Standing up for teaching: the 'crime' of striving for excellence

In recent years a proliferation of local and national teaching awards has occurred in many countries. The new language of excellence has led institutions and policy-makers to embrace teaching awards. Although these award schemes harbour competing and coexisting drivers and appeal to different stakeholders for different reasons, they have helped to raise the profile and importance of teaching in higher education. At the same time, the idea of recognising individuals as excellent teachers remains distasteful to many educators. Awards remain controversial as they compete with traditional ideals of egalitarianism which dominate the education profession. In the backdrop of lingering controversy, this short opinion paper reflects on the costs of standing up for teaching after applying for and successfully winning a National Award for Sustained Excellence in Teaching. Using an acronym it describes the CRIME of excellence and makes the case for teaching awards criteria to recognise critical forms of scholarship. While definitions of excellence will always be contestable it argues that teaching awards are not mutually exclusive from an individual ethos of striving for continuous improvement. The paper concludes that the education profession does a great disservice to the status of teaching if we shame and snipe away at those judged by peers as our best

Conditional Demand System for Beverages

Estimates of a conditional demand system for twelve beverages, based on the Rotterdam model subject to a full, first-order autoregressive process, are discussed. Impacts of beverage prices, total beverage expenditures and promotions on beverage quantities demanded are provided. The results indicate that all beverages were normal goods; the majority had price elastic demands; most had a relatively large own-promotion effect; and a number of significant cross-promotional effects exist, indicating a relatively high level of competition for market share among the beverages studied.conditional demand system, beverages, Agribusiness,

Fish Habitat Utilization Patterns and Evaluation of the Efficacy of Marine Protected Areas in Hawaii: Integration of NOAA Digital Benthic Habitat Mapping and Coral Reef Ecological Studies

Over the past four decades, the state of Hawaii has developed a system of eleven Marine Life Conservation Districts (MLCDs) to conserve and replenish marine resources around the state. Initially established to provide opportunities for public interaction with the marine environment, these MLCDs vary in size, habitat quality, and management regimes, providing an excellent opportunity to test hypotheses concerning marine protected area (MPA) design and function using multiple discreet sampling units. NOAA/NOS/NCCOS/Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment’s Biogeography Team developed digital benthic habitat maps for all MLCD and adjacent habitats. These maps were used to evaluate the efficacy of existing MLCDs for biodiversity conservation and fisheries replenishment, using a spatially explicit stratified random sampling design. Coupling the distribution of habitats and species habitat affinities using GIS technology elucidates species habitat utilization patterns at scales that are commensurate with ecosystem processes and is useful in defining essential fish habitat and biologically relevant boundaries for MPAs. Analysis of benthic cover validated the a priori classification of habitat types and provided justification for using these habitat strata to conduct stratified random sampling and analyses of fish habitat utilization patterns. Results showed that the abundance and distribution of species and assemblages exhibited strong correlations with habitat types. Fish assemblages in the colonized and uncolonized hardbottom habitats were found to be most similar among all of the habitat types. Much of the macroalgae habitat sampled was macroalgae growing on hard substrate, and as a result showed similarities with the other hardbottom assemblages. The fish assemblages in the sand habitats were highly variable but distinct from the other habitat types. Management regime also played an important role in the abundance and distribution of fish assemblages. MLCDs had higher values for most fish assemblage characteristics (e.g. biomass, size, diversity) compared with adjacent fished areas and Fisheries Management Areas (FMAs) across all habitat types. In addition, apex predators and other targeted resources species were more abundant and larger in the MLCDs, illustrating the effectiveness of these closures in conserving fish populations. Habitat complexity, quality, size and level of protection from fishing were important determinates of MLCD effectiveness with respect to their associated fish assemblages. (PDF contains 217 pages

Production and Price Effects of New Diseases and Other Challenges Confronting the Processed Orange Industry

Sao Paulo and Florida are the primary producers of orange juice. Both regions face production challenges. In this paper, a model of the world orange juice market is used to analyze the effect of citrus greening and high sugarcane prices on the production and price of orange juice.Crop Production/Industries, Demand and Price Analysis, Production Economics,

D\'evissage for periodic cyclic homology of complete intersections

We prove that the d\'evissage property holds for periodic cyclic homology for a local complete intersection embedding into a smooth scheme. As a consequence, we show that the complexified topological Chern character maps for the bounded derived category and singularity category of a local complete intersection are isomorphisms, proving new cases of the Lattice Conjecture in noncommutative Hodge theory.Comment: 14 page

Idempotent completions of equivariant matrix factorization categories

We prove that equivariant matrix factorization categories associated to henselian local hypersurface rings are idempotent complete, generalizing a result of Dyckerhoff in the non-equivariant case.Comment: 6 pages. To appear in the Journal of Algebr