Materialising reform: how conservation encounters collection practises in zoos

This paper examines how zoos decide which animals to keep, drawing on guidance produced by zoo membership organisations and in-depth interviews with zoo curators. Zoos make curatorial decisions within constraints posed by each zoo’s legacy of buildings and animals. Different versions of ‘conservation value’ inform decision-making alongside other criteria such as education value, visitor value and whether or not animals are available. We find that an international agenda to rationalise zoo collection planning in the name of environmental conservation has only partially reshaped existing practices. As a ‘bald object’ in the Latourian sense, ‘conservation’ presents a clean surface, which also means that it invites projections that attach to concrete practices only in loose ways. Given the ambiguity of conservation as a value, conservation presents zoos with a range of options and can be made to fit a broad range of choices, which make sense to actors for other reasons. Reform efforts gain traction where they are inserted as ‘hairy objects’ and resonate with practical problems zoos are already facing. Reforms in the name of conservation have led to networks of exchange and co-operation, which help zoos to secure new animals in the context of new regulations

Non-liberal internationalism: the field of international mission agencies

This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the variegated ties established across national borders by non-state actors by offering an account of the field of international mission agencies. Noting agencies’ specific goal to promote the gospel, we ask how mission agencies shape where missionaries go, whom they are trying to reach and what activities they engage in. Based on in-depth interviews with managers, we discuss the historical focus on the individual person or family as the unit through which ties are established, and analyse the broad set of practices, which are considered legitimate as part of mission work. To the extent that managers see themselves as engaged in rationalisation, rationalisation is understood as reform towards distinctively mission-related outcomes. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of considering the work of mission agencies for our understanding of the “international” and for the study of social change in global society

Language and Mathematics: Questioning Strategies in a Dual Language Bilingual Education Classroom

This study presents an emerging framework of teaching moves for teaching mathematics in a DLBE classroom. Our preliminary findings indicate how the teacher in our study uses language during mathematics instruction to a) support the development of conceptual understanding, b) create opportunities for cross-linguistic connections, and c) create opportunities to support bilingual students’ linguistic and mathematical understanding

Needs Assessment for Informing Extension Professional Development Trainings on Teaching Adult Learners

As society becomes more information saturated, Extension must evaluate its educational programming and delivery methods used to facilitate adult learning. Extension professionals must have a comprehensive understanding of how adults learn. Accordingly, we conducted a needs assessment as a basis for providing professional development trainings focused on teaching adults. Our objective was to identify Extension professionals\u27 professional development needs related to designing and facilitating programming based on andragogy. We developed a survey instrument that addressed andragogy-related topics and administered it to Extension professionals. The results indicated that professional development centered on andragogy was needed by and relevant to the study participants. We describe the study and resulting professional development training and provide associated recommendations that are applicable across Extension

Needs Assessment for Informing Extension Professional Development Trainings on Teaching Adult Learners

As society becomes more information saturated, Extension must evaluate its educational programming and delivery methods used to facilitate adult learning. Extension professionals must have a comprehensive understanding of how adults learn. Accordingly, we conducted a needs assessment as a basis for providing professional development trainings focused on teaching adults. Our objective was to identify Extension professionals\u27 professional development needs related to designing and facilitating programming based on andragogy. We developed a survey instrument that addressed andragogy-related topics and administered it to Extension professionals. The results indicated that professional development centered on andragogy was needed by and relevant to the study participants. We describe the study and resulting professional development training and provide associated recommendations that are applicable across Extension

“Charismatic Species and Beyond: How Cultural Schemas and Organisational Routines shape Conservation”

It has long been suggested that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation. This paper follows up on this observation to investigate how cultural schemas and organisational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly. Based on 44 in-depth interviews with programme managers in international conservation NGOs and in zoos with conservation programmes, we argue that the way units of intervention are institutionalised in conservation work shapes the allocation of resources in ways that are not directly based on conservation science. In addition to the role of species, and charismatic species in particular, we examine the role of focus countries political boundaries shape the conditions under which NGOs can do their work and they shape NGOs’ work via the priorities of institutional donors. We also discuss the role of landscape types, and competition among landscape types, and of solution-based programming

Communicating absolute fracture risk reduction and the acceptance of treatment for osteoporosis

Healthcare professionals frequently communicate the benefits of treatments as a relative risk reduction (RRR) in the likelihood of an event occurring. Here we evaluated whether presenting the benefits of osteoporosis treatment as a RRR in fractures compared with an absolute risk reduction (ARR) changed the patient’s attitudes towards accepting treatment. We surveyed 160 individuals attending a specialised osteoporosis clinic for face-to-face consultations between May 2018 and Jan 2021. They were presented with information on RRR for the treatment being considered followed by ARR and after each question were asked about how likely they would be to start treatment on a 5-point scale (1 = very likely, 5 = very unlikely). Participants were less likely to accept treatment when it was presented as ARR (mean score 2.02 vs. 2.67, p < 0.001, 95% CI for difference − 0.82 vs − 0.47) and thirty-eight participants (23.7%) declined treatment with knowledge of their ARR when they would have accepted the same treatment based on the RRR. Individuals who declined treatment had a lower 5-year risk of fracture than those who accepted treatment (9.0 vs. 12.5%, p < 0.001, 95% CI − 5.0 to − 1.6) and as fracture risk decreased, the participant was less likely to accept treatment (Spearman r − 0.32, 95% CI − 0.46 to − 0.17, p ≤ 0.001). Whilst presentation of data as ARR more accurately reflects individual benefit and helps facilitate shared decision-making, clinicians should be aware that this will lead to a proportion of patients with lower fracture risk declining treatment for osteoporosis

A Deep Learning Approach to Geographical Candidate Selection through Toponym Matching

Recognizing toponyms and resolving them to their real-world referents is required to provide advanced semantic access to textual data. This process is often hindered by the high degree of variation in toponyms. Candidate selection is the task of identifying the potential entities that can be referred to by a previously recognized toponym. While it has traditionally received little attention, candidate selection has a significant impact on downstream tasks (i.e. entity resolution), especially in noisy or non-standard text. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning method for candidate selection through toponym matching, using state-of-the-art neural network architectures. We perform an intrinsic toponym matching evaluation based on several datasets, which cover various challenging scenarios (cross-lingual and regional variations, as well as OCR errors) and assess its performance in the context of geographical candidate selection in English and Spanish. </p

Blogging in the physics classroom: A research-based approach to shaping students' attitudes towards physics

Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to calculate, but come out of a general physics course without a deep understanding of how physics has transformed the world around them. In other words, they get the "how" but not the "why". Studies have shown that students leave introductory physics courses almost universally with decreased expectations and with a more negative attitude. This paper will detail an experiment to address this problem: a course weblog or "blog" which discusses real-world applications of physics and engages students in discussion and thinking outside of class. Specifically, students' attitudes towards the value of physics and its applicability to the real-world were probed using a 26-question Likert scale survey over the course of four semesters in an introductory physics course at a comprehensive Jesuit university. We found that students who did not participate in the blog study generally exhibited a deterioration in attitude towards physics as seen previously. However, students who read, commented, and were involved with the blog maintained their initially positive attitudes towards physics. Student response to the blog was overwhelmingly positive, with students claiming that the blog made the things we studied in the classroom come alive for them and seem much more relevant.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure