Sunday, September 24, 2023

Peru's Operation Mercury stopped most illegal gold mining in one biodiversity hotspot—then the COVID-19 pandemic hit

Peru's Operation Mercury stopped most illegal gold mining in one biodiversity hotspot in the Amazon. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. — A former mining camp shows where shallow mining ponds have overwhelmed a former

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is a lifeline for many who live in Madre de Dios, a region in southeastern Peru, where poverty is high and jobs are scarce. But the economic development in this part of the Amazon basin comes at a cost, as it causes deforestation, build up of sediment in rivers, and mercury contamination in nearby watersheds, threatening public health, Indigenous peoples, and the future of the biodiversity hotspot. And much of the mining activity is unauthorized.

Seeking to eliminate illegal artisanal and small-scale gold mining activity and its many negative impacts, the Peruvian government deployed "Operation Mercury" (Operation Mercurio) in February 2019 in the La Pampa region, an area where gold mining is banned in most places. La Pampa straddles the Interoceanic Highway. North of the highway, mining is mostly legal in mining concessions. However, south of the highway mining is strictly prohibited in the buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve.

Through Operation Mercury, armed military and national police were dispatched to the region and had a sustained presence until March 2020. Miners were evicted and mining equipment was destroyed. The intervention was successful in stopping illegal gold mining activity in La Pampa but activity in legal areas spiked, triggering many of the same environmental concerns, according to a Dartmouth-led study. The results are published in Conservation Letters.

"Although illegal gold mining operations in La Pampa came to a near halt during Operation Mercury's two intervening years (2019—2020), mining activity essentially just shifted across the road to legal areas on the other side of the Interoceanic Highway," says lead author Evan Dethier, an assistant professor at Occidental College, who conducted the study while he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth.

Following Operation Mercury, mining decreased by 70% to 90%. Excavated mining pits ("mining ponds") in illegal mining areas decreased by up to 5% per year as compared to increasing by 33% to 90% per year before the intervention.

Although deforested areas experienced revegetation at a rate of 1 to 3 square kilometers per year, progress was offset by increases in deforestation in legal mining areas north of the Interoceanic Highway at a rate of 3 to 5 square kilometers per year. Most of the revegetation occurred on the edges of deforested areas, with the highest revegetation in La Pampa south. Mining pond areas outside intervention zones also saw increases ranging from 42% to 83%

"The spillover effect in areas near the intervention zone demonstrates that stronger regulations are also needed in legal gold mining areas, to help mitigate the environmental effects," says Dethier. "But this intervention did have some of the intended effects, limiting mining in a protected area for a sustained period."

To assess Operation Mercury's impact on mining activity, the research team drew on satellite data from 2016 to 2021 from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. Data were obtained from nine mining areas: four illegal mining areas targeted by the intervention, two legal areas to the north on the other side of the Interoceanic Highway, and three distant sites that were not part of the enforcement, which served as a control for the study.

Using the radar and multispectral data, the researchers were able to quantify changes in water, water quality, mining pond areas, and deforestation in La Pampa following Operation Mercury, by comparing data from before, during, and after the intervention.

As part of the analysis, the team examined the spectral properties of the mining ponds and changes in pond color. Mining ponds typically take on a yellow color, which acts as a marker for gold mining activity. The "yellowness" of the ponds is associated with increases in suspended sediment in the water, according to prior research led by Dethier.

Through gold mining processes, sediment is churned up from the land, creating turbid water with lower reflectance levels, while clearer water has higher reflectance. After Operation Mercury was implemented, reflectance increased in mining ponds in La Pampa south but then stabilized.

Following Operation Mercury, pond yellowness decreased rapidly after mining activity was suspended in all areas of La Pampa, except in the north. In La Pampa northwest, mining activity spiked and pond yellowness increased by 43%, as compared to before the intervention. In La Pampa northeast, yellowness remained stable due to continued mining activity.

"Like many other countries around the world with highly prized natural resources, with Peru's rich deposits of gold, it has had to determine who controls this extractable resource and how this particular mining sector will be formed," says co-author David A. Lutz, a research assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth.

