Atomic and molecular intracules for excited states

Intracules in position space, momentum space and phase space have been calculated for low-lying excited states of the He atom, Be atom, formaldehyde and butadiene. The phase-space intracules (Wigner intracules) provide significantly more information than the position- and momentum-space intracules, particularly for the Be atom. Exchange effects are investigated through the differences between corresponding singlet and triplet states.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the award of an Advanced Research Fellowship (GR/R77636) to NAB and a Joint Research Equipment Initiative grant (GR/R62052)

Aboriginal Pastoralism, Social Embeddedness, and Cultural Continuity in Central Australia

Aboriginal people are involved in pastoral enterprises throughout the inland and north of Australia. This has generated difficulties as landowners and policymakers struggled with conflicts between Aboriginal social structures and the demands of running commercial businesses. Problems often arose due to imposition of nonindigenous norms regarding land use. It has been suggested that pastoralism can generate social and cultural benefits for Aboriginal landowners, but these have not been investigated in any detail. Drawing on the concept of social embeddedness and fieldwork with Aboriginal pastoralists, this article identifies, describes, and ranks sociocultural benefits arising from Aboriginal pastoralism. Pastoralism fulfilled uniquely Aboriginal aims and was most important for its role in Aboriginal social and cultural and reproduction. In the Aboriginal context, pastoralism should be conceived in terms that include these Aboriginal motivations and that recognize the social embeddedness of pastoralism

Describing the impact of health research: a Research Impact Framework.

BACKGROUND: Researchers are increasingly required to describe the impact of their work, e.g. in grant proposals, project reports, press releases and research assessment exercises. Specialised impact assessment studies can be difficult to replicate and may require resources and skills not available to individual researchers. Researchers are often hard-pressed to identify and describe research impacts and ad hoc accounts do not facilitate comparison across time or projects. METHODS: The Research Impact Framework was developed by identifying potential areas of health research impact from the research impact assessment literature and based on research assessment criteria, for example, as set out by the UK Research Assessment Exercise panels. A prototype of the framework was used to guide an analysis of the impact of selected research projects at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Additional areas of impact were identified in the process and researchers also provided feedback on which descriptive categories they thought were useful and valid vis-à-vis the nature and impact of their work. RESULTS: We identified four broad areas of impact: I. Research-related impacts; II. Policy impacts; III. Service impacts: health and intersectoral and IV. Societal impacts. Within each of these areas, further descriptive categories were identified. For example, the nature of research impact on policy can be described using the following categorisation, put forward by Weiss: Instrumental use where research findings drive policy-making; Mobilisation of support where research provides support for policy proposals; Conceptual use where research influences the concepts and language of policy deliberations and Redefining/wider influence where research leads to rethinking and changing established practices and beliefs. CONCLUSION: Researchers, while initially sceptical, found that the Research Impact Framework provided prompts and descriptive categories that helped them systematically identify a range of specific and verifiable impacts related to their work (compared to ad hoc approaches they had previously used). The framework could also help researchers think through implementation strategies and identify unintended or harmful effects. The standardised structure of the framework facilitates comparison of research impacts across projects and time, which is useful from analytical, management and assessment perspectives

Impact as Odyssey

Within the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic labor is being tagged to ‘impact’: to demonstrable outputs that go beyond academia and benefit “the wider economy and society” (HEFCE, 2009, 13; see also Rogers et al., this issue). This move is certainly not new, nor is it unique to institutions of higher education in the UK. ‘Impact statements’ have been standard in funding proposals for quite a while, grant funded projects have long required evidence of application within the communities where research occurs and, in the US, ‘service’ to institutional, professional, and broader communities is well established as one of the metrics used in governing promotion and tenure processes. In this intervention, we reflect on our experience working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project where questions of impact – understood as efforts to engage participants and to produce applied results – were an ongoing concern. We offer a vision that recognizes that producing impact in research is a complicated process where alternatives to what some describe as the “wholesale neoliberalization of knowledge production” (Jazeel, 2010, np) might potentially be realized. More specifically, we offer an allegorical rendering of impact as odyssey

Empowering Transformation Through Structure: Assessing Effectiveness On The Organizational Placement Of Institutional Researchers

Higher education has a rich history steeped in the assumed trust of academia; however, shrinking resources have increased the demand for more objective assessment. Institutional Researchers (IR) have emerged as agents of change, adding college-wide assessment to their responsibilities alongside pragmatic reporting (Ross & Swing, 2016; Terenzini, 2012). As data-driven culture is still a relatively new institutional framework, IR may hold the key to engendering trust around this new status quo (Kirby & Floyd, 2016). This study explored the role of organizational structure in promoting the strategic success of Institutional Researchers. The researcher examined eight field professionals through the conceptual lens of transformational leadership. Each participant willingly participated in a triangulated data collection strategy which employed a formal document review; written qualitative survey; and semi-structured, qualitative interview. The data collected highlighted four key emergent themes that are indicative of successful strategic IR, including the role of proximity to central leadership, strong supervisory support, and shared actions. The study findings suggest that taking action to empower communication with senior leaders and advocate for managerial support are imperative to advancing strategic IR. In addition, the study illuminated several ways that institutional leaders can cultivate professionals who support a data-driven, assessment-focused culture

