Releasing the power: research led learning in a professional practice undergraduate curriculum

There is a challenge for vocational programmes in Higher Education in addressing the needs of a practice based discipline while developing enquiry based abilities in students. Ongoing research is being carried out into the use and suitability of student research-led learning within Built Environment curriculum at Northumbria University. This is aimed at undergraduate professional practice education and its perceived value by staff and students as compared to the use of the more traditional perceived transmission-based pedagogy. A focus group based survey of final years students was carried out to obtain an improved understanding of the value of research-led learning and to seek to highlight and extend staff opportunities and motivation to employ such methods across a wider range of curriculum activity, thus helping to justify the “release” of curriculum ownership to the student. It appears that students struggle to see the value of work which is not directly related to employment and it is suggested that more work is needed in measuring and understanding the enquiry based skills which are being used in the workplace already and using pedagogical approaches in language and practice which are more easily digested by students because research led learning is seen to be practical and have real results in what they perceive as the “real world”. Research-led learning needs to be carefully and sensitively embedded within the student learning experience at undergraduate level

Hot Pursuit from a Contiguous Fisheries Zone - An Assault on the Freedom of the High Seas

This Comment will demonstrate that the court was incorrect in its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. The court\u27s interpretation rested on two sources: the history of the Geneva Conventions and the perception of Congress concerning the compatibility of the Bartlett and the Contiguous Fisheries Zone Acts with the Conventions. This Comment will first examine the history of the treaty provisions in question to demonstrate that the parties to the Conventions intended Article 24 to be restrictive. The legislative history of the Bartlett Act and the Contiguous Fisheries Zone Act will then be examined to determine whether the court\u27s holding is supported by congressional perception of compatibility between the Acts and the Conventions. Finally, the scope of the exception established in Cook v. United States will be explored to determine its applicability to F/V Taiyo Maru

Workers\u27 Compensation and Disability Benefits: The Effect of the Permanent Partial Disability Multiplier and Settlement Method on Back Injury Claims in the State of Tennessee

Back pain is the leading cause of work place disability in Tennessee. The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI, 2002) found that in the United States back claims account for thirty-two (32%) percent of all workers\u27 compensation claims and the average cost of a back claim is roughly fifty (50%) percent higher than the cost of other work-related injuries. Previous research on Tennessee workers\u27 compensation suggests that permanent partial disability benefits (PPD) are a major source of cost and litigation in a court based system (Gardner, Telles, & Moss, 1996; Boden, 1997; Ballantyne, 2003). The workers\u27 compensation system in Tennessee is a court based system. Trial courts have full discretion in determining the amount of permanent partial disability (PPD) awards. Workers\u27 compensation claims may be settled under the following methods: (1) trial; (2) settlement approved by court - complaint filed; (3) settlement approved by court - complaint not filed; and (4) settlement approved by the Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development. Permanent partial disability (PPD) awards for back injuries are dependent upon whether the employer returned the employee to work after injury.1 Permanent partial disability (PPD) indemnity benefit costs in Tennessee can be greatly influenced by the magnitude of the permanent partial disability multiplier (PPDM) (Garnder, Telles, & Moss, 1996; Boden, 1997; Ballantyne, 2003). The use of multipliers to assign permanent partial disability (PPD) indemnity benefits is unique and utilized only by Tennessee (Gardner, Telles, & Moss, 1996; Boden, 1997; Ballantyne, 2003). A previous published study on Tennessee reported that permanent partial disability (PPD) awards for low back injuries vary among judicial districts and that the application of the multipliers may be one of the causes of variation in awards (Boden, 1997). Previous research has not investigated whether permanent partial disability (PPD) awards for back injuries vary by the method of settlement. This study investigated the Tennessee workers\u27 compensation system to determine if benefit variation existed among settlement methods for back injury claims. Workers\u27 compensation claim data from 2000-2003 was obtained from the Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development. Regression analysis was used to determine whether there was a significant difference between group means using a p value of .05. The settlement method found to have the greatest influence on permanent partial disability (PPD) awards in return-to-work and a non-return-to-work claim was trial. A claim resolved at trial was found to be four percent (3.729%) more in permanent partial disability (PPD) indemnity benefits paid when compared to settlements approved by the Tennessee Department of Labor in return-to-work claims and eleven percent (11.406%) more in non-return-to-work claims. Employees with a work-related back injury claim had a forty-three percent (43.5%) probability of having surgery. Of the employees who had back surgery, sixty-one percent (61.3%) were able to return-to-work with their pre-injury employer

Using root economics traits to predict biotic plant soil-feedbacks.

UNLABELLED Plant-soil feedbacks have been recognised as playing a key role in a range of ecological processes, including succession, invasion, species coexistence and population dynamics. However, there is substantial variation between species in the strength of plant-soil feedbacks and predicting this variation remains challenging. Here, we propose an original concept to predict the outcome of plant-soil feedbacks. We hypothesize that plants with different combinations of root traits culture different proportions of pathogens and mutualists in their soils and that this contributes to differences in performance between home soils (cultured by conspecifics) versus away soils (cultured by heterospecifics). We use the recently described root economics space, which identifies two gradients in root traits. A conservation gradient distinguishes fast vs. slow species, and from growth defence theory we predict that these species culture different amounts of pathogens in their soils. A collaboration gradient distinguishes species that associate with mycorrhizae to outsource soil nutrient acquisition vs. those which use a "do it yourself" strategy and capture nutrients without relying strongly on mycorrhizae. We provide a framework, which predicts that the strength and direction of the biotic feedback between a pair of species is determined by the dissimilarity between them along each axis of the root economics space. We then use data from two case studies to show how to apply the framework, by analysing the response of plant-soil feedbacks to measures of distance and position along each axis and find some support for our predictions. Finally, we highlight further areas where our framework could be developed and propose study designs that would help to fill current research gaps. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11104-023-05948-1

