Active Learning for Active Citizenship: participatory approaches to evaluating a programme to promote citizen participation in England

Just as the notion of participatory approaches has been subjected to questioning and criticism, so has the more specific notion of participatory approaches to monitoring and evaluation. There are parallel possibilities of tokenism and even of manipulation, here, just as there are parallels around the need for more critical reflection and dialogue. Even if not actually manipulative, participatory evaluation can involve little more than the occasional use of particular techniques from a participatory toolkit. This article draws upon our experiences of evaluating a participatory programme to promote active citizenship in England, starting from our shared commitment to achieve more than this. Building upon principles and experiences of best practice, the aim was to use participatory principles ‘in order to democratise social change’ (Cousins and Whitmore, 1998.7), addressing the challenges of putting participatory principles into practice right from the outset, through to the completion of the final report. We begin by summarising key arguments from previous debates. This sets the context for the discussion of our case study, as evaluators of this particular programme. Finally, we conclude by reflecting upon our experiences of working with some of the tensions inherent in the processes associated with participatory monitoring and evaluation, identifying similarities with as well as differences from Kate Newman’s conclusions, on the basis of her experiences in the global South

Engagine me, engaging you ....Ah Haa

As a non-traditional research office, we have been heavily involved in dissemination activity and, increasingly, rather than just academic staff who are already interested in the outcome of research projects, this means attempting to engage, involve and inspire the public. Public engagement involves a range of approaches that universities or research institutes can take to involve the public with their work. An important part of any public engagement work is to think about the people you want to engage with – but who are the public and how can you ensure that you identify and engage with them effectively? Whoever you are interested in disseminating your research findings to we will consider ways to ensure your planned activity is appropriate and relevant to the target audience so they can effectively contribute to your research. The workshop will help you to identify your audience and, using new technology to track, monitor and evaluate events, to engage with them to further disseminate and promote research. This interactive workshop will involve working in groups using a range of craft materials to create a mood board to demonstrate how you would identify and engage with your audience to maximise participation for your event

The early death of Colonel Robert C. Tytler and the afterlife of his collection

A letter by Allan Octavian Hume and three by Bertram Bevan-Petman, all written between 1904 and 1911 to Ernst Hartert, bird curator of Rothschild’s Tring Museum, are present in the Rothschild Tring archive, now held by the Natural History Museum. These shed light on both the probable cause of the early death in 1872 of Colonel Robert C. Tytler, British army officer and naturalist in colonial India, and on the somewhat convoluted fate of his collection subsequently.Copyright: © 2021 Prys-Jones, R et al. 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 credite

The Claims Culture: A Taxonomy of Industry Attitudes

This paper presents an analysis of a familiar aspect of construction industry culture that we have dubbed 'the claims culture'. This is a culture of contract administration that lays a strong emphasis on the planning and management of claims. The principal elements of the analysis are two sets of distinctions. The first comprises economic and occupational orders, referring to two kinds of control that are exercised over the construction process; predicated respectively on economic ownership and occupational competence. The second refers to contrasting attitudes towards relationships and problem solving within these orders: respectively 'distributive' and 'integrative'. The concepts of economic and occupational order entail further sub-categories. The various attitudes associated with these categories and sub-categories are described. They are assessed as to their consequences for change initiatives in the industry

Predicting feed intake using modelling based on feeding behaviour in finishing beef steers.

