The Privilege of Healthy Eating: A Qualitative Study Exploring the Local Food Choices of Low-Income Families from Appalachia

Using qualitative semi-structured interviews, 15 low-income women of different ages were asked to discuss their perceptions of healthy eating, local farmers’ markets, as well as their visitation of farmers’ markets. The participants were also asked to share what features of farmers’ markets they found appealing. The results showed that most of the participants had either a deep or moderate understanding of what it means to eat healthy. However, many of them also believed they could improve their own patterns of eating. The data also showed that the low-income women who took part in the study had positive attitudes overall toward local farmers’ markets, despite rather low levels of visitation (only 5 participants had visited farmers’ market at least once and only one of them visited farmers’ market on a regular basis). Lastly, participants discussed constraints that prevented them from visiting farmers’ markets more often and provided suggestions for possible facilitators to increase the frequency of their use of farmers’ markets

Structural Change, Intersectoral Linkages And Hollowing-Out in the Taiwanese Economy, 1976-1994

This paper analyses structural change in the Taiwanese economy over the period 1976-1994 using a series of input-output tables. Unlike other studies of structural change, this analysis investigates the evolving internal complexity of intersectoral interdependencies using Key Sector Analysis which gauges the strength of forward and backward linkages, and the recently developed method of Minimal Flow Analysis, which gauges the degree of connectivity of the system. This analysis indicates that there has been a "hollowing-out" of the Taiwanese economy as the density of intersectoral linkages has declined since the early 1980s, similar to what has been observed of the US and Japanese economies at a much later stage of their development.

From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo

This paper’s research question concerns how the ecological creativity of the Volcanic Plains region of Western Victoria may be transformed into an ecology of well-being of benefit to the local community. Drawing on the philosophies of Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, we argue that community well-being results from the richness of connections and relationships made within a place. The case study for our investigation is ‘Flows & Catchments’, which is an ongoing, collaborative, creative-arts research project auspiced by Deakin University. Its modus operandi is Practice-Based Research (PBR), and its aim is to promote community well-being in Western Victoria. However, while the whole metier of the creative arts is to make the novel connections and relationships that should bring about community well-being, the various artists of ‘Flows & Catchments’ have proved slightly reluctant to make connections outside of their individual or small-group sub-projects. In this way, ecological creativity has not reached its full potential as an ecology of well-being because the rich connections and relationships essential to this well-being have not yet been fully realised. This paper explores the potential of using the NVivo qualitative analysis software package to bring together the creative-arts sub-projects of ‘Flows & Catchments’, as a way of fostering an ecology of well-being out of a currently dispersed ecological creativity

Mentoring: A Tool for Career Development in Academic Libraries

Every organisation have new intake of junior staff and senior staff to achieve a common organizational goals. The new intakes need to be shown what it takes to have a successful career. The senior (mentors), need to assist, direct and counsel the junior (mentees) working under them to grow and advance in the job. Mentoring is a tool in career development and advancement of library staff it gives individuals the opportunity to be mentored in order to develop their career and makes them feel like they are valued by the organization. This makes the mentees to be more involved in the job for effective and efficient performance .This study examines the roles of mentors and mentees, on how mentors promote and improve mentees job performance for career development and advancement. The study also focus on the approaches to mentorship. In conclusion mentors need the right environment to carry on their role of mentoring to the mentees on both research writing and their job duties to achieve the desired goals of the library.Mentoring increases confidence and motivation of librarians and help in the career development advancement within the library. It was recommended among others that mentoring tools should be well defined fit in handling mentees for attainment of optimal educational and objectives aimed at learner,s behavioural change .Mentoring programme that are very specific to the needs especially to the career development needs should be put in place

Sustained Attention, Not Procedural Learning, is a Predictor of Reading, Language and Arithmetic Skills in Children

The procedural deficit hypothesis claims that impaired procedural learning is a causal risk factor for developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder. We investigated the relationships between measures of basic cognitive processes (declarative learning, procedural learning and attention) and measures of attainment (reading, grammar and arithmetic) in a large sample of 7- and 8-year-old children. A latent variable path model showed that verbal declarative memory skills predicted attainment but were not significantly related to attention. Procedural learning was only weakly related to measures of attainment and attention assessed during the procedural learning task accounted entirely for its relationship with measures of attainment. Our results challenge the procedural deficit hypothesis of reading and language disorders, but suggest that attentional skills (rather than procedural learning ability per se) may be an important predictor of reading, arithmetic and grammatical skills

