Literacy practices of primary education children in Andalusia (Spain): a family-based perspective

Primary school children develop literacy practices in various domains and situations in everyday life. This study focused on the analysis of literacy practices of children aged 8–12 years from the perspec- tive of their families. 1,843 families participated in the non-experimental explanatory study. The children in these families speak Spanish as a first language and are schooled in this language. The instrument used was a self-report questionnaire about children’s home-literacy practices. The data obtained were analysed using categorical principal components analysis (CATPCA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show the complex relationship between literacy practices developed by children in the domains of home and school and the limited development of a literacy-promoting ‘third space’. In conclusion, the families in our study had limited awareness of their role as literacy- promoting agents and thought of literacy learning as restricted to formal or academic spaces

Dynamical resonant structures in meteoroid stream orbits

ABSTRACT Herein we use the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) data set to search for evidence of a resonant swarm in the Taurid meteoroid stream at the 7:2 Jovian resonance. We use a numerical method to estimate the reduction in radar orbit measurement uncertainty required to detect this feature in a data set. This is highly dependent on the proportion of observed particles that are members of the resonant swarm. However, we find that a meteor radar with uncertainties a factor of 10 lower than those of the current CMOR will be sufficient for detection to be possible, if the meteor shower consists of more than 5 per cent resonant particles (considered likely given the results of visual meteor studies). Such an improvement will require accurate removal of deceleration errors from pre-atmospheric meteor velocities, and improvement to the robustness of echo inflection point identification algorithms and interferometric measurements

Affinities and Beyond! Developing Ways of Seeing in Online Spaces

This article presents an insider view of an online community of adults involved in sharing digital photography through a host website, Flickr. It describes how reciprocal teaching and learning partnerships in a dynamic multimodal environment are achieved through the creation of a ‘Third Space’ or ‘Affinity Space’, where ‘Funds of Knowledge’ are shared and processed in such a way that new meanings and discourses are generated. It is argued that this process is evidence of valuable learning and of the deepening of global understandings within the local space of Flickr. The new understandings are at least partly identifiable on the Flickr space, through the co-constructed ‘folksonomy’ or ‘online taxonomy’ of ways of looking at the world. Further, the article provides evidence for broadening existing definitions of literacy, at a time when the visual mode increasingly works interactively with verbal cues and explanations

Investigating pupils’ interactions around digital texts: a spatial perspective on the ‘classroom-ness’ of digital literacy practices in schools

This paper complements debates around use of new technologies and literacy in education by proposing a focus on “classroom-ness.” It highlights the significance of incidental, everyday and ephemeral practices associated with classroom technology-use. Using examples from a study of primary pupils’ interactions around digital texts, it argues that we must acknowledge the distinctiveness of technology-use in classroom contexts but also see the spaces associated with those contexts as continually constructed, relational and heterogeneous. This helps us look beyond binary distinctions – between in/out of school and global/local practices, on/off-screen and on/offline activity, material/virtual contexts and official/unofficial discourses – to recognise the complex and nuanced ways that children make meaning around new technologies. It is proposed that this theoretical lens – in recognising the complexity of classroom-ness – can help us better understand the barriers and opportunities associated with effective integration of new technologies in educational contexts

Report of the IAU/IAG Joint Working Group on Theory of Earth Rotation and Validation

This report focuses on some selected scientific outcomes of the activities developed by the IAU/IAG Joint Working Group on Theory of Earth rotation and validation along the term 2015–2019. It is based on its end-of-term report to the IAG Commission 3 published in the Travaux de l’IAG 2015–2019, which in its turn updates previous reports to the IAG and IAU, particularly the triennial report 2015–2018 to the IAU Commission A2, and the medium term report to the IAG Commission 3 (2015–2017). The content of the report has served as a basis for the IAG General Assembly to adopt Resolution 5 on Improvement of Earth rotation theories and models.JMF, AE, and JG were partially supported by Spanish Project AYA2016-79775-P (AEI/FEDER, UE). The work of RSG described in this paper was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Support for that work was provided by the Earth Surface and Interior Focus Area of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate

