Tracking Oregon's Progress: A Report of the Tracking Oregon's Progress (TOP) Indicators Project

In 1989, Oregon embarked on a novel experiment to track the progress of the state toward a set of economic, social and environmental goals embodied in the state strategic plan Oregon Shines. The task of tracking a set of indicators to measure progress was assigned to a new state entity: the Oregon Progress Board. For two decades, the Progress Board measured the state's progress using a set of social, economic and environmental indicators. After the 2009 report was completed however, the state decided not to continue funding the Progress Board and discontinued the tracking of state and county indicators.This 2014 report is a report to the people of Oregon. It identifies trends in the state that suggest both progress toward prosperity as well as issues that may be a source of future barriers and concerns. Like those who led previous indicator efforts, we hope that the report and website will be used by policymakers, government analysts, the press, business and civic leaders and the civically-engaged population to better understand the current social, economic, and environmental condition of the state

Reputation-based trust evaluations through diversity

Non peer reviewedPostprin

EFFECTS OF DESIGN STUDIO CULTURE ON PERFORMANCE OF ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS

Architectural education will not be complete without due reference to its studio culture. This culture consists of patterns, habits and experiences expressed by students in their design studio. The design studio culture has been observed to affect students’ performance over the years. This paper examined the effect of design studio culture on the performance of architecture students. The survey method was adopted to obtain quantitative data from students in selected schools in south-west Nigeria through the use of structured questionnaires. The data gotten was subjected to factor and regression analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Results gotten showed that the students perceived some other factors to be the core components of design studio culture, in addition to those already identified in the review of literature. The findings also indicated that only four of these components of design studio culture affects students’ performance and they are encouragement, Environment of the design studio, constraint and sacrifice. The paper thus recommends that awareness of design studio culture should be promoted through departmental policies as a way of improving students’ performance

EFFECTS OF DESIGN STUDIO CULTURE ON PERFORMANCE OF ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS

Architectural education will not be complete without due reference to its studio culture. This culture consists of patterns, habits and experiences expressed by students in their design studio. The design studio culture has been observed to affect students’ performance over the years. This paper examined the effect of design studio culture on the performance of architecture students. The survey method was adopted to obtain quantitative data from students in selected schools in south-west Nigeria through the use of structured questionnaires. The data gotten was subjected to factor and regression analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Results gotten showed that the students perceived some other factors to be the core components of design studio culture, in addition to those already identified in the review of literature. The findings also indicated that only four of these components of design studio culture affects students’ performance and they are encouragement, Environment of the design studio, constraint and sacrifice. The paper thus recommends that awareness of design studio culture should be promoted through departmental policies as a way of improving students’ performance

Factors influencing the incidence of pre-term birth in Calabar, Nigeria

Women who had pre-term birth in the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, Calabar, over a 2 ½ year period were studied. The aim was to establish the factors influencing the incidence of pre-term birth in Calabar. Factors which significantly increase the incidence of pre-term delivery included: previous induced abortion (

Supporting reasoning with different types of evidence in intelligence analysis

The aim of intelligence analysis is to make sense of information that is often conflicting or incomplete, and to weigh competing hypotheses that may explain a situation. This imposes a high cognitive load on analysts, and there are few automated tools to aid them in their task. In this paper, we present an agent-based tool to help analysts in acquiring, evaluating and interpreting information in collaboration with others. Agents assist analysts in reasoning with different types of evidence to identify what happened and why, what is credible, and how to obtain further evidence. Argumentation schemes lie at the heart of the tool, and sense-making agents assist analysts in structuring evidence and identifying plausible hypotheses. A crowdsourcing agent is used to reason about structured information explicitly obtained from groups of contributors, and provenance is used to assess the credibility of hypotheses based on the origins of the supporting information

Building Bridges with Boats: Preserving Community History through Intra- and Inter-Institutional Collaboration

This chapter discusses Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City, a project which documents the historical and contemporary role of dory fishers in the life of the coastal village of Pacific City, Oregon, U.S. Linfield College’s Department of Theatre and Communication Arts, its Jereld R. Nicholson Library, the Pacific City Arts Association, the Pacific City Dorymen\u27s Association, and the Linfield Center for the Northwest joined forces to engage in a collaborative college and community venture to preserve this important facet of Oregon’s history. Using ethnography as a theoretical grounding and oral history as a method, the project utilized artifacts from the dory fleet to augment interview data, and faculty/student teams created a searchable digital archive available via open access. The chapter draws on the authors’ experiences to identify a philosophy of strategic collaboration. Topics include project development and management, assessment, and the role of serendipity. In an era of value-added services where libraries need to continue to prove their worth, partnering with internal and external entities to create content is one way for academic libraries to remain relevant to agencies that do not have direct connections to higher education. This project not only developed a positive “town and gown” relationship with a regional community, it also benefited partner organizations as they sought to fulfill their missions. The project also serves as a potential model for intra- and inter-agency collaboration for all types of libraries

The Language of Advertising and Sales Transactions in Traditional Buying and Selling Contexts: A Comparative Study of Popular Nigerian English and Ibibio

Language has a powerful influence over people and their behaviour. This is especially true in the fields of marketing and advertising. The choice of language to convey specific messages with the intention of influencing people is vitally important. This paper attempts a contrastive analysis of the language of advertising (traditional buying and selling) in Ibibio and a variety of Nigerian English, known by Jowitt (1991) as Popular Nigerian English (PNE). To carry out this investigation, the researcher relies on surreptitious tape recordings and his deep knowledge of marketing activities and its language in Ibibio. The paper discovers that while both languages have almost the same marketing schematic structure, the language of advertising is slightly different. The users of Ibibio employ a richer linguistic content in advertising, as the language is theirs and so the innuendos, persuasive and rhetorical devices are easily expressed. PNE though a variety of English that has been ‘accultured’ to carry the Nigerian experience, still poses a problem to some of its users resulting in frequent code-mixing, code-switching and interference. This research is concluded with the recommendations that language experts and the Nigerian government alike revisit the clamour (by the Nigerian people) for a national language that can suitably detail or express succinctly the collective Nigerian experience. The paper equally suggests that discourse analysts and language experts discourage the use of restructured English loan words in place of Ibibio equivalents by promoting the proper use of Ibibio

A Seasonal Arima Model for Nigerian Gross Domestic Product

Time series analysis of Nigerian Gross Domestic Product series is done. A seasonal difference and then a non-seasonal one were obtained. The correlogram of the differenced series revealed seasonality of order 4. It also reveals an autocorrelation structure of a known seasonal model involving a seasonal autoregressive component of order one and a non-seasonal moving average component of order one. The model has been shown to be adequate. Keywords: Gross Domestic Product, ARIMA modelling, Seasonal models, Nigeria