Editorial

Editoria

SQUARING THE CIRCLE: An analysis of programmes in Dublin schools to prevent early school leaving. With recommendations for effective best practice

THE DUBLIN EMPLOYMENT PACT represents a very broad range of interests across the Dublin Region. Its aim is to promote practical solutions and recommendations regarding unemployment (particularly long-term unemployment), future sustainable employment policy and the economic growth and development of the Dublin Region. The Pact recognises the key role of educational disadvantage in the continuing problems of long-term unemployment, social exclusion and skills deficits in the labour force in Dublin. The Focus Group on Youth Employment and Education established by the Pact decided that there was a critical need for an in-depth examination of the wide range of interventions and pilot projects implemented in Dublin to tackle early school-leaving. Such a study needed to establish the nature, aims and achievements of these diverse interventions and establish clear and coherent parameters for future policy development in this area. Disadvantaged communities in Dublin in particular have been affected by very high rates of early school-leaving, which is known to be a key adverse factor in the life chances of young people. Tackling this issue is now a major priority of government policy, which includes ambitious national targets for increased retention rates at school. A very large range of quality interventions have been developed and tried, both by the Department of Education and Science and also by youth organisations, schools, other statutory and voluntary agencies and Partnership companies at the local level. Many of these, however, have remained as local pilots, sometimes even in competition for funding. The very diversity, range and uneven spread of these interventions has possibly prevented a coherent overview of their individual and combined effect. The Pact therefore commissioned Dr Ted Fleming and Dr Mark Murphy of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to examine the nature and structure of the diverse preventative education projects in Dublin and to produce recommendations towards establishing models of best practice. Based on a detailed examination of existing reports and evaluations, the study establishes that interventions tend to be based on one or more of a range of specific assumptions, viz. that the cause of early school leaving lies primarily with either the individual, the parents, the local community, the school or with society. The underlying assumption of a given intervention necessarily influences the intervention. Where the individual child is the focus, programmes will be aimed at enhancing social skills and developing self-esteem. Where the school is the focus, programmes will tend to concentrate on resources, training and syllabus, and where the family is the focus, programmes will concentrate on homework facilities, breakfast provision and parent support. The researchers introduce the concept of the overall âcapital contextâ of early school-leaving, involving personal, social, cultural and economic factors. Each type of capital plays a role in deciding whether or not a child stays on at school. They stress that all of these capital elements must be included in any interventionist programme and to omit any one of them fragments and reduces the effectiveness of the response. The researchers further suggest that, given the strong correlation between socio-economic background and early school leaving, policy must be directed as much towards inequalities in society as towards schools, districts, parents and pupils. In tackling educational disadvantage it is essential that a level playing field be established with access by all children to the key forms of capital. In proposing a model of best practice applicable to all programmes of intervention, they categorise the main components of an integrated response. This must include both adequate human and material resources as well as close attention to how projects are organised internally and externally â i.e. including the involvement of parents, students and the community. The study concludes with a range of recommendations regarding this model of best practic

The Organic Research Centre - Elm Farm:Bulletin 87

Bulletin 87 with coverage of Avian Influenza H5N1 in Suffolk,commentary on Biofuels, a paper on the organic "transition to sustainable resilience",paper on participatory approach to agronomy trials,update on evolutionary breeding of wheat project,article on formation of new growers alliance in UK

SQUARING THE CIRCLE: An analysis of programmes in Dublin schools to prevent early school leaving. With recommendations for effective best practice