By January 2023, when this paper was under review by the journal, illegal gold mining had resumed in protected areas, as enforcement and anticorruption activities by the military and national police had ceased, once they were redeployed to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our results demonstrate how intervention at the federal level can effectively stop illegal mining in Peru," says Dethier. "But that is just one aspect of the problem, as a multifaceted approach is necessary to address the long-term impacts of both illegal and legal gold mining activity on humans, wildlife and the environment in the Madre de Dios watershed."

Dethier says that "strong governance and conservation and remediation strategies are needed to protect this tropical biodiversity hotspot. And, as we continue to show in our related work, this challenge is a global phenomenon."

Dethier, Lutz, and others just published a related study that showed the rise of similar mining operations in 49 countries across the global tropics. They showed that as much as 7% of large tropical rivers have been degraded by these expanding mining operations.

More information: Evan N. Dethier et al, Operation mercury: Impacts of national‐level armed forces intervention and anticorruption strategy on artisanal gold mining and water quality in the Peruvian Amazon, Conservation Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1111/conl.12978

Journal information: Conservation Letters

Provided by Dartmouth College Illegal gold mining continues to harm Amazon ecosystem

Diamond materials as solar-powered electrodes: Spectroscopy shows what's important

by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

It sounds like magic: photoelectrodes could convert the greenhouse gas CO2 back into methanol or N2 molecules into valuable fertilizer—using only the energy of sunlight.

An HZB study has now shown that diamond materials are in principle suitable for such photoelectrodes. By combining X-ray spectroscopic techniques at BESSY II with other measurement methods, Tristan Petit's team has succeeded for the first time in precisely tracking which processes are excited by light as well as the crucial role of the surface of the diamond materials.

At first glance, lab-grown diamond materials have little in common with their namesakes in the jewelry shop. They are often opaque, dark and look not spectacular at all. But even if their looks are unimpressive, they are promising in many different applications, for example in brain implants, quantum sensors and computers, as well as metal-free photoelectrode in photo-electrochemical energy conversion.

They are fully sustainable and made of carbon only, they degrade little in time compared to metal-based photoelectrodes and they can be industrially produced!

Diamond materials are suitable as metal-free photoelectrodes because when excited by light, they can release electrons in water and trigger chemical reactions that are difficult to initiate otherwise. A concrete example is the reduction of CO2 to methanol which turns the greenhouse gas into a valuable fuel. It would also be exciting to use diamond materials to convert N2 into nitrogen fertilizer NH3, using much less energy than the Haber-Bosch process.

However, diamond electrodes oxidize in water and oxidized surfaces, it was assumed, no longer emit electrons into the water. In addition, the bandgap of diamond is in the UV range (at 5.5 eV), so visible light is unlikely to be sufficient to excite electrons. In spite of this expectation, previous studies have shown puzzling emission of electrons from visible light excitation. A new study by Dr. Tristan Petit's group at HZB now brings new insights and gives cause for hope.

Dr. Arsène Chemin, a postdoctoral researcher in Petit's team, studied samples of diamond materials produced at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics in Freiburg. The samples were engineered to facilitate the CO2 reduction reaction: doped with boron to insure good electrical conductivity and nanostructured, which gives them huge surfaces to increase the emission of charge carriers such as electrons.

Chemin used four X-ray spectroscopic methods at BESSY II to characterize the surface of the sample and the energy needed to excite specific electronic surface states. Then, he used the surface photovoltage measured in a specialized laboratory at HZB to determine which ones of these states are excited and how the charge carriers are displaced in the samples. In complement, he measured the photoemission of electrons of samples either in air or in liquid.

By combining these results, he was able for the first time to draw a comprehensive picture of the processes that take place on the surfaces of the sample after excitation by light.

"Surprisingly, we found almost no difference in the photoemission of charges in liquid, regardless of whether the samples were oxidized or not," says Chemin. This shows that diamond materials are well suited for use in aqueous solutions. Excitation with visible light is also possible: in the case of the boron-doped samples, violet light (3.5 eV) is sufficient to excite the electrons.

