The Georgia Poll is a bi-annual survey of opinions about issues and topics concerning residents of Georgia. This survey includes issues such as the biggest problem facing the state of Georgia, the attack on America by terrorists, confidence in institutions, job performance of President Bush and Georgia's Governor and Senators, the new Georgia state flag, source of information on nutrition and health, preserving food, race-based admissions at the University of Georgia, landscape plants and gar dening, and computer access and use. Demographic information includes respondent's state of residence while growing up, length of residence in Georgia, age, race, gender, marital status, education, religious affiliation, political ideology, and household income.

Homeowners in coastal environments often augment their access to estuarine ecosystems by building private docks on their personal property. Despite the commonality of docks, particularly in the Southeastern United States, few works have investigated their historical development, their distribution across the landscape, or the environmental justice dimensions of this distribution. In this study, we used historic aerial photography to track the abundance and size of docks across six South Carolina counties from the 1950s to 2016. Across our roughly 60-year study period, dock abundance grew by two orders of magnitude, the mean length of newly constructed docks doubled, and the cumulative length of docks ballooned from 34 to 560 km. Additionally, we drew on census data interpolated into consistent 2010 tract boundaries to analyze the racial and economic distribution of docks in 1994, 1999, 2011, and 2016. Racial composition, measured as the percentage of a tract’s population that was White, positively correlated with dock abundance in each year. Median household income and dock abundance were only correlated in 2011. Taken together, these metrics indicate the growing desire for direct estuary access, however, that access does not appear to be equally spread across racial groups. Because docks enhance estuarine access and demarcate private property, our study provides longitudinal insights into environmental justice concerns related to disparate private property ownership. We found a persistent correlation between the racial characteristics of an area and dock abundance, strongly indicating that White South Carolinians have had disproportionately greater private water access for the past two decades. Methods Dock data was collected via historic aerial imagery of the South Carolina coast. Pre-1990 imagery was obtained from the University of South Carolina library, 1994 and 1999 imagery was obtained from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and 2011 imagery was obtained from the US Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program’s Geospatial Data Gateway (https://nrcs.app.box.com/v/gateway/folder/19350726983). Census data was obtained from the NHGIS and Historical Housing Unit and Urbanization Database at the tract level using their crosswalk files to interpolate 1990 and 2000 data to 2010 tract geographies. Docks were tracked across decades in ArcGIS Pro and statistical models were run using R. Greater methodological detail is provided in the "Historic Infrastructure Methodology" file in the "Historic_Dock_Supplemental" folder on Zenodo. All pre-1990 images therein are reproduced with permission of the University of South Carolina library.

H. Ron Pulliam (University of Georgia Emeritus) established 17 plant demography grids (each between 250 and 480 m2 in size) divided into 2 x 2 m cells in 1999 at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory (35.060037,-83.43044) in Macon County, N.C, Chattahoochee National Forest in Habersham County (34.51271,-83.47465) and Whitehall Forest in Athens-Clarke County, GA (33.884774,-83.357527). Grids 1-6 located at Coweeta were 20 x 24 m; grids 7-10 located at Chattahoochee were 20 x 24 m, except grid 10 was 10 x 24; grids 11-17 located at Whitehall were 20 x 24 m, except grids 12 and 13 were 10 x 12 m, grid 16 was 20 x 20 m and grid 17 was 12 x 24. Individuals of six plant species occurring in each grid were flagged and monitored in for eight years, 1999-2006, along with soil moisture and temperature (presented in a separate data set). All grids were located in the understory shade environment of deciduous forests in mid- to mature stages of succession (60+ years of growth). Each plant was visited at least twice annually to assess survival, growth, reproduction and fecundity. Survival was based on the presence or absence of a plant as identified by its flagged identification number (per grid and individual). For absent plants, mortality was distinguished from dormancy by leaving flag markers in place and recording the subsequent return of an adult plant to the same location. Growth was based on leaf size. Reproduction was based on the presence of reproductive structures, flowers or fruit, and fecundity was based on the appearance of local seedlings. As dormancy is not uncommon in understory plants, flags were not removed due to the absence of a previously measured plant which allowed for the assessment of dormancy rates upon its potential return. The data contained herein are for Anemone americana (previously Hepatica nobilis), which only occurred in grid cells located at Whitehall.

