LANDCARE: A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE

Land Economics/Use,

Using Different Approaches to Evaluate Individual Social Equity in Transport

Inequalities not only exist in the field of economics in relation to income and wealth, but also in other areas, such as the transport sector, where access to and use of different transport modes varies markedly across population groups, and which provides the means to access everyday living activities. A key concern within the transport sector is that inequality has extended beyond the traditional measures of travel, and now covers a wide range of effects relating to social exclusion, freedom, well-being and being able to access reasonable opportunities and resources. In order to address the aforementioned issues, an important question to resolve is what type of methods can be used to measure inequalities in transport most effectively. Therefore, this study aims to apply different approaches, including the Capabilities Approach (CA) and a further six inequality indices, namely the Gini coefficient, the Atkinson index, the Palma ratio, the Pietra ratio, the Schutz coefficient and the Theil index, to the case study using the relatively migrant-rich lower-income neighbourhood of Tuqiao, in Beijing, in order to assess individual transport-related social inequity issues. The findings suggest that the CA is useful in assessing transport-related inequalities where there are significant barriers to the take up of accessibility, for example where there are high levels of disadvantaged groups and disaggregated analysis can be undertaken. The Palma ratio appears to have a larger effect than the Gini coefficient and the other inequality indices when measuring transport-related social inequity. In addition, we also found that most income inequality methods adapted from econometrics may be better suited to measuring transport-related social inequity between different regions, cities or countries, or within the same area, but at different points in time, rather than to measuring a single neighbourhood as a whole. Finally, we argue that to what extent politicians or transport planners can use appropriate management tools to measure transport-related social inequalities may be significant in terms of the progress that can be made in the fight against social inequity in the transport field

A preliminary description of the Chemical Camera

Spinning cryostat, or chemical camera, for sampling supersonic gas stream and recording chemical kinetic

The role of communities of practice in shaping modernisation: A case study of change, persistence, and survival in the UK cockle-fishing industry 2011-2018.

Most Management and Organisational Studies research attempts to conceptualise Communities of Practice (CoP) within and between organisations. In contrast, with an empirical focus on a single community of practitioners experiencing what Salaman (1974) refers to as, locally structured occupational work, out of the organisation spotlight, this thesis responds to the call to join the conversation about occupational communities as an adjoining branch of CoP theory (Nicolini et al., 2022). The aim is to yield insights about the social interaction and mechanisms of coordination employed by practitioners engaged in modernisation. In other words, a local occupational community (Salaman, 1974) whose work has been transformed by mechanisation and technology. To achieve this aim, a combination of different conceptual aspects of CoP and occupational communities are amalgamated to theorise about a community of practitioners who share a specific work situation albeit with contrasting and competing reference points. Adopting an interpretative approach, combining observation-interview techniques, field data was collected using a scheme of qualitative methods which included unrehearsed questioning of participants using photographs and loosely planned observations. More specifically, while developing an ethnographic case study, called Leigh-on-Sea Cockle Fishery, a collective of independent shellfish merchants who harvest cockle beds along the estuary of the river Thames were observed whilst undertaking their ordinary work of commercial shellfishing. The results are the product of observational analysis of the same group of participants over several annual fishing seasons (2011-2018). As such, the findings reveal a rich cultural description of the everyday work and drama that typifies small-scale fisheries in the UK. The research shows that whilst the effect of modernisation on communities and their practice may well be transformational, the process of modernisation typically involves many intermediate steps. The findings also indicate that modernisation has become a salient element in the self-image of the UK shellfish merchant. Moreover, in the context of CoP and modernisation, but with an alternative formulation of occupational CoP, this study asserts that licence and mandate constitute a proprietary attribute of, to use Wenger’s (1998) term, a community’s shared repertoire. By liberating CoP from the conventional context in which they are enacted, namely organisations, the characterisation of occupational CoP as outlined in this study provide an alternative template for theorising about the dynamics of learning and/in work. Or, to make this point more strategically, because of synthesising two adjacent literatures (CoP and occupational communities) this thesis can offer a nuanced theoretical perspective (Thatcher and Fisher, 2022) on divergent types of communities and their work practice which, in turn may energise Management and Organisation scholars