Effect of Salt Concentration on Electrochemical Detection of DNA

Electrochemical approaches for biological sensing offer the potential advantages of facile sample preparation, fast response times, ease of parallel and multiplexed measurements, and the possibility of miniaturization (of sample sizes, electrodes, and associated electronics). All of these factors contribute towards the feasibility of electrochemical methods in biological sensing and analysis. This potential has already been achieved with the commercialization of blood glucose meters, which often rely on an electrochemical transduction mechanism. We have previously demonstrated the ability to electrochemically detect and differentiate complementary and mismatched DNA using our method of melting DNA duplexes at electrified gold surfaces, i.e. e-melting. Recently, we have optimized a new approach for preparing our DNA modified gold electrodes, and we are now able to precisely control the DNA surface coverage. In this work, we are using our improved methodology to explore the effects of electrolyte concentration (NaCl) on the electrochemical signal and the e-melting behavior. More specifically, our approach assumes a linear relationship between the amount of duplex DNA and the measured electrochemical signal. Here, we show that the concentration of salt in our buffer effects both the signal and the melting behavior. An understanding of these results are necessary for accurate interpretation of e-melting data

PASSING IT ON: DISSEMINATING AND EVALUATING THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE MUSIC EDUCATION PROGRAM

ABSTRACT This paper reports on an innovatory approach to music education and its means of dissemination The Music Education Program revolves around shared, altruistic music making through the Music Outreach Principle. Central to this Principle is the idea of individual free choice requiring constant questioning and monitoring of participants engagement and their opinions about their engagement. Thus the Music Outreach Principle provides an in-built, on-going facility for evaluation that is immediately of practical value. The paper describes how this continuous feedback has developed into part of the practice of the MEP as well as its practical and theoretical dissemination through a formalisation of its evaluative structure. Three levels of evaluation are embedded in the Program: first, on-going formative evaluation has a utilitarian function in providing immediate change and/or development that affects participants and is often created by them; secondly, collected data contributes to a form of illuminative evaluation that refines and disseminates practice and theory; thirdly, the widening pool of largescale survey information and deeper critical incidents and case studies contributes to the evaluation of the impact of the program across its broad range of participants. From this evaluation model, ideas can be developed that have a wider application in other music making situations

Using PHREEQC to model cement hydration

This paper presents the steps involved in undertaking an analysis of hydrating cements with different levels of limestone powder using the PHREEQC geochemical software with the Notepad++ editor. The analysis begins with determining which solid phases are thermodynamically predicted to precipitate and form using the oxide compositions of commercial CEM I and CEM II/A-L cements. When the phases are known, PHREEQC is programmed to provide predictions of the phase dissolution and phase assemblage over time (here, 1000 days of hydration) as well as the pore solution chemistry. Thermodynamics has been successfully applied to the field of cement hydration to predict phase assemblages and pore solution changes. With an appropriate cement-based thermodynamic database, PHREEQC has the potential to be a very powerful tool in the ongoing development of sustainable cements into the future. The paper also discusses the ongoing work to couple PHREEQC with the HYDCEM model to provide users with an all-in-one platform to undertake a complete simulation of cement hydration

Anomalous structure in the single particle spectrum of the fractional quantum Hall effect

The two-dimensional electron system (2DES) is a unique laboratory for the physics of interacting particles. Application of a large magnetic field produces massively degenerate quantum levels known as Landau levels. Within a Landau level the kinetic energy of the electrons is suppressed, and electron-electron interactions set the only energy scale. Coulomb interactions break the degeneracy of the Landau levels and can cause the electrons to order into complex ground states. In the high energy single particle spectrum of this system, we observe salient and unexpected structure that extends across a wide range of Landau level filling fractions. The structure appears only when the 2DES is cooled to very low temperature, indicating that it arises from delicate ground state correlations. We characterize this structure by its evolution with changing electron density and applied magnetic field. We present two possible models for understanding these observations. Some of the energies of the features agree qualitatively with what might be expected for composite Fermions, which have proven effective for interpreting other experiments in this regime. At the same time, a simple model with electrons localized on ordered lattice sites also generates structure similar to those observed in the experiment. Neither of these models alone is sufficient to explain the observations across the entire range of densities measured. The discovery of this unexpected prominent structure in the single particle spectrum of an otherwise thoroughly studied system suggests that there exist core features of the 2DES that have yet to be understood.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure