Sentience and animal welfare: Affirming the science and addressing the skepticism

Broom’s (2014) book is a well-researched and thoroughly written exploration and evaluation of the journey from the origins of animal welfare science to what we can say we now know and need to consider in relation to animal sentience and welfare. This book will help to counter any skepticism among academics and policy makers

Characterizations of k-copwin graphs

AbstractWe give two characterizations of the graphs on which k cops have a winning strategy in the game of Cops and Robber. One of these is in terms of an order relation, and one is in terms of a vertex ordering. Both generalize characterizations known for the case k=1

A note on the Cops & Robber game on graphs embedded in non-orientable surfaces

The Cops and Robber game is played on undirected finite graphs. A number of cops and one robber are positioned on vertices and take turns in sliding along edges. The cops win if they can catch the robber. The minimum number of cops needed to win on a graph is called its cop number. It is known that the cop number of a graph embedded on a surface $X$ of genus $g$ is at most $3g/2 + 3$, if $X$ is orientable (Schroeder 2004), and at most $2g+1$, otherwise (Nowakowski & Schroeder 1997). We improve the bounds for non-orientable surfaces by reduction to the orientable case using covering spaces. As corollaries, using Schroeder's results, we obtain the following: the maximum cop number of graphs embeddable in the projective plane is 3; the cop number of graphs embeddable in the Klein Bottle is at most 4, and an upper bound is $3g/2 + 3/2$ for all other $g$.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Development and evaluation of lessons for class and group situations in grade one

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The welfare of wildlife: an interdisciplinary analysis of harm in the legal and illegal wildlife trades and possible ways forward

Wildlife trade—both legal and illegal—is an activity that is currently the focus of global attention. Concerns over the loss of biodiversity, partly stemming from overexploitation, and the corona virus pandemic, likely originating from wildlife trade, are urgent matters. These concerns though centre on people. Only sometimes does the discussion focus on the wildlife traded and their welfare. In this article, we make the case as to why welfare is an important component of any discussion or policy about wildlife trade, not only for the interests of the wildlife, but also for the sake of humans. We detail the harm in the trade as well as the current welfare provisions, particularly in relation to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which guide global transport and trade. There are a number of ways that the current approach to wildlife welfare could be improved, and we propose ways forward in this regard

The Need for Performance Standards in Preschools: Stealing Shamelessly from Comprehensive School Mental Health Literature

Young children are at-risk for developing significant mental health difficulties just as their older, school-aged peers. Preschool settings have increasingly attempted to proactively address early childhood socioemotional needs by expanding their prevention and intervention activities. A number of emerging best practices in promoting early childhood mental health have been proposed. However, there are no comprehensive performance standards for preschool mental health and limited guidance on how preschools can align themselves with best practices. This expansion in service scope parallels the development of Comprehensive School Mental Health Systems in K-12 schools. Resources and tools developed for K-12 educational settings may serve as a useful example for preschool mental health systems interested in quality comprehensive mental health care. This conceptual article will describe the prevalence of mental health difficulties in young children, review the current guidance on supporting mental health in young children, and provide support for adapting widely used K-12 school mental health performance standards to establish comprehensive standards for organizing and implementing high quality care systems in preschool settings

The development and preliminary validation of a Preference-Based Stroke Index (PBSI)

BACKGROUND: Health-related quality of life (HRQL) is a key issue in disabling conditions like stroke. Unfortunately, HRQL is often difficult to quantify in a comprehensive measure that can be used in cost analyses. Preference-based HRQL measures meet this challenge. To date, there are no existing preference-based HRQL measure for stroke that could be used as an outcome in clinical and economic studies of stroke. The aim of this study was to develop the first stroke-specific health index, the Preference-based Stroke Index (PBSI). METHODS: The PBSI includes 10 items; walking, climbing stairs, physical activities/sports, recreational activities, work, driving, speech, memory, coping and self-esteem. Each item has a 3-point response scale. Items known to be impacted by a stroke were selected. Scaling properties and preference-weights obtained from individuals with stroke and their caregivers were used to develop a cumulative score. RESULTS: Compared to the EQ-5D, the PBSI showed no ceiling effect in a high-functioning stroke population. Moderately high correlations were found between the physical function (r = 0.78), vitality (r = 0.67), social functioning (r = 0.64) scales of the SF-36 and the PBSI. The lowest correlation was with the role emotional scale of the SF-36 (r = 0.32). Our results indicated that the PBSI can differentiate patients by severity of stroke (p < 0.05) and level of functional independence (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Content validity and preliminary evidence of construct validity has been demonstrated. Further work is needed to develop a multiattribute utility function to gather information on psychometric properties of the PBSI

Air pollution impacts on forests in a changing climate

Growing awareness of air pollution effects on forests has, from the early 1980s on, led to intensive forest damage research and monitoring. This has fostered air pollution control, especially in Europe and North America, and to a smaller extent also in other parts of the world. At several forest sites in these regions, there are first indications of a recovery of forest soil and tree conditions that may be attributed to improved air quality. This caused a decrease in the attention paid by politicians and the public to air pollution effects on forests. But air pollution continues to affect the structure and functioning of forest ecosystems not only in Europe and North America but even more so in parts of Russia, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. At the political level, however, attention to climate change is focussed on questions of CO2 emission and carbon sequestration. But ecological interactions between air pollution including CO2 and O3 concentrations, extreme temperatures, drought, fire, insects, pathogens, and fire, as well as the impact of ecosystem management practices, are still poorly understood. Future research should focus on the interacting impacts on forest trees and ecosystems. The integrative effects of air pollution and climatic change, in particular elevated O3, altered nutrient, temperature, water availability, and elevated CO2, will be key issues for impact research. An important improvement in our understanding might be obtained by the combination of long-term multidisciplinary experiments with ecosystem-level monitoring, and the integration of the results with ecosystem modelling within a multiple-constraint framework

The Challenges and Opportunities for Meeting the Content Area Needs of English Language Learners in the Teacher Educator Classroom

Teacher preparation in the 21st century within the United States and those states such as Georgia that are experiencing unprecedented increases in immigrant populations must be responsive to the changing demographics and the concomitant content, linguistic and cultural needs and resources of our PK-12 populations. This paper comes out of our collective interest in ensuring that we are delivering a quality and timely education to teacher learners. With the exception of our ESOL and Science programs[1], we report on the extent to which our curricula are serving the needs of the State’s ELL population in subject-area syllabi for pre-service teachers in the English, Social Studies, Mathematics, Library Media, and Instructional Technology units in our department. From our review, we discuss the challenges and the opportunities that are presented to us in striving to be responsive to the needs of our State’s immigrant population through our pre-service teacher education programs. [1] This paper is based on a presentation given at the 2010 GATE Conference in Atlanta GA. All the present authors including Miyoun Lim, representing Science participated. Dr. Lim was unable to participate in the preparation of this paper. The department’s ESOL program, represented by the first author is not reported on in this paper as the purpose was to encourage the content area professors to study their practices