Mystery or Magic--A Grants Review Process that Works

For Extension professionals involved with Extension or community funded grant programs, the grant review process can be mysterious or open and informative. An open review process that includes interviewing grant applicants in a collegial setting can better position reviewers to make decisions and provide a learning experience for the applicants. It takes the mystery out of the process and provides grant applicants with valuable insights to assist them in future applications. This article outlines a grants review process that both reviewers and applicants have found useful

Citizen participation in news

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply

LIMS: Livestock Information Management System - Introductory guide

This introductory guide has been written to facilitate the use of the LIMS (Livestock Information Management System) package, details of which are given in the system documentation manual. The LIMS system was based on the experience gained from IDEAS (ILCA's Data Entry and Analysis System) a software package designed for the management of animal performance data. This guide takes the reader through the entire features of the LIMS software using sample data sets. The user is most likely to gain if the manual is read while performing the suggested tasks

Linear resolutions of powers and products

The goal of this paper is to present examples of families of homogeneous ideals in the polynomial ring over a field that satisfy the following condition: every product of ideals of the family has a linear free resolution. As we will see, this condition is strongly correlated to good primary decompositions of the products and good homological and arithmetical properties of the associated multi-Rees algebras. The following families will be discussed in detail: polymatroidal ideals, ideals generated by linear forms and Borel fixed ideals of maximal minors. The main tools are Gr\"obner bases and Sagbi deformation