"These results are a great cause for optimism," says Chemin: "With diamond materials we have a new class of materials that can be explored and widely used." What's more, also the methodology of this study is interesting: The combination of these different spectroscopic methods could also lead to new breakthroughs in other photoactive semiconductor materials, the physicist points out.

The work is published in the journal Small Methods.

More information: Arsène Chemin et al, Surface‐Mediated Charge Transfer of Photogenerated Carriers in Diamond, Small Methods (2023). DOI: 10.1002/smtd.202300423

Journal information: Small Methods

Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres Exploring nanodiamonds that can be activated as photocatalysts with sunlight

Researcher uncovers how stereotypes about brilliance shape women's decisions to study psychology or philosophy

by Patty Cox, Florida State University

Even though women in high school and college tend to outperform men academically, they still internalize the stereotype that brilliance is more linked to men. This belief affects their choice of major and perpetuates gender gaps in academic fields, according to a new study by a Florida State University researcher.

Heather M. Maranges, a research fellow in the Department of Human Development and Family Science, compared the fields of philosophy and psychology to explore factors that contribute to these disparities. This study is published in the journal Sex Roles.

Philosophy and psychology share historical and topical overlap and have long been known for their inverse gender gaps. More men than women study philosophy, while more women opt to study psychology. These gaps begin to develop at the undergraduate level, after introductory classes before majors are chosen, and perpetuate through graduate school and into academic careers.

Past research on gender gaps has focused on comparing STEM fields, which are perceived as requiring high brilliance and where women are underrepresented, to humanities and education, which are perceived to require less brilliance and where women are overrepresented, Maranges said.

"Missing from prior research was the ability to isolate the most important factors contributing to gender gaps by comparing fields that are more similar, such as philosophy and psychology," she said. "Our objective was to consider how stereotypes about brilliance versus mindsets about intelligence might differently affect men and women's decisions about what to study."

Maranges conducted the research with an interdisciplinary team at Concordia University in Montreal. The team surveyed 467 undergraduate students studying philosophy and psychology in universities across the United States and Canada.

The study found that brilliance beliefs about oneself—beliefs that a person has especially high levels of innate intelligence—played a crucial role in shaping students' academic choices.

Specifically, women who believed they were not as brilliant as men tended to major in psychology, which people perceived as requiring less brilliance than philosophy, regardless of their own gender. But men's major choices were not strongly influenced by their self-perceptions of brilliance.

Surprisingly, intelligence mindsets did not play a significant role. Whether people believed that intelligence could be grown through hard work and effort (growth mindset) or that it was unmalleable and innate (fixed mindset) did not contribute to their choice of what to study.

"This is striking, given that women come into university with objective markers of academic ability, such as higher GPAs, and that academic psychology requires the similar types of thinking as philosophy but also statistical abilities," Maranges said.

The findings suggest internalized beliefs about the gendered nature of brilliance are crucial in understanding why men and women tend to pursue different academic fields, she said.

"By addressing brilliance beliefs, we can open doors for capable and interested individuals of all genders and other unrepresented groups by allowing actual abilities and interests to play out, reducing disparities across academic fields," she said.

More information: Heather M. Maranges et al, Brilliance Beliefs, Not Mindsets, Explain Inverse Gender Gaps in Psychology and Philosophy, Sex Roles (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s11199-023-01406-5

Journal information: Sex Roles

Provided by Florida State University Academic fields valuing 'brilliance' less welcoming to women, new analysis shows

Teacher well-being not a priority in schools, experts warn

by Taylor & Francis

Against a backdrop of funding shortages and recruitment issues across the education sector, two education experts argue that equipping leaders with more soft skills will improve mental health and well-being in school staff.

In the U.K., the government has just announced it is establishing a taskforce to look at reducing teacher workload, with representatives from across the education sector.

"There is a clear and urgent need to make schools better places to work," School well-being expert Mark Solomons explains, "school leaders need the skills to enact change and quickly."

What exactly is the problem?

Solomons and education journalist Fran Abrams have co-authored a new book to help schools to build a culture of well-being and to ensure staff are not overworked or stressed, called "What Makes Teachers Unhappy, and What Can You Do About it?"

