Special Section Introduction: Mass Observation as Method

Since Mass Observation's foundation in 1937, the organisation has played witness to the great and the small events of everyday life during the last eight decades, recording people's opinions, beliefs and experiences, and making them available for researchers to develop new interpretations of British social life. Although the data produced is often messy and unwieldy and apparently contradicts many sociological assumptions about methodological rigour, the Archive is uniquely placed to offer detailed and exceptionally rich accounts of the fibre of everyday life and to reveal the deep complexities of family, personal and intimate life. As Mike Savage notes in Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940, 'Mass-Observation is the most studied, and arguably the most important, social research institution of the mid-twentieth century' (Savage 2010: 57). He situates this significance in it providing the focus for the emergence of a new intellectual class in late 1930s Britain of people who identified with a social scientific outlook. Until that point in time, the main point of entry into intellectual circles for newly educated classes was through literary culture, which was often implicitly elitist and hierarchical in its attitude to wider society

Making online learning more student-centred in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Nanjing

A major challenge for tertiary education in China today is the requirement to provide an education for progressively increasing numbers of students, with relatively static resources. Enrolments are at an all-time high and growing rapidly. In contrast, teaching staff and physical resources (such as practical rooms and lecture theatres) have not grown at a comparable rate. Educational institutions are commonly located in urban areas and tend to be concentrated in densely populated areas which reduces the access to tertiary education for people living in the more remote parts of the country. In order to deal with these two challenges, tertiary institutions in the People’s Republic of China began to utilise the advantages of online learning around five years ago. One of the useful characteristics of online learning is the ease of access – educational resources can be uploaded to the Web and then utilised by anyone with a modem and a telephone. These resources can be shared among all people. Learners can access these educational resources at any time and from any place. Online learning is a new tool that can increase our reach, so that we can communicate with a much larger audience and maximise the educational opportunities of people living in the more remote regions. This technology also has the potential to improve the quality of learning and reduce the cost of education

Submarine mass movements and their consequences

This sixth edition of the Submarine Mass Movements and Their Consequences volume, coincident with the seventh eponymous conference includes 61 papers that span a variety of topics and are organized into nine parts as follows: (1) Submarine mass movement in margin construction and economic significance; (2) Failure dynamics from landslide geomorphology; (3) Geotechnical aspects of mass movement; (4) Multidisciplinary case studies; (5) Tectonics and mass move- ment processes; (6) Fluid flow and gas hydrates, (7) Mass transport deposits in modern and outcrop sedimentology; (8) Numerical and statistical analysis; and, (9) Tsunami generation from slope failure. The breath and quality of this body of work underpins a positive outlook and our enthusiasm for the future direction of research in this area of science as it moves towards ever more detailed analysis and monitoring. We also emphasize in this volume the need to look at mountain-scale outcrops to better understand our seismic imaging, to carry out statistical studies that draw on global data sets to better constrain broad behavioural characteristics, and to undertake numerical modelling to understand the sensitivity of a range of natural slopes.peer-reviewe

Extending the boundaries of non-Indigenous science to embrace the cultural curriculum by creating a living compendium of practice

BACKGROUND Embedding cultural competence (CC) into science curricula is key to the University of Sydney’s commitment to producing students with skills and knowledge to work in cross-cultural settings. Within the Faculty of Science, there are eight disciplinary schools who have, to some extent, endeavoured to introduce CC into their delivery and content to ensure students achieve this graduate outcome. Cultural competence inclusion was initiated by the Wingara Mura-Bunga Barrabugu program, with a focus on integration of Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) into non-Indigenous science. PLAN In 2018, we initiated a CC compendium to act as a bridging space between academics, to share content and explore collaborations laterally across the faculty. ACTIONS This paper documents the process of interviewing academic staff and collating the compendium by gathering teaching materials and CC teaching approaches, highlighting the points of highest resonance within each discipline. Academics are using creative and innovative ways to extend their disciplinary boundaries, are embracing personal and professional growth by taking on this challenge and are carving out new pathways in science. REFLECTION These boundary-pushing efforts are however, marginal, and are largely being introduced by non-Indigenous academics, which raises questions about IKS inclusion as a pathway for generating CC. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank the Wingara Mura-Bunga Barrabugu, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Strategy and Services for funds for this project

Developing and enhancing biodiversity monitoring programmes: a collaborative assessment of priorities

1.Biodiversity is changing at unprecedented rates, and it is increasingly important that these changes are quantified through monitoring programmes. Previous recommendations for developing or enhancing these programmes focus either on the end goals, that is the intended use of the data, or on how these goals are achieved, for example through volunteer involvement in citizen science, but not both. These recommendations are rarely prioritized. 2.We used a collaborative approach, involving 52 experts in biodiversity monitoring in the UK, to develop a list of attributes of relevance to any biodiversity monitoring programme and to order these attributes by their priority. We also ranked the attributes according to their importance in monitoring biodiversity in the UK. Experts involved included data users, funders, programme organizers and participants in data collection. They covered expertise in a wide range of taxa. 3.We developed a final list of 25 attributes of biodiversity monitoring schemes, ordered from the most elemental (those essential for monitoring schemes; e.g. articulate the objectives and gain sufficient participants) to the most aspirational (e.g. electronic data capture in the field, reporting change annually). This ordered list is a practical framework which can be used to support the development of monitoring programmes. 4.People's ranking of attributes revealed a difference between those who considered attributes with benefits to end users to be most important (e.g. people from governmental organizations) and those who considered attributes with greatest benefit to participants to be most important (e.g. people involved with volunteer biological recording schemes). This reveals a distinction between focussing on aims and the pragmatism in achieving those aims. 5.Synthesis and applications. The ordered list of attributes developed in this study will assist in prioritizing resources to develop biodiversity monitoring programmes (including citizen science). The potential conflict between end users of data and participants in data collection that we discovered should be addressed by involving the diversity of stakeholders at all stages of programme development. This will maximize the chance of successfully achieving the goals of biodiversity monitoring programmes

