STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS ACADEMIC PROGRAMS

Major changes affecting Agricultural Economics include: level and sources of funding, increased accountability, a renewed emphasis on teaching, increasing university and college linkages, an evolving student base, and the continuing adoption of educational technology. Major implications include: broader faculty teaching involvement, agribusiness program development, expanding multidisciplinary majors, Ph.D program modifications for teacher preparation, expanding professional M.S. degrees, graduate program size and specialization reductions, alternative financing of graduate education, and faculty training in teaching methods. Teaching represents a major growth opportunity for Agricultural Economics, but it remains to be seen whether the discipline takes advantage of this opportunity.Agribusiness, Accountability, Funding, Environmental, Undergraduate, Graduate, Multidisciplinary, Portfolio, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

DEPARTMENT VALUES IN THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

Any academic department should place a high value on excellence. Regardless of the area or nature of the department, the age of the faculty, availability of funds, or particular administrator, excellence should be the paramount pursuit of all faculty. It is necessary to distinguish between individual and departmental excellence. Both are important. However, departmental excellence is more than merely the aggregation of program excellence of individual faculty. There is a considerable difference between "a community of scholars" and a "collection of individual scholars."Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Contextual barriers to mobile health technology in African countries: a perspective piece

On a global scale, healthcare practitioners are now beginning to move from traditional desktop-based computer technologies towards mobile computing environments[1]. Consequently, such environments have received immense attention from both academia and industry, in order to explore these promising opportunities, apparent limitations, and implications for both theory and practice[2]. The application of mobile IT within a medical context, referred to as mobile health or mHealth, has revolutionised the delivery of healthcare services as mobile technologies offer the potential of retrieving, modifying and entering patient-related data/information at the point-of-care. As a component of the larger health informatics domain mHealth may be referred as all portable computing devices (e.g. mobile phones, mobile clinical assistants and medical sensors) used in a healthcare context to support the delivery of healthcare services

Magnetic compressibility and ion-temperature-gradient-driven microinstabilities in magnetically confined plasmas

The electromagnetic theory of the strongly driven ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) instability in magnetically confined toroidal plasmas is developed. Stabilizing and destabilizing effects are identified, and a critical $\beta_{e}$ (the ratio of the electron to magnetic pressure) for stabilization of the toroidal branch of the mode is calculated for magnetic equilibria independent of the coordinate along the magnetic field. Its scaling is $\beta_{e}\sim L_{Te}/R,$ where $L_{Te}$ is the characteristic electron temperature gradient length, and $R$ the major radius of the torus. We conjecture that a fast particle population can cause a similar stabilization due to its contribution to the equilibrium pressure gradient. For sheared equilibria, the boundary of marginal stability of the electromagnetic correction to the electrostatic mode is also given. For a general magnetic equilibrium, we find a critical length (for electromagnetic stabilization) of the extent of the unfavourable curvature along the magnetic field. This is a decreasing function of the local magnetic shear

Differential equations for the cuspoid canonical integrals

Differential equations satisfied by the cuspoid canonical integrals I_n(a) are obtained for arbitrary values of n≥2, where n−1 is the codimension of the singularity and a=(ɑ_1,ɑ_2,...,ɑ_(n−1)). A set of linear coupled ordinary differential equations is derived for each step in the sequence I_n(0,0,...,0,0) →I_n(0,0,...,0,ɑ_(n−1)) →I_n(0,0,...,ɑ_(n−2),ɑ_(n−1)) →...→I_n(0,ɑ_2,...,ɑ_(n−2),ɑ_(n−1)) →I_n(ɑ_1,ɑ_2,...,ɑ_n−2,ɑ_(n−1)). The initial conditions for a given step are obtained from the solutions of the previous step. As examples of the formalism, the differential equations for n=2 (fold), n=3 (cusp), n=4 (swallowtail), and n=5 (butterfly) are given explicitly. In addition, iterative and algebraic methods are described for determining the parameters a that are required in the uniform asymptotic cuspoid approximation for oscillating integrals with many coalescing saddle points. The results in this paper unify and generalize previous researches on the properties of the cuspoid canonical integrals and their partial derivatives

What resources are available in greater Portland, Maine for the enrichment of the junior high school curriculum?,

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University PLEASE NOTE: pages 102, 112, 116, and 143 are missing from the physical thesis