"Any lady can do this without much trouble ...": class and gender in The dining room (1878)

Macmillan's "Art at Home" series (1876–83) was a collection of domestic advice manuals. Mentioned in every study of the late-nineteenth-century domestic interior, they have often been interpreted, alongside contemporary publications such as Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste (1868), as indicators of late 1870s home furnishing styles. Mrs Loftie's The Dining Room (1878) was the series' fifth book and it considers one of the home's principal (and traditionally masculine) domestic spaces. Recent research on middle-class cultural practices surrounding food has placed The Dining Room within the tradition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management (1861); however, it is not a cookery book and hardly mentions dinners. Drawing upon unpublished archival sources, this paper charts the production and reception of The Dining Room, aiming to unravel its relationships with other contemporary texts and to highlight the difficulties of using it as historical evidence. While it offers fascinating insights into contemporary taste, class and gender, this paper suggests that, as an example of domestic design advice literature, it reveals far more about the often expedient world of nineteenth-century publishing practices

Hotelier Attitudes toward Sustainability in Virginia Beach

This study examined Virginia Beach hoteliers’ knowledge surrounding sustainable tourism, awareness of sustainable programs offered both on the local and national levels, and evaluation of the current sustainable programs available in Virginia Beach. The Virginia Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau distributed a sustainability-focused survey to the General Managers of all hotels in Virginia Beach city limits. With the various programs available and limited success to this point, it is imperative to get hoteliers involved in order to continue to work toward Virginia Beach’s vision of being a sustainable destination. In order for Virginia Beach to continue to position itself as a premier sustainable destination, its leaders must educate their hoteliers of the programs available in order to increase engagement

Cutting the trees to save the forest: The Finch Pruyn working forest

The past two decades have seen sales of millions of acres of commercial forest land in the United States. Changed ownership often results in altered forest management, parcelization or development. Such changes have profound implications for forest species and ecosystems, as well as the timber industry, recreational opportunities, and local and regional economies. An emerging strategy seeks to protect lands through complex public-private partnerships involving state agencies, conservation organizations, and commercial investors. By definition, these partnerships have both environmental and socioeconomic goals; as such, they represent contemporary experiments in sustainable development applied to forested landscapes. As this approach is a recent innovation, its benefits for nature and people have yet to be demonstrated, and the general applicability of this integrated approach to conservation is unknown. Our objective is to identify context-specific objectives and indicators to support integrated monitoring and adaptive management for the former Finch Pruyn lands, which encompass 161,000 acres in the Adirondack region of New York State. This interdisciplinary project involves social science faculty and students from Cornell University and cooperation from conservation scientists from The Nature Conservancy. Through a review of the literature on criteria and indicators for sustainable forestry, we developed an analytical framework for measuring ecological, social, and economic implications of forest management practices. Through key informant interviews, we identified context-specific objectives and indicators for the Finch Pruyn lands, including forest health, species protection, expanded recreation opportunities and community economic vitality. Our approach allows us to compare existing commitments to collection of monitoring data to ideal data sets as defined by actors occupying various structural positions. Identification of potential gaps in monitoring represents an opportunity for dialogue, reallocation of resources and enrollment of new strategic partners. Over time, these global and local indicators can support an adaptive framework through which flows of information inform management in an iterative process. Preliminary results indicate that this project entails several innovations that may contribute to its success, including the development of a comprehensive ecological baseline and the explicit engagement of local claims to livelihoods and access. We make several recommendations for future working forest agreements, such as the need to define clear environmental and socioeconomic goals at the outset, and, when private philanthropy is central to project viability, the incorporation of monitoring costs into initial fundraising targets. We believe these lessons are applicable to conservation development projects in the Northern Forest region and beyond

Host-linked soil viral ecology along a permafrost thaw gradient

Climate change threatens to release abundant carbon that is sequestered at high latitudes, but the constraints on microbial metabolisms that mediate the release of methane and carbon dioxide are poorly understood1,2,3,4,5,6,7. The role of viruses, which are known to affect microbial dynamics, metabolism and biogeochemistry in the oceans8,9,10, remains largely unexplored in soil. Here, we aimed to investigate how viruses influence microbial ecology and carbon metabolism in peatland soils along a permafrost thaw gradient in Sweden. We recovered 1,907 viral populations (genomes and large genome fragments) from 197 bulk soil and size-fractionated metagenomes, 58% of which were detected in metatranscriptomes and presumed to be active. In silico predictions linked 35% of the viruses to microbial host populations, highlighting likely viral predators of key carbon-cycling microorganisms, including methanogens and methanotrophs. Lineage-specific virus/host ratios varied, suggesting that viral infection dynamics may differentially impact microbial responses to a changing climate. Virus-encoded glycoside hydrolases, including an endomannanase with confirmed functional activity, indicated that viruses influence complex carbon degradation and that viral abundances were significant predictors of methane dynamics. These findings suggest that viruses may impact ecosystem function in climate-critical, terrestrial habitats and identify multiple potential viral contributions to soil carbon cycling

Setting the Mood for Critical Thinking in the Classroom

Most current efforts to enhance critical thinking focus on skills practice and training. The empirical research from the fields of cognition and affect sciences suggest that positive mood, even when transiently induced, can have beneficial effects on cognitive flexibility and problem solving. We undertook this study to test this hypothesis in a practical setting. Using an A-B-A-B within subject design, we measured the impact of positive (versus neutral) mood on critical thinking demonstrated on four essay exams in an undergraduate course in personality. There was a significant enhancing effect of positive mood on critical thinking in female students, but not in male students. We discuss possible sex differences that may account for the partial support of the mood-critical thinking effect

The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from submitted version