Chickadees are selfish group members when it comes to food caching

The topic of the article I chose focused on the particular caching habits of Chickadees, and if cache pilferage occurred in these populations. Specifically, the question asked was, “How do the caching habits of Chickadees change when in the presence of a familiar observers of the same group and an unfamiliar conspecific observers?” 22 mountain chickadees were captured in September 2009 in Tahoe National Forest over 11km at feeders spaced widely enough to find specimens of different social groups. The experiment placed caching specimens with an observer of the same social group, one familiar and one unfamiliar observer, and with no observers. Results showed Chickadees try to minimize cache pilferage among all observers by going out of site of each observer when caching. The data required was information on how chickadees cache their food, which are acts or events. The method of gathering was direct observation, the researches observed how caching habits changed in each specific setting. This was simply comparing habits of chickadees, non-numerical data, and it was purely researcher-centered analysis, for the researchers compared how far and to what extent chickadees would cache their foods with intent of secrecy. Overall I think this research was successful, the methods seemed straightforward and uncomplicated which I believe to provide thorough research. I thought it was interesting the study noted there were no changes in rate of caching, indicating there was no perceived threat of aggression from the point of view of the caching chickadee.

Pravosudov, V. V., Roth, T.C., LaDage, L.D. (2010, July-September). Chickadees are selfish group members when it comes to food caching. Animal Behavior, 80, 175-180.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Volume 96 Number 5

Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior

Authors: William B. Swann Jr., Angel Gomez, D. Connor Seyle, J. Fransisco Morales, and Carmen Huici

This article is about “The authors purpose that when people become fused with a group, their personal and social identities become functionally equivalent. Two hypotheses follow from this proposition. First, activating either personal or social identities of fused persons should increase their willingness to endorse extreme behaviors on behalf of the group. Second, because personal as well as social identities support group related behaviors of fused person”.  I think the research topic for this article is seeing how people interact when they get infused with a certain group of people. So, the research question would be Do personal identities get influenced negatively by the people you associate yourself with? The type of data needed for this research question is Personal and Psychological Traits, Self-Identity, and Deeply Held Opinions and Attitudes. These types have to do with Identity and that is what the research question is trying to get at. The type of methods the authors use surveys and questionnaires, psychological scales, and focus groups. The data analysis method they used is ordinal and categorical data. I think the authors did a great job with their research. They conducted a lot of good studies to back up what they were trying to prove. I think it is helpful to have more than one author so you can conduct more research and get different point of views on the topic you are looking at. They did a great job at following the six research steps.

The article Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise by Robert M. DeConto and David Pollard is about the ice caps in Antarctica melting at a rapid rate. The extensive ice shelves in the Ross and Weddell Seas are about 1km thick at the grounding line and around a few hundred meters thick near the calving front. These ice sheets are eroding fast due to the oceans warming. The oceans are warming at rates faster than 10 meters per year. These ice shelves are also effected by atmospheric warming, causing meltwater on the ice-shelf surfaces which leads to thinning of the ice because of percolation. The Antarctica ice sheets are melting rapidly causing habitat loss to many species.

The question the authors are asking in this article is, will atmospheric warming soon become the dominant driver of ice loss? To collect the data the scientists used a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics which would be reports of acts and behaviors. The data analysis method is interval and ratio data. This research article was well written and easy enough for anyone to understand. The authors did a good job covering all the different ways that climate change is effecting the Antarctic ice sheets and there were no bias opinions. I found this research article very interesting but the part that stood out to me the most is how fast the sea ice is melting. This has so many effects of animals and organisms but it also affects us as humans because the more ice that melts, the more the sea level will rise.

The title of this article in Ecological Restoration also happens to be a research question: “Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting?” Rephrased a bit to tell the researcher more about data, it would be “Do smaller coral fragments have a higher success rate for reef restoration than larger fragments?” The topic is reef restoration, and the data they were seeking was coral growth, which is an event/act, which they gathered by detached observation. Going more in-depth, they gathered fragments of coral that had already been broken off of their original colonies by storms, and transplanted them to a different reef. To compare larger versus smaller fragment growth, they matched their fragments by size and split one half of the pair into several small pieces and left the other intact, then attached them close together on the new reef, tagging each individual fragment. They measured the surface area of each fragment after three and twelve months. They analyzed this data comparatively by cross-tabulating the amounts of experimental coral versus control coral that survived, and found that in their experiment the smaller fragments were less likely to survive than the larger ones.

This research was relatively easy to match to the six research design steps, and the method was easy to follow, knowing a little bit about coral propagation. It seems like a very easy and replicable experiment, but the actual work of transplanting and monitoring takes up a lot of resources. Also, it would have been better to check back on the coral after several years as well as several months, because as it is, they only learned about oral survival, and not whether smaller or larger fragments grew quicker, as coral is very slow-growing. For short-term restoration, at least, larger fragments seem to definitely be better.

