1,128 research outputs found
The interminable issue of effectiveness: substantive purposes, outcomes and research challenges in the advancement of environmental impact assessment theory
Ten more years of discovery: revisiting the quality of the sauropodomorph dinosaur fossil record
Spatiotemporal changes in fossil specimen completeness can bias our understanding of a group's evolutionary history. The quality of the sauropodomorph fossil record was assessed a decade ago, but the number of valid species has since increased by 60%, and 17% of the taxa from that study have since undergone taxonomic revision. Here, we assess how 10 years of additional research has changed our outlook on the group's fossil record. We quantified the completeness of all 307 sauropodomorph species currently considered valid using the skeletal completeness metric, which calculates the proportion of a complete skeleton preserved for each taxon. Taxonomic and stratigraphic age revisions, rather than new species, are the drivers of the most significant differences between the current results and those of the previous assessment. No statistical differences appeared when we use our new dataset to generate temporal completeness curves based solely on taxa known in 2009 or 1999. We now observe a severe drop in mean completeness values across the JurassicâCretaceous boundary that never recovers to preâCretaceous levels. Explaining this pattern is difficult, as we find no convincing evidence that it is related to environmental preferences or body size changes. Instead, it might result from: (1) reduction of terrestrial fossil preservation space due to sea level rise; (2) ecological specificities and relatively high diagnosability of Cretaceous species; and/or (3) increased sampling of newly explored sites with many previously unknown taxa. Revisiting patterns in this manner allows us to test the longevity of conclusions made in previous quantitative studies
Impact mitigation in environmental impact assessment: paper promises or the basis of consent conditions?
Search for the hero: an investigation into the sports heroes of British sports fans
This is an initial study into British sports fansâ heroes. A questionnaire was sent to 95 students (average age ÂŒ 19.75) to identify their sporting hero, the heroâs sport and nationality and the reasons for this choice. Football was the most common source of sports heroes, identified by 49% of participants with a sporting hero. The majority (60%, N ÂŒ 48) of heroes chosen by participants were British, with David Beckham the most popular choice. Differences were observed between the gender of participants, gender of hero chosen and the reasons for choosing the hero. The most common reason for selecting a hero was a personal trait rather than skill, while in the questionnaire a category of Local Affiliation was added to those suggested by previous work. It was concluded that to become a hero athletes should combine skill with devotion to family, charity work and a place in popular culture
Staring into the abyss? The state of UK rugby's Super League
Rugby League's Super League was formed in 1995, due to unprecedented turmoil experienced in rugby league in Australia and a desire to run a season parallel to the Australian game during the British summer. The predicted outcomes of the Super League included greater uncertainty of outcome, increased attendances, and higher revenues for clubs, ultimately leading to the transformation of rugby league from a northern minority sport into a national/international sport. However, twenty years on, it appears that the Super League is running short of the objectives that it set itself. This paper analyses the financial health of Super League clubs alongside trends in attendance and participation. In summary, all three indicators of performance are poor in relation to the objectives set. These factors point to a bleak future for the sport and rugby league needs to produce a sustainable business model to keep both the clubs and the sport alive
Multiple Isoforms of Arabidopsis Casein Kinase I Combine Conserved Catalytic Domains with Variable Carboxyl-Terminal Extensions
Global Study of Electron-Quark Contact Interactions
We perform a global fit of data relevant to contact interactions,
including deep inelastic scattering at high from ZEUS and H1, atomic
physics parity violation in Cesium from JILA, polarized on nuclei
scattering experiments at SLAC, Mainz and Bates, Drell-Yan production at the
Tevatron, the total hadronic cross section at LEP, and
neutrino-nucleon scattering from CCFR. With only the new HERA data, the
presence of contact interactions improves the fit compared to the Standard
Model. When other data sets are included, the size of the contact contributions
is reduced and the overall fit represents no real improvement over the Standard
Model.Comment: 26 pages (now single-spaced), Revtex, 2 eps figures, uses epsf.sty.
Some clarifications, minor corrections, 2 new references, also 3 new tables
which present 95% CL bounds on the contact interaction scales Lambd
Marketing and the cultural production of celebrity in the era of media convergence
Celebrity endorsement research in the marketing literature has been over-reliant on an exogenous notion of celebrity as something produced outside of the marketing system, from which meanings can be transferred to brands within the marketing system. In fact, marketing has been deeply implicated in the constitution of celebrity since the dawn of Western consumer culture in the early part of the twentieth century. In the era of media convergence, there is a pressing need for researchers in marketing to re-evaluate the meta-assumptions around celebrity and its relation to marketing in the light of marketingâs culturally constitutive role
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