In the Wake of a Report

**TW: Sexual Assault Earlier in the semester, many students and professors gathered in the Junction from 10 am until well into the evening to watch as Christine Blasey Ford and now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were each questioned at length. In all that has happened in the past two years, the looming feeling that spread through campus on this day was the closest rival to that which invaded campus on the morning of November 9th, 2016. [excerpt

Developing the human-computer interface for Space Station Freedom

For the past two years, the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the Johnson Space Center has been involved in prototyping and prototype reviews of in support of the definition phase of the Space Station Freedom program. On the Space Station, crew members will be interacting with multi-monitor workstations where interaction with several displays at one time will be common. The HCIL has conducted several experiments to begin to address design issues for this complex system. Experiments have dealt with design of ON/OFF indicators, the movement of the cursor across multiple monitors, and the importance of various windowing capabilities for users performing multiple tasks simultaneously

From bridewealth to dowry? A Bayesian estimation of ancestral states of marriage transfers in Indo-European groups

Significant amounts of wealth have been exchanged as part of marriage settlements throughout history. Although various models have been proposed for interpreting these practices, their development over time has not been investigated systematically. In this paper we use a Bayesian MCMC phylogenetic comparative approach to reconstruct the evolution of two forms of wealth transfers at marriage, dowry and bridewealth, for 51 Indo-European cultural groups. Results indicate that dowry is more likely to have been the ancestral practice, and that a minimum of four changes to bridewealth is necessary to explain the observed distribution of the two states across the cultural groups

Market imperfections and land productivity in the Ethiopian Highlands:

This study analyzes how market imperfections affect land productivity in a degraded low-potential cereal- livestock economy in the Ethiopian highlands. A wide array of variables is used to control for land quality in the analysis. Results of three different selection models were compared with least squares models using the HC3 heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator. Market imperfections in labor and land markets were found to affect land productivity. Land productivity was positively correlated with household male and female labor force per unit of land. Female-headed households achieved much lower land productivity than male- headed households. Old age of household heads was also correlated with lower land productivity. Imperfections in the rental market for oxen appeared to cause overstocking of oxen by some households. Conservation technologies had no significant positive short-run effect on land productivity. The main results were consistent across the different econometric models. .Livestock productivity Ethiopia., Cereal crops., Labor productivity., Markets.,

Coming of age

Copyright at Demos 2011. This work is made available under the terms of the Demos licence.Britain’s ageing population is often described as a demographic time-bomb. As a society we often view ageing as a ‘problem’ which must be ‘managed’ – how to cope with the pressure on national health services of growing numbers of older people, the cost of sustaining them with pensions and social care, and the effect on families and housing needs. But ageing is not a policy problem to be solved. Instead it is a normal part of life, which varies according to personal characteristics, experience and outlook, and for many people growing older can be a very positive experience. Drawing on the Mass Observation project, one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world, Coming of Age grounds public policy in people’s real, lived experiences of ageing. It finds that the experience of ageing is changing, so that most people who are now reaching retirement do not identify themselves as old. One-size-fits-all policy approaches that treat older people as if they are all alike are alienating and inappropriate. Instead, older people need inclusive policy approaches that enable them to live their lives on their own terms. To ensure that older people are actively engaged, policy makers should stop emphasising the costs posed by an ageing population and start building on the many positive contributions that older people already make to our society.The Research Support and Development Office (RSDO) at Brunel University and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

From imagery to ecology: Leveraging time series of all available Landsat observations to map and monitor ecosystem state and dynamics

https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rse2.24Published versio