THE DUBLIN EMPLOYMENT PACT represents a very broad range of interests across the Dublin Region. Its aim is to promote practical solutions and recommendations regarding unemployment (particularly long-term unemployment), future sustainable employment policy and the economic growth and development of the Dublin Region. The Pact recognises the key role of educational disadvantage in the continuing problems of long-term unemployment, social exclusion and skills deficits in the labour force in Dublin. The Focus Group on Youth Employment and Education established by the Pact decided that there was a critical need for an in-depth examination of the wide range of interventions and pilot projects implemented in Dublin to tackle early school-leaving. Such a study needed to establish the nature, aims and achievements of these diverse interventions and establish clear and coherent parameters for future policy development in this area. Disadvantaged communities in Dublin in particular have been affected by very high rates of early school-leaving, which is known to be a key adverse factor in the life chances of young people. Tackling this issue is now a major priority of government policy, which includes ambitious national targets for increased retention rates at school. A very large range of quality interventions have been developed and tried, both by the Department of Education and Science and also by youth organisations, schools, other statutory and voluntary agencies and Partnership companies at the local level. Many of these, however, have remained as local pilots, sometimes even in competition for funding. The very diversity, range and uneven spread of these interventions has possibly prevented a coherent overview of their individual and combined effect. The Pact therefore commissioned Dr Ted Fleming and Dr Mark Murphy of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to examine the nature and structure of the diverse preventative education projects in Dublin and to produce recommendations towards establishing models of best practice. Based on a detailed examination of existing reports and evaluations, the study establishes that interventions tend to be based on one or more of a range of specific assumptions, viz. that the cause of early school leaving lies primarily with either the individual, the parents, the local community, the school or with society. The underlying assumption of a given intervention necessarily influences the intervention. Where the individual child is the focus, programmes will be aimed at enhancing social skills and developing self-esteem. Where the school is the focus, programmes will tend to concentrate on resources, training and syllabus, and where the family is the focus, programmes will concentrate on homework facilities, breakfast provision and parent support. The researchers introduce the concept of the overall âcapital contextâ of early school-leaving, involving personal, social, cultural and economic factors. Each type of capital plays a role in deciding whether or not a child stays on at school. They stress that all of these capital elements must be included in any interventionist programme and to omit any one of them fragments and reduces the effectiveness of the response. The researchers further suggest that, given the strong correlation between socio-economic background and early school leaving, policy must be directed as much towards inequalities in society as towards schools, districts, parents and pupils. In tackling educational disadvantage it is essential that a level playing field be established with access by all children to the key forms of capital. In proposing a model of best practice applicable to all programmes of intervention, they categorise the main components of an integrated response. This must include both adequate human and material resources as well as close attention to how projects are organised internally and externally â i.e. including the involvement of parents, students and the community. The study concludes with a range of recommendations regarding this model of best practic

Habitat Protection Under The Magnuson-Stevens Act: Can It Really Contribute To Ecosystem Health In The Northeast Atlantic?

