An Agent-Based Model of Urban Sprawl: York and Cumberland Counties, Maine

Urban sprawl is defined as the movement of populations towards the fringes of urban centers, leading to the conversion of rural land to suburban consumption. This expansion in the distribution of populations has many implications for local and state policymakers, business owners and consumers. In Maine, sprawl is particularly prevalent in Cumberland County and York County, where the state’s population is the densest. The objective of this paper is to develop an agent-based model (ABM), which attempts to reflect the movement of households within these counties. These households make decisions sourced in microeconomic theory that are built into the model. Households seek locations that maximize utility, based on their income and time constraints. This model also incorporates a gravity model of migration to determine the likelihood that a household will migrate to another area when motivated by a higher income. Simulations of the model display characteristics of sprawl, including a decline in population density. Additionally, several policy simulations were conducted to demonstrate the effects on land use and projected population migration patterns. This model serves as a basis for future exploration and customization to forecast land-use trends, as well as the corollaries of potential economic policies or developmen

Alien Registration- Lavallee, Arthur Charles G. (Lewiston, Androscoggin County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/28341/thumbnail.jp

A planning language for activity scheduling

Mission planning and scheduling of spacecraft operations are becoming more complex at NASA. Described here are a mission planning process; a robust, flexible planning language for spacecraft and payload operations; and a software scheduling system that generates schedules based on planning language inputs. The mission planning process often involves many people and organizations. Consequently, a planning language is needed to facilitate communication, to provide a standard interface, and to represent flexible requirements. The software scheduling system interprets the planning language and uses the resource, time duration, constraint, and alternative plan flexibilities to resolve scheduling conflicts

Professional development issues in Britain: Lessons from Australia and the USA

First paragraph: The formation of the Division of Sport and Exercise Psychology within the British Psychological Society represents a significant step forward for the professional status of sport and exercise psychology in Great Britain. As our profession continues to evolve the Division is faced with a number of tasks and challenges. However, these challenges are not unique to Britain. The purpose of this article is to give insight into the procedures in place in Australia and USA for certifying and training sport and exercise psychologists, so that we can learn lessons from these countries

Vpliv športne identitete vrhunskih atletov na kognitivno ocenjevanje in soočanje z neuspešnostjo v športu

Previous studies have demonstrated that strong and exclusive athletic identity is a risk factor for adjustment difficulties following major sport career transitions (e.g., Cecić Erpič, Wylleman, & Zupančič, 2004; Grove, Lavallee, & Gordon, 1997). However, research investigating the influence of athletic identity on adjustment to negative events that athletes encounter more routinely is scant. This study adopted a stress perspective (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and qualitative method to examine the influence of athletic identity on athletes' appraisal and coping responses to underperforming. Three male and three female UK international track athletes provided accounts of their experiences of underperforming in semi-structured interviews. Athletic identity was established with the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS; Brewer, Van Raalte, & Linder, 1993), in addition to qualitative data. Case studies were constructed and cross-case comparisons revealed that athletes with strong and exclusive athletic identity appraised underperforming as a threat to their self-identities, experienced intense emotional disturbance and implemented emotionfocused and avoidance coping. These findings suggest that the risks of over-identification with the athlete role are more widespread than is currently recognized and highlight the need for intervention programs that encourage athletes to invest in non-sport sources of identification

Native and non-native plant species differentially affect arthropod community dynamics with consequences for crop production in Lower Rio Grande Valley

