Mechanics’ Institutes: Glorious Failures Or Modest Successes?

Mechanics Institutes or, as they are more commonly known in the State of New South Wales, Schools of Arts are often portrayed as having been glorious failures in that they did not achieve their founding purpose. They did not educate the artisan in science and technology. This paper partially disputes that point of view. It argues that, in Australia, the so-called second wave of Schools were really quite successful in achieving their much more modest goals. They adapted the overstated idealism of the early Schools to meet the real needs of their local communities. These later Schools provided a local home for reading, learning, culture, civil society, and recreation in the then developing suburbs and towns of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Schools of Arts, as multipurpose centres of adult learning and activity, eventually declined as their communities grew and diversified. Their earlier comprehensive functions were taken over by a range of more specialised providers and facilities

The Contribution of Spawning Pacific-salmon to Nitrogen Fertility and Vegetation Nutrition during Riparian Primary Succession on an Expansive Floodplain of a Large River

Floodplain vegetation communities are mosaics of succession stages caused by erosion/redeposition as river channels migrate throughout their floodplains. Typically, plants colonizing alluvial deposits are severely N-limited, but N accumulates during succession, and this process determines long term fertility. The Kol River (Kamchatka, RU), received large annual N-subsidies from salmon and we sought to determine how salmon-N contributed to fertility during succession. We constructed a vegetation chronosequence model and made N-fertility measurements within replicate succession stages before, during and after salmon runs. Natural abundance of 15N was used as a tracer of salmon-N. We found that new alluvial deposits were N-poor, containing \u3c 200 kg-N ha-1 (to 10cm). However, soil-N increased more than 10X within 30 years and soils were N-rich henceforth. Net N-mineralization on young alluvial bars only provided a small fraction of the colonizing forest\u27s N requirement, whereas soils in older forests provided abundant N. Negative correlation between foliar C:N and soil N during the first 20 years of succession indicated that the youngest succession stages were N-limited. The salmon run commenced in midsummer and caused river water N to increase 3X. Subsequent late season flooding deposited an average of 25 kg-N ha-1 as salmon carcasses onto young alluvial bars during 2006, but deposition rates were 10 to 30X higher on other years. The N-pulse created by decomposing salmon on young alluvial bars was brief because subsequent flooding flushed these coarse soils, but colonizing willows assimilated N rapidly during this time and high foliar δ15N (3 to 5) confirmed that salmon were a major N-source in early succession. Foliar δ15N was abnormally high throughout the floodplain (1 to 5) indicating that older forests recycled salmon-N that accumulated during early succession. All plant species that occurred during the first several centuries of succession had N-rich foliage (mean C:N 12 to 22). We conclude that salmon fertilized otherwise N-poor early succession annually, and built ecosystem N-pools during early succession, thereby allowing nitrophillic plant species to proliferate

The Grazing Value of Intermediate Wheatgrass in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana

Paper published as Bulletin 7 in the UM Bulletin Forestry Series.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/umforestrybulletin/1004/thumbnail.jp

Educational change and ICT: an exploration of priorities 2 and 3 of the DfES e-strategy in schools and colleges: the current landscape and implementation issues

Landscape review of integrated online support for learners and collaborative approaches to personalised learning activities

Majority rule models and legislative elections

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Voters, legislators and bureaucracy: Institutional design in the public sector

The purpose of this paper is to outline a theory of representative democracy which explains why rational actors construct an excessively bureaucratized government. We define excessive bureaucratization as the selection of an inefficient production technology for the public sector, characterized by relative factor proportions that entail more bureaucracy than the proportions that would minimize total costs. Thus, the question of excessive bureaucracy is related to but conceptually different from whether a particular policy is worthwhile. Furthermore, it presumes a concern more fundamental than the observation that implementing a public policy inevitably requires the expenditure of scarce resources