Herbivore interactions and grassland biodiversity

Imperial Users onl

Psychrometric Properties of Humid Air from Multi-Fluid Helmholtz-Energy-Explicit Models

Psychrometric properties of humid air are widely used in the analysis and modeling of thermal systems. In this work we present a method for obtaining these properties from the multi-fluid mixture formulation of the GERG mixture model. This mixture model was originally developed to model the thermodynamics of natural gas mixtures, and now has been extended to model thermodynamic properties relevant for carbon capture and storage. The primary advantage of this formulation is that the dry air composition is not fixed, and can be adjusted to suit the application, for instance in submarines, for Martian atmospheres, etc. We present an algorithm that can be used to calculate the saturated vapor water composition in vapor-liquid equilibrium, and other properties that arise out of this equilibrium calculation, such as relative humidity and dewpoints. Solid-vapor equilibrium is not considered, and neither is the calculation of wet-bulb temperatures

Intraspecific trait changes have large impacts on community functional composition but do not affect ecosystem function

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Journal of Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.Plant functional traits can provide a mechanistic understanding of community responses to global change and of community effects on ecosystem functions. Nitrogen enrichment typically shifts trait composition by promoting the dominance of acquisitive plants (high specific leaf area [SLA] and low leaf dry matter content [LDMC]), translating into high biomass production. Changes in mean trait values can be due to shifts in species identity, relative abundances and/or intraspecific trait values. However, we do not know the relative importance of these shifts in determining trait responses to environmental changes, or trait effects on ecosystem functioning, such as biomass production. We quantified the relative importance of species composition, abundance and intraspecific shifts in driving variation in SLA and LDMC, and how these shifts affected above- and below-ground biomass. We measured traits in a grassland experiment manipulating nitrogen fertilisation, plant species richness, foliar fungal pathogen removal and sown functional composition (slow vs. fast species). We fitted structural equation models to test the importance of abundance and intraspecific shifts in determining (a) responses of functional composition to treatments and (b) effects on above- and below-ground biomass. We found that species intraspecific shifts were as important as abundance shifts in determining the overall change in functional composition (community weighted mean trait values), and even had large effects compared to substantial initial variation in sown trait composition. Intraspecific trait shifts resulted in convergence towards intermediate SLA in diverse communities; although convergence was reduced by nitrogen addition and enhanced by pathogen removal. In contrast, large intraspecific shifts in LDMC were not influenced by the treatments. However, despite large responses, intraspecific trait shifts had no effect on above- or below-ground biomass. Only interspecific trait variation affected functioning: below-ground biomass was reduced by SLA and increased by LDMC, while above-ground biomass was increased by SLA. Synthesis. Our results add to a growing body of literature showing large intraspecific trait variation and emphasise the importance of using field collected data to determine community functional composition. However, they also show that intraspecific variation does not necessarily affect ecosystem functioning and therefore response–effect trait relationships may differ between versus within species.Peer reviewe

Fast–slow traits predict competition network structure and its response to resources and enemies

Plants interact in complex networks but how network structure depends on resources, natural enemies and species resource‐use strategy remains poorly understood. Here, we quantified competition networks among 18 plants varying in fast–slow strategy, by testing how increased nutrient availability and reduced foliar pathogens affected intra‐ and inter‐specific interactions. Our results show that nitrogen and pathogens altered several aspects of network structure, often in unexpected ways due to fast and slow growing species responding differently. Nitrogen addition increased competition asymmetry in slow growing networks, as expected, but decreased it in fast growing networks. Pathogen reduction made networks more even and less skewed because pathogens targeted weaker competitors. Surprisingly, pathogens and nitrogen dampened each other's effect. Our results show that plant growth strategy is key to understand how competition respond to resources and enemies, a prediction from classic theories which has rarely been tested by linking functional traits to competition networks

Hydrodynamic propulsion of human sperm

The detailed fluid mechanics of sperm propulsion are fundamental to our understanding of reproduction. In this paper, we aim to model a human sperm swimming in a microscope slide chamber. We model the sperm itself by a distribution of regularized stokeslets over an ellipsoidal sperm head and along an infinitesimally thin flagellum. The slide chamber walls are modelled as parallel plates, also discretized by a distribution of regularized stokeslets. The sperm flagellar motion, used in our model, is obtained by digital microscopy of human sperm swimming in slide chambers. We compare the results of our simulation with previous numerical studies of flagellar propulsion, and compare our computations of sperm kinematics with those of the actual sperm measured by digital microscopy. We find that there is an excellent quantitative match of transverse and angular velocities between our simulations and experimental measurements of sperm. We also find a good qualitative match of longitudinal velocities and computed tracks with those measured in our experiment. Our computations of average sperm power consumption fall within the range obtained by other authors. We use the hydrodynamic model, and a prototype flagellar motion derived from experiment, as a predictive tool, and investigate how sperm kinematics are affected by changes to head morphology, as human sperm have large variability in head size and shape. Results are shown which indicate the increase in predicted straight-line velocity of the sperm as the head width is reduced and the increase in lateral movement as the head length is reduced. Predicted power consumption, however, shows a minimum close to the normal head aspect ratio