Sparrows in urban complexity: macro and micro-scale habitat use of sympatric sparrows in Guwahati City,India

In recent decades the House Sparrow and Tree Sparrow have suffered considerable declines. To date, little is known about the fine scale habitat selection of sparrows where they occur together. We investigated how sympatric sparrows used macro and microhabitats in the urban environment of Guwahati city. Survey of sparrows was carried out in 572 locations of different urban settings to find out the city scale distribution. We classified urban habitats and collected micro-habitat variables at 45 point count stations during 2013–2015. Urbanization gradient was found to be influential in limiting the abundance of sparrows. House Sparrow was more common within the urbanized areas compared to low settlement densities located far from the urban core. In contrast, Tree Sparrows were more scattered and seldom found in crowded areas. Spatial overlap was comparatively high in the residential areas adjacent to hillocks. At micro scale, House Sparrow had quadratic response to the degree of urbanization. Both the species avoided areas where urbanization reached the peak; specifically, the areas which were completely devoid of natural vegetation and top soil was paved, and in shopping centers with glass facades. Habitat requirements of both the species at local landscape scale seemed to be similar, although, with some overlaps, they occupied different gradients of the urban environment. Since urban landscapes are highly managed, the fundamental tool for enhancing urban sparrow populations would be the protection of mosaic habitat prioritizing suitable design and management of private gardens and allotments.

     

Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies

Extending the works of scholars who have elucidated writing as the quintessential site for social transformation, the aim of this article is to locate the myriad possibilities for actualizing Donna Haraway's concept of cyborg writing in the field of organization studies. I contend that cyborg writing functions as a discursive mechanism by which to disrupt Enlightenment ideals of Cartesian duality, objectivity and rationality. These ideals inform the very structure of masculine privilege that emerge from having a society that is organized along androcentric values. Situating the scholarship of Jo Brewis, a contemporary scholar in the field, I illuminate how cyborg writing can be practised effectively, whereby greater richness is imparted into conceptualizations of, and theorizing on, organizational and management phenomena. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of cyborg writing, and with the identification of two trajectories that scholars can pursue in future studies. Progress along these two paths will move towards actualizing the feminist project for gender egalitarianism.     

The Role of Innovation Characteristics and Perceived Voluntariness in the Acceptance of Information Technologies

The often paradoxical relationship between investment in information technology and gains in productivity has recently been attributed to a lack of user acceptance of information technology innovations. Diverse streams of research have attempted to explain and predict user acceptance of new information technologies. A common theme underlying these various research streams is the inclusion of the perceived characteristics of an innovation as key independent variables. Furthermore, prior research has utilized different outcomes to represent user acceptance behavior. In this paper we focus on individual's perceptions about the characteristics of the target technology as explanatory and predictive variables for acceptance behavior, and present an empirical study examining the effects of these perceptions on two frequently used outcomes in the context of the innovation represented by the World Wide Web. The two outcomes examined are initial use of an innovation and intentions to continue such use in the future, that is, to routinize technology use. Two research questions motivated and guided the study. First, are the perceptions that predict initial use the same as those that predict future use intentions? Our results confirm, as hypothesized by prior research, that innovation characteristics do explain acceptance behavior. The results further reveal that the specific characteristics that are relevant for each acceptance outcome are different. The second research question asks if perceived voluntariness plays a role in technology acceptance. Results show that external pressure has an impact on adopters' acceptance behavior. Theoretical and practical implications that follow are presented.     

EMPIRICALLY ACCELERATED CONVERGENCE OF THE SPACINGS STATISTICS TO NORMALITY

If the asymptotic normality of a statistic is inadequate for approximating its distribution in practice, then the statistic may be transformed in order to improve the approximation by accelerating the convergence to normality. We treat a goodness-of-fit statistic, the sum of the logarithms of generalized uniform spacings introduced by Cressie (1976, 1978), in this spirit. Specifically, we apply the method of maximum likelihood to simulations of the statistic in order to estimate a power transformation, as in Box & Cox (1964), and hence develop a small sample normal approximation. This approximation provides a more versatile method of applying the statistic than currently available tables of percentiles.     

Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: exploring the creation of plurilingual ‘identity texts’ in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier

In an age of transnational mobility, there has been a growing recognition of the need for both English and French mainstream classroom teachers to be trained to teach increasingly plurilingual student populations. In this article, I begin by describing the context for an exploratory comparative and collaborative ethnographic action research study in four English and French schools in Toronto, Canada and one school in Montpellier, France that engaged children as co-researchers of their lived plurilingualism. I analyse in particular the process of creating plurilingual multimodal books with students and teachers across the five different school cases. This paper focuses on the iterative ‘identity text’ creation process across all five schools by examining one plurilingual identity text from each case, along with students’ research conversations about their creative productions, and interviews with their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, I summarize five features of inclusive plurilingual pedagogy that emerged across the five cases and call for further collaborative research across English and French schools and scholarly communities investigating creative plurilingual language and literacy production in the twenty-first century.     

Partial least squares estimator for single-index models

The partial least squares (PLS) approach first constructs new explanatory variables, known as factors (or components), which are linear combinations of available predictor variables. A small subset of these factors is then chosen and retained for prediction. We study the performance of PLS in estimating single-index models, especially when the predictor variables exhibit high collinearity. We show that PLS estimates are consistent up to a constant of proportionality. We present three simulation studies that compare the performance of PLS in estimating single-index models with that of sliced inverse regression (SIR). In the first two studies, we find that PLS performs better than SIR when collinearity exists. In the third study, we learn that PLS performs well even when there are multiple dependent variables, the link function is non-linear and the shape of the functional form is not known.     

Some improved ratio type estimators of population mean and ratio in finite population sample surveys

In this paper we present a class of ratio type estimators of the population mean and ratio in a finite population sample surveys with without replacement simple random sampling design, where information on an auxiliary variate x positively correlated with the main variate y is available. Large sample approximations to mean square errors (MSE) of these estimatorsare evaluated and their MSE's are compared with the MSE of the usual ratio estimator [ybar]_R of [ybar] the population mean of y. It is shown that under certain conditions these estimators are more efficient than [ybar]_R. When a prior knowledge of the value of thecoefficient of variation, c_y, of y is at hand, ratio type estimator, say [ybar]₁ of [ybar] is proposed. It is shown, under certain conditions, that [ybar]₁ is more efficient than [ybar]_R. When values of c_y, c_x and the population correlation coefficient ρ is at hand, then we have proposed another estimator, say [ybar]₂ of [ybar], which is always better than [ybar]_R as far as the efficiency is concerned. In fact, is [ybar] ₂ is shown to be even better than [ybar]₁. Finally estimators better than the usual ratio estimator [ybar]/[xbar] of [Ybar] are given.     

Estimation of parameters of mixed failure time distribution

The problem of estimation of parameters of a mixture of degenerate and exponential distributions is considered. A new sampling scheme is proposed and the exact bias and the mean square error (MSE) of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters is derived. Moment estimators, their approximate biases and the MSE are obtained. Asymptotic distributions of the estimators are also obtained for both the cases.