Solomons and Abrams have extensively examined current research and policy to inform a guide for school leaders, which argues staff well-being should be rooted in the culture and climate of all schools. It provides a roadmap to recovery for schools, colleges and multi-academy trusts, which will lead to improvements in staff morale, workload management and mental well-being.

Solomons explains, "School leaders are often under-supported and underprepared to take on something as challenging as staff well-being in a high-stress environment."

The book provides psychological techniques for school leaders to bolster their own resilience and well-being, something the authors argue is crucial before trying to improve team morale.

Utilizing up-to-date research, the authors advise leaders on how to support staff well-being and reduce stress.

"The issue is that leaders in schools are a product of their knowledge and experience. Often they are a teacher or support staff member one day, then the next they are leading a team, often with no or little training. And they usually have to continue to do more than 80 percent of their previous job."

The guide shows how to effectively audit a school's well-being support on a whole-school and individual level, as well as offering ways to address and improve any gaps.

Structural and systemic failures

The U.K.'s Department for Education (DfE) has this week announced it is planning an update to its teacher recruitment and retention strategy, with a priority to "create the right climate for leaders to establish supportive school cultures."

In "What Makes Teachers Unhappy," the authors analyzed the DfE's Education Staff Well-being Charter, which was published in 2021 and asked schools to sign up to a number of pledges on staff well-being.

They found only minor updates to the charter had been posted on the DfE website, none of them providing updates on its pledges.

"It is encouraging that the DfE has renewed its interest in staff well-being," Solomons says. "By creating an environment that supports staff development and encourages staff to make decisions, take responsibility and learn from mistakes, rather than being judged from them, it's possible to improve staff well-being and deliver significant benefits to school leaders and students. In short, it's vital that well-being is built into the culture of organizations from top to bottom if real and lasting change is to take place.

"The failure isn't at an individual level, people are thrust into positions they have had no real training for—and with the background landscape of funding cuts and long hours, it's no wonder the education system seems to be in permanent crisis."

The book, which features a range of real-life examples, will be published by Routledge on September 26. It will focus on how school leaders can build workplace well-being in even the current challenging environment.

More information: Mark Solomons et al, What Makes Teachers Unhappy, and What Can You Do About It? Building a Culture of Staff Wellbeing (2023). DOI: 10.4324/9781003315766

Provided by Taylor & Francis Online tool to support delivery of 'whole school' approach to food

Researchers ready NASA's SPHEREX space telescope for 2025 launch

by Whitney Clavin, California Institute of Technology

JPL Director Laurie Leshin poses with SPHEREx at JPL. The instrument is mounted to a vibration table for simulating shaking during launch. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's SPHEREx space telescope has been tucked inside a custom-built chamber on and off for the past two months undergoing tests to prepare it for its two-year mission in space. SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is set to launch into orbit around Earth no later than April 2025.

It will map the entire sky in infrared wavelengths of light, capturing not only images of hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies but spectra for these objects as well. Spectra are created by instruments that break apart light into a rainbow of wavelengths, revealing new details about a cosmic object's composition, distance, and more.

"It's a small telescope, but it gathers an enormous amount of light thanks to its very wide field of view," explains Stephen Padin, a research professor of physics at Caltech and member of the SPHEREx team. "This will be the first all-sky near-infrared spectroscopic survey."

The telescope is tilted to allow SPHEREx to map the entire sky. SPHEREx must carry out its observations without letting sunlight into the thermal system, which means the sun must always be more than 90 degrees off the central axis. If the telescope were pointed straight up, this constraint would leave two holes in the map coverage, located at the north and south ecliptic poles. By tipping the telescope slightly toward the sun, SPHEREx avoids these coverage holes while also preventing sunlight from entering the thermal system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The SPHEREx telescope and detectors will stay cold in space with the help of three "V-groove" radiators, seen here at the bottom of the telescope. Nicknamed the "jewels that keep SPHEREx cool," these radiators emit thermal energy as infrared radiation out to the sides, and into the cold of space. The radiators are staged such that each one reaches a lower temperature as you move toward the top. The last radiator stage is a plate, located near the top of the telescope, which provides the lowest temperature stage for the long-wavelength detectors. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To ready SPHEREx for its journey, scientists and engineers at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech for NASA, have been busy testing SPHEREx's detectors and optics in a basement lab at Caltech's Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Because performing these tests requires simulating the extremely cold vacuum of space, the SPHEREx team enlisted colleagues at the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) to build a specialized chamber for this purpose. The SUV-sized chamber cools the telescope to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 200 degrees Celsius).