New England’s legendary Atlantic cod fishery is in deep trouble. The cod, along with several additional fish species that make up New England’s groundfish fishery, remain critically depleted, and are at only a small fraction of healthy levels. In 2004, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC or Council) and the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) implemented the first comprehensive rebuilding program for groundfish in New England. This plan relies primarily on management measures designed to reduce fishing rates in order to end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks. The most recent scientific review by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) released in 2005, however, showed that overfishing was still occurring on several groundfish species, including the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks. Their levels had plummeted another twenty-five and twenty-one percent respectively since the last comprehensive NEFSC review in 2001, leaving them at only ten and twenty-three percent of the target levels that scientists consider the minimum for health and sustainability. The continued depletion of New England’s critical groundfish populations is not only bad news for the fish, but also for coastal New England fishermen and their communities, who face economic hardship caused by regulators’ attempts to end overfishing. While ending overfishing is clearly a fundamental first step in addressing our fisheries problems, the healthy growth and development of juvenile fish is essential to rebuilding sustainable commercial fisheries and the healthy ecosystems fish require. Habitat is necessary to fish for food, shelter, and reproduction, and demersal (groundfish) juveniles are particularly dependent upon sea floor structure for predator evasion and energy conservation. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that many different types of fishing gear—especially bottom trawls and dredges but also gillnets, traps, longlines and other gear—degrade critical fish habitat which can lead to declines in fish populations. As a result, certain fishing gear should be restricted in sensitive habitat areas to protect juvenile fish habitat and to help ensure that marine fish populations are restored to healthy levels for years to come. Ten years after the Sustainable Fisheries Act was enacted in 1996 to strengthen the conservation provisions of our nation’s fisheries law, protections for Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) from harmful fishing practices remain inadequate. Over this time period, the NEFMC, like most of our nation’s fishery management councils, has demonstrated all the classic failures of protecting habitat by hiding behind scientific uncertainty, maintaining that existing management measures are sufficient, limiting prohibitions of destructive gear to where it currently is not a threat, and providing limited protection for some of the most vulnerable habitat types while ignoring other important areas. The NEFMC itself appears to recognize that it has fallen short in fulfilling the conservation promise offered in the habitat provisions added by the Sustainable Fisheries Act. The NEFMC is currently developing an omnibus habitat amendment designed to review and update its EFH designations and to consider new actions designed to protect habitat. Recently, in response to a request for proposals to identify habitat areas of particular concern in New England waters, the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and World Wildlife Fund-Canada (WWF-Canada) developed an innovative new strategy to restore New England’s depleted cod and other groundfish populations. These groups proposed creating a network of Habitat Areas of Particular Concern (HAPC), locations where large concentrations of young fish from eight struggling, overfished species, such as Atlantic cod, hake, and yellowtail flounder live (the Multi-species HAPC proposal). With the aid of a powerful computer modeling tool, the groups generated a unique, objective, and science-based proposal that seeks to restore and protect areas that provide critical habitat for many species at the same time, thus keeping the number of isolated habitat sites to a minimum. If implemented, the result would be an efficient system that conserves critical areas with large numbers of juvenile fish while minimizing the impacts to U.S. and Canadian fishermen. Unfortunately, when called upon to recognize the areas identified in the Multi-species HAPC proposal as HAPCs and to take action to protect them, the NEFMC abruptly set the proposal aside despite the strong support of the leading habitat scientists advising the Council. This rejection by the Council, which is overseeing the demise of one of the world’s legendary fishing grounds, is especially frustrating given modern scientific understanding of the value of habitat protection as the key component of ecological health. This rejection calls into question whether the Magnuson- Stevens Act’s habitat provisions are an adequate tool to help stop the decline of our ocean ecosystems and for restoring such ecosystems to a reasonable approximation of what they once were. This Article looks at the implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s habitat provisions through the prism of the New England groundfish fishery. The fisheries of the Northwest Atlantic, under the oversight of the NEFMC, have played a pivotal role as case studies for Congress throughout the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s history. Examining the New England fishery allows us to evaluate where managers have delivered on the Act’s habitat conservation promises, where they have fallen short, and where one might look to begin to chart a better course for the health of our oceans. The Council’s failures also help bring into focus the need for new tools for restoring and protecting ecological health, the need for reform of the nation’s fishery management councils, and the need for a broader approach to ocean governance

Habitat Protection Under The Magnuson-Stevens Act: Can It Really Contribute To Ecosystem Health In The Northeast Atlantic?