Forrester, G., Dauksis, R., & Ferguson, M. (2013). Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting? Ecological Restoration, 31(1), 4-7. doi:10.3368/er.31.1.4

The article I found is titled “The Poetics of a School Shooter: Decoding Political Signification in Cho Seung-Hui’s Multimedia Manifesto” by Edward J. Carvalho. This article is published in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies journal. The topic centers around the Virginia Tech school shooting and the social, political, and cultural factors involved. The research question is “What socioeconomic factors contributed to Cho Seung-Hui’s violent response at Virginia Tech, including the creation of his manifesto?” The article discusses Cho Seung-Hui’s familial background of emigration and how the class tensions led to his identity formation, isolation, alienation, bullying, and rage. His manifesto illustrates the failure of society to listen and understand the disaffected youths. This research question requires descriptive research to understand the dynamics of the situation and to describe the event in detail. A case study was utilized by Carvalho to focus on the details and examine a single instance to shed light on a wider social trend. Since the research requires the understanding of how general social processes work in a particular setting, the type of data utilized by Carvalho are reports of acts, behaviors, events and hidden social patterns. The data collection methods of content and discourse analysis provide an examination of the text in the manifesto, interviews, and other media sources to identify patterns in the way the violent act is portrayed to analyze the implicit cultural assumptions. The way the interviewees and Cho-Seung-Hui himself describe the violent act reveal how Cho-Seung-Hui is shaped by systems of social and political power. Therefore, the data collection sites include Cho Seung-Hui’s 23-page PDF manifesto, follow-up reports, televised interviews, documentaries, and other mainstream media sources. The research suggests that the data analysis method is coding because the researcher analyzes interviews and transcripts to discover patterns. I think the research is thorough and provides a detailed account of the factors that led Cho Seung-Hui to commit a tremendously violent act. It is interesting that Carvalho attempts to apply social and cultural logical to a seemingly indiscriminate and illogical action.

Carvalho, E.J. (2010). The Poetics of a School Shooter: Decoding Political Signification in Cho Seung-Hui’s Multimedia Manifesto. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural    Studies, 32(4-5), 403-430. Doi:10.1080/10714413.2010.510355.

Learning Disabilities and Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis by Jason M. Nelson and Hannah Harwood digs into the hypothesis that school aged students with learning disabilities also frequently have anxiety. Their study showed that students with learning disabilities have higher mean scores of anxiety than their peers who do not have learning disabilities. They also backed their research up with the fact that learning disabilities and emotional problems have been associated since the first conceptualizations of learning disabilities in the early 1900s, not to mention the theoretical explanations linking the two together. The research question asked if students with learning disabilities also have a high level of anxiety and if the two are somehow linked to one another, which they later found was true. The type of data needed to answer Nelson and Harwood’s research question would be demographic data because they obtained their data from different studies. The data gathering method for this research would be through public and private records since the research was obtained through 533 studies through the database search and references list reviews. Similarly, the method of data analysis would then be numeric since the research came from counting of already gathered statistics. I believe this is a very good research strategy and different from all of the others that I have looked into since it is focused on compiling previously collected data instead of gathering new data. I found the results of this study to be very interesting as well as the way in which the researchers compiled their data.

Nelson, Jason M., Harwood, Hannah. (2011). Learning Disabilities and Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp.1-96.

The journal article is titled “Household Responses to Increased Water Rates during the California Drought” it was written by Ellen M. Pint published by the University of Wisconsin Press. It provides a detailed study regarding the price of water for 599 single-family households in Alameda County over the course of 10 years. The article’s topic was to gain a further understanding of household responses to changing water rates in order to answer their research question which is how will single-family households behavior during the course of California’s drought. The type of data needed to answer the research question is organizational data because the study aims to observe the water demands in order to create accurate maximum likelihood models. This goal was achieved through gathering data through applying mechanical observation. An interval data analysis method was used due to the data’s continuous and logical order. I believe that the researched served its purpose of answering its research question by developing multiple methods to predict reactions the final and most precise being the maximum likelihood model. Although, a concern that I have with the research is it is it is fairly shallow research that provides an understanding of the fiscal repercussions while providing no insight into the non-monetary responses. It is also pertinent to one’s understanding of this research that they heavily consider that the results are determined through educated speculation. Seeing as the research is posed to predict the results that California’s drought will have and does not take into account unexpected changes in the condition of the drought like the fact that recent rainfall has severely altered the severity of the drought thus drastically altering water demands.

Pint, Ellen M. “Household Responses to Increased Water Rates during the
California Drought.” Land Economics, vol. 2, no. 75, May 1999, pp. 246-66.
JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3147009.

Tree recruitment in relation to climate and fire in northern Mexico

Jed Meunier, Peter M. Brown, William Romme.

Over the past decades, forest structure in mountainous regions have changed due to factors such as anthropogenic disturbance, varying climate, species competition, and changes in the way we use land. This article looks closely at how fire, climate, and tree recruitment* interact with these factors in the Sierra San Luis mountains of northern Mexico. Researchers found that fires are closely related to wet-dry climate cycles where the climate will go through periods of drought and periods of wet conditions. The greatest times of tree recruitment were tied to a mid-century drought and low fire frequency and also in fireless periods with low precipitation levels.