Slag, steel and swamp: perceptions of restoration of an urban coastal saltmarsh

A community group, in conjunction with local government and industry, has been working on aquatic and terrestrial restoration at a Wollongong saltmarsh, previously diminished in size and degraded by harbour reclamation and an urban rubbish tip. Students evaluate restoration progress to date and devise some interesting potential directions

The Evolution of Long-Term Fieldwork-Based Teaching in Heritage Management: Implications for Non-placement Work Integrated Learning

From a tradition of fieldwork-based teaching in geography, we consider the intersections of fieldwork sites and their social and spatial relationships for implications for non-placement work integrated learning (NPWIL). As the skills agenda gathers pace in universities it is critical to understand forms of NPWIL and their development. As a form of NPWIL in geography and related disciplines, fieldwork generates a range of personal, professional and academic skills for students. Through a case study of site-based fieldwork for cultural heritage teaching, we examine how such teaching can expand our understanding of this form of NPWIL. In contrast to ideas of university work including WIL as characterized and bounded by temporal linearity, we argue for seeing WIL in terms of non-linear temporality and slow “innovation flow”. We link this analysis of WIL with understandings of cultural heritage and heritage sites as also non-linear and emergent in both time and space. We reflect on a detailed case study of heritage management teaching that draws on fieldtrip and a long-term relationship with a heritage site that is an historic coal mine. Over time the evolution of the field trip shows that the site itself is a key agent in this form of NPWIL. The site embodies and generates a range of changing social and spatial relationships with community, heritage managers, and other sites linked to the mine and its history. This networked perspective on fieldwork sites illustrates how supporting “slow innovation” in fieldwork based NPWIL can facilitate beneficial teaching and other outcomes

How does trade affect regional inequalities?

As part of the ongoing globalisation of the world economy, the past twenty-five years have witnessed a steep rise in the amount of trade between nations, as well as changes in the composition of trade. This has been linked to economic growth, with most literature on the subject highlighting the benefits of greater openness. Concurrently, however, regional spatial inequalities within nations have also tended to increase steadily. In this paper we explore to what extent there is a link between the phenomena of increased trade flows and regional inequalities. We present a preliminary empirical evaluation based on eight major world economies, and ground these results in the theoretical literature. It emerges that the link between trade and regional inequalities is evidenced most strongly when sectoral shifts in the composition of trade are accounted for. Specifically, we find that as trade in primary sector goods loses importance in the composition of total trade, regional inequalities are likely to increase. Such an impact of changes in the composition of trade on regional inequalities is likely to have a greater negative impact on developing than on developed countries for two reasons. First, because the dimension of intra-national disparities tends to be greater in the developing than in the developed world. Second, because the share of agricultural trade in developing countries has traditionally been higher and has been declining at a much faster rate in recent decades

Within-guild dietary discrimination from 3-D textural analysis of tooth microwear in insectivorous mammals

Resource exploitation and competition for food are important selective pressures in animal evolution. A number of recent investigations have focused on linkages between diversification, trophic morphology and diet in bats, partly because their roosting habits mean that for many bat species diet can be quantified relatively easily through faecal analysis. Dietary analysis in mammals is otherwise invasive, complicated, time consuming and expensive. Here we present evidence from insectivorous bats that analysis of three-dimensional (3-D) textures of tooth microwear using International Organization for Standardization (ISO) roughness parameters derived from sub-micron surface data provides an additional, powerful tool for investigation of trophic resource exploitation in mammals. Our approach, like scale-sensitive fractal analysis, offers considerable advantages over twodimensional (2-D) methods of microwear analysis, including improvements in robustness, repeatability and comparability of studies. Our results constitute the first analysis of microwear textures in carnivorous mammals based on ISO roughness parameters. They demonstrate that the method is capable of dietary discrimination, even between cryptic species with subtly different diets within trophic guilds, and even when sample sizes are small. We find significant differences in microwear textures between insectivore species whose diet contains different proportions of ‘hard’ prey (such as beetles) and ‘soft’ prey (such as moths), and multivariate analyses are able to distinguish between species with different diets based solely on their tooth microwear textures. Our results show that, compared with previous 2-D analyses of microwear in bats, ISO roughness parameters provide a much more sophisticated characterization of the nature of microwear surfaces and can yield more robust and subtle dietary discrimination. ISO-based textural analysis of tooth microwear thus has a useful role to play, complementing existing approaches, in trophic analysis of mammals, both extant and extinct