New England’s legendary Atlantic cod fishery is in deep trouble. The cod, along with several additional fish species that make up New England’s groundfish fishery, remain critically depleted, and are at only a small fraction of healthy levels. In 2004, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC or Council) and the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) implemented the first comprehensive rebuilding program for groundfish in New England. This plan relies primarily on management measures designed to reduce fishing rates in order to end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks. The most recent scientific review by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) released in 2005, however, showed that overfishing was still occurring on several groundfish species, including the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks. Their levels had plummeted another twenty-five and twenty-one percent respectively since the last comprehensive NEFSC review in 2001, leaving them at only ten and twenty-three percent of the target levels that scientists consider the minimum for health and sustainability. The continued depletion of New England’s critical groundfish populations is not only bad news for the fish, but also for coastal New England fishermen and their communities, who face economic hardship caused by regulators’ attempts to end overfishing. While ending overfishing is clearly a fundamental first step in addressing our fisheries problems, the healthy growth and development of juvenile fish is essential to rebuilding sustainable commercial fisheries and the healthy ecosystems fish require. Habitat is necessary to fish for food, shelter, and reproduction, and demersal (groundfish) juveniles are particularly dependent upon sea floor structure for predator evasion and energy conservation. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that many different types of fishing gear—especially bottom trawls and dredges but also gillnets, traps, longlines and other gear—degrade critical fish habitat which can lead to declines in fish populations. As a result, certain fishing gear should be restricted in sensitive habitat areas to protect juvenile fish habitat and to help ensure that marine fish populations are restored to healthy levels for years to come. Ten years after the Sustainable Fisheries Act was enacted in 1996 to strengthen the conservation provisions of our nation’s fisheries law, protections for Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) from harmful fishing practices remain inadequate. Over this time period, the NEFMC, like most of our nation’s fishery management councils, has demonstrated all the classic failures of protecting habitat by hiding behind scientific uncertainty, maintaining that existing management measures are sufficient, limiting prohibitions of destructive gear to where it currently is not a threat, and providing limited protection for some of the most vulnerable habitat types while ignoring other important areas. The NEFMC itself appears to recognize that it has fallen short in fulfilling the conservation promise offered in the habitat provisions added by the Sustainable Fisheries Act. The NEFMC is currently developing an omnibus habitat amendment designed to review and update its EFH designations and to consider new actions designed to protect habitat. Recently, in response to a request for proposals to identify habitat areas of particular concern in New England waters, the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and World Wildlife Fund-Canada (WWF-Canada) developed an innovative new strategy to restore New England’s depleted cod and other groundfish populations. These groups proposed creating a network of Habitat Areas of Particular Concern (HAPC), locations where large concentrations of young fish from eight struggling, overfished species, such as Atlantic cod, hake, and yellowtail flounder live (the Multi-species HAPC proposal). With the aid of a powerful computer modeling tool, the groups generated a unique, objective, and science-based proposal that seeks to restore and protect areas that provide critical habitat for many species at the same time, thus keeping the number of isolated habitat sites to a minimum. If implemented, the result would be an efficient system that conserves critical areas with large numbers of juvenile fish while minimizing the impacts to U.S. and Canadian fishermen. Unfortunately, when called upon to recognize the areas identified in the Multi-species HAPC proposal as HAPCs and to take action to protect them, the NEFMC abruptly set the proposal aside despite the strong support of the leading habitat scientists advising the Council. This rejection by the Council, which is overseeing the demise of one of the world’s legendary fishing grounds, is especially frustrating given modern scientific understanding of the value of habitat protection as the key component of ecological health. This rejection calls into question whether the Magnuson- Stevens Act’s habitat provisions are an adequate tool to help stop the decline of our ocean ecosystems and for restoring such ecosystems to a reasonable approximation of what they once were. This Article looks at the implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s habitat provisions through the prism of the New England groundfish fishery. The fisheries of the Northwest Atlantic, under the oversight of the NEFMC, have played a pivotal role as case studies for Congress throughout the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s history. Examining the New England fishery allows us to evaluate where managers have delivered on the Act’s habitat conservation promises, where they have fallen short, and where one might look to begin to chart a better course for the health of our oceans. The Council’s failures also help bring into focus the need for new tools for restoring and protecting ecological health, the need for reform of the nation’s fishery management councils, and the need for a broader approach to ocean governance

The Organic Research Centre; Elm Farm Bulletin 84 July 2006

Regular bulletin with technical updates of the Organic Advisory Service Issue contains: Battling on for Avian Flu preventive vaccination; Organic Colombian Blacktail eggs; UK Co-existence - GMOand non-GMO crops; Aspects of Poultry Behaviour; CAP in the service of biodiversity; Seeing the Wood, the Trees and the Catch 22; Beware of organic market "statistics"; A central role in energy review

System-level linking of synthesised hardware and compiled software using a higher-order type system

Devices with tightly coupled CPUs and FPGA logic allow for the implementation of heterogeneous applications which combine multiple components written in hardware and software languages, including first-party source code and third-party IP. Flexibility in component relationships is important, so that the system designer can move components between software and hardware as the application design evolves. This paper presents a system-level type system and linker, which allows functions in software and hardware components to be directly linked at link time, without requiring any modification or recompilation of the components. The type system is designed to be language agnostic, and exhibits higher-order features, to enables design patterns such as notifications and callbacks to software from within hardware functions. We demonstrate the system through a number of case studies which link compiled software against synthesised hardware in the Xilinx Zynq platform

