Movement Patterns of Carabid Beetles Between Heterogenous Crop and Noncrop Habitats

Habitats adjacent to crop fields can increase natural enemy populations by providing additional food, shelter and overwintering sites. While many studies have focused on the role of non-crop borders for supporting natural enemies, here we investigate the influence of adjacent crop habitats as well. We monitored the movement of carabid beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) between wheat fields and adjacent crop and non-crop habitats using bi-directional pitfall traps. We found greater movement of carabids from corn into wheat fields than from forest and soybean, with intermediate levels of movement from roadside vegetation. Additionally, significantly more carabids were captured moving into corn from wheat than into any other habitat. We also found that carabid community assemblages at habitat borders were different from those in the interior of wheat fields. Our findings suggest that agricultural ecosystems composed of a variety of both non- crop and crop habitats are necessary to maintain carabid abundance and diversity

Assessing the significance of changes in ENSO amplitude using variance metrics

© Copyright 2014 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or [email protected] variance of time series records relating to ENSO, such as the interannual anomalies or bandpass filtered components of equatorial Pacific SST indices, provides one approach to quantifying changes in ENSO amplitude. Robust assessment of the significance of changes in amplitude defined in this way is, however, hampered by uncertainty regarding the sampling distributions of such variance metrics within an unforced climate system. The present study shows that the empirical constraints on these sampling distributions provided by a range of unforced CGCM simulations are consistent with the expected parametric form, suggesting that standard parametric testing strategies can be robustly applied, even in the case of the nonlinear ENSO system. Under such an approach, the sampling distribution of unforced relative changes in variance may be constrained by a single parameter τd: the value of which depends on the choice of method used to extract the ENSO-related component of time series variability. In the case of interannual anomaly records, the value of τd is also substantially dependent on the overall spectral properties of the climatic variable under consideration. In contrast, the τd value for bandpass filtered records can be conservatively constrained from the lower edge of the filter passband, allowing for the direct but robust assessment of the significance of relative changes in ENSO amplitude, regardless of the climatic variable under consideration. Example applications of this approach confirm marginally significant F-test p values for multidecadal changes in central Pacific instrumental SST variance and highly significant ones for centennial changes in central Pacific coral δ18O variance. © 2014 American Meteorological Society.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC

Impact Evaluation Based on Buddhist Principles

 Background:  This is one in a series of articles in which the authors attempt to relate Eastern philosophy to contemporary programme planning and evaluation. Setting: Not applicable. Purpose: The authors examine impact evaluation through the lens of Eastern Philosophy. Subjects: Not applicable. Research Design: Not applicable. Data Collection and Analysis:  The authors examine the basic causal statements from the approach to impact evaluation commonly used by The World Bank and from Buddhist philosophy.  Second, they examine the econometric assumptions on which impact evaluation is often based and propose alternative Buddhist principles. Lastly, they speculate what impact evaluation might look like using the alternative principles that were identified. Findings: Not applicable. Conclusions:  There is no such thing as impact in and of itself.  Rather, a combination of conditions comes together in a certain way, at a certain time, and we call it an impact. Impact is, therefore, the result of conditionality (Salzberg, & Goldstein, 2001). Evaluation that examined the conditionality of impact would be in a position to make statements about patterns of relationships.  Instead of experimental and quasi-experimental approaches, the Insight Evaluation approach (Russon and Russon, 2011) might be more appropriate.

Politics in the Facebook era : evidence from the 2016 US presidential elections

Social media enable politicians to personalize their campaigns and target voters who may be decisive for the outcome of elections. We assess the effects of such political "micro-targeting" by exploiting variation in daily advertising prices on Facebook, collected during the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We analyze the variation of prices across political ideologies and propose a measure for the intensity of online political campaigns. Combining this measure with information from the ANES electoral survey, we address two fundamental questions: (i) To what extent did political campaigns use social media to micro-target voters? (ii) How large was the effect, if any, on voters who were heavily exposed to campaigning on social media? We find that online political campaigns targeted on users' gender, geographic location, and political ideology had a signicant eect in persuading undecided voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn out on polling day. Moreover the effect of micro-targeting on Facebook was strongest among users without university or college-level education

Inter-annual tropical Pacific climate variability in an isotope-enabled CGCM: implications for interpreting coral stable oxygen isotope records of ENSO

Water isotope-enabled coupled atmosphere/ocean climate models allow for exploration of the relative contributions to coral stable oxygen isotope (δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>coral</sub>) variability arising from Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and the isotopic composition of seawater (δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub>). The unforced behaviour of the isotope-enabled HadCM3 Coupled General Circulation Model affirms that the extent to which inter-annual δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub> variability contributes to that in model δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>coral</sub> is strongly spatially dependent, ranging from being negligible in the eastern equatorial Pacific to accounting for 50% of δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>coral</sub> variance in parts of the western Pacific. In these latter cases, a significant component of the inter-annual δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub> variability is correlated to that in SST, meaning that local calibrations of the effective local δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>coral</sub>–SST relationships are likely to be essential. Furthermore, the relationship between δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub> and SST in the central and western equatorial Pacific is non-linear, such that the interpretation of model δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>coral</sub> in the context of a linear dependence on SST alone may lead to overestimation (by up to 20%) of the SST anomalies associated with large El-Niño events. Intra-model evaluation of a salinity-based pseudo-coral approach shows that such an approach captures the first-order features of the model δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub> behaviour. However, the utility of the pseudo-corals is limited by the extent of spatial variability seen within the modelled slopes of the temporal salinity–δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>sw</sub> relationship

The Insight Evaluation Approach

Projects and programmes that are often the objects of our inquiry are actually no more than mental constructs. They are the result of numerous conditions that happen to come together for one brief moment. Their funding, activities, and results arise, dwell in a state of constant flux for a period of time, and then pass away. Insight Evaluation provides an approach to see projects and programmes clearly, without false impression.   The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the International Labour Organization, the United Nations, or the Evaluation Capacity Development Grou

How the I Ching or Book of Changes can Inform Western Notions of Theory of Change

Background: This article is the third part of a trilogy. The Eastern paradigm article (Russon, 2008) dealt with ontological issues (the nature of reality). The insight evaluation article (Russon & Russon, 2009) dealt with epistemological issues (how we can know reality). Purpose: This article deals with a methodological issue—specifically it explores how ancient Chinese philosophy might influence the way in which modern day evaluators think about theories of change.  Setting: Not applicable. Subjects: Not applicable. Research Design: Not applicable. Data Collection and Analysis: The paper is the result of a desk review that compared and contrasted modern theory of change literature with the writings contained in the I Ching or Book of Changes.Findings: The authors believe that the theories of change expressed in the systems diagrams of the I Ching would be considered to be conducive to recurrent change that occurs due to cycles in the natural world. They further believe that the change which harnesses the power of naturally occurring cycles offers the best hope for long-term sustainability. This is because such change takes advantage of an intuitive cooperation with the natural order. Conclusions: The authors believe that using the diagrams of the I Ching as a theory of change template offers modern day evaluators a number of advantages. The advantage of greater sustainability has already mentioned. The authors believe that organic theories of change also encourage evaluators to think about the contribution from many factors instead of attribution of a few factors. Keywords: program evaluation, theory of change, I Ching, Book of Changes, Tao, yin, yang, systems diagram