Making and Breaking Trust in Forest Collaborative Groups

There has been a recent increase in use of an organized, forest ‘collaborative’ group approach for multi-stakeholder input on federal forestlands in the U.S. West. This approach relies on the creation of shared trust to achieve social agreement. Yet growing critiques suggest a lack of trust in the U.S. Forest Service [Forest Service], between stakeholders, and the collaborative process itself. We conducted three comparative case studies of established forest collaborative groups in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho to ask how trust is created and damaged or broken in this context. We found multiple, interlinked dimensions to trust, including significant reliance on procedural trust, trust of ‘in-groups’ who shared norms for conduct, and distrust of new participants. We also found that trust or distrust in the Forest Service affected other trust and process dynamics within groups. Our research offers new insights into the functions and limitations of a collaborative approach that is increasingly central to federal forest governance; and new empirical knowledge toward recent theoretical developments about trust in natural resource collaboration

Advancing Our Understanding of the Inheritance and Transmission of Pectus Excavatum

Pectus excavatum is the most common congenital chest wall abnormality expressed in children, yet its inheritance is poorly understood. Here we present the first comprehensive assessment of the inheritance of this disorder. After evaluating 48 pedigrees and 56 clinical traits of probands and family members, we find strong evidence of autosomal recessive, genetic control for this disorder. Additionally there is likely more than one pectus disease-associated allele, as well as a relatively large number of disease allele carriers in the human population. Some clinical traits appear important and may serve as reliable indicators for predicting the likelihood of pectus excavatum in children before severe symptoms present. Quantifying sex-ratio bias in probands demonstrates a highly significant male bias associated with pectus excavatum. When combined with pedigree data, sex-bias is indicative of sex-linked, sex-limited, and/or epigenetic control such as X-inactivation, reiterating a point made with pedigrees alone, which is that more than one mutation is likely responsible for this disorder

Genome Sequence of the Chestnut Blight Fungus Cryphonectria parasitica EP155: A Fundamental Resource for an Archetypical Invasive Plant Pathogen.

Cryphonectria parasitica is the causal agent of chestnut blight, a fungal disease that almost entirely eliminated mature American chestnut from North America over a 50-year period. Here, we formally report the genome of C. parasitica EP155 using a Sanger shotgun sequencing approach. After finishing and integration with simple-sequence repeat markers, the assembly was 43.8 Mb in 26 scaffolds (L50 = 5; N50 = 4.0Mb). Eight chromosomes are predicted: five scaffolds have two telomeres and six scaffolds have one telomere sequence. In total, 11,609 gene models were predicted, of which 85% show similarities to other proteins. This genome resource has already increased the utility of a fundamental plant pathogen experimental system through new understanding of the fungal vegetative incompatibility system, with significant implications for enhancing mycovirus-based biological control

Factors influencing engineering students’ decisions to cheat by type of assessment

Academic dishonesty (cheating) has been prevalent on college campuses for decades, and the percentage of students reporting cheating varies by college major. This study, based on a survey of 643 undergraduate engineering majors at 11 institutions, used two parallel hierarchical multiple regression analyses to predict the frequency of cheating on exams and the frequency of cheating on homework based on eight blocks of independent variables: demographics, pre-college cheating behavior, co-curricular participation, plus five blocks organized around Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (moral obligation not to cheat, attitudes about cheating, evaluation of the costs and benefits of cheating, perceived social pressures to cheat or not to cheat, and perceived effectiveness of academic dishonesty policies). The final models significantly predict 36% of the variance in “frequency of cheating on exams” and 14% of the variance in “frequency of cheating on homework”. Students don’t see cheating as a single construct and their decisions to cheat or not to cheat are influenced differently depending on the type of assessment. Secondary findings are that a student’s conviction that cheating is wrong no matter what the circumstances is a strong deterrent to cheating across types of assessment and that a student who agrees that he/she would cheat in order to alleviate stressful situations is more likely to cheat on both exams and homework.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42694/1/11162_2006_Article_9010.pd