Investment in Sustainable Development: A UK Perspective on the Business and Academic Challenges

There are many legislative, stakeholder and supply chain pressures on business to be more ‘sustainable’. Universities have recognised the need for graduate knowledge and understanding of sustainable development issues. Many businesses and universities have responded and introduced Sustainable Development models into their operations with much of the current effort directed at climate change. However, as the current worldwide financial crisis slowly improves, the expectations upon how businesses operate and behave are changing. It will require improved transparency and relationships with all stakeholders, which is the essence of sustainable development. The challenges and opportunities for both business and universities are to understand the requirements of sustainable development and the transformation that is required. They should ensure that knowledge is embedded within the culture of the organisation and wider society in order to achieve a sustainable future

Investigating the relationships between the feedback practices of lecturers and students in the context of assessment and learning within a postgraduate business school

It is commonly agreed that feedback is a key component of higher education and critical for learning. Despite decades of research problems with feedback are still reported. Lecturers and students describe issues with feedback such as, timing, quality, usefulness, use of, effectiveness, and recipience. There are also differences between lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of feedback as well as among students and lecturers. The last two decades of research have repositioned feedback from something provided to students, to an ongoing dialogic process, with a focus on the development of feedback literacy. Whilst there is a growing body of research focusing on the feedback literacy of students and more recently lecturers, the effect of student and lecturer interactions is under researched. In particular, the interrelationship of student and lecturer feedback practices and its influence on the feedback process and feedback literacy. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of lecturers’ and students’ feedback practices and the relationship between these practices. A better understanding of feedback practices highlighted the importance of involving students and lecturers in the development of the feedback process, and a way of aligning understandings of feedback. The research study was designed to answer the questions: How do feedback practices affect lecturers’ and students’ conceptions of feedback and the feedback process? How do the interrelationships between students’ and lecturers’ feedback practices and the arrangements that constitute these practices, affect the feedback process

Individual contributions to group behaviour in the cooperatively breeding southern ground-hornbill Bucorvus leadbeateri

Cooperative breeding, in which individuals other than breeders contribute to raising offspring, has been the focus of much scientific research over the past decades. Why do some individuals help to raise offspring that are not their own? In birds, cooperative breeding is found mainly in harsh regions with greater environmental variability, such that individuals might do better to help relatives than attempt to breed themselves. However, in some bird families cooperative breeding is instead associated with stable and benign environments, suggesting that species may form cooperative groups for different reasons. Most studies have focused on the benefits that additional group members bring to offspring, by increasing provisioning rates, nestling survival, and overall reproductive output. These benefits have been suggested to mitigate the effects of harsh climatic conditions and to be particularly important in the face of anthropogenic climate change, during which increases in temperature extremes and interannual rainfall variability are expected to push species' tolerance to the limit. However, other advantages of group living have been less often considered; for example, collective territory defence is common in cooperative breeders and ensures exclusive access to crucial resources such as food, nesting sites, and mates. A better understanding of the diverse factors favouring cooperative behaviour can offer insights as to why, and in what environmental conditions, social behaviour has evolved, and whether and how it might help animal populations to cope with environmental change. Therefore, the aims of this thesis were to investigate how individuals within cooperative groups contribute to reproduction and territory defence in an atypical cooperative breeder, the southern ground-hornbill Bucorvus leadbeateri. The large body size and exceptionally long lifespan of ground-hornbills leads to a “slow” life-history strategy, providing a striking contrast to most wellstudied avian cooperative breeders, which tend to be small, relatively short-lived passerines. Furthermore, while the hornbill family is usually associated with mesic, stable environments, groundhornbills inhabit semi-arid, fluctuating environments. Studying them thus may shed light on why cooperative breeding might be favoured in both harsh, fluctuating environments, as well as benign, stable environments. I use a combination of my own data collected over five years (2017‒2022) and long-term data collected from the APNR Southern Ground-Hornbill Project (2000‒2022) to test the effects of environmental and social factors (climatic conditions, group size and composition, and age structure of group members) on reproductive and territorial cooperative behaviour. The first two data chapters focus on how group members influence provisioning efforts and reproductive outcomes, and whether group members of different ages can mitigate the effects of harsh climatic conditions. My results showed that high temperatures and low rainfall had generally negative effects on reproduction, and that cooperative breeding provided some reproductive benefits, but did not act as a buffer to provisioning rates or reproductive outputs. Specifically, we showed that adult males had the highest provisioning rates and provisioned larger items, but the additive care they provided did not buffer the effects of high temperatures. Additionally, we showed that hot and dry conditions were associated with decreased breeding probability, later laying dates, and decreased nestling body mass, and that group composition did not significantly mitigate these negative effects. Instead, our results suggested that group or territory quality may be a more important factor in determining reproductive success. The second two data chapters focus on territory defence. Specifically, I asked how different group members contributed to the species' characteristic deep booming chorus vocalisations used to advertise territories, and how responses to territorial intrusions were mediated by caller identity and group size. I showed that calls were significantly different between the sexes, and that females produced sequences of calls that formed unique melodies that could be automatically assigned to the correct individual with a 94% success rate. Melodies are an effective way of signalling individual identity in long distance communication, as this acoustic information travels well when composed of low-pitched sounds. Therefore, since each group generally contains only one adult female, groups can be identified by the female's signature. Next, I showed that there were no clear effects of intruder group identity on the responses of territory holders, but found that group size was positively associated with aggressive responses, indicating that group living may provide resource defence benefits. Overall, the findings in this thesis indicated that group living provided benefits for territory defence and to a lesser extent, reproduction, and that individual contributions of different group members varied between different cooperative behaviours. Despite ground-hornbills inhabiting semiarid regions with harsh climatic conditions, the presence of additional group members of different ages during reproduction were insufficient to mitigate the negative effects of high temperature and low rainfall. However, the likely benefits provided by additional helpers to territory defence suggest that the ecology, longevity, and slow-development of ground-hornbills may render the presence of additional helpers less critical for reproduction, but more important for resource defence. Further research into other group behaviours such as predator vigilance, foraging and hunting, and energy conservation would provide additional insights into other benefits that cooperative breeding might provide. This study implies that a species' life-history strategy may be an important mechanism determining the benefits individuals receive from breeding cooperatively, and so help to explain the ecological correlates and diversity of forms taken by cooperative breeding, including the remarkable biology of the southern ground-hornbill

