps showed only faint resemblance to those in the tremendously fluctuating competitive environments that characterize nectar-feeding bird assemblages in large anthropogenic old fields nearby or at other tropical sites. Our results, and reconsideration of results from other studies involving natural disturbance mosaics, suggest that responses of consumers to disturbance mosaics may often be subtle and complex. Comparisons between patch types in a natural disturbance mosaic need not resemble comparisons between points in a successional sequence after anthropogenic disturbance