Extinctions are predicted to rise by an order of magnitude over the next century. Although contemporary documented extinctions are uncommon, local extirpations likely provide hints about global extinction risks. Comparing responses to global change of locally extinct versus extant species pairs in a phylogenetic framework could highlight why certain species are more vulnerable to extinction than others and which anthropogenic changes are most relevant to their decline. As anthropogenic changes likely interact to affect population declines, demographic studies partitioning the effects of multifactorial stressors are needed but remain rare. I examine demographic responses to nitrogen addition and deer herbivory, two major drivers of species losses in grasslands, in experimental reintroductions of fourteen locally extinct and extant confamilial native plants from Michigan prairies. Nitrogen consistently reduces survival, especially in locally extinct species, and growth of locally extinct species benefits less from nitrogen than growth of extant species. Nitrogen reduces population growth rates, largely via reductions in survival. Deer herbivory, meanwhile, had inconsistent effects on vital rates among species and did not affect population growth. Nitrogen and herbivory rarely interacted to affect vital rates. These results link community-level patterns of species loss under nitrogen addition to the population-level processes underlying those losses.

Metapopulation theory posits that suitable habitat may frequently be unoccupied because it is isolated and has never been colonized or has been colonized followed by local extinction and has not yet been recolonized. This research addresses the question of how to identify suitable, unoccupied habitat and distinguish it from unsuitable habitat. We are studying a group of six species of forest understory herbs chosen to represent a broad range of habitat distribution and dispersal characteristics. Our aim is to quantify the fundamental niche of these species (sensu Hutchinson 1957), in terms of variables such as soil moisture and temperature, by developing a set of habitat specific demographic stage transition models (i.e. conditional on such environmental variables) for these species. These models, in combination with data from field surveys of the local distribution of the species, will be used to develop testable predictive maps of the distribution of suitable habitat which can be compared to the observed distribution of the plants. We hypothesize that both dispersal ability and the distribution of suitable habitat are important determinants of the actual distribution of species. The goal of this research is both to further our conceptual understanding of the relationships between habitat requirements and species distributions, and to provide a practical approach to operationalizing the concept of "suitable habitat."

H. Ron Pulliam (University of Georgia Emeritus) established 17 plant demography grids (each between 250 and 480 m2 in size) divided into 2 x 2 m cells in 1999 at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory (35.060037,-83.43044) in Macon County, N.C, Chattahoochee National Forest in Habersham County (34.51271,-83.47465) and Whitehall Forest in Athens-Clarke County, GA (33.884774,-83.357527). Grids 1-6 located at Coweeta were 20 x 24 m; grids 7-10 located at Chattahoochee were 20 x 24 m, except grid 10 was 10 x 24; grids 11-17 located at Whitehall were 20 x 24 m, except grids 12 and 13 were 10 x 12 m, grid 16 was 20 x 20 m and grid 17 was 12 x 24. Individuals of six plant species occurring in each grid were flagged and monitored in for eight years, 1999-2006, along with soil moisture and temperature (presented in a separate data set). All grids were located in the understory shade environment of deciduous forests in mid- to mature stages of succession (60+ years of growth). Each plant was visited at least twice annually to assess survival, growth, reproduction and fecundity. Survival was based on the presence or absence of a plant as identified by its flagged identification number (per grid and individual). For absent plants, mortality was distinguished from dormancy by leaving flag markers in place and recording the subsequent return of an adult plant to the same location. Growth was based on leaf size. Reproduction was based on the presence of reproductive structures, flowers or fruit, and fecundity was based on the appearance of local seedlings. As dormancy is not uncommon in understory plants, flags were not removed due to the absence of a previously measured plant which allowed for the assessment of dormancy rates upon its potential return. The data contained herein are for Anemone americana (previously Hepatica nobilis), which only occurred in grid cells located at Whitehall.

Why do students write the way they do? And are they any good at it?

Understanding the nuance of how students write remains a complex challenge – one that can be aided by deeper insight into how various writing components ultimately come together to form effective essays and other texts.

When researchers are able to study the anatomy of student writing, their resulting analysis can provide invaluable glimpses into how students engage with and comprehend text. These insights can generate better feedback on student writing as a whole, which is crucial to creating proficient writers – something that research reveals is a growing education challenge. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), less than a third of high school seniors are proficient writers with those numbers shrinking to only 15% for some marginalized communities. Granular writing feedback can help create better writers but teachers are often too overwhelmed to provide it as needed. So what can help? More knowledge about the different elements of student writing can aid in better development of customized AI, machine learning, and also more effective, formative teacher feedback.

