Deer and reforestation in the Pacific Northwest

Deer and reforestation interact mainly during regeneration after wildfire or logging. In interior forests, browsing by mule deer often damages conifer seedlings planted on winter or transitional ranges. In the Douglas-fir region, numbers of blacktailed deer increase dramatically after forests are logged or burned, in response to improved forage supplies. Here, browsing on planted stock in clearcuts lowers forest productivity by reducing growth rates and occasionally contributes to plantation failures. Browsing damage can be controlled by fences or cages, but costs are prohibitive. Amelioration of damage by black-tailed deer could be achieved through long-range planning for concurrent deer and timber harvests, with hunting pressure directed to areas where logging promotes more deer. Thus, more deer can be made available to hunters and browsing damage to reforestation lessened. Such programs would require complete cooperation among resource managers and an intensive, well-planned effort to sell them to both customers and critics

2012-13 Arkansas Test Results

In early August, the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) released the 2012-2013 test score results. The following brief will highlight the results of these tests, compare achievement scores over time, and provide a glimpse of regional achievement results for the following exams: Benchmark Exam (Grades 3-8) End-of-Course Exam (Algebra I, Geometry, Biology, and Grade 11 Literacy). Iowa Test of Basic Skills (Grades 1-9

Reusable thermal cycling clamp

A reusable metal clamp for retaining a fused quartz ampoule during temperature cycling in the range of 20 deg C to 1000 deg C is described. A compressible graphite foil having a high radial coefficient of thermal expansion is interposed between the fused quartz ampoule and metal clamp to maintain a snug fit between these components at all temperature levels in the cycle

DEER AND REFORESTATION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Deer and reforestation interact mainly during regeneration after wildfire or logging. In interior forests, browsing by mule deer often damages conifer seedlings planted on winter or transitional ranges. In the Douglas-fir region, numbers of black-tailed deer increase dramatically after forests are logged or burned, in response to improved forage supplies. Here, browsing on planted stock in clearcuts lowers forest productivity by reducing growth rates and occasionally contributes to plantation failures. Browsing damage can be controlled by fences or cages, but costs are prohibitive. Amelioration of damage by black-tailed deer could be achieved through long-range planning for concurrent deer and timber harvests, with hunting pressure directed to areas where logging promotes more deer. Thus, more deer can be made available to hunters and browsing damage to reforestation lessened. Such programs would require complete cooperation among resource managers and an intensive, well-planned effort to sell them to both customers and critics

Development of a long life thermal cell Final report

Development of long life thermal cells, environmental and electrochemical performance tests to evaluate their capability and reproductibilit

PERCEPTION OF RURAL GENERAL EDUCATORS ON THE INCLUSION AND PARTICIPATION OF STUDENTS WITH SIGNIFICANT DISABILITIES

The purpose of the study was to question rural general education teachers’ perceptions and attitudes on the inclusion of students with significant disabilities. The investigator surveyed rural general education teachers on their perceptions of what should be occurring in terms of inclusion and on what they saw as occurring in terms of inclusion of students with significant disabilities. The results yielded mixed perceptions and were generally positive in terms of the inclusion occurring within that school district

Raising the Floor on Learning Levels: Equitable Improvement Starts with the Tail

Learning levels among the vast majority of children in developing countries often do not meet the expectations of national curricula, nor the much more basic levels of competence tested in citizen-led assessments (e.g., ASER, UWEZO). Moreover, the median level of achievement in many developing countries equates to approximately the 5th percentile of the distribution in OECD countries; a level at which OECD pupils may be expected to receive remedial intervention. The scale of this ‘learning crisis’ has been well documented; while the nature of the systemic failures that explain the prevalence of poor learning outcomes remains a key area of study, not least by RISE. While in many developing countries a tiny group of pupils reach learning levels comparable to OECD norms, de facto exclusion of most children from minimum acceptable learning competencies represents not only a major failure of education systems, but also an ‘equity crisis’ on a global scale. Poor learning among most children, especially where it is a result of poor quality education, is inequitable not only because it contributes to massive global (North-South) inequality, but also because the failure to develop and realise the talents of all pupils is in and of itself unjust. This latter form of inequity is not so much a distributive concern per se, but is linked to absolute notions of right or entitlement; or perhaps in Sen’s terms, to rights to opportunities to develop valuable human ‘capabilities’ and ‘functioning’, in whose pursuit education plays a key role. It is on the development of such capabilities, rather than ‘schooling’ in a narrow sense, that the right to education enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and elsewhere is founded. More recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an opportunity to focus on learning and its distribution. These goals, which replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are much more focused on learning than the MDGs were and are concerned with a minimum-proficiency approach (increasing the percentage of children reaching at least a minimum level of proficiency) and inequality, which is consistent with the empirical patterns and themes documented in this note. Educational inequalities in developing countries are typically very high (higher than income inequalities in some cases), but average performance levels are very low (striking examples include South Africa and India). OECD evidence tends to suggest that educationally high performing countries on average are those with lower levels of inequality, i.e., higher average learning levels are associated with lower inequality in learning levels. But whether higher average learning levels are most readily reached specifically by reducing inequalities; or whether reduced inequalities are the likely result of more general efforts to raise learning outcomes, is an important empirical question. We consider the potential benefits of a path ‘through the middle’ whereby attention to the left hand of the learning distribution, namely the poor-performing students and schools, may serve to both improve outcomes as a whole and to reduce inequality; thereby serving two equity goals. Raising achievement across what is, in many countries, a large bulge of poorly performing students and schools at the left of the distribution, may be an efficient strategy for raising learning outcomes as a whole. While it is an empirical question whether this is feasible, or is in fact what successful countries tend to do, it would by almost any standard be an equitable thing to do

Eliminating global learning poverty: The importance of equalities and equity

This paper explores the quantitative relationships between average levels of learning achievement across countries, changes in average levels of learning achievement, the inequality of distribution of achievement (akin to income or wealth inequality in general development analysis), and the proportion of students learning at or below an absolute minimum (akin to poverty in general development analysis). The paper uses a variety of data from cross-national and national assessments: aggregate data, micro (student-level) data, school-level data, and time-series data. The paper shows how various factors such as gender or wealth impact learning levels, but also shows that ‘systems-related’ inequality, not directly related to such factors, is typically much larger than inequality associated with any of those factors. The paper shows that countries progress from very low average levels of achievement to middle levels more by reducing the percentage of students with very low scores (that is, by paying attention to the ‘bulging’ left-hand tail of the distribution) than by increasing the percentage of high performing students. The availability of micro data from a particular case allows exploration of the relationship between inequality measures and measures of the percentage of students below a low level of achievement and shows that, at least in that case, the reduction in inequality that accompanies improvements in the average levels takes place mostly through a reduction in the percentage below a low level. Unlike in the case of income, where vast reductions in income poverty seem possible without reducing income inequality, the evidence presented here suggests that this typically does not happen with learning levels: inequality reduction, reductions in percentages below a low level, and improvements in the averages are all empirically connected. More work is needed to show whether that connection is also causal