Mongolian hospitality: intrepid travelling

Continuing the series on exploring diverse hospitality practices, Kevin O'Gorman and Karen Thompson explore the origins of Mongolian hospitality. They highlight the lack of commercial hospitality provision in Mongolia and reflect on some of the contemporary hospitality customs and practices centred on the 'home'

More Than Same-Sex Marriage: Law, Health, and Defining Family

Ms. Thompson\u27s speech, delivered at an event presented by the UCSF/UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy, presents the struggles and obstacles Ms. Thompson and her partner encountered in decades of litigation and advocacy arising out of a tragic car accident. This issue features a transcript of that speech in which Ms. Thompson highlights not just the struggle for recognition of same-sex relationships but also the need for advanced care directives and greater attention to disability rights

EMERGENCE OF U.S. ORGANIC AGRICULTURE: CAN WE COMPETE?

This compilation of papers for principal papers session PP-03 at the AAEA 1998 Annual Meeting assesses the current status of the organic agriculture industry in the United States. Paper topics address production, market and certification issues faced by the industry, research challenges and emerging conditions shaping domestic and international markets.production, marketing, industry structure, international trade, certification, organic agriculture, Industrial Organization, International Relations/Trade, Marketing, Production Economics,

Hybrid Decompositional Verification for Discovering Failures in Adaptive Flight Control Systems

Adaptive flight control systems hold tremendous promise for maintaining the safety of a damaged aircraft and its passengers. However, most currently proposed adaptive control methodologies rely on online learning neural networks (OLNNs), which necessarily have the property that the controller is changing during the flight. These changes tend to be highly nonlinear, and difficult or impossible to analyze using standard techniques. In this paper, we approach the problem with a variant of compositional verification. The overall system is broken into components. Undesirable behavior is fed backwards through the system. Components which can be solved using formal methods techniques explicitly for the ranges of safe and unsafe input bounds are treated as white box components. The remaining black box components are analyzed with heuristic techniques that try to predict a range of component inputs that may lead to unsafe behavior. The composition of these component inputs throughout the system leads to overall system test vectors that may elucidate the undesirable behavio

Harnessing Marine Renewable Energy from Poole Harbour: Case Study

Global warming and its impact on our environment, society, economies and security is one of the fundamental concerns of our time. In response, the United Kingdom government has put in place a legally binding target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions on 1990 levels by 2050. The United Kingdom will need to achieve a tenfold expansion of energy supply from renewable sources by 2020 to meet its share of the European Union renewable energy target. The marine and coastal environment’s renewable energy potential in Britain is high. It is estimated that it has 50% of the tidal energy, 35% of wave and 40% of wind resources in the European Union. Use of geothermal resources using heat pump technology is the least evolved sector, but in 2010 contributed to 0.7 TWh of energy and it is believed that non domestic heat pumps could contribute up to 22 TWh by 2020. In the Southwest of England, Poole Harbour has been recognised as a potential, highly predictable source of tidal and heat energy. Local groups are embarking on a feasibility study for harnessing this energy for the benefit of the community. The purpose of this article is to examine the potential conflict of interest between the laudable aims of promoting the use of renewable energy and of safeguarding ecosystems and their biodiversity. Using Poole Harbour as a case study, it will consider the environmental and economic costs and benefits of a Community Renewable Energy project (the Poole Tidal Energy Partnership) in the context of an area subject to a number of statutory and non-statutory designations to protect nationally and internationally important habitats and species. The paper identifies key environmental legislation, including spatial planning law and policy, which will facilitate exploring whether there is potential for reconciling what may be perceived as competing objectives for sustainable development

English Learners’ Time to Reclassification: An Analysis

This study uses 9 years of longitudinal, student-level data from the Los Angeles Unified School District to provide updated, empirically–based estimates of the time necessary for English learners (ELs) to become reclassified as proficient in English, as well as factors associated with variation in time to reclassification. To illustrate how different aspects of proficiency develop, estimates of the time necessary for ELs to attain six separate reclassification criteria are provided. Findings corroborate prior cross-sectional research suggesting that the development of full proficiency in a second language typically takes 4 to 7 years. However, after 9 years in the district, approximately one-fourth of students had not been reclassified. There appears to be a reclassification window during the upper elementary grades, and students not reclassified by this point in time become less likely ever to do so. Findings illustrate the crucial role that students’ initial academic language proficiencies, both in English and their primary language, play in their likelihood of reclassification. This work has implications for the design of next-generation assessment and accountability systems, as well as for instructional practices.This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by the author and published by SAGE Publications. It can be found at: http://epx.sagepub.com/Keywords: Second language, English language learners, Educational policyKeywords: Second language, English language learners, Educational polic

Is Separate Always Unequal? A Philosophical Examination of Ideas of Equality in Key Cases Regarding Racial and Linguistic Minorities in Education

Advocates for language minority students depict the movement for language minority students' rights as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, which focused initially on securing rights for racial minorities. This article examines whether the same conceptions of equality and legal remedies apply for both groups. Building on Berlin's notions of negative and positive liberty, I identify two conceptions of equality evoked in key legal cases regarding racial and linguistic minorities: negative equality, which consists of removing morally untenable discriminatory practices to ensure equality via similar treatment, and positive equality, which consists of ensuring equality by customizing treatment depending on a group's particular needs. While these two conceptions of equality may appear at odds, I propose that the least restrictive environment standard, emanating from disability law, can serve to reconcile the two, holding that negative equality is paramount but positive equality may sometimes be necessary in time-bound, limited contexts.This is the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The article is copyrighted by American Educational Research Association and published by Sage. It can be found at: http://aer.sagepub.com/content/50/6/1249.Keywords: historical analysis, textual analysis, bilingual, race, bicultural, legal, law, equit

Evidence for an evolutionarily conserved interaction between cell wall biosynthesis and flowering in maize and sorghum

BACKGROUND: Factors that affect flowering vary among different plant species, and in the grasses in particular the exact mechanism behind this transition is not fully understood. The brown midrib (bm) mutants of maize (Zea mays L.), which have altered cell wall composition, have different flowering dynamics compared to their wild-type counterparts. This is indicative of a link between cell wall biogenesis and flowering. In order to test whether this relationship also exists in other grasses, the flowering dynamics in sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) were investigated. Sorghum is evolutionarily closely related to maize, and a set of brown midrib (bmr) mutants similar to the maize bm mutants is available, making sorghum a suitable choice for study in this context. RESULTS: We compared the flowering time (time to half-bloom) of several different bmr sorghum lines and their wild-type counterparts. This revealed that the relationship between cell wall composition and flowering was conserved in sorghum. Specifically, the mutant bmr7 flowered significantly earlier than the corresponding wild-type control, whereas the mutants bmr2, bmr4, bmr6, bmr12, and bmr19 flowered later than their wild-type controls. CONCLUSION: The change in flowering dynamics in several of the brown midrib sorghum lines provides evidence for an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that links cell wall biosynthesis to flowering dynamics. The availability of the sorghum bmr mutants expands the germplasm available to investigate this relationship in further detail

A Group Motivational Interviewing Intervention Reduces Drinking and Alcohol-Related Negative Consequences in Adjudicated College Women

College students who violate campus alcohol policies (adjudicated students) are at high risk for experiencing negative alcohol-related consequences and for undermining campus life. Further, college women may be especially at risk due to differential intoxication effects and sexual consequences experienced mainly by female students. Research on interventions for adjudicated students, especially adjudicated females, has been limited. One hundred and fifteen college women who received a sanction for violating campus alcohol policies participated in the study. The two hour group intervention focused on female-specific reasons for drinking and included decisional balance, goal setting and other exercises. Participants completed follow-up surveys for 12 weeks following the intervention and answered questions regarding alcohol consumption and alcohol-related negative consequences. Findings support the use of an MI-based intervention to reduce both alcohol consumption and consequences among adjudicated females. Specifically, alcohol use was reduced by 29.9% and negative consequences were reduced by 35.87% from pre-intervention to 3-month follow up. Further, the intervention appeared to successfully initiate change in the heaviest drinkers, as women who drank at risky levels reduced alcohol consumption to a greater extent than women who drank at moderate levels