Distribution, Abundance, and Biological Characteristics of Groundfish off the Coast of Washington, Oregon, and California, 1977-1986

We compare results of bottom trawl surveys off Washington, Oregon, and California in 1977, 1980, 1983, and 1986 to discern trends in population abundance, distribution, and biology. Catch per unit of effort, area-swept biomass estimates, and age and length compositions for 12 commercially important west coast groundfishes are presented to illustrate trends over the lO-year period. We discuss the precision, accuracy, and statistical significance of observed trends in abundance estimates. The influence of water temperature on the distribution of groundfishes is also briefly examined. Abundance estimates of canary rockfish, Sebastes pinniger, and yellowtail rockfish, S. Jlavidus, declined during the study period; greater declines were observed in Pacific ocean perch, S. alutus, lingcod, Ophiodon elongatus, and arrowtooth flounder, Atheresthes stomias. Biomass estimates of Pacific hake, Merluccius productus, and English, rex, and Dover soles (Pleuronectes vetulus, Errex zachirus, and Microstomus pacificus) increased, while bocaccio, S. paucispinis, and chilipepper, S. goodei, were stable. Sablefish, Anoplopoma fimbria, biomass estimates increased markedly from 1977 to 1980 and declined moderately thereafter. Precision was lowest for rockfishes, lingcod, and sablefish; it was highest for flatfishes because they were uniformly distributed. The accuracy of survey estimates could be gauged only for yellowtail and canary rockfish and sablefish. All fishery-based analyses produced much larger estimates of abundance than bottom trawl surveys-indicative of the true catchability of survey trawls. Population trends from all analyses compared well except in canary rockfish, the species that presents the greatest challenge to obtaining reasonable precision and one that casts doubts on the usefulness of bottom trawl surveys for estimating its abundance. (PDF file contains 78 pages.

Investigating the Magnitude and Range of the Urban Heat Island within Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Cities experience UHIs due to the thermal properties (albedo, thermal emittance, radiative flux, and heat capacity) of human-made substances and urban geometry. This study investigated the existence of an urban heat island (UHI) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The goal of this project was to assess whether a small-scale city like Gettysburg demonstrates an UHI effect and, if present, the extent and magnitude of the UHI. We hypothesized that (1) temperatures within the city are significantly higher than the surrounding area, (2) the magnitude of the UHI will diminish as distance from the city center increases, and (3) the UHI will not extend further than 0.5 miles outside the city center. Air temperatures were collected using digital thermometers over four weeks along two different transects that each extended one mile from the center square of Gettysburg. Our results show that Gettysburg, despite its small size, has an UHI. A linear regression model shows that there is a strong correlation between temperature and distance from the center square. The magnitude of the UHI lessens with increasing distance from the center of town. The first two hypotheses were supported while the hypothesis that the UHI will be localized was not. Statistically analyses show that the temperature change remains significant past 0.5 miles. The results of this study demonstrate that even a small-scale city like Gettysburg create a UHI

Technologies in rational self-management: Interventions in the ‘responsibilisation’ of school governors

A key driver of market education experimentation in England since the 1980s has been a focus on improved conditions for school autonomy and devolved management through greater privatisation management of education services and public-private partnerships, reduced local government bureaucracy and oversight, and maximum delegation of financial and managerial responsibilities to school leaders and governors. In 2010 the scope and scale of these reforms were enlarged significantly through the expansion of the academies programme which led to large numbers of schools operating outside local government jurisdiction. The roll back of local government made possible and encouraged by these reforms has not only given rise to concerns over a regulation gap but intensified scrutiny of the role of school governors. Worried that some school governors are ineffective at holding school leaders to account for the educational and financial performance of schools, government and non-government actors and organisations have intervened in various ways to promote new forms of institutional reflexivity and professionalisation designed to embed self-governance and mitigate ‘governance failure’. In this chapter I examine how school governors are called upon to take responsibility for various strategic-management priorities against the background of receding government control, while at the same time appear to be implicated in various technologies of rational self-management that strengthen the continuation and exercise of government control. An additional, related focus of the chapter therefore concerns the contradictions and vagaries of these reforms, namely the contraction and expansion of state power or what is described as ‘decentralised centralism’

The processual life of neoliberalisation: Permutations of value systems and normative commitments in a co-operative trust setting

Since 2010 the government in England has committed to accelerating the expansion of academies (‘state-funded independent schools’) through displacing the role of local government as principal manager and overseer of schools. In response increasing numbers of schools are embracing the co-operative trust model to improve economies of scale, facilitate stakeholding and community resilience, and fend off the monopolising tendencies of some large multi-academy trusts seeking wholesale takeover of certain underperforming schools. Yet there are concerns that co-operative schools do not represent a radical departure from routines of neoliberalism – defined by managerial deference, technocratic efficiency, upward accountability, and performativity – despite clear signs that co-operative schools promote themselves as jointly-owned, democratically-controlled enterprises. In this paper I adopt a ‘processual view of neoliberalisation’ (Peck and Tickell 2002) to complicate the idea that co-operative schools can be judged in binary terms of ‘either/or’ – neoliberal or democratic, exclusionary or participatory – and instead point to the variegated organisational life of co-operative schools and their messy actualities as they straddle competing and sometimes conflicting sets of interests, motives and demands in their practice of school governance