Community social status effects on migration outcomes

Using the geocoded version of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), this study examines patterns of internal migration in the United States by investigating individual residential mobility between low socioeconomic and high socioeconomic counties. Specifically, through the use of data between the years of 1979 and 2002, this study asks three questions. First, if the sending community is socioeconomically different than the receiving community where the migrant lives during middle age, does this show upward, downward or lateral status movement? Second, do migrants tend to move from less desirable communities to communities with higher socioeconomic standards of living? Third, what is the relationship between education and upward mobility, as the individual education levels increases is there movement to communities with higher socioeconomic standards of living? This analysis examines migration outcomes for individuals who in 1979 were between the ages of 14 and 21 and 23 years later where between the ages of 37 and 45 years of age in 2002, the latter period represents when individuals are entering middle age. Life cycle events, such as education, entry into the labor force and the start of marriage and childbearing tend to be complete at this stage of life cycle and migration is less frequent

A floor sensor system for gait recognition

This paper describes the development of a prototype floor sensor as a gait recognition system. This could eventually find deployment as a standalone system (eg. a burglar alarm system) or as part of a multimodal biometric system. The new sensor consists of 1536 individual sensors arranged in a 3 m by 0.5 m rectangular strip with an individual sensor area of 3 cm2. The sensor floor operates at a sample rate of 22 Hz. The sensor itself uses a simple design inspired by computer keyboards and is made from low cost, off the shelf materials. Application of the sensor floor to a small database of 15 individuals was performed. Three features were extracted : stride length, stride cadence, and time on toe to time on heel ratio. Two of these measures have been used in video based gait recognition while the third is new to this analysis. These features proved sufficient to achieve an 80 % recognition rate

A smart environment for biometric capture

The development of large scale biometric systems require experiments to be performed on large amounts of data. Existing capture systems are designed for fixed experiments and are not easily scalable. In this scenario even the addition of extra data is difficult. We developed a prototype biometric tunnel for the capture of non-contact biometrics. It is self contained and autonomous. Such a configuration is ideal for building access or deployment in secure environments. The tunnel captures cropped images of the subject's face and performs a 3D reconstruction of the person's motion which is used to extract gait information. Interaction between the various parts of the system is performed via the use of an agent framework. The design of this system is a trade-off between parallel and serial processing due to various hardware bottlenecks. When tested on a small population the extracted features have been shown to be potent for recognition. We currently achieve a moderate throughput of approximate 15 subjects an hour and hope to improve this in the future as the prototype becomes more complete

A middleware for a large array of cameras

Large arrays of cameras are increasingly being employed for producing high quality image sequences needed for motion analysis research. This leads to the logistical problem with coordination and control of a large number of cameras. In this paper, we used a lightweight multi-agent system for coordinating such camera arrays. The agent framework provides more than a remote sensor access API. It allows reconfigurable and transparent access to cameras, as well as software agents capable of intelligent processing. Furthermore, it eases maintenance by encouraging code reuse. Additionally, our agent system includes an automatic discovery mechanism at startup, and multiple language bindings. Performance tests showed the lightweight nature of the framework while validating its correctness and scalability. Two different camera agents were implemented to provide access to a large array of distributed cameras. Correct operation of these camera agents was confirmed via several image processing agents

Geography of Business Incubator Formation in the United States

The geography of business incubators has seldom been examined against the public aspirations and beliefs that incubators should either inhabit economically distressed areas to alleviate unemployment and poverty (in the case of empowerment business incubators) or proliferate in technologically capable regions to adequately unleash and exploit local high-technology potentials (in the case of technology business incubators). In this paper, the geographic distribution of 719 U.S. business incubators, which are located in 465 out of the 3,141 counties, is examined drawing upon a newly built incubator population database. In addition, the location factors underlying the formation of business incubators are also identified and analyzed, which leads to the discovery of a dichotomy between rural and urban incubators in their locational determinants