"A series of measurements inside the chamber will test that the telescope is in focus and stays in focus through the shaking of launch," says Jamie Bock, the principal investigator of the mission, professor of physics at Caltech, and senior research scientist at JPL. "The chamber will later be used to characterize SPHEREx's spectrometer, which will capture detailed spectral information for every point on the sky."

Last year, the custom chamber was lowered into the basement of Cahill with the help of a 30-ton crane, as seen in a timelapse video. The telescope was then carefully prepared to be placed in the chamber, a process that included wrapping parts of the telescope in a foil material to block out stray light and to keep the telescope cool. A second timelapse video shows team members loading the telescope into the chamber.

To test whether the telescope is in focus, the team uses a collimator, basically a telescope operating in reverse, to shine an artificial star into the chamber and onto the detectors. The chamber was designed with a gold-coated sapphire window that allows the team to project the artificial star into the chamber while reflecting heat from the laboratory away from the chamber.

"The lab is glowing at infrared wavelengths," explains Phil Korngut, a scientific researcher at Caltech and instrument scientist for the SPHEREx team. "We need to keep that nasty thermal background light from getting into the telescope because it would totally swamp the detectors."

In between tests at Caltech, the telescope is being shipped to JPL, where a large mechanical shaker is mimicking the vibrations that SPHEREx will experience when it blasts off into space aboard a rocket. Once SPHEREx passes the tests at Caltech and JPL, it will be shipped to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, for integration with the spacecraft starting in March 2024.

The mission's maps of the sky will showcase stars and galaxies throughout the universe in just over 100 different infrared wavelengths of light. Its images and spectral data will allow astronomers to trace the large-scale structure of the universe to answer fundamental questions about the first moments after the birth of our cosmos 13.8 billion years ago. SPHEREx will also help answer the mystery of how water arrived on Earth by studying the abundance of water and other ices in regions where stars and planetary systems are forming.

"Our mission is complementary to others like JWST and the future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope," says Chi Nguyen, a postdoctoral scholar research associate at Caltech and member of the SPHEREx team. "They look at objects in detail, whereas we map out the whole sky and look more at global features."

SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA's Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Ball Aerospace will supply the spacecraft. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx data set will be publicly available.

Provided by California Institute of Technology

Test chamber for NASA's new cosmic mapmaker makes dramatic entrance

One in three children who've been in care system enter youth justice system, UK research shows

by Lancaster University

One in three children who've been in care enter youth justice system, new research shows — Median cautions or convictions for those with youth justice involvement, by care

An unprecedented study of 2.3m children has found that one in three children born between 1996 and 1999 who had experience of the care system received a youth justice caution or conviction between the ages of 10 and 17, compared with just 4% of those without experience of care.

This figure was even higher for some ethnic groups, with a total of 39% of Black Caribbean, 38% of White and Black African and 42% of White and Black Caribbean children who'd been in care involved in the youth justice system.

Of all children in the study, custodial sentences were almost twice as common among Black and Mixed ethnicity children who'd been in care compared to White children who'd been in care.

The study found that 5% of White children who'd been in care received a custodial sentence—with 9% of Black and Mixed ethnicity children who'd been in care sentenced to custody.

Dr. Claire Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University and co-author of the report, said, "The findings from this research led by Dr. Katie Hunter are deeply concerning and ought to be taken very seriously. In particular, the extent of justice-system over-representation that has been revealed is shocking.

