Student engagement is an important factor for learning outcomes in higher education. Engagement with learning at campus-based higher education institutions is difficult to quantify due to the variety ...of forms that engagement might take (e.g. lecture attendance, self-study, usage of online/digital systems). Meanwhile, there are increasing concerns about student wellbeing within higher education, but the relationship between engagement and wellbeing is not well understood. Here we analyse results from a longitudinal survey of undergraduate students at a campus-based university in the UK, aiming to understand how engagement and wellbeing vary dynamically during an academic term. The survey included multiple dimensions of student engagement and wellbeing, with a deliberate focus on self-report measures to capture students' subjective experience. The results show a wide range of engagement with different systems and study activities, giving a broad view of student learning behaviour over time. Engagement and wellbeing vary during the term, with clear behavioural changes caused by assessments. Results indicate a positive interaction between engagement and happiness, with an unexpected negative relationship between engagement and academic outcomes. This study provides important insights into subjective aspects of the student experience and provides a contrast to the increasing focus on analysing educational processes using digital records.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We characterized > 150 countries' resilience to COVID-19 as the nationwide decay rate of daily cases or deaths from peak levels. Resilience to COVID-19 varies by a factor of ~ 40 between countries ...for cases/capita and ~ 25 for deaths/capita. Trust within society is positively correlated with country-level resilience to COVID-19, as is the adaptive increase in stringency of government interventions when epidemic waves occur. By contrast, countries where governments maintain greater background stringency tend to have lower trust within society and tend to be less resilient. All countries where > 40% agree "most people can be trusted" achieve a near complete reduction of new cases and deaths, but so do several less-trusting societies. As the pandemic progressed, resilience tended to decline, as adaptive increases in stringency also declined. These results add to evidence that trust can improve resilience to epidemics and other unexpected disruptions, of which COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last.
Social sensing of floods in the UK Arthur, Rudy; Boulton, Chris A; Shotton, Humphrey ...
PloS one,
01/2018, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural ...hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes 'relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Marine ecosystems are sensitive to stochastic environmental variability, with higher-amplitude, lower-frequency——i.e., “redder”——variability posing a greater threat of triggering large ecosystem ...changes. Here we show that fluctuations in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index have slowed down markedly over the observational record (1900–present), as indicated by a robust increase in autocorrelation. This “reddening” of the spectrum of climate variability is also found in regionally averaged North Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and can be at least partly explained by observed deepening of the ocean mixed layer. The progressive reddening of North Pacific climate variability has important implications for marine ecosystems. Ecosystem variables that respond linearly to climate forcing will have become prone to much larger variations over the observational record, whereas ecosystem variables that respond nonlinearly to climate forcing will have become prone to more frequent “regime shifts.” Thus, slowing down of North Pacific climate variability can help explain the large magnitude and potentially the quick succession of wellknown abrupt changes in North Pacific ecosystems in 1977 and 1989. When looking ahead, despite model limitations in simulating mixed layer depth (MLD) in the North Pacific, global warming is robustly expected to decrease MLD. This could potentially reverse the observed trend of slowing down of North Pacific climate variability and its effects on marine ecosystems.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) exhibits two stable states in models of varying complexity. Shifts between alternative AMOC states are thought to have played a role in past ...abrupt climate changes, but the proximity of the climate system to a threshold for future AMOC collapse is unknown. Generic early warning signals of critical slowing down before AMOC collapse have been found in climate models of low and intermediate complexity. Here we show that early warning signals of AMOC collapse are present in a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, subject to a freshwater hosing experiment. The statistical significance of signals of increasing lag-1 autocorrelation and variance vary with latitude. They give up to 250 years warning before AMOC collapse, after ~550 years of monitoring. Future work is needed to clarify suggested dynamical mechanisms driving critical slowing down as the AMOC collapse is approached.
Potential climate tipping points pose a growing risk for societies, and policy is calling for improved anticipation of them. Satellite remote sensing can play a unique role in identifying and ...anticipating tipping phenomena across scales. Where satellite records are too short for temporal early warning of tipping points, complementary spatial indicators can leverage the exceptional spatial-temporal coverage of remotely sensed data to detect changing resilience of vulnerable systems. Combining Earth observation with Earth system models can improve process-based understanding of tipping points, their interactions, and potential tipping cascades. Such fine-resolution sensing can support climate tipping point risk management across scales.
Abstract
The cooling transition into the Little Ice Age was the last notable shift in the climate system prior to anthropogenic global warming. It is hypothesised that sea-ice to ocean feedbacks ...sustained an initial cooling into the Little Ice Age by weakening the subpolar gyre circulation; a system that has been proposed to exhibit bistability. Empirical evidence for bistability within this transition has however been lacking. Using statistical indicators of resilience in three annually-resolved bivalve proxy records from the North Icelandic shelf, we show that the subpolar North Atlantic climate system destabilised during two episodes prior to the Little Ice Age. This loss of resilience indicates reduced attraction to one stable state, and a system vulnerable to an abrupt transition. The two episodes preceded wider subpolar North Atlantic change, consistent with subpolar gyre destabilisation and the approach of a tipping point, potentially heralding the transition to Little Ice Age conditions.
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