Farmers’ Visions on Soils: A Case Study among Agroecological and Conventional Smallholders in Minas Gerais,Brazil

Abstract

Purpose: Why do farmers not take better care of their soils? This article aims to give insight into how farmers look at soil quality management.

Design/methodology/approach: It analyses diverse land management practices and visions on soils and soil quality of ten agroecological and 14 conventional smallholder farmers in Araponga, Minas Gerais, Brazil. As agroecological farming (that is, managing soils with minimum use of external inputs) requires more complex knowledge, it is assumed that agroecological farmers would be more knowledgeable on soils compared to conventional farmers. This case study tests the hypothesis that differences in land management practices between agroecological and conventional farmers can be explained by differences in their knowledge on soils.

Findings: The hypothesis turned out to be faulty: agroecological and conventional farmers do not differ in what they know about soils, but how they use their knowledge in their farming strategy. Both groups of farmers have different but rational farming strategies.

Practical implications: Designing policies and measures to make farming more environmentally friendly and more sustainable as two-way knowledge exchange between farmers and science (and not as one-way knowledge transfer from science to farmers), to benefit from vital and context-based farmers’ knowledge and to ensure successful implementation of more sustainable land management practices.

Originality/value: By analysing farmers’ visions on soil quality management and farming strategies, this study shows that farmers’ knowledge is valuable for farmers, for scientific knowledge on soil quality management and for policies which are to be effective and adapted to the local environment.     

Self-regulating activity: use of metacognitive guides in the interpreting classroom

This research studies the development of metacognitive skills in students of consecutive interpreting from German into Spanish. The purpose is to discover which self-regulating processes appear after introducing a specific pedagogical action based on metacognitive guides. Our hypothesis is that self-regulating activity will increase as work with the guides advances. We also analyse the changes which occur as the course progresses. The analysis of the corpus enables us to describe metacognitive activity in consecutive interpretation students and also to justify the introduction of a component of self-regulation in teaching andlearning processes. The research contributes to pedagogical development in consecutive interpretation since it sheds light on how to use effective teaching and learning patterns that can lead to self-regulation.     

Bad News Sells: The Demand for News Magazines and the Tone of Their Covers

News media are often believed to focus on negative events as a means to increase their audience and profits. This study evaluates whether this conjecture applies in the case of the 3 German news magazines Der Spiegel, Stern, and Focus in the period from 1997 to 2009. Based on detailed content analyses of issues with political and economic cover stories, the results indicate significant, positive correlations between explicitly negative cover pages and the magazines' sales, after controlling for a comprehensive set of other success drivers and influences.     

The Influence of Message and Audience Characteristics on TV News Grazing Behavior

This study examined television news channel changing (AKA grazing, zapping) behavior by focusing on the viewing duration and attention paid to stories that varied in sensational content and packaging. These two message-related factors had independent and interactive effects on how long grazers stayed tuned to a channel. Moreover, high sensation seekers, who were more avid news consumers in everyday life, exhibited different viewing and attentional patterns compared to low sensation seekers. While arousing television news was the most watched by all, high sensation seekers unexpectedly showed less preference for sensational tabloid packaging of arousing content than low sensation seekers.     

Teaching skills to promote clinical reasoning in early basic science courses

Basic and superior reasoning skills are woven into the clinical reasoning process just as they are used to solve any problem. As clinical reasoning is the central competence of medical education, development of these reasoning skills should occur throughout the undergraduate medical curriculum. The authors describe here a method of teaching reasoning skills in a clinical context during a human anatomy course. Anat Sci Educ 3:267–271, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.     

Deafness and attention in deaf children

The study shows the differences between hearing parents and deaf instructors interacting with deaf children and directing their attention. Data were collected at home and at a service for special needs in Bristol, England. The mother or instructor was asked to play naturally with the child with the toys provided. When the child's attention was focused during their play, the mother or instructor had to try to direct the child's attention to each of the toys. The results suggest that both groups (mothers and instructors) were effective in directing attention to objects not in the immediate area of play; however, hearing mothers were more successful than deaf instructors.     

Number sense growth in kindergarten: a longitudinal investigation of children at risk for mathematics difficulties

Number sense development of 411 middle- and low-income kindergartners (mean age 5.8 years) was examined over 4 time points while controlling for gender, age, and reading skill. Although low-income children performed significantly worse than middle-income children at the end of kindergarten on all tasks, both groups progressed at about the same rate. An exception was story problems, on which the low-income group achieved at a slower rate; both income groups made comparable progress when the same problems were presented nonverbally with visual referents. Holding other predictors constant, there were small but reliable gender effects favoring boys on overall number sense performance as well as on nonverbal calculation. Using growth mixture modeling, 3 classes of growth trajectories in number sense emerged.     

香港特别行政区高等院校图书馆统计指标的发展研究

图书馆统计指标与规范直接关系着图书馆历史数据的准确性与有效性.自2000年6月香港特别行政区大学图书馆长联席会达成建立通用统计指标意向开始,历经12年的发展,现在香港地区高校图书馆已建立较为完善的统计指标体系.该文对香港地区高等院校图书馆统计指标与规范的发展历程进行回顾梳理,对比分析不同时期的统计指标的差异及最新指标与美国研究图书馆学会统计指标的差异,并对香港地区高校图书馆现行统计指标进行详细解读.     

Doors Being Open: Rights of Afro‐descendents in the National Museum of Colombia

Abstract In the early 1990s, Colombia developed a highly sophisticated constitutional and judicial framework. The Constitution of 1991 offers two sets of principles: First, the rights granted to minority groups so they might guide their lives according to their traditions and the recognition of the multicultural character of the nation. Second, the values of unity and sovereignty and universal human dignity, the minimum denominator that unites the Colombian people. In the context of a multicultural nation, what is the role of museums in supporting demands of minorities and disenfranchised groups? This paper looks at the issue of differentiated rights for Afro‐descendents through analysis of Wakes and Live Saints among Black, Afro‐Colombian, Maroon and Islander Communities at the National Museum of Colombia (2008). This exhibition was chosen because Afro‐Colombian activists and scholars have strongly demanded that the National Museum respond to claims of historical reparation.     

Intelligence assessment: Gardner multiple intelligence theory as an alternative

In the multiple intelligence framework, newer and more contextualized cognitive tasks are suggested as alternative to more traditional psychometric tests. The purpose of this article is to examine whether or not these two types of instruments converge into a general factor of cognitive performance. Thus, the Battery of General and Differential Aptitudes (BADyG: reasoning, memory, verbal aptitude, numerical aptitude and spatial aptitude) and a set of Gardner's multiple intelligence assessment tasks (linguistic, logical, visual/spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic and musical intelligences) were administered to 294 children aged 5 to 7. The confirmatory factor analysis points out the absence of a common general factor considering both batteries, indicating instead the existence of two general factors, which gather the tests that encompass them. Also, these two general factors correspond to traditional and multiple intelligence assessments and show a statistically moderate correlation between them. These results challenge Gardner's original position on refusing a general factor of intelligence, especially when considering the cognitive dimensions measured which do not coincide with the more traditional tests of intelligence.