"This research demonstrates the importance of using more detailed ethnicity information when considering inequalities in youth justice involvement, particularly for those who have been in care. It highlights the serious need to ensure that all children can benefit from efforts at preventing unnecessary criminalization, no matter who they are or where they have come from."

The research, authored by Manchester Metropolitan University and Lancaster University, is the largest ever study of its kind in England, demonstrating that children who'd been in care—and particularly those who are Black—are statistically over-represented in the criminal justice system.

The report also emphasizes that high levels of youth justice involvement among children who've been in care are not an inevitability but a sign that somewhere along the line, they have been failed.

An Administrative Data Research UK Research Fellowship project, the study analyzed new linked data from the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education. It included four cohorts of children born between 1996 and 1999, with snapshot demographic information extracted from the 2006 to 2009 educational censuses when they were aged ten, the minimum age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales.

The resulting dataset contains information for approximately 2.3m children, comprising demographic information—including gender and ethnicity—information about children's services involvement and/or youth justice involvement. The data included 50,000 children who had experience of being in care including foster care, children's homes and kinship care.

Based on the report findings, the authors have outlined a series of policy recommendations, including improving the availability of linked data from the justice system and other government departments, the publication of data using detailed ethnicity categories, a statutory duty on local authorities to prevent unnecessary criminalization of children in care and care leavers, and promoting understanding across youth justice agencies of the needs of children who've been in care in order to improve support.

Dr. Katie Hunter, Lecturer in Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University and lead author of the study, said, "As a result of this analysis, we now know the shocking extent of criminalization among care-experienced children in England. It also reveals what individuals working in the field have long suspected—that racially minoritized care-experienced children are especially vulnerable to youth justice involvement and imprisonment.

"Clearly, we need urgent action from government to prevent the unnecessary criminalization of children in care and care leavers which takes account of the specific needs of minoritized groups. We also need to keep in mind that youth justice involvement among children who've been in care is not an inevitability. We must avoid stigmatizing these children—this is about over-criminalization and system failures."

The report, Care Experience, Ethnicity and Youth Justice Involvement: Key Trends and Policy Implications, is authored by Dr. Katie Hunter at Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as Professor Brian Francis and Dr. Claire Fitzpatrick at Lancaster University.

More information: Report: www.adruk.org/fileadmin/upload … ing-Katie-Hunter.pdf

Provided by Lancaster University The unfair 'double whammy' of minority ethnic children in care

Generative AI already being used in majority of college classrooms, according to new survey

by Wiley

university lecture — Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A new report from Wiley suggests that generative artificial intelligence (AI) is already being used in the majority of college classrooms—and that number could climb quickly.

The majority (58%) of college instructors who responded to Wiley's recent survey say they or their students are already using generative AI in their classrooms, according to the company's new report, "Higher Ed's Next Chapter, 2023–2024." And another third of those who aren't say they'd consider using it in the future.

More than 60% of instructors are somewhat or very familiar with generative AI tools.

"The whirlwind that is generative AI has swept across our college campuses with remarkable speed, and there's no going back," said Smita Bakshi, senior vice president of academic learning at Wiley. "It's important for college instructors to educate themselves and their students on effective and appropriate use of this new technology in the classroom."

Generative AI's growth is happening quickly, and respondents expect that trend to continue. Two-thirds of instructors say they expect their program or department will use more technology over the next three years, and nearly six in ten anticipate AI-based tools, virtual/augmented reality, or courseware with flexible assignment types will be important in delivering their courses three years from now.

The quick adoption of AI technology does not come without its concerns. Just around one third of instructors say they feel somewhat or very positive about AI usage. The large majority believe it will allow students to cheat more easily and make it harder to detect cheating. More than six in ten are looking for new ideas and solutions to address these concerns.

A recent study from zyBooks and the University of California suggested that simple, low-effort methods can help reduce cheating in college courses, such as discussing academic integrity with students early in the course, requiring an academic integrity quiz, and demonstrating anti-cheating tools the instructor has available.

The rise of technology and AI is one of four emerging trends in higher education identified in the report. The other three trends are:

Students are concerned that they're not well prepared for their post-graduation lives.
Students are searching for meaningful careers.
Instructors are prioritizing student needs despite challenges of their own.

