This progressive production: Agency, durability and keeping it contemporary

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(5), 71-77, 2012 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13528165.2012.728447.Tino Sehgal is a Berlin based Anglo-German conceptual artist who creates ‘constructed situations’; a process whereby he hands over the delivery of the work to selected ‘interpreters’ or in the case of the Tate Modern (London) 2012 commission, to ‘participants’, who he rehearses and supports to carry out the instructions which embody his vision. Each time a Sehgal work is presented, it is animated by those he has asked and paid to participate, for an audience who are often called upon to engage with a question or conversation. In taking this approach, Sehgal explicitly rejects the idea of the artist as a making of objects. However, unlike the sorts of transitory and ephemeral works of art created in the 1970s which were a deliberate challenge to the commodification of art and by extension the artist, Sehgal constructs situations for other reasons which will be explored in this article. This article will also start to consider how dependence on interpreters or participants extends, transforms or circumscribes authorial control. It will begin to consider the extent to which the construction of live artworks that potentially exceed the life time and certainly the physical presence of the maker represent long-term duration. Does such an approach extend the field of influence and the potential for lasting impact? What impact does duration have on the re-enactor/interpreters capacity to comply with the artist's instructions and what investment do they have in embodying another's artistic vision, particularly if they are required to do so for an extended period of time

La forme universitaire à l’épreuve des pratiques médiatiques personnelles

International audienceThe evolution of educational forms in the light of the integration of digital technologies into pedagogical practices interests many researchers, but also institutional decision-makers. This theoretical article proposes a reference framework to question and analyse the possible disruptions caused by the irruption of media practices from the personal sphere into educational practices. Considered as a social form of reference, the school form makes it possible to define and describe the university form from the point of view of four constitutive dimensions. Different levels of changes of different nature and intensity are considered in order to appreciate the transformations that can take place from the integration of new media devices and the blurring of boundaries between social spheres characteristic of today's communicative practices.L’évolution des formes éducatives à l’aune de l’intégration des technologies numériques au sein des pratiques pédagogiques intéresse de nombreux chercheurs, mais aussi les décideurs institutionnels. Cet article théorique propose un cadre de référence pour interroger et analyser les perturbations possibles engendrées par l’irruption, dans les pratiques pédagogiques, de pratiques médiatiques issues de la sphère personnelle. Considérée comme forme sociale de référence, la forme scolaire permet de définir et de décrire la forme universitaire sous l’angle de quatre dimensions constitutives. Plusieurs niveaux de changements de nature et d’intensité différentes sont envisagés pour apprécier les transformations qui peuvent s’opérer à partir de l’intégration de nouveaux dispositifs médiatiques et de l’effacement des frontières entre les sphères sociales caractéristiques des pratiques communicationnelles d’aujourd’hui

Does Prey Composition Influence the Breeding Rate, Nest Success, and Productivity of the Northern Goshawk

As an apex predator and an indicator species, Northern Goshawks play a crucial role in the ecosystem of the Sawtooth National Forest and they are considered important to the Forest Service in matters of forest management. In recent years we’ve observed declining breeding rates, nest success, and productivity within the region. We are interested in better determining the contribution of prey abundance to these trends. To this end, we will record observations of common Northern Goshawk prey species seen and heard along 750 m transects from the most recent or currently occupied nest. We will perform distance sampling analysis to generate prey abundance estimates for each territory. We will use those estimates as predictors in logistic regression to predict the response of nest success and occupancy. We expect that lesser prey abundance will correlate with reduced breeding rate, nest success, and productivity and be consistent with Miller et al. (2014) which showed avian abundance, but not mammalian abundance, to be a predictor of occupancy. We hope to expand upon these finding to determine how goshawks have adapted to prey variety and quantity and the impacts of these changes. Additionally, the results of this study will help to inform future forest management practices that could have an effect on prey abundance for the birds located in these historically inhabited goshawk territories

Changes in forest productivity across Alaska consistent with biome shift

International audience"Global vegetation models predict that boreal forests are particularly sensitive to a biome shift during the 21st century. This shift would manifest itself first at the biome’s margins, with evergreen forest expanding into current tundra while being replaced by grasslands or temperate forest at the biome’s southern edge. We evaluated changes in forest productivity since 1982 across boreal Alaska by linking satellite estimates of primary productivity and a large tree‐ring data set. Trends in both records show consistent growth increases at the boreal–tundra ecotones that contrast with drought‐induced productivity declines throughout interior Alaska. These patterns support the hypothesized effects of an initiating biome shift. Ultimately, tree dispersal rates, habitat availability and the rate of future climate change, and how it changes disturbance regimes, are expected to determine where the boreal biome will undergo a gradual geographic range shift, and where a more rapid decline." (source éditeur

Software Review Of Flexmirt Version 3.5

flexMIRT is a versatile program for unidimensional and multidimensional item response theory (IRT) calibrations, scoring analyses, and model-based simulations. With an adaptable syntax that allows for various combinations of model specifications, estimation constraints, and estimation choices, flexMIRT can handle almost all of the most popular IRT models for dichotomous and polytomous data. The software package also supports diagnostic classification models and multigroup and multilevel analyses. This review evaluates the software from a user's perspective as well as some of its calibration, scoring, and simulation capabilities. Two simulation studies are included: one demonstrates some basic simulation capabilities and the other provides some direct comparisons with BILOG-MG. The review suggests that flexMIRT is a very good product that is only likely to get better as new features and suggestions for improvement are implemented.Wo