FFA Informational Video in Spanish

According to California Agriculture Education there are 89,000 FFA students enrolled in 334 high schools throughout the state and of those students, 53% are of Hispanic descent (California Agriculture Education, 2019). Yet there are limited materials available in Spanish for these parents and students in the California FFA Organization. It is critical for more resources to be developed and made available for students, families, and communities to facilitate a smooth transition into FFA involvement. This project will be a video resource in Spanish that explains the background of FFA, how it is structured, and give perspectives from FFA advisors, past alumni and current students. This video resource will assist agriculture teachers and students in communicating the FFA program to parents and community members with Spanish language and English subtitles. In addition to FFA’s basic structure, the video will share testimonials and show parents and guardians how the FFA will positively impact their children in personal and career development areas

Losing the Right to Confront: Defining Waiver to Better Address a Defendant\u27s Actions and Their Effects on a Witness

Part I of this Note examines the current legal landscape regarding a defendant\u27s waiver of the right to confrontation. This Part explores the justifications courts have provided for finding a waiver of the confrontation right, both through the use of the traditional intentional relinquishment of a known right standard and the less precise formulations of waiver found in cases of defendant misconduct. Part II offers a critique of the reasoning courts employ to find waiver of the right to confrontation. In the process, the analysis explores general theories of waiver which have been advanced by other commentators. In so doing, this Note seeks to arrive at a theory of waiver of the confrontation right through a defendant\u27s misconduct which is both descriptive, in that it more accurately characterizes what courts are either doing or attempting to do, and normative, in that it offers an understanding of waiver which, if employed, can better protect the rights of witnesses and defendants. Part III then applies this theory of waiver to the context of child abuse

Reducing parental anxiety using a family based intervention for youth mental health : a randomized controlled trial

This paper presents findings on parent anxiety and attachment relationship style from the Deakin Family Options (DFO) pilot study, a randomized controlled pilot study comparing a family-based treatment (BEST Plus), versus a youth only treatment (CBT) versus a group who received both of these treatments (COMBINED). Eligible participants were families with a young person (aged 12 - 25 years) with a high prevalence mental health problem. Youth from participating families scored in the clinical or subclinical range for depression, anxiety and/or substance misuse symptoms on standardized measures during the initial assessment. The collected sample was drawn from regional and urban centers in Victoria, Australia and allocated to treatment condition using a simple randomization procedure (parallel design). It was hypothesized that families receiving the BEST Plus would experience greater reductions in youth and parent mental health symptoms, and improved parent-child relationships, compared with those in the CBT condition. This paper describes and discusses changes in parent anxiety and parent attachment, according to whether the parent participated in a treatment (BEST Plus) or did not (NONBEST Plus). Participants were blind to the study hypotheses. In total 71 parent participants returned pre data and were allocated to a treatment group. In this paper, data from parent participants who completed pre and post measures (n = 48) and pre, post, and 6-month follow-up measures (n = 28) on anxiety and attachment were analyzed by group (BEST Plus versus NONBEST Plus). The results of this study suggest that parent anxiety decreased significantly more following parent involvement in a group treatment, than for parents that did not receive treatment. Unexpectedly, avoidant attachment increased in the no treatment group, but remained relatively stable following the BEST Plus group. There were no significant findings in relation to compulsive traits and anxious attachment. These findings are discussed in light of the study limitations.<br /

Simulated jury decision making in online focus groups

Purpose &ndash; A significant issue in jury research has been the use of individual jurors to analyse jury decision-making. This paper aimed to examine the applicability of computer-mediated communication to a mock jury deliberation study.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; Groups of three to five Australian residents anonymously attended a secure chat room and participated in a semi-structured discussion about a simulated child sexual assault scenario. Deliberation transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo. A hermeneutic framework was used to analyse the deliberation transcripts.Findings &ndash; Five interrelated themes were revealed, each reflecting the tools online juries used to communicate, create meaning, and arrive at a verdict. Electronic jury deliberation promoted an understanding of how people make sense of child sexual assault cases in Australia today.Originality/value &ndash; This study advanced the understanding of online decision making in a child sexual assault scenario. It demonstrated that knowledge of how juries deliberate and create meaning could improve our understanding of how verdicts are achieved. Electronic mock juries are a valuable adjunct to traditional jury deliberation studies because they are cost effective, time efficient, and offer wider recruitment opportunities