To answer these questions about tree populations in northern Mexico, researchers had to use demographic data because they were describing characteristics of a population, although it was a forest population and trees rather than people were being described and analyzed through tree-coring.

This data was collected by sampling 30 plots among 3 sampling sites in Ponderosa Pine dominant wilderness which included pinyon pines and Chihuahua pines. Plot sizes ranged from .04 hectares to .37 hectares. Data analysis was completed using spatial analysis tools such as GIS.

From reading this study, I think the research was done quite well although there is a wide range of plot sizes. I wonder if the research would have been more consistent if they had sed the same plot measurement for each tested plot, however that does not take into account landscape changes that researchers likely had to deal with.

*recruitment occurs when juvenile organisms survive to be added to the population to a stage where organisms are settled.

MEUNIER, JED, PETER M. BROWN, and WILLIAM H. ROMME. “Tree Recruitment In Relation To Climate And Fire In Northern Mexico.” Ecology 95.1 (2014): 197-209

Elevated Concentrations of Methyl Mercury in Streams after Forest Clear-cut: A Consequence of Mobilization from Soil or New Methylation?

Ulf Skyllberg, Mattias Björkman Westin, Markus Meili, and Erick Björn
This article, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology investigates the relationship between neurotoxin Methyl Mercury (MeHg) and forestry practices. Hg is formed from the process of combustion of fossil fuels. Long range transport by the atmosphere moves the Me to other locations where it is deposited. The inorganic Hg transforms into MeHg in areas characterized by wetlands and forested regions. MeHg can bioaccumulation in organisms meaning the toxic MeHg is absorbed faster than the organism can remove it. Increased Hg in the environment has also been linked to forest logging actives. The article’s topic is the impacts of inorganic compounds resulting from forestry practices on environments and organisms.

The question this article seeks to answer is to confirm the causal relationship between clear-cutting forest and increasing MeHg concentrations as well as determining if the elevated concentrations of MeHg were a result of the mobilization of Hg is the soils or from new production of Hg. The authors used acts, behaviors or events and detached observations to measure data in regards to the contents of streams. The data was collected at 47 unique forest stands that were subjected to clear-cutting from 1998-2007 and 10 mature forest stands with trees >70 years old. A criterion for the sites was each had to have a consistent stream with a width of .5-1m at the sampling site. No data about the area draining into the stream was collected.

The sites were sampled once during a two-week period in August of 2007. No major precipitation event took place during the two-week sampling period. The data was analyzed quantitatively using statistical analysis to compare data from the clear-cut areas by age and to the reference site. An ANOVA, Analysis of Variation, was used to determine if the data would be a part of one population. This means it was testing to see if there were any significant differences in the data. It was concluded that there was a significant difference meaning clear-cutting was tied to increases in MeHg.

This research was executed well with detailed descriptions of how data was collected and the procedures that the researchers used. I felt that more data could have been collected during a separate two-week period in order decrease the margin for error. The graphs showed multiple data tables in a succinct manner that made them easy to interpret. Overall I felt the article was clear and concise. The aspect that I would highlight would be that there are many implications for removing forests. Not only does it decrease CO₂ sequestration, increase erosion and increase desertification it adds harmful neurotoxins to the environment which damage organisms in areas downstream from the clear-cutting.

Ulf Skyllberg, Mattias Björkman Westin, Markus Meili, and Erick Björn. Elevated Concentrations of Methyl Mercury in Streams after Forest Clear-cut: A Consequence of Mobilization from Soil or New Methylation? Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, 43, 8537-8541.

This article “Our Princess Is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education” by Michael F. Young, Stephen Slota, Andrew B. Cutter, Gerard Jalette, Greg Mullin, Benedict Lai, Zeus Simeoni, Mathew Tran, Mariya Yukhymenka sought to find out if the higher use of video games would mean that students K-12 would benefit scholastically. The article seeks to see if video games effect the students, such as their level of achievement and interest in subjects like masth, science, language, history, and physical education.

The topic of this piece was to find the “connection between video game and classroom achievement and to establish the unique affordances and benefits video games may have for school learning.” Their research question was to “determine whether or not the overarching technology has reached enough of a ‘tipping point’ in the past 30 years to support the claim that video games can enhance classroom learning.” The type of data this article needed was reports of acts, behavior, or event. To do this the authors used meta-analysis collecting, at first, academic journals as well as dissertations, thesis papers, and research reports but they found they had to expand their “scope” so they also collected quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods designs, case studies and conceptual articles.

As I read the article I found that, although I believe youths K-12 have an addiction to their technology, I saw the merit in this research. The evidence shows that video games may in fact have a positive effect on students in the classroom. It shows signs of higher motivation, a better grasp on a subject, better test scores, an increase in achievement; however, these findings are by no means found across the board. I did think it very interesting, though, that some students who just observed video games grasped information on a subject better than the actual players, something I would not have guessed.

Each subject had studies that showed positives and negatives and so the question is still only a maybe but it does show the possibilities of what could happen if video games were properly introduced into the academic curriculum.