Some data on AI were generated in an August 2023 survey consisting of responses from 1,078 instructors in North America from various disciplines (including business, math, science, psychology, and technology). Other data were gathered in August 2022 in a survey of 2,452 instructors.

Provided by Wiley

Survey: Higher confidence in academic integrity of remote instruction among college instructors

Two new species of ancient primates resembling lemurs identified

by University of Texas at Austin

2 new species of ancient primates identified that resembled lemurs — *Artist's reconstruction of the two species described in the paper—Mytonius williamsae (L)*

Fossil evidence from the Tornillo Basin in West Texas and the Uinta Basin in Utah reveals two new species of omomyids—a family of small-bodied early primates from the Eocene epoch. The findings also clarify previously disputed taxonomic distinctions among these primates, according to researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, Des Moines University in Iowa and Midwestern University in Arizona.

The study, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, significantly expands the fossil record of primates from these regions and also allowed the researchers to confirm the existence of three distinct genera of omomyids.

"Since fossil primates were first discovered in North America in the 1860s, only a handful of specimens from the late middle Eocene of Texas and Utah have been described," said Chris Kirk, professor of anthropology at UT and first author on the paper. "For the larger members of the extinct primate family Omomyidae, these small sample sizes have led to some confusion, with past authors unable to agree whether there are one, two or three genera represented."

Omomyids initially had body masses below 500 grams, but some evolved to double that size during the late middle Eocene. The two new species identified—from the genera Ourayia and Mytonius—are on the larger end of the spectrum. They probably resembled present-day small to medium-size lemurs and consumed a diet of fruit and leaves.

Both new species appear to be endemic to the Tornillo Basin and differ from fossil primates found in other parts of North America.

"This distinctiveness of the West Texas primate community suggests that they were evolving at least partly in isolation, with perhaps relatively few opportunities for migration or gene flow with communities of primates living in other parts of North America at the same time," Kirk said. "Eocene primates in the Big Bend may also have been adapting to the local environmental conditions."

The study also expanded the fossil evidence of three previously discovered species—Diablomomys dalquesti, Mytonius hopsoni and Ourayia uintensis—painting a clearer picture of these primates' anatomies and diets.

Previous studies on the evolution of Eocene primates focused on earlier periods and regions with more abundant fossil samples, such as Bighorn and Bridger basins in Wyoming. Increasing the sample of fossil primates from different regions may offer insights into the changing environmental factors that shaped these divergent populations.

"The fact that more than 150 years after the first Eocene primates from North America were first described, I can travel eight hours from my home in Austin and find new species of fossil primates in the Big Bend country is still astonishing to me," Kirk said.

"There is so much interesting research that remains to be done on these Texas primates. It's a reminder of how many gaps still exist in the fossil record, and how many important paleontological discoveries are waiting to be made, sometimes even more or less in our own back yards."

More information: E. Christopher Kirk et al, New specimens of middle Eocene omomyines (Primates, Omomyoidea) from the Uinta Basin of Utah and the Tornillo Basin of Texas, with clarification of the generic status of Ourayia, Mytonius, and Diablomomys, Journal of Human Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103425

Journal information: Journal of Human Evolution

Provided by University of Texas at Austin Three previously unknown ancient primates identified

Avoiding the 'nothingburger' effect in government contractor mergers and acquisitions

by Benjamin Kessler, George Mason University

Avoiding the 'nothingburger' effect in GovCon M&A — Illustrations of customer asset strategies: Government customer penetration and

In love and business alike, the laws of attraction can be obscure. Companies pursue mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for a host of reasons ranging from gaining market share to gaming the tax system. In his recently published research, Brett Josephson, associate dean for executive development and associate professor of marketing at George Mason University, pondered one particularly mysterious M&A motivator: customer strategy.

"We suspected one of the primary reasons firms were buying each was for the other company's customer assets," Josephson says. "But the information was hidden behind the firewalls of these companies. Companies are not going to reveal their customer portfolio unless they are forced to."

