A comparison between dinosaur footprints from the Middle Jurassic of the Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK, and Shell, Wyoming, USA

Measurements of Middle Jurassic tridactyl dinosaur tracks from the Bathonian, Lealt Shale, Valtos Sandstone, Duntulm and Kilmaluag formations of the Isle of Skye, UK, are compared to the same measurements taken for dinosaur footprints from the Bajocian, Gypsum Spring and the Bathonian, Sundance Formation of the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA. Principal component analysis of the data suggests that the smaller footprints from the Valtos Sandstone and Kilmaluag formations are indistinguishable from the footprints of the Sundance Formation. The single footprint from the Lealt Shale Formation is similar to the larger footprints from the Valtos Sandstone Formation. The footprints from the Duntulm and Gypsum Springs formations form distinct groupings from all other footprints. Four different groupings of dinosaur footprints can be recognized from the principal component analysis that may represent at least four different types of dinosaur

School system merger: A study of power and redistribution of resources

The purpose of this study was to examine the merger of the school systems of the City of South Norfolk and Norfolk County in the State of Virginia. The merger of these two geographical entitites was consummated on January 1, 1963. Norfolk County was formed in 1636 by the Virginia General Assembly. The cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and South Norfolk were carved from this county. A series of annexations by these cities between 1940 and 1960 cost Norfolk County thirty-three square miles of territory, 110,000 residents, and {dollar}1,881,000 in revenue.;In order to protect its viability, Norfolk County voted to merge with the small City of South Norfolk. The City of Chesapeake was formed. Since schools were a major issue during the pre-merger campaign, this study examined the merger of the two school systems with primary emphasis on the control of power and the distribution of resources for facilities in the newly formed city.;The research data included primary and secondary sources in the areas of documents, newspapers, oral history, quantitative records, historical texts, and relics. A number of major figures in the school system of that period were available for personal interviews.;The hypothesis that resources for facilities were distributed equitably to the former South Norfolk and Norfolk County areas was accepted. Equitable did not mean equal since South Norfolk schools were in much greater physical need at the time of the 1963 merger. Therefore, the new Chesapeake School Board provided a larger share of the 1963 bond revenues and other fiscal resources to the former South Norfolk schools.;The hypothesis that the power in the newly merged Chesapeake School System was unevenly controlled by former Norfolk County leaders and residents was accepted. While it is fair to conclude from a review of School Board minutes, newspapers, periodicals, and interviews that former Norfolk County leaders and residents controlled decisionmaking through the Chesapeake School Board and major central office leadership roles, there was no indication that this power was used unjustly. Research into sources of the period and extensive interviews indicated that the leaders genuinely wanted the best for the new school system.;The issues of power and distribution of resources examined in this dissertation must be considered in any merger of school systems. Research into other school system mergers would advance this study

Altering Attitudes on Climate Change: Testing the Effect of Time Orientation and Motivation Framing

Climate change has become a defining issue of the 21st century. According to a Pew Research (2020) survey, for the first time in its two-decade history, a majority of Americans now believe that dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the President and Congress, which is a 14% rise from four years prior. Nonetheless, this rise is accompanied by a deep partisan divide amongst citizens of the United States (U.S.) and Republicans are far less likely to consider climate change a top public priority with a roughly 50% partisan gap on the issue (Popovich, 2020). Thus, this partisan gap raises an important question: what are the effects of political orientation, time orientation, and motivation orientation on climate change attitudes and behavioral intention? The goal of this research is to examine this question by testing the influence of these factors on eight outcome variables

Planning for Beef Cattle Operations in the Face of Drought

About two years ago we wrote a Cornhusker Economics article on this same topic. Unfortunately, the current drought is more widespread and onerous. Presently, many producers are out or about to be out of grass. This late in the year options are limited. Selling cattle, including part of the breeding herd is an option that many have begun to exercise. Weaning early, selling the calves or placing them in feedlots and feeding the cows are other options

Wildlife Management Education Needs to Go Urban

One of the common problems associated with introducing urban wildlife management (UWM) as part of the curriculum in the wildlife sciences has been the simplistic notions our colleagues, students, and others have regarding its conceptual framework. For example, the “raccoon in a garbage can” always seems to become the summative explanation of urban wildlife management. Other reductionist definitions include animal damage control, or that UWM is a particular suite of techniques peculiar only to urban areas. The latter problem is of our own making given the inclusion of UWM in the Wildlife Management Techniques Manual published by The Wildlife Society. Truth be known, wildlife management techniques primarily consist of catching, identifying, marking, and counting wild animals flavored with a healthy dose of formulae and statistics to add scientific rigor to the first four activities. UWM is another expression of the depth and breadth of human involvement with wild things. This presentation will explore several similarities and differences that differentiate wildlife management in human‐altered and natural rural landscapes. This analysis is required to provide a more complete and accurate presentation about UWM to colleagues, students, and the general public. As such, it will help to articulate and summarize the critical curriculum components for courses on UWM. Finally, this exercise will provide a unique identity to the UWM profession which goes far beyond raccoons and techniques

Worked Examples in Physics Games: Challenges in Integrating Proven Cognitive Scaffolds into Game Mechanics

The current study is an exploratory study into the potential of integrating research on worked examples and physics games. Students were assigned to either a base version of a physics game, called the Fuzzy Chronicles, or assigned to a version of the Fuzzy Chronicles augmented with worked examples. Students in both conditions demonstrated significant gains on the pre-post-test, but students in the base game version demonstrated significantly greater gains than the students in the worked example version. The results from the current study reinforce results from other studies by our research group demonstrating how important it is that scaffolds based on multimedia research (a) do not over scaffold the student or promote passive, automatic behaviors, (b) do not excessively detract from the student’s gameplay time, and (c) do not disrupt game cognition and flow

SBSI:an extensible distributed software infrastructure for parameter estimation in systems biology

Complex computational experiments in Systems Biology, such as fitting model parameters to experimental data, can be challenging to perform. Not only do they frequently require a high level of computational power, but the software needed to run the experiment needs to be usable by scientists with varying levels of computational expertise, and modellers need to be able to obtain up-to-date experimental data resources easily. We have developed a software suite, the Systems Biology Software Infrastructure (SBSI), to facilitate the parameter-fitting process. SBSI is a modular software suite composed of three major components: SBSINumerics, a high-performance library containing parallelized algorithms for performing parameter fitting; SBSIDispatcher, a middleware application to track experiments and submit jobs to back-end servers; and SBSIVisual, an extensible client application used to configure optimization experiments and view results. Furthermore, we have created a plugin infrastructure to enable project-specific modules to be easily installed. Plugin developers can take advantage of the existing user-interface and application framework to customize SBSI for their own uses, facilitated by SBSI’s use of standard data formats