The UV-Optical Color Dependence of Galaxy Clustering in the Local Universe

We measure the UV-optical color dependence of galaxy clustering in the local universe. Using the clean separation of the red and blue sequences made possible by the NUV - r color-magnitude diagram, we segregate the galaxies into red, blue and intermediate "green" classes. We explore the clustering as a function of this segregation by removing the dependence on luminosity and by excluding edge-on galaxies as a means of a non-model dependent veto of highly extincted galaxies. We find that \xi (r_p, \pi) for both red and green galaxies shows strong redshift space distortion on small scales -- the "finger-of-God" effect, with green galaxies having a lower amplitude than is seen for the red sequence, and the blue sequence showing almost no distortion. On large scales, \xi (r_p, \pi) for all three samples show the effect of large-scale streaming from coherent infall. On scales 1 Mpc/h < r_p < 10 Mpc/h, the projected auto-correlation function w_p(r_p) for red and green galaxies fits a power-law with slope \gamma ~ 1.93 and amplitude r_0 ~ 7.5 and 5.3, compared with \gamma ~ 1.75 and r_0 ~ 3.9 Mpc/h for blue sequence galaxies. Compared to the clustering of a fiducial L* galaxy, the red, green, and blue have a relative bias of 1.5, 1.1, and 0.9 respectively. The w_p(r_p) for blue galaxies display an increase in convexity at ~ 1 Mpc/h, with an excess of large scale clustering. Our results suggest that the majority of blue galaxies are likely central galaxies in less massive halos, while red and green galaxies have larger satellite fractions, and preferentially reside in virialized structures. If blue sequence galaxies migrate to the red sequence via processes like mergers or quenching that take them through the green valley, such a transformation may be accompanied by a change in environment in addition to any change in luminosity and color.Comment: accepted by MNRA

The Atlas3D project -- XIII. Mass and morphology of HI in early-type galaxies as a function of environment

We present the Atlas3D HI survey of 166 nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs) down to M(HI)~10^7 M_sun. We detect HI in ~40% of all ETGs outside the Virgo cluster and in ~10% of all ETGs inside it. This demonstrates that it is common for non-cluster ETGs to host HI. The HI morphology varies from regular discs/rings (the majority of the detections) to unsettled gas distributions. The former are either small discs (M(HI)<10^8 M_sun) confined within the stellar body and sharing the same kinematics of the stars, or large discs/rings (M(HI) up to 5x10^9 M_sun) extending to tens of kpc from the host galaxy and frequently kinematically decoupled from the stars. Neutral hydrogen provides material for star formation in ETGs. Galaxies with central HI exhibit signatures of star formation in ~70% of the cases, ~5 times more frequently than galaxies without central HI. The central ISM is dominated by molecular gas. In ETGs with a small gas disc the conversion of HI into H_2 is as efficient as in spirals. The ETG HI mass function has M*~2x10^9 M_sun and slope=-0.7. ETGs host much less HI than spirals as a family. However, a significant fraction of them is as HI-rich as spirals. The main difference between ETGs and spirals is that the former lack the high-column-density HI typical of the bright stellar disc of the latter. We find an envelope of decreasing M(HI) with increasing environment density. The gas-richest ETGs live in the poorest environments (where star-formation is more common), galaxies in the centre of Virgo have the lowest HI content, and the cluster outskirts are a transition region. We find an HI morphology-density relation. At low environment density HI is mostly distributed on large discs/rings. More disturbed HI morphologies dominate environment densities typical of rich groups, confirming the importance of processes occurring on a galaxy-group scale for the evolution of ETGs.Comment: Accepted for publication on MNRA

Observing America: what mass-observation reveals about British views of the USA

Since its foundation in 1937, the social research organisation Mass-Observation has systematically documented the opinions of a British public experiencing profound societal change. This includes the most extensive data available on grassroots attitudes towards the USA, from the outbreak of the Second World War to the final phase of the Cold War. Most of the scholarship on Anglo-American relations focuses on the political and diplomatic elites of Britain and the USA. The extent to which their interaction reflected and reinforced public opinion is seldom considered. This article uses the Mass-Observation archive to situate elite interaction within the broader context of public opinion. In so doing, it assesses the extent to which British political leaders have in their dealings with the USA represented the views of the electorate they serve

Annual estimates of occupancy for bryophytes, lichens and invertebrates in the UK, 1970–2015

Here, we determine annual estimates of occupancy and species trends for 5,293 UK bryophytes, lichens, and invertebrates, providing national scale information on UK biodiversity change for 31 taxonomic groups for the time period 1970 to 2015. The dataset was produced through the application of a Bayesian occupancy modelling framework to species occurrence records supplied by 29 national recording schemes or societies (n = 24,118,549 records). In the UK, annual measures of species status from fine scale data (e.g. 1 × 1 km) had previously been limited to a few taxa for which structured monitoring data are available, mainly birds, butterflies, bats and a subset of moth species. By using an occupancy modelling framework designed for use with relatively low recording intensity data, we have been able to estimate species trends and generate annual estimates of occupancy for taxa where annual trend estimates and status were previously limited or unknown at this scale. These data broaden our knowledge of UK biodiversity and can be used to investigate variation in and drivers of biodiversity change