In agricultural ecosystems, arthropods play critical roles- including biocontrol, pollination services, and as herbivores. While herbivory negatively affects crop production, the recent decline in beneficial insect numbers have created a global concern, and consequently have led into multiple lines of conservation strategies. Agroecological practices that can provide sustenance, nesting, and refuge for beneficial organisms are considered as some of them, except we lack a better understanding of how seasonal and crop specific variation can affect their community dynamics. In this study, we examined this by investigating how native and non-native plants, when incorporated into a vegetable agroecosystem in Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas can influence arthropod community over their life cycle. We used a combination of different trapping systems and the following species: four species native to Texas: Ratibidia columnifera, Helianthus anuus L., Desmanthus virgatus var. and Pappophorum bicolor. We then compared these results to the non-native species Lobularia maritima (L.) Desv. We found that among the arthropods trapped, pests accounted for 66.3%, and were significantly more prevalent than beneficials. More specifically, we found that sampling time and feeding guild, also affected arthropods, but not plant species or their native/ invasive status. Detailed analyses also revealed that Eulophidae was the most abundant parasitoids family, and Aleyrodidae was the most abundant herbivore family. We followed the experiment by also examining whether these differences had any consequences for eggplant, the cash crop planted post cover, although we found no significant effects. Collectively, we show that arthropod community response to vegetation is variable, and a single species may not create the interactive dynamics to meet the benefits desired in food production and needs to be examined further

La Recursivite, mode de programmation distribuee

Projet PARADISRésumé disponible dans le fichier PD

New Zealand athletes' attitudes towards seeking sport psychology consultation

The aim of this study was to use the Sport Psychology Attitudes-Revised (SPA-R) questionnaire (Martin, Kellman, Lavallee & Page, 2002) to develop an understanding of the attitudes elite New Zealand athletes (N = 112) hold towards sport psychology so that services can be tailored to accommodate these views. The influence of athlete characteristics such as nationality, gender, age, level of competition achieved, and previous use of sport psychology on attitudes was explored. Further, the SPA-R was used as a measure of attitudes within the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) and Theory Planned Behaviour (TPB; Ajzen, 1985, 1991), and integrated with measures of subjective norm and perceived behavioural control to investigate the influence of these variables on predicting athletes' intention to use sport psychology. Results suggested that New Zealand athletes generally held positive attitudes regarding sport psychology, with gender and previous experience of sport psychology significantly influencing attitudes. Regression analyses indicated that the TPB was a better model than the TRA for predicting intention, and the variables predicted 39.7% of variance in intention to use sport psychology. The only SPA-R subscale that contributed significantly was confidence in sport psychology, and perceived behavioural control and subjective norm also contributed significantly. These findings suggest the SPA-R may have limited value in predicting intentions, although the TPB could provide a useful theoretical framework to direct interventions aimed at increasing athletes' intention to use sport psychology

Systematic building of a distributed recursive algorithm : example : the shortest path algorithm

Projet PARADISDesigners of distributed algorithms must deal with a variety of issues including sequential algorithms design, communication protocols, fault tolerance. The distributed design must also include a proof step of the whole algorithm features. This paper gives a new scheme for the design of distributed algorithms. In this approach the design step is performed simultaneously with the proof step. Our distributed design method is mainly based upon parallel recursive schemes, but recursivity is used in a distributed environment so we use two existing and widely available tools : remote procedure call and the PAR instruction parallel execution of threads

A psycho-educational curriculum for sport career transition practitioners: Development and evaluation

Research question: This paper is an integration of three studies. Study 1 investigates sport career transition organisational intervention programmes for high performance athletes and training and development programmes for sport career transition practitioners in order to find a research gap with regard to sport career transition supporting services. A psycho-educational curriculum was developed for sport career transition practitioner in Study 2 to fill the research gap. In Study 3, the curriculum was examined to see if the curriculum contributed to enhancing practitioners’ confidence in key competences.  Research methods: A range of methods were applied to the studies including One Group Pre- and Post-test design, Case Study, Focus Group, Semi-Structured Interview, two-round Delphi-Method and Questionnaires. The data for Study 1 collected from 19 countries worldwide and total 16 participants based in seven different countries were invited to development and evaluation of the curriculum.  Results and Findings: A novel psycho-educational curriculum for sport career transition practitioner was developed and evaluated concerning four competences as a form of curriculum package. The findings revealed that the curriculum package increased the participants’ confidence in key competences concerning sport career transition.  Implications: The findings deepen the knowledge of sport career transition in the areas of organisational intervention programmes focusing on high performance athletes and sport career transition practitioners. These findings contribute to modifying the Conceptual Model of Adaptation to Career Transition (Lavallee, Park, & Taylor, 2014) by strengthening the organisational intervention perspective and applied work in respect of sporting organisation management strategie