Recent enhancements in the ability to study specific student writing components are now possible thanks to the Learning Agency Lab’s PERSUADE dataset. This dataset opens a window into how students think, label, and organize their thoughts as they write. The resulting snapshots of information provide greater clarity and enhanced knowledge of specific writing elements.

Traditionally, these types of labeled datasets, which break down and focus on particular elements of discourse in an essay, are hard to come by. The PERSUADE (Persuasive Essays for Rating, Selecting, and Understanding Argumentative and Discourse Elements) dataset available here on the Lab’s Learning Exchange is a rare and exciting, nationally representative new resource that lets learning engineers glean in-depth insights on student writing in the United States.

The PERSUADE dataset provides access to comprehensive data such as labels for more than 14,000 essays, including the various argumentative and rhetorical elements contained within each essay response. It also includes the effectiveness rating of these discourse elements, holistic quality scores for the essay responses, and student demographic information that includes grade level, race/ethnicity, economic background, and more.

The dataset was developed as a part of the Feedback Prize project, an initiative by Georgia State University and The Learning Agency Lab. The goal of the prize is to spur the development of open-source algorithms in assisted writing feedback tools and help struggling students dramatically improve in writing. Information in the PERSUADE dataset encompasses the actual questions and argumentative writing elements from students in grades 6-12.

More details on the development of the PERSUADE dataset can be found in the Feedback Prize case study.

Persuade dataset © 2024 by The Learning Agency Lab is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Feedback Prize Competitions - Aigner Picou, Alex Franklin, Maggie, Meg Benner, Perpetual Baffour, Phil Culliton, Ryan Holbrook, Scott Crossley, Terry_yutian, ulrichboser. (2021). Feedback Prize - Evaluating Student Writing. Kaggle. https://kaggle.com/competitions/feedback-prize-2021 - Alex Franklin, Maggie, Meg Benner, Natalie Rambis, Perpetual Baffour, Ryan Holbrook, Scott Crossley, ulrichboser. (2022). Feedback Prize - Predicting Effective Arguments. Kaggle. https://kaggle.com/competitions/feedback-prize-effectiveness - Alex Franklin, Maggie, Meg Benner, Natalie Rambis, Perpetual Baffour, Ryan Holbrook, Scott Crossley, ulrichboser. (2022). Feedback Prize - English Language Learning. Kaggle. https://kaggle.com/competitions/feedback-prize-english-language-learning

Publications - Baffour, P., & Crossley, S. Advances in Automating Feedback for Argumentative Writing: Feedback Prize as a Case Study. In The Routledge International Handbook of Automated Essay Evaluation (pp. 303-328). Routledge. - Baffour, P., Saxberg, T., & Crossley, S. (2023, July). Analyzing bias in large language model solutions for assisted writing feedback tools: Lessons from the feedback prize competition series. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023) (pp. 242-246). - Crossley, S. A., Tian, Y., Baffour, P., Franklin, A., Kim, Y., Morris, W., Benner, B., Picou, A., & Boser, U. (2023). Measuring second language ...

Public opinion poll on: Congress; Economics; Elections; Ideology; Information; Middle East; Mood; Notable People; Political Partisanship; Presidency; Presidential Approval; Problems; Ratings; Religion; Terrorism; Values; Veterans; Vote for President; War.

Patterns of population structure and historical genetic demography of blacknose sharks in the western North Atlantic Ocean were assessed using variation in nuclear-encoded microsatellites and sequences of mitochondrial (mt)DNA. Significant heterogeneity and/or inferred barriers to gene flow, based on microsatellites and/or mtDNA, revealed the occurrence of five genetic populations localized to five geographic regions: the southeastern U.S Atlantic coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the western Gulf of Mexico, Campeche Bay in the southern Gulf of Mexico, and the Bahamas. Pairwise estimates of genetic divergence between sharks in the Bahamas and those in all other localities were more than an order of magnitude higher than between pairwise comparisons involving the other localities. Demographic modelling indicated that sharks in all five regions diverged after the last glacial maximum and, except for the Bahamas, experienced post-glacial, population expansion. The patterns of genetic variation also suggest that the southern Gulf of Mexico may have served as a glacial refuge and source for the expansion. Results of the study demonstrate that barriers to gene flow and historical genetic demography contributed to contemporary patterns of population structure in a coastal migratory species living in an otherwise continuous marine habitat. The results also indicate that for many marine species, failure to properly characterize barriers in terms of levels of contemporary gene flow could in part be due to inferences based solely on equilibrium assumptions. This could lead to erroneous conclusions regarding levels of connectivity in species of conservation concern.