Bio-economic evaluation of pasture-cropping, a novel system of integrating perennial pastures and crops on crop-livestock farms

Pasture-cropping is a novel approach to increase the area of perennial crops in mixed sheep and cropping systems. It involves planting annual cereals directly into a living perennial pasture. There is interest in subtropical grasses as they are winter dormant and their growth profile is potentially well suited to pasture-cropping. However, a wide range of factors can affect the uptake of such systems. This paper assesses the relative importance of factors that can influence decisions to introduce pasture-cropping. In this paper the research question is: what factors predispose a farm to take up a new technology such as (1) subtropical grass and (2) subtropical grass that is pasture-cropped. The analysis uses the MIDAS model of a central wheatbelt farm in Western Australia. The results suggest the adoption of subtropical grasses is likely to be strongly influenced by soil mix; feed quality; and whether the farm is predominantly grazing or cropping and by the presence of meat versus wool producing animals. The same factors are relevant for subtropical grass that is pasture-cropped but in addition yield penalties due to competition between the host perennial and the companion cereal become important. The results suggest the level of forage production by subtropical grass is less important but this factor is likely to become more important if feed quality can be improved.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Moral Disengagement in Legal Judgments

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists\u27 willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants\u27 existing attitudes and their judgmentsa theoretical bridge between attitudes and judgmentswas robustly supported. Moral disengagement was key to understanding how psychologists decide to engage in competence for execution evaluations. We describe in detail the moral disengagement measure we used, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across two separate samples. The four-factor measure accounted for a total of 52.18 percent of the variance in the sample of forensic psychologists, and the model adequately fit the data in the entirely different sample of jurors in a confirmatory factor analysis. Despite the psychometric strengths of this moral disengagement measure, we describe the pros and cons of existing measures of moral disengagement. We outline future directions for moral disengagement research, especially in legal contexts

Heaviside's dolphins (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) relax acoustic crypsis to increase communication range

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biological Sciences 285 (2018): 20181178, doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.1178.The costs of predation may exert significant pressure on the mode of communication used by an animal, and many species balance the benefits of communication (e.g. mate attraction) against the potential risk of predation. Four groups of toothed whales have independently evolved narrowband high-frequency (NBHF) echolocation signals. These signals help NBHF species avoid predation through acoustic crypsis by echolocating and communicating at frequencies inaudible to predators such as mammal-eating killer whales. Heaviside’s dolphins (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) are thought to exclusively produce NBHF echolocation clicks with a centroid frequency around 125 kHz and little to no energy below 100 kHz. To test this, we recorded wild Heaviside’s dolphins in a sheltered bay in Namibia. We demonstrate that Heaviside’s dolphins produce a second type of click with lower frequency and broader bandwidth in a frequency range that is audible to killer whales. These clicks are used in burst-pulses and occasional click series but not foraging buzzes. We evaluate three different hypotheses and conclude that the most likely benefit of these clicks is to decrease transmission directivity and increase conspecific communication range. The expected increase in active space depends on background noise but ranges from 2.5 (Wenz Sea State 6) to 5 times (Wenz Sea State 1) the active space of NBHF signals. This dual click strategy therefore allows these social dolphins to maintain acoustic crypsis during navigation and foraging, and to selectively relax their crypsis to facilitate communication with conspecifics.This research was supported by a Fulbright U.S. Research Fellowship, the National Geographic Society’s Emerging Explorers Grant in conjunction with the Waitt Foundation (38115) and the University of Pretoria’s Zoology Department. TG was funded by the Claude Leon Foundation, and SE was funded by the South African National Research Foundation. FHJ acknowledges funding from the Office of Naval Research (N00014-1410410) and an AIAS-COFUND fellowship from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

Bridging the Divide: Connecting Urban and Rural Care Through the Right! From the Start Initiative

Disparities in health and barriers to healthcare are prominent in rural areas, particularly in the Delta region of Mississippi where high rates of premature births, infant mortality, low weight births, and maternal mortality exacerbate the dearth of access to care. Extending the reach of healthcare providers and services between urban and rural areas is of utmost importance in improving the landscape of maternal and child health. Community health workers (CHWs), trusted individuals in the community, play a valuable role in this through social support. This research note delineates the importance of community health workers as connectors in establishing a trusted continuum between the urban Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) setting and rural community health centers through the Right! From the Start NICU Breastfeeding Initiative in Mississippi