To test his hypothesis, Josephson turned to the government contracting (GovCon) sector, where vendor disclosures are a requirement for doing business. Moreover, M&A activity in the federal GovCon ecosystem has been extremely robust in recent years, as the competitive conditions increasingly favor entities with scale advantages.

"In the business-to-government (B2G) space, companies have difficulty achieving organic growth due to regulatory oversight, budgeting challenges and the unique nature of this sector," Josephson says. "So they often turn to M&A's to fuel growth and increase profitability, but we really don't know whether and when these activities actually lead to increased returns."

Josephson's paper for Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, co-authored by Shuai Yan of University of Stavanger and Ju-Yeon Lee of Iowa State University, poses the question: Do equity markets prefer M&As between companies who serve the same customers, or different ones?

In theory, either strategy could work. Doubling down with shared customers—which the paper terms customer penetration—could reinforce key relationships with major government agencies and take advantage of scale benefits. Gaining access to new customers— or customer expansion—has obvious virtues of access to new markets and revenue streams, but could be thwarted by the steep learning curve B2G firms face when onboarding new clients.

The researchers analyzed market response to 422 M&A deals during the period 2001-2017, where both target and acquirer were government contractors. For each M&A pairing, they assessed customer penetration and customer expansion by comparing value generated by contracts from shared customers against those from customers new to the acquirer.

They found that investors reacted positively to news of M&As that were heavily weighted toward customer expansion—in other words, a customer expansion focus was associated with higher short-term cumulative abnormal returns (firm share price increased more than expected). The opposite was true of M&As where customer penetration dominated. Deals that were more evenly split between the two strategies also met with a slightly negative investor response.

Josephson suggests that markets are generally aware of the uphill battle that may lie ahead for contractors that consolidate in order to win more business from an existing customer. Thanks to the unique power dynamic that occurs when your client is also your potential regulator, these attempts can backfire if a government agency perceives that the deal would inordinately increase its dependency on a single vendor.

Highly specific vendor requirements can also make consolidated firms ineligible to retain the government contracts they previously serviced as separate entities. These are just a couple of the reasons why investors perceive customer penetration as generally unlikely to pay off in the short term.

"With customer penetration, it's hard to change pricing schema and net 'unexpected' new revenue," Josephson further explains. "Your income statement may change, but that's not an exciting story for investors. There's an impression of diminishing returns."

The "nothingburger" effect of customer penetration M&A was diminished when product-based contractors absorbed service-based companies. The mix of offerings added a dimension of diversification to the deal that apparently interested investors. With customer expansion M&As, it had the opposite effect—firm values went down as investors may have considered it a risky proposition to try integrating these two doubly different entities.

However, both types of M&A were generally more successful when the customers serviced by target and acquirer were in growth areas of the federal budget, e.g. cybersecurity or anti-terrorism in the post-9/11 period. "Government contracting companies are looking for fast-moving streams, with budgets rising faster in certain sectors than the federal budget as a whole," Josephson says.

He cautions that his findings may not equally apply to all M&As in the B2G space, because not all deals are geared toward share price maximization. For example, it is often the case that companies would rather merge than compete with one another. But these sorts of anti-competitive deals are the ones most likely to raise regulator eyebrows and prompt accusations of favoritism.

The particularities of the B2G sector may complicate the applicability of these findings to the broader economy. However, tighter regulatory oversight places some industries in a roughly analogous position to B2G. Josephson says, "We believe our findings will stand up within highly regulated markets such as telecom and pharma that have a large base of commercial customers."

More information: Shuai Yan et al, The effect of customer asset strategies on acquisition performance in business-to-government markets, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s11747-023-00955-1

Journal information: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Provided by George Mason University A 'power boost' for customers is key to enhancing engagement and well-being, suggests study

New Indo-European language discovered during excavation in Turkey

by Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient Near East, is involved in investigating the discovery.

The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC).

Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbors.

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise: Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Hittites were interested in foreign languages

Professor Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Prof. Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.

More precise classification of the new language is in progress

Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Prof. Schwemer's colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg University), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages.

According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.

Provided by Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Ancient Hittite cuneiform scripts will soon be accessible online

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment