Factors Influencing New Entrant Dairy Farmer's Decision-making Process around Technology Adoption

Purpose: The aims of this paper are to (1) evaluate the main factors influencing grazing system technology adoption among new entrant (NE) dairy farmers within Europe and the Irish pasture-based dairy industry, and (2) to determine the extent to which economic factors influence decision-making around technology adoption and use among NEs to the Irish dairy industry.

Methodology: Multivariate analysis is used to investigate the associations between region, education level, previous experience in dairy farming, herd size, age and the farmer's perception of the usefulness (PU) and ease-of-use of a technology (PEOU), and the likelihood of that technology being adopted.

Findings: The results of this study identify a high rate of grazing, artificial insemination (AI) and financial management technology adoption among NE dairy farmers whose technology decisions are primarily motivated by financial considerations and are closely related to the PU and PEOU scores of the technology. Grassland measurement had the lowest adoption rate (51%) compared to AI (86%) and farm financial management (84%).

Practical Implications: The substantial importance of PU and PEOU to technology adoption decisions indicates that future research, extension and education programmes should place increased emphasis on the benefits and usability of key technologies in addition to evaluating their scientific merit.

Originality/Value: For the first time information assessing technology adoption amongst new dairy farmers is available. This has the potential to improve and increase extension and education for new dairy farmers in a future post-quota environment.     

Two-Year-Olds Readily Learn Multiple Labels for the Same Basic-Level Category

2 basic frameworks for lexical principles have been proposed (Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek; Markman). In many types of situations, these frameworks make the same predictions regarding 2-year-olds' interpretation of novel terms. However, the predictions diverge in some cases. 3 experiments were conducted to address 1 such situation: the case in which the child hears a novel term but already knows a label for each of the objects present. Results of all 3 studies converged on the same outcome: The new term was most likely to be treated as a second basic-level name for the category to which the object belonged. Analyses of individual patterns of responding revealed that, of the 58 subjects, 50 made more basic-level responses than part responses, 1 made equal numbers of basic-level and part responses, and 7 made more part responses than basic-level responses. Implications of these findings for models of early lexical development are discussed.     

Effects of early literacy environments on the reading attitudes, behaviours and values of veteran teachers

Research has linked early literacy environments to the attitudes, behaviours and instructional values of reading teachers, but most prior research has addressed preservice or early inservice teachers. This mixed-methods, hypothesis-generating, Q methodology-based study explored the relationship between early literacy environments and the subsequent reading experiences, attitudes and behaviours of a purposive sample of veteran literacy educators. By-person factor analysis identified three empirical profiles of shared reading experiences, attitudes and behaviours: Early Readers Supported by Nurturing Early Literacy Environments; Early Readers Not Supported by Nurturing Early Literacy Environments; and Later Readers Not Supported by Nurturing Early Literacy Environments. Conceptual variables found across all models using qualitative analysis included: Nature of Early Literacy Environments, Early and Later Competence and Appreciation of Reading, Attitudes about the Value of Reading, and Instructional Values and Behaviors in Literacy Education. These models suggest further evidence for the importance of early literacy environments (both home and classroom environments) and provide empirically-derived testable hypotheses for future research.     

TIMELIT: Topics in Medical Education Database

TIMELIT is a database covering the topic of medical education. Entries in this resource cover a range of topics from professional education to both health and patient education. This column will provide an overview of the database and its content, as well as give basic information about searching TIMELIT.     

CPDB: Carcinogenic Potency Database

ABSTRACT

The Carcinogenic Potency Database reports analyses of animal cancer tests on 1,547 chemicals. These tests are used in support of cancer risk assessments for humans. Results are searchable and are made available via the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) TOXNET system. This column will provide background information on the database, as well as present search basics.     

Memorial: The Social Construction of Rob Kling

Abstract

This paper summarizes the concept of privacy, reviews some of its underlying tenets and axioms, illustrates the drift toward a national counterprivacy posture in terms of events involving the Social Security number (SSN), and discusses new faces in terms of three case histories: the California action to require SSNs on driver's licenses, the effort by telephone companies to introduce calling number identification, and the aggregation of public records into dossier databases. Remedial actions by government and legislators are suggested.     

‘Soldiers may Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905

During the second half of the nineteenth century concerns about hysteria and other nervous diseases in males became extensive in some countries. One presumed cause of such afflictions were military conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The Anglo-Saxon, at least according to many British and American commentators, had more sand, pluck, and courage than did men of other nations. In the United States, concerns about ‘Soldier's Heart’, a condition brought forth by the Civil War (1861–1865), were soon replaced by ‘neurasthenia’, a term used by American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. In an 1872 article entitled ‘Are Americans Less Healthy Than Europeans’, author C. S. Young hoped that the types of ‘games of competition’ that were infused with the values of Muscular Christianity’ would become part of ‘every educational establishment in the land’ so that the youth of America would acquire not only muscular vigor but ‘the manly virtues of truth, honor, and fair play’. Some attention would be given to such values; however, attention turned increasingly to ‘gridiron football’, a game likely to be infused with rampant commercialism that rapidly became the predominating sport in American institutions of higher learning. In 1898, American physician Morton H. Prince asked whether football might cause ‘traumatic neurasthenia and hysteria’ in males in the way that these conditions sometimes occurred among men engaged in a battle, and answered his own question by replying ‘no’! Football players were so well-prepared physically and mentally that there would be ‘no shock or terror’ attendant upon their injuries as might occur in a military conflict. By the time the 1903 edition of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders: A History of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was published debates about intercollegiate athletics that continue today were reaching a fever pitch.     

Dissertations on the history of sport

Among the Greeks of antiquity, the mesomorphic male form had been accorded high status. Two approaches inform the modern world's thinking about ‘the body’ – that which predominates in the biological sciences (the body is a ‘machine’ that is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry) and that which has been receiving intense attention from scholars in the social sciences and humanities (the body is substantially a neutral surface upon which social and cultural values are imprinted). What occurs deep within the body's structures is immensely important but it is anatomical form that commands our attention. The mesomorphic forms that presently pervade the media insistently proclaim that muscularity defines what it is ‘to be a man’. This is by no means the first time that such a message has been heard in the modern world. Among the better educated, by the 1860s the icon of the well-muscled male – and all that this implied – was rapidly replacing the eighteenth-century ideal of manliness as one of proper stances, gestures and countenance. This found particularly powerful expression in new forms of athletics and the concept of ‘athleticism’ that emerged first in England and quickly made its way across the Atlantic, where it became linked to the rising interest in anthropometry and a host of contemporary values. Not everyone agreed, however, that athletics were beneficial; or that the tape measure and dynamometer alone could ‘take a man's measure’. This paper examines the complex matter of the reassertion of the mesomorphic male body in Britain and America from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s – about not only its physical configuration but what was inferred from and about gross anatomical form.