Floating Nurses to Specialty Areas

As the largest group of health care providers, nurses play a vital role in the safety and satisfaction of patients. Despite this vital role, the nursing shortage continues to grow. As a result of this shortage and to fix staffing insufficiencies, nurses are frequently assigned to work in an area that they are not familiar with. This reassignment of a nurse to a different unit from their normally assigned unit is referred to as floating. Nurses that are reassigned to a different unit from their normally assigned unit are referred to as float nurses. Some healthcare professionals believe the use of float nurses to provide care compromises patient outcomes, safety, and satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the perceptions of registered nurses regarding the use of float nurses to provide care. The participants consisted of 33 registered nurses all working in the acute care setting. Of the 33 participants who responded, the majority (55.3%) worked on a critical care unit. The majority (65.8%) of the participants had been floated to a unit that requires different competencies than their primary assigned unit. The participants completed 13 questions related to their perception of the use of float nurses to provide patient care. Statistical analysis revealed the majority of nurses most strongly agreed with the following four questions: (1) RNs should receive special training prior to being floated to a unit other than their primary unit, (2) RNs floated to a unit different from their primary unit should be recognized on the clinical ladder, (3) RNs who are floated are provided extra support, and (4) RNs floated should be given lighter patient assignment. The majority of nurses most strongly disagreed with the following three questions: (1) RNs floated to a unit different than their primary unit provide safe care to their patients, (2) RNs should be floated, and 3) RNs are satisfied with the level of care provided by RNs who are floated to their unit

Development of a Curriculum Analysis and Simulation Library with Applications in Curricular Analytics

Higher education institutions are currently investing significant resources in attempts to improve student success by improving instruction quality, implementing tutoring programs, and providing other services to help students. While these are all worth- while, one area that tends to be overlooked is the structure of the curricula that are offered. When viewing curricula as data, or more specifically, a graph, it is intuitive to see how its structure can influence a student’s ability to move through it. How- ever, there are currently no tools to analyze a curriculum’s structural properties and how they might affect student success. This thesis describes a software library that was developed to address this issue by providing the ability to represent curricula in a programming environment as well as a set of tools to evaluate the complexity of curricula and simulate students moving through them. Furthermore, the application of these tools are shown through several experiments that demonstrate a negative correlation between a curriculum’s complexity and student success

A Comparative Evaluation of Gait between Children with Autism and Typically Developing Matched Controls

Anecdotal reports suggest children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) ambulate differently than peers with typical development (TD). Little empirical evidence supports these reports. Children with ASD exhibit delayed motor skills, and it is important to determine whether or not motor movement deficits exist during walking. The purpose of the study was to perform a comprehensive lower-extremity gait analysis between children (aged 5–12 years) with ASD and age- and gender-matched-samples with TD. Gait parameters were normalized to 101 data points and the gait cycle was divided into seven sub-phases. The Model Statistic procedure was used to test for statistical significance between matched-pairs throughout the entire gait cycle for each parameter. When collapsed across all participants, children with ASD exhibited large numbers of significant differences (p \u3c 0.05) throughout the gait cycle in hip, knee, and ankle joint positions as well as vertical and anterior/posterior ground reaction forces. Children with ASD exhibited unique differences throughout the gait cycle, which supports current literature on the heterogeneity of the disorder. The present work supports recent findings that motor movement differences may be a core symptom of ASD. Thus, individuals may benefit from therapeutic movement interventions that follow precision medicine guidelines by accounting for individual characteristics, given the unique movement differences observed

Transverse effects in multifrequency Raman generation

The theory of ultrabroadband multifrequency Raman generation is extended, for the first time, to allow for beam-propagation effects in one and two transverse dimensions. We show that a complex transverse structure develops even when diffraction is neglected. In the general case, we examine how the ultrabroadband multifrequency Raman generation process is affected by the intensity, phase quality, and width of the input beams, and by the length of the Raman medium. The evolution of power spectra, intensity profiles, and global characteristics of the multifrequency beams are investigated and explained. In the two-dimensional transverse case, bandwidths comparable to the optical carrier frequency, spanning the whole visible spectrum and beyond, are still achievable

Ultrabroad-bandwidth multifrequency Raman generation

We report on the modeling of transient stimulated rotational Raman scattering in H2 gas. We predict a multifrequency output, spanning a bandwidth greater than the pump frequency, that may be generated without any significant delay with respect to the pump pulses. The roles of dispersion and transiency are quantified