Emissions from village cookstoves in Haryana, India, and their potential impacts on air quality

Air quality in rural India is impacted by residential cooking and heating with biomass fuels. In this study, emissions of CO, CO2, and 76 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) were quantified to better understand the relationship between cook fire emissions and ambient ozone and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation. Cooking was carried out by a local cook, and traditional dishes were prepared on locally built chulha or angithi cookstoves using brushwood or dung fuels. Cook fire emissions were collected throughout the cooking event in a Kynar bag (VOCs) and on polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) filters (PM2.5). Gas samples were transferred from a Kynar bag to previously evacuated stainless-steel canisters and analyzed using gas chromatography coupled to flame ionization, electron capture, and mass spectrometry detectors. VOC emission factors were calculated from the measured mixing ratios using the carbon-balance method, which assumes that all carbon in the fuel is converted to CO2, CO, VOCs, and PM2.5 when the fuel is burned. Filter samples were weighed to calculate PM2.5 emission factors. Dung fuels and angithi cookstoves resulted in significantly higher emissions of most VOCs (p < 0.05). Utilizing dung-angithi cook fires resulted in twice as much of the measured VOCs compared to dung-chulha and 4 times as much as brushwood-chulha, with 84.0, 43.2, and 17.2g measured VOCkgg fuel carbon, respectively. This matches expectations, as the use of dung fuels and angithi cookstoves results in lower modified combustion efficiencies compared to brushwood fuels and chulha cookstoves. Alkynes and benzene were exceptions and had significantly higher emissions when cooking using a chulha as opposed to an angithi with dung fuel (for example, benzene emission factors were 3.18gkgg fuel carbon for dung-chulha and 2.38gkgg fuel carbon for dung-angithi). This study estimated that 3 times as much SOA and ozone in the maximum incremental reactivity (MIR) regime may be produced from dung-chulha as opposed to brushwood-chulha cook fires. Aromatic compounds dominated as SOA precursors from all types of cook fires, but benzene was responsible for the majority of SOA formation potential from all chulha cook fire VOCs, while substituted aromatics were more important for dung-angithi. Future studies should investigate benzene exposures from different stove and fuel combinations and model SOA formation from cook fire VOCs to verify public health and air quality impacts from cook fires

Monitoring vegetation response to culvert removals in a salt marsh: education for college interns, citizen scientists and the local community.

Stillwaters Environmental Center spearheaded the Carpenter Creek Estuary Restoration project, which replaced two undersized culverts in a pocket estuary in Kingston, WA with large-span bridges in 2012 and 2018. This restored natural tidal and creek flows and sediment transport, and increased access for salmonids to the creek and estuary. To establish a pre-restoration baseline and involve the community, Stillwaters coordinated citizen science monitoring of water quality and ecological conditions in the estuary, salt marsh, and creek in 2005 and have continued this monitoring during the recovery. Since 2013, we have also hosted 31 undergraduate and graduate interns from local colleges whose projects have expanded the scope of our work. Some of our most popular projects for volunteers and interns alike have involved monitoring salt marsh plants to document changes in the distribution of both natives and invasives, and in the survival of Sitka spruce that dominate the marsh edge. Volunteers are eager to use the training we provide in salt marsh vegetation identification, and point-intercept sampling methods increased volunteers’ confidence in their abilities and in the reliability of data collected by multiple observers. A larger number of community members were engaged in a tree-planting drive to support a study of the survival and growth of Sitka spruce seedlings planted along the marsh-forest interface. Interns have been involved in all aspects of these projects, such as learning field methods and training volunteers, gathering supplementary data on pore water salinity, and in summarizing the data from multiple studies on native vegetation and reed canary grass control. Lessons learned so far in terms of both post-restoration recovery of the salt marsh and the successes and pitfalls of collaborations between citizen scientists and college interns will be discussed