As the previous chapter indicates, there has been a significant shift in advanced economies from manufacturing to information and knowledge services. Knowledge itself is growing ever more specialized and expanding exponentially. Information and communication technology is transforming the nature of how work is conducted and the meaning of social relationships. Decentralized decision making, information sharing, teamwork, and innovation are key in today’s enterprises. No longer can students look forward to middle class success in the conduct of manual labor or use of routine skills – work that can be accomplished by machines. Rather, whether a technician or a professional person, success lies in being able to communicate, share, and use information to solve complex problems, in being able to adapt and innovate in response to new demands and changing circumstances, in being able to marshal and expand the power of technology to create new knowledge, and in expanding human capacity and productivity.

Defining Twenty-First Century Skills

This paper presents the lubridate package for R, which facilitates working with dates and times. Date-times create various technical problems for the data analyst. The paper highlights these problems and offers practical advice on how to solve them using lubridate. The paper also introduces a conceptual framework for arithmetic with date-times in R.

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Dates and Times Made Easy with lubridate

The impacts of climate change on livestock and livestock systems in developing countries: A review of what we know and what we need to know

AimThe variation in species composition among sites, or beta diversity, can be decomposed into replacement and richness difference. A debate is ongoing in the literature concerning the best ways of computing and interpreting these indices. This paper first reviews the historical development of the formulae for decomposing dissimilarities into replacement, richness difference and nestedness indices. These formulae are presented for species presence‐absence and abundance using a unified algebraic framework. The indices decomposing beta play different roles in ecological analysis than do beta-diversity indices. InnovationReplacement and richness difference indices can be interpreted and related to ecosystem processes. The pairwise index values can be summed across all pairs of sites; these sums form a valid decomposition of total beta diversity into total replacement and total richness difference components. Different communities and study areas can be compared: some may be dominated by replacement, others by richness/abundance difference processes. Within a region, differences among sites measured by these indices can then be analysed and interpreted using explanatory variables or experimental factors. The paper also shows that local contributions of replacement and richness difference to total beta diversity can be computed and mapped. A case study is presented involving fish communities along a river. Main conclusionsThe different forms of indices are based upon the same functional numerators. These indices are complementary; they can help researchers understand different aspects of ecosystemfunctioning. The methods of analysis used in this paper apply to any of the indices recently proposed. Further work, based on ecological theory and numerical simulations, is required to clarify the precise meaning and domain of application of the different forms. The forms available for presence‐absence and quantitative data are both useful because these different data types allow researchers to answer different types of ecological or biogeographic questions.

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Interpreting the replacement and richness difference components of beta diversity

The maximum imaging resolution in classical optics is limited to approximately the wavelength of light used, and subwavelength resolution can only be achieved by advanced imaging schemes. The appeal of the super-oscillatory lens optical microscope described here is that it enables subwavelength imaging with, in principle, unlimited resolution using a modified conventional microscope. The past decade has seen an intensive effort to achieve optical imaging resolution beyond the diffraction limit. Apart from the Pendry–Veselago negative index superlens1, implementation of which in optics faces challenges of losses and as yet unattainable fabrication finesse, other super-resolution approaches necessitate the lens either to be in the near proximity of the object or manufactured on it2,3,4,5,6, or work only for a narrow class of samples, such as intensely luminescent7,8 or sparse9 objects. Here we report a new super-resolution microscope for optical imaging that beats the diffraction limit of conventional instruments and the recently demonstrated near-field optical superlens and hyperlens. This non-invasive subwavelength imaging paradigm uses a binary amplitude mask for direct focusing of laser light into a subwavelength spot in the post-evanescent field by precisely tailoring the interference of a large number of beams diffracted from a nanostructured mask. The new technology, which—in principle—has no physical limits on resolution, could be universally used for imaging at any wavelength and does not depend on the luminescence of the object, which can be tens of micrometres away from the mask. It has been implemented as a straightforward modification of a conventional microscope showing resolution better than λ/6.

Wahid Quabili

Papers

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