Highgate Cemetery heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space

Highgate Cemetery is nominally presented as a heterotopia, constructed, and theorized through the articulation of three “spaces.” First, it is configured as a public space which organizes the individual and the social, where the management of death creates a relationship between external space and its internal conceptualization. This reveals, enables, and disturbs the sociocultural and political imagination which helps order and disrupt thinking. Second, it is conceived as a creative space where cemetery texts emplace and materialize memory that mirrors the cultural capital of those interred, part of an urban aesthetic which articulates the distinction of the metropolitan elite. Last, it is a celebritized counterpublic space that expresses dissent, testimony to those who have actively imagined a better world, which is epitomized by the Marx Memorial. Representation of the cemetery is ambiguous as it is recuperated and framed by the living with the three different “spaces” offering heterotopic alliances

Biochar standardization and legislation harmonization

It is a relatively new concept to use biochar as soil amendment and for climate change mitigation. For this reason, the national and supranational legislation in the EU is not yet adequately prepared to regulate both the production and the application of biochar. Driven by this “regulatory gap”, voluntary biochar quality standards have been formed in Europe with the European Biochar Certificate, in the UK with the Biochar Quality Mandate and in the USA with the IBI Standard which is intended to be used internationally. In parallel to this, biochar producers and biochar users in a number of EU countries were partly successful in fitting the new biochar product into the existing national legislation for fertilisers, soil improvers and composts. The intended revision of the EC Regulation 2003/2003 on fertilisers offers the opportunity to regulate the use of biochar at the EU level. This publication summarizes the efforts on biochar standardization which have been carried out by voluntary products standards and illustrates existing legislation in EU member states, which apply to the production and use of biochar. It describes existing and planned EU regulations, which impact biochar applications and it develops recommendations on the harmonization of biochar legislation in the EU.  First published online: 24 Jan 201

From a certain point of view: sensory phenomenological envisionings of running space and place

The precise ways in which we go about the mundane, repetitive, social actions of everyday life are central concerns of ethnographers and theorists working within the traditions of the sociology of the mundane and sociological phenomenology. In this article, we utilize insights derived from sociological phenomenology and the newly developing field of sensory sociology to investigate a particular, mundane, and embodied social practice, that of training for distance running in specific places: our favored running routes. For, despite a growing body of ethnographic studies of particular sports, little analytic attention has been devoted to the actual, concrete practices of “doing” or “producing” sporting activity, particularly from a sensory ethnographic perspective. Drawing upon data from a 2-year joint autoethnographic research project, here we explore the visual dimension, focusing upon three key themes in relation to our runners’ visualization of, respectively, (1) hazardous places, (2) performance places, (3) the time–space–place nexus

Soil methane sink capacity response to a long-term wildfire chronosequence in Northern Sweden

Boreal forests occupy nearly one fifth of the terrestrial land surface and are recognised as globally important regulators of carbon (C) cycling and greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon sequestration processes in these forests include assimilation of CO2 into biomass and subsequently into soil organic matter, and soil microbial oxidation of methane (CH4). In this study we explored how ecosystem retrogression, which drives vegetation change, regulates the important process of soil CH4 oxidation in boreal forests. We measured soil CH4 oxidation processes on a group of 30 forested islands in northern Sweden differing greatly in fire history, and collectively representing a retrogressive chronosequence, spanning 5000 years. Across these islands the build-up of soil organic matter was observed to increase with time since fire disturbance, with a significant correlation between greater humus depth and increased net soil CH4 oxidation rates. We suggest that this increase in net CH4 oxidation rates, in the absence of disturbance, results as deeper humus stores accumulate and provide niches for methanotrophs to thrive. By using this gradient we have discovered important regulatory controls on the stability of soil CH4 oxidation processes that could not have not been explored through shorter-term experiments. Our findings indicate that in the absence of human interventions such as fire suppression, and with increased wildfire frequency, the globally important boreal CH4 sink could be diminished