Search results for "resource"
showing 10 items of 4058 documents
Acorn Ants May Create and Use Two Entrances to the Nest Cavity
2021
Many ant species construct large nests that are inhabited by numerous workers, but other species dwell in ready-for-use cavities and live in small colonies. Ants of the genus Temnothorax inhabit small cavities, e.g., in acorns, twigs, and under rocks. Although a preference for nest sites with a narrower entrance is known, recent studies have shown that they also use cavities with wider entrances and may modify the size of such entrances. As good cavities for nest sites are a limited resource, the possibility to modify a potential nest site, including a reduction in the size of the hole, should be a favorable matter for the ants. Through field and laboratory experiments, I studied the acorn …
Job insecurity among temporary workers: Looking through the gender lens
2014
Based on the gender model and the life context model, the financial and domestic responsibilities and expectations associated with getting a new assignment are tested as potential gender specific moderators of the link between job insecurity and commitment, performance, and depressive moods. In a cross-sectional international questionnaire study of 1981 temporary workers’ three-way interactions between job insecurity, gender, and the moderators were tested. Expectations play a moderating role for women only, intensifying the negative relationship between job insecurity and commitment. Financial responsibility strengthened the negative relationship of job insecurity with commitment, as well…
The Air-Ténéré National Natural Reserve (RNNAT) Observatory: Territorial Intelligence for Sustainable Development
2007
International audience; The Aïr-Ténéré National Natural Reserve is a protected area in which conservation and development principles tempt to be combined (co-management). To follow-up environmental changes which determine people's life, and to support decisions to manage the Reserve, the first steps of a territorial observatory are introduced. Beyond the technical build up of the Geographical Information System (GIS), the prototype proposed here is a concrete expression of a part of a territorial intelligent tool. It embraces all territorial dimensions from spatial to actors ones, and try in the context of the reserve, to revisit the definition of local governance. This work is based on a m…
Whitewater sports: An innovation conducive to regional development? The case of the Ubaye Valley
2015
The Ubaye Valley in the French Alps became a center of tourism and outdoor sports in the twentieth century. It is named after the river which became a site for the practice of whitewater sports (canoeing/kayaking, rafting, etc.). Various structures were created there to disseminate these practices (associations, clubs and finally companies). The marketing of products combining these activities was able to take off thanks to the promotion of events undertaken by elected officials and area companies. But how was this offer able to foster innovation, understood as the adaptation of practices to current needs? Reconstructing the perspectives of ordinary innovation, this article examines the tec…
Processes of Reflection in the Teaching and Learning Research Lab: Effects of Reflecting on Classroom Actions
2021
The ability to reflect on teaching is crucially important for the professionalization of trainee teachers. The fostering of reflection processes – by means of the systematic analysis of one’s own and others’ teaching from subject-specific, methodological, and educational science perspectives – plays a central role in a continuing and consecutive two-semester teacher training seminar concept at the University of Mainz. This paper explores the different effects of reflection on teaching on the basis of a quasi-experimental pre-post test design. Additionally, it shows how systematic reflection on teaching affects the students’ subjective experience of competence as well as the extent the semin…
A Methodology for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora
2015
Dictionary extraction using parallel corpora is well established. However, for many language pairs parallel corpora are a scarce resource which is why in the current work we discuss methods for dictionary extraction from comparable corpora. Hereby the aim is to push the boundaries of current approaches, which typically utilize correlations between co-occurrence patterns across languages, in several ways: 1) Eliminating the need for initial lexicons by using a bootstrapping approach which only requires a few seed translations. 2) Implementing a new approach which first establishes alignments between comparable documents across languages, and then computes cross-lingual alignments between wor…
Inverse Malthusianism and Recycling Economics: The Case of the Textile Industry
2020
The current use of natural resources in the textile industry leads us to introduce a new economic concept called inverse Malthusianism describing a context in which population grows linearly and resource consumption grows exponentially. Inverse Malthusianism implies an exponential increase in environmental impact that recycling may contribute to reduce. Our main goal is to extend the analysis of materials selection under the principle of equimarginality proposed by Jevons. As a first result, we show the particular circumstances under which policies excluding recycled supplies are never optimal. We also aim to overcome the difficulties of reducing environmental aspects to monetary units. To …
La Seconda Vita dell'Ambiente Costruito
2021
Il contributo inquadra i saggi, gli studi, le ricerche e progetti pubblicati sul numero 9 di AGATHÓN su ‘La Seconda Vita dell’Ambiente Costruito’, tema di interesse per il mondo accademico, delle professioni e dell’industria. Cambiamenti climatici, eccessivo consumo di suolo e di risorse non rinnovabili, produzione sempre crescente di rifiuti, emergenza pandemica e crisi socio-economica globale sono entrati di fatto nel nostro quotidiano: seppur drammatiche, per certi versi, tali questioni possono essere colte come un’opportunità per ripensare il modo e il mondo in cui viviamo. In questo contesto di ‘rivoluzione’(Floridi, 2020) e di ‘policrisi’ (Losasso, 2020), e con riferimento specifico a…
Weekly homework quizzes as formative assessment for Engineering students are a fair and effective strategy to increase learning?
2018
International audience; A strategy to apply online weekly homework quizzes as formative assessment for Engineering students was designed and tested in order to study if it increases student's learning. The strategy was to make optional weekly online quizzes not randomly generated that students may retry over and over again until to reach the correct answer, they contribute to 10% of grade but only if students get 45% or more in traditional assessment.The quizzes were applied to two different mathematics courses (Single and Multivariable Calculus) of two different Engineering degrees, each one to around 100 students and during a semester. Student's adherence was very high, nearly all student…
“Making connections” in the mathematics courses for engineers: the example of online resources for trigonometry
2018
International audience; This paper concerns the teaching of mathematics for future engineers, focusing on the theme of trigonometry. We claim that the use of trigonometry in engineering courses requires different kinds of connections: connecting different domains, different concepts, frames and registers. We use here the concept of connectivity, developed in the frame of e-textbooks analysis, to analyse online courses for future engineers in France. We evidence that these courses propose some connections; but their connectivity is not developed enough to meet the requirements of engineering courses.