Orbital Decay: Space Junk and the Environmental History of Earth\u27s Planetary Borderlands

What is space junk, and who defines pollution in an environment seemingly devoid of nature as we know it? Beginning with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, spacefaring nations transformed the region between the upper atmosphere and the moon from a wilderness into a landscape. Like any terrestrial industry, the construction of a satellite infrasctructure in orbit also yielded a system of byproducts—human-made waste colloquially known as “space junk.” Although remote and largely invisible to the majority of space technology users, the orbital environment nonetheless played a critical role in Cold War geopolitics. Contrary to current space policy literature that portrays space junk and awareness of space junk as recent phenomena, communities around the world were both aware and concerned about space junk from the very first moments of the Space Age. By tracing convergent changes in the orbital landscape and in the political landscape below during the Cold War, concurrent with the rise of mainstream environmentalism, this dissertation reveals the roots of an international understanding of the borderlands between Earth and outer space as a natural environment at risk. Focusing on highly mobile, unruly space junk artifacts illuminates the many ways that humankind mutually shaped and was shaped by the global ecosystem surrounding our planet during the Cold War. Situated at the intersection of the histories of science, technology, and the environment, this dissertation illustrates how space junk in orbit and falling to Earth brought geographically and politically disparate states into dangerous proximity during the Cold War. An international consciousness of outer space as a fragile environment emerged early in the Space Age, and influenced the negotiation of new modes of international scientific and environmental governance in near-Earth space

Participatory visual methods: exploring young people’s identities, hopes and feelings

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children’s and young people’s everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training contexts in England are presented through the reflection of two ethnographies’ that encouraged the use of participatory visual techniques to facilitate the gathering of data. Participatory visual approaches capture meaningful child-centred and child-generated perspectives of their everyday lives in situ (Oh 2012). The participatory visual method is a powerful instrument within the plethora of methods available to the ethnographer. By offering reflexive accounts of doing ethnography in an unobtrusive and child respectful way the power of ethnography is revealed via its versatility

Responding to Quiet Students: Implications for Educators and Advisors

Quiet students seldom speak in class and rarely approach the instructor. Educators may find such students perplexing because it is difficult to discern if they are fostering such students’ learning. This paper compares and contrasts introversion and shyness, explores ways in which quiet tendencies influence students’ learning, and lastly, presents implications for teachers and advisors

Semantic Effects In Word Recognition And Picture Naming Are Moderated By Body-Object Interaction

A potential embodied influence in the semantic effects of Danger and Usefulness is investigated using Body-Object Interaction (BOI). Lexical decision times are influenced by ratings of Danger and Usefulness. In a frequently-found interaction, thought to be produced by activated approach-withdraw motor responses, increasing Danger ratings produce faster responses for items with lower Usefulness ratings while producing slower responses for items with higher Usefulness ratings. BOI is used to test the embodied explanation of this interaction. The same 102 words were presented in two lexical decision experiments. In both auditory and visual lexical decision, the effects of Danger and Usefulness were found to be larger for items with lower BOI ratings. BOI moderates Danger and Usefulness effects in both auditory and visual lexical decision, in a way that suggests BOI is either the stronger or the temporally earlier effect. In addition, a picture naming study was done using 101 items, looking at the same relationship. Picture naming results showed a stronger effect of Danger and Usefulness in items that are higher BOI rating suggesting there may be differences based on task modality or that the pattern may reflect response oscillation

Reaching Florida Urban Opinion Leaders: Uncovering Preferred Communication Channels

Opinion leadership is a common concept in communication theory and research. This study examines the communication channels and sources of information that opinion leaders access for general information and specifically for agricultural information. Through a mailed survey opinion leaders’ pre-existing knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions toward agriculture were measured as well as their concern with several agricultural issues. This information was used to construct a foundation for an agricultural campaign in the state of Florida. By understanding the important issues that could make effective agricultural messages and the means for disseminating those messages, agricultural communicators can more successfully implement public relations campaigns to garner support for the agricultural industry. Survey findings suggest that opinion leaders do not have high knowledge levels about agriculture; however, they feel it is an important industry and have an interest in knowing more. The results indicate that an agricultural campaign to reach Florida urban opinion leaders should consist of a message dealing with agriculture’s role in water quality and the primary means of message dissemination should be through print media, primarily newspapers