Current techniques for measuring feed intake in housed cattle are both expensive and time-consuming making them unsuitable for use on commercial farms. Estimates of individual animal intake are required for assessing production efficiency. The aim of this study was to predict individual animal intake using parameters that can be easily obtained on commercial farms including feeding behaviour, liveweight and age. In total, 80 steers were used, and each steer was allocated to one of two diets (40 per diet) which consisted of (g/kg; DM) forage to concentrate ratios of either 494:506 (MIXED) or 80:920 (CONC). Individual daily fresh weight intakes (FWI; kg/day) were recorded for each animal using 32 electronic feeders over a 56-day period, and individual DM intakes (DMI; kg/day) subsequently calculated. Individual feeding behaviour variables were calculated for each day of the measurement period from the electronic feeders and included: total number of visits to the feeder, total time spent at the feeder (TOTFEEDTIME), total time where feed was consumed (TIMEWITHFEED) and average length of time during each visit to the feeder. These feeding behaviour variables were chosen due to ease of obtaining from accelerometers. Four modelling techniques to predict individual animal intake were examined, based on (i) individual animal TOTFEEDTIME relative expressed as a proportion of the dietary group (GRP) and total GRP intake, (ii) multiple linear regression (REG) (iii) random forests (RF) and (iv) support vector regressor (SVR). Each model was used to predict CONC and MIXED diets separately, giving eight prediction models, (i) GRP_CONC, (ii) GRP_MIXED, (iii) REG_CONC, (iv) REG_MIXED, (v) RF_CONC, (vi) RF_MIXED, (vii) SVR_CONC and (viii) SVR_MIXED. Each model was tested on FWI and DMI. Model performance was assessed using repeated measures correlations (R2_RM) to capture the repeated nature of daily intakes compared with standard R2, RMSE and mean absolute error (MAE). REG, RF and SVR models predicted FWI with R2_RM = 0.1–0.36, RMSE = 1.51–2.96 kg and MAE = 1.19–2.49 kg, and DMI with R2_RM = 0.13–0.19, RMSE = 1.15–1.61 kg and MAE = 0.9–1.28 kg. The GRP models predicted FWI with R2_RM = 0.42–0.49, RMSE = 2.76–3.88 kg and MAE = 2.46–3.47 kg, and DMI with R2_RM = 0.32–0.44, RMSE = 0.32–0.44 kg, MAE = 1.55–2.22 kg. Whilst more simplistic GRP models showed higher R2_RM than regression and machine learning techniques, these models had larger errors, likely due to individual feeding patterns not being captured. Although regression and machine learning techniques produced lower errors associated with individual intakes, overall precision of prediction was too low for practical use

Using the forces of hydrodynamic countercurrent chromatography for the study of bacteriophages

Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that target bacteria, with the ability to lyse and kill host bacterial cells. Due to this, they have been of some interest as a therapeutic since their discovery in the early 1900s, but with the recent increase in antibiotic resistance, phages have seen a resurgence in attention. Current methods of isolation and purification of phages can be long and tedious, with caesium chloride concentration gradients the gold standard for purifying a phage fraction. Isolation of novel phages requires centrifugation and ultrafiltration of mixed samples, such as water sources, effluent or faecal samples etc, to prepare phage filtrates for further testing. We propose countercurrent chromatography as a novel and alternative approach to use when studying phages, as a scalable and high-yield method for obtaining phage fractions. However, the full extent of the usefulness and resolution of separation with this technique has not been researched; it requires optimization and ample testing before this can be revealed. Here we present an initial study to determine survivability of two phages, T4 and ϕX174, using only water as a mobile phase in a Spectrum Series 20 HPCCC. Both phages were found to remain active once eluted from the column. Phages do not fully elute from the column and sodium hydroxide is necessary to flush the column between runs to deactivate remaining phages

Pervasive deformation of an oceanic plate and relationship to large >Mw 8 intraplate earthquakes: The northern Wharton Basin, Indian Ocean

Large-magnitude intraplate earthquakes within the ocean basins are not well understood. The Mw 8.6 and Mw 8.2 strike-slip intraplate earthquakes on 11 April 2012, while clearly occurring in the equatorial Indian Ocean diffuse plate boundary zone, are a case in point, with disagreement on the nature of the focal mechanisms and the faults that ruptured. We use bathymetric and seismic reflection data from the rupture area of the earthquakes in the northern Wharton Basin to demonstrate pervasive brittle deformation between the Ninetyeast Ridge and the Sunda subduction zone. In addition to evidence of recent strike-slip deformation along approximately north-south–trending fossil fracture zones, we identify a new type of deformation structure in the Indian Ocean: conjugate Riedel shears limited to the sediment section and oriented oblique to the north-south fracture zones. The Riedel shears developed in the Miocene, at a similar time to the onset of diffuse deformation in the central Indian Ocean. However, left-lateral strike-slip reactivation of existing fracture zones started earlier, in the Paleocene to early Eocene, and compartmentalizes the Wharton Basin. Modeled rupture during the 11 April 2012 intraplate earthquakes is consistent with the location of two reactivated, closely spaced, approximately north-south–trending fracture zones. However, we find no evidence for WNW-ESE–trending faults in the shallow crust, which is at variance with most of the earthquake fault models