Creating assessments that conform to W3C accessibility guidelines

As Computerised Assessment becomes more widely accepted, they are also being more commonly applied within higher stakes testing, for summative assessment and examinations. In these situations, it is vitally important that authors and administrators are rigorous in making sure that their assessments meet the accessibility guidelines that have already been specified by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This paper outlines these guidelines and considers the steps that authors can make to achieve these goals. On a practical note, it also demonstrates how both authors and administrators can confirm to those guidelines using Questionmark Perception

Public and private benefits from Shelterbelt Centre activities

Non-Peer ReviewedThe Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada – Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (AAFC–PFRA) Shelterbelt Centre was established at Indian Head in 1901 and since then has been a major source of tree seedlings to prairie farmers and to other eligible interested agencies. The Centre has distributed over 576 million tree seedlings. On farms, these shelterbelts have become an important resource, both to the producers as well as to the society as a whole. A survey of producers attending the Shelterbelt Centre Field Day in 2003, indicated that shelterbelts lived up to their expectations and that both society and producers derive benefits from them. They affect the producers and society in a variety of ways – some directly and others indirectly through ecosystem functions. Based on the study, this value to the society (other than land owners) of the shelterbelts established since 1981 could exceed $150 million, and can even be as high as$940 million. Major benefits accrue from carbon sequestration, wildlife habitats and related activities, and from energy conservation. These benefits, although apparent to most of us, are difficult to estimate precisely, and require better data and an interdisciplinary approach

Regional-scale brine migration along vertical pathways due to CO2 injection - Part 1: The participatory modeling approach

Saltwater intrusion into potential drinking water aquifers due to the injection of CO₂ into deep saline aquifers is one of the potential hazards associated with the geological storage of CO₂. Thus, in a site selection process, models for predicting the fate of the displaced brine are required, for example, for a risk assessment or the optimization of pressure management concepts. From the very beginning, this research on brine migration aimed at involving expert and stakeholder knowledge and assessment in simulating the impacts of injecting CO₂ into deep saline aquifers by means of a participatory modeling process. The involvement exercise made use of two approaches. First, guideline-based interviews were carried out, aiming at eliciting expert and stakeholder knowledge and assessments of geological structures and mechanisms affecting CO₂-induced brine migration. Second, a stakeholder workshop including the World Café format yielded evaluations and judgments of the numerical modeling approach, scenario selection, and preliminary simulation results. The participatory modeling approach gained several results covering brine migration in general, the geological model sketch, scenario development, and the review of the preliminary simulation results. These results were included in revised versions of both the geological model and the numerical model, helping to improve the analysis of regional-scale brine migration along vertical pathways due to CO₂ injection

Population Structure of Mountain Plover as Determined Us ing Nuclear Microsatellites

Moountainuntai Plloverove (Charadrius montanus) is a specie s of conservation concern that has experienced significant habitat loss an d population decline. This, couple d with previous observation s that the species exhibits strong fidelity to breeding grounds, suggests that breeding population s may be genetically differentiate d an d possibly suffer from reduced genetic variation associate d with relatively small population sizes. A previous genetic study comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences of plover s in Montana and Colorado found high level s of genetic variability and very little genetic differentiation among breeding locale s. Because mitochondrial DNA can track only female movement s an d is sample d from only one locus, we used 14 nu clear micro satellite lo ci to further examine population structure, there by bot h documenting male movement s and providing a more comprehensive vie w of genetic structure. We found no significant differences among breeding population s. The most likely number of unique genetic clusters was one, suggesting that all sampled breeding locations comprise a single relatively homogenous gene pool. Level s of genetic diversity was similar across all four population s, with the greatest diver sit y in the southern plains population. We speculate that the lack of detectable genetic differentiation among population s is due to sufficient gene flow among breeding population s that might en sue if at least some pair bon ds are formed when birds form mixed flocks on wintering grounds. This study corroborate s and expands upon the findings of a previous mitochondrial DNA study providing a more comprehensive vie w of Mountain Plover population structure

Formal matched asymptotics for degenerate Ricci flow neckpinches

Gu and Zhu have shown that Type-II Ricci flow singularities develop from nongeneric rotationally symmetric Riemannian metrics on $S^m$, for all $m\geq 3$. In this paper, we describe and provide plausibility arguments for a detailed asymptotic profile and rate of curvature blow-up that we predict such solutions exhibit