The Effects of Pre-Movement on Large Building Evacuations

Evacuation times for buildings with a range of heights and occupant loads were generated by a computer simulation algorithm, assuming simultaneous start. Additional evacuation times were generated for the same buildings with pre-movement times assigned to building occupants. Pre-movement times were assigned based on uniform and gamma distributions. Building evacuation times with pre-movement were compared to those without, to determine the quantitative effects of pre-movement. Using regression analysis, equations were generated to predict the effects of pre-movement for given building heights and occupant loads. Regression equations were shown to reasonably predict the effects of pre-movement for the building cases used for the regression analysis. Additional simulations were performed with and without pre-movement for buildings with alternative heights and occupant loads. The regression function was applied to these additional simulations, and found to predict the effects of pre-movement in these building cases with some accuracy

Measuring health outcomes, experience of care and cost of healthcare in student-led healthcare services: a literature review

Introduction: In student-led healthcare services, health students take responsibility for the management and delivery of health services as part of clinical training. Like all healthcare services, student-led healthcare services need to be evaluated to ensure they provide high quality, safe and cost-effective services. The aim of this literature review was to understand how student-led healthcare services have been evaluated to date, and to assess alignment of previous evaluations with the Triple Aim framework. The Triple Aim is a conceptual framework, offering a systematic approach to evaluating healthcare services that may be appropriate for evaluation of student-led services. Methods: Electronic databases were searched for articles describing a student-led healthcare service and were screened for studies that evaluated the impact of a student-led healthcare service on patient outcomes. Results: Fourteen of 211 identified articles met the inclusion criteria. All 14 studies met the Triple Aim measurement principles of “a defined population,” “gather data over time” and “distinguish between measures” while only eight of the 14 studies achieved “comparison data”. All 14 studies measured at least one or more of the Triple Aim dimensions. Discussion/Conclusion: There was little consistency across the evaluations of student-led healthcare services, limiting the extent to which the benefits of student-led healthcare services can be shown to be a valuable resource to the healthcare system. Further investigation is required to determine a suitable evaluation framework for student-led healthcare services

Increasing the effective participation of women in food and nutrition security in Africa

What can be done to increase the effective participation of women in food and nutrition security in Africa? This brief advocates a two-pronged approach. First, eradicate discrimination against women, and second, promote catch-up by implementing more active measures in key areas such as control over land, water, and other assets, and investment in education, health, child care, and other services for women. Since the set of actions that are most appropriate in a given situation will be context specific, we present examples of approaches that have worked in Sub-Saharan Africa." from TextNutrition ,Property rights ,Child care ,Education ,Women ,Gender ,

Ethics, Education and Ethnography; working with young people and children

Ethnography is one of the most responsive research methodologies and research products within educational research; it is also one of the most contested. There are continual debates about how educational ethnographies should be conducted and presented (Walford, 2008). Not only does ethnography incorporate a wide array of methodologies, but educational ethnographers themselves are situated in the practical domain of the everyday life where the course of predicting ethically sound research practise is to some degree challenging. The ethnographer is forced to respond to the process itself rather than being situationally forged prior to its conduct (Dennis, 2010). This paper attempts to address the dearth in knowledge regarding the exploration of ethics and reflexive practise by exploring the work of two education ethnographers’ work with children and young people. This paper argues that education ethnographers need to be reflexive in their consideration of ethics, especially when taking into account the variable fields of investigation, the close proximity to children and young people over a longitudinal basis and the potential use of a plethora of research methodologies. Ethnography can be varied and unpredictable and as such have key unprecedented consequences for the use of ethics when working with children and young people

Characteristics and causes of severe poverty and hunger:

Poverty reduction, Poverty, Hunger, Landlessness in rural areas, Poverty dynamics, Measuring severe poverty, Characteristics of poor and hungry, Women,