Recent trend reversal for declining European seagrass meadows

Seagrass meadows, key ecosystems supporting fisheries, carbon sequestration and coastal protection, are globally threatened. In Europe, loss and recovery of seagrasses are reported, but the changes in extent and density at the continental scale remain unclear. Here we collate assessments of changes from 1869 to 2016 and show that 1/3 of European seagrass area was lost due to disease, deteriorated water quality, and coastal development, with losses peaking in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, loss rates slowed down for most of the species and fastgrowing species recovered in some locations, making the net rate of change in seagrass area experience a reversal in the 2000s, while density metrics improved or remained stable in most sites. Our results demonstrate that decline is not the generalised state among seagrasses nowadays in Europe, in contrast with global assessments, and that deceleration and reversal of declining trends is possible, expectingly bringing back the services they provide

Coping with workplace incivility in hospital teams: How does team mindfulness influence prevention and promotion focused emotional coping?

Incivility is a growing concern for researchers and practitioners alike, yet we know little about how the team context is related to the way that employees respond to it. In this study, we examined the role of team mindfulness and its direct and buffering effects on individual-level promotion and prevention focused emotional coping. We also examined how these forms of coping were related to individual work engagement. In a temporally lagged study of 73 hospital teams (involving 440 team members), multi-level analyses showed that team mindfulness was directly negatively as-sociated with individual-level prevention focused emotional coping (behavioral disengagement, denial, and venting), however it was not positively related to individual-level promotion focused forms of coping (positive reframing and acceptance). In addition, a cross-level interaction effect was identified, whereby team mindfulness reduced the positive relationship between incivility and venting, meaning there was less individual-level venting following incivility in the context of higher team mindfulness. These findings may have implications for work engagement, which was shown to be negatively related to venting and behavioral disengagement. Our findings are useful for managers of teams that regularly experience customer incivility as it uncovers how they can develop a team context that discourage ineffective coping responses

How to quantify bilingual experience? Findings from a Delphi consensus survey

While most investigations of bilingualism document participants’ language background, there is an absence of consensus on how to quantify bilingualism. The high number of different language background questionnaires used by researchers and practitioners jeopardises data comparability and cross-pollination between research and practice. Using the Delphi consensus survey method, we asked 132 panellists (researchers, speech and language therapists, teachers) from 29 countries to rate 124 statements on a 5-point agreement scale. Consensus was pre-defined as 75% agreement threshold. After two survey rounds, 79% of statements reached consensus. The need for common measures to quantify bilingualism was acknowledged by 96% of respondents. Agreement was reached to document: language exposure and use, language difficulties, proficiency (when it cannot be assessed directly), education and literacy, input quality, language mixing practices, and attitudes (towards languages and language mixing). We discuss the implications of these findings for the creation of a new tool to quantify bilingual experience

Mechanisms of Psychological Distress following War in the Former Yugoslavia: The Role of Interpersonal Sensitivity

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This study was funded by a grant from the European Commission, contract number INCO-CT-2004-509176. AN was supported by a Clinical Early Career Research Fellowship (113295) and a Project Grant (104288

Rotation-based formulation for stable matching

We introduce new CP models for the many-to-many stable matching problem. We use the notion of rotation to give a novel encoding that is linear in the input size of the problem. We give extra filtering rules to maintain arc consistency in quadratic time. Our experimental study on hard instances of sex-equal and balanced stable matching shows the efficiency of one of our propositions as compared with the state-of-the-art constraint programming approach

A conceptual framework and practical guide for assessing fitness-to-operate in the offshore oil and gas industry

The paper outlines a systemic approach to understanding and assessing safety capability in the offshore oil and gas industry. We present a conceptual framework and assessment guide for understanding fitness-to-operate (FTO) that builds a more comprehensive picture of safety capability for regulators and operators of offshore facilities. The FTO framework defines three enabling capitals that create safety capability: organizational capital, social capital, and human capital. For each type of capital we identify more specific dimensions based on current theories of safety, management, and organizational processes. The assessment guide matches specific characteristics to each element of the framework to support assessment of safety capability. The content and scope of the FTO framework enable a more comprehensive coverage of factors that influence short-term and long-term safety outcomes

A Process Model of Scholarly Media Annotation

Annotation has been identified as one of the "scholarly primitives", and plays a pivotal role in facilitating access to audio-visual (AV) media in a scholarly context. However, there is a lack of understanding of scholars' annotation needs and behavior. This paper is part of a group of studies aiming to understand how to improve annotation support of AV media, in order to facilitate research activities of media scholars and other scholars who make intensive use of AV media. The main findings confirm previous research discerning stages in media scholars' research processes, and indicate a great variety of research activities which occur in a non-linear order. Our studies also show that different annotation activities occur along those stages. The main contribution of this paper is a generic process model capturing AV media annotation, potentially applicable to a variety of research use cases in a scholarly context

Amine functionalization of cholecyst-derived extracellular matrix with generation 1 PAMAM dendrimer

This document is the unedited author's version of a Submitted Work that was subsequently accepted for publication in Biomacromolecules, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work, see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/bm701055k.A method to functionalize cholecyst-derived extracellular matrix (CEM) with free amine groups was established in an attempt to improve its potential for tethering of bioactive molecules. CEM was incorporated with Generation-1 polyamidoamine (G1 PAMAM) dendrimer by using N-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-N′-ethylcarbodiimide and N-hydroxysuccinimide cross-linking system. The nature of incorporation of PAMAM dendrimer was evaluated using shrink temperature measurements, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) assessment, ninhydrin assay, and swellability. The effects of PAMAM incorporation on mechanical and degradation properties of CEM were evaluated using a uniaxial mechanical test and collagenase degradation assay, respectively. Ninhydrin assay and FTIR assessment confirmed the presence of increasing free amine groups with increasing quantity of PAMAM in dendrimer-incorporated CEM (DENCEM) scaffolds. The amount of dendrimer used was found to be critical in controlling scaffold degradation, shrink temperature, and free amine content. Cell culture studies showed that fibroblasts seeded on DENCEM maintained their metabolic activity and ability to proliferate in vitro. In addition, fluorescence cell staining and scanning electron microscopy analysis of cell-seeded DENCEM showed preservation of normal fibroblast morphology and phenotype

Literacy under and over the desk: oppositions and heterogeneity

In this paper I argue that a dominant theme in New Literacy Studies research, the differences between literacy practices inside and outside school, has sometimes involved conflating ‘home literacy’ with private, unregulated ‘vernacular literacy’, and the use of an idealised abstract notion of schooled literacy to represent students’ actual everyday experience in the classroom. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research in two British primary schools, I use examples of ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ literacy activities from 10-11 year-olds to show that a wide range of different forms of literacy can be found in the classroom and I argue that the division between ‘vernacular’ and ‘schooled’ is not as clear-cut as is sometimes assumed. My analysis of children’s literacy activities suggests that, on the one hand, unofficial activities orientate towards and index official knowledges and the macro-level institutional order and, on the other hand, official activities are interpenetrated with informal practices and procedures. I also comment on some implications of using the New Literacy Studies ‘events and practices’ conceptual framework for understanding what is going on in classrooms