Realism In Assessment Research Articles

Marina MacKay. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic.

Marina MacKay. <i>Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic</i>.

The sensitivity of seabird populations to density‐dependence, environmental stochasticity and anthropogenic mortality

Abstract The balance between economic growth and wildlife conservation is a priority for many governments. Enhancing realism in assessment of population‐level impacts of anthropogenic mortality can help achieve this balance. Population Viability Analysis (PVA) is commonly applied to investigate population vulnerability, but outcomes of PVA are sensitive to formulations of density‐dependence, environmental stochasticity and life history. Current practice in marine assessments is to use precautionary models that assume no compensation from density‐dependence or rescue‐effects via “re‐seeding” from other colonies. However, if we could empirically quantify regulatory population processes, the responses of populations to additional anthropogenic mortality may be assessed with more realism in PVA. Using Bayesian state‐space models fitted to population time series from three sympatric seabird populations, selected for varied life histories, we inferred the extent to which their dynamics are driven by environmental stochasticity and density‐dependence. Based on these inferences, we conducted an exhaustive PVA across credible parameterizations for intrinsic and extrinsic population regulation, simulated as a closed and re‐seeded system. Scenarios of anthropogenic mortality, along a sliding scale of precaution, were applied both proportionally and as a fixed quota using Potential Biological Removal (PBR). Baseline results from fitting revealed clear environmental regulation in two of our three species. Crucially, we found that for our empirically derived, realistic model parameterizations there are risks of decline to real populations even under very precautionary mortality scenarios. We find that PBR is dubious in application as a sustainable tool for population assessment when we account for regulation. Closed versus re‐seeded models showed a large divergence in outcomes, with sharper declines in closed simulations. Fixed‐quota mortality typically induced greater population declines comparative to proportional mortality, subject to regulation and re‐seeding. Synthesis and applications. Practitioners using arbitrary formulations of population regulation risk over‐precaution (economic constraint) or under‐precaution (endangering populations). The demands of increased economic development and preservation of wildlife require that methodologies apply techniques that confer reality and rigour to assessment. The current practice of employing models lacking density‐dependence and empirical environmental information imposes limitations in the efficacy of estimating impacts. Here, we provide a method to quantify the conditions that predominantly regulate a population and exacerbate the risk of decline from anthropogenic mortality. It is in the interests of both developers and conservationists to apply methods in population impact assessments that capture realism in the processes driving population dynamics.

Slipping from Secret History to Novel

The secret history, a genre of writing made popular as opposition political propaganda during the reign of Charles ii, has been the subject of renewed critical interest in recent years. By the mid-1740s, novelists were using markers of secret histories on the title pages of their works, thus blurring the genres. This forgotten history of the secret history can help us understand why Ian Watt and other twentieth-century critics tended to end their narratives of the rise of the “realist” Whig novel with the works of the Tory novelist Jane Austen. In particular, the blended narrative perspective that Watt praises in Austen’s novels—in which the author balances a realism of presentation with a realism of assessment—may stem in part from the layers of narrative framing deployed in secret histories to shield the author from prosecution for libel. The opposition and Tory secret historians that Watt excludes from his Whiggish triple-rise theory may have contributed to the complex narratological perspective that he identifies as the culmination of the novel’s formal emergence.

Realism in assessment of effort estimation uncertainty: it matters how you ask

Traditionally, software professionals are requested to provide minimum-maximum intervals to indicate the uncertainty of their effort estimates. We claim that the traditional request is not optimal and leads to overoptimistic views about the level of estimation uncertainty. Instead, we propose that it is better to frame the request for uncertainty assessment: "How likely is it that the actual effort will be more than/less than X?" Our claim is based on the results of a previously reported-experiment and field studies in two companies. The two software companies were instructed to apply the traditional and our alternative framing on random samples of their projects. In total, we collected information about 47 projects applying the traditional-framing and 23 projects applying the alternative framing.

Smollett's Development as a Novelist

The only way fully to grasp the dynamics of Smollett's development as a novelist is through examination of his continuing efforts to create a unified art work. Recently, in support of this concern, attention has been drawn to the kinetic nature of his search for form.1 As a further step in a reassessment of Smollett's career, we should see that his quest involved a redefinition of his philosophic attitudes as well as changes of a more purely formal nature. Throughout his career he searched for new modes of expression to mirror his insights about life in a fully coherent work of art; only gradually did he recognize and respond to the inevitability of transforming that insight itself into something more congenial to the novel form and to the historical circumstances that give rise to this genre. In a general way, Smollett's experiments with novel form reveal a movement away from a satiric anatomy largely derived from the picaresque tradition toward a more coherent novel world in which character, plot, and authorial assessment work together in a unified manner. Smollett's evolution thus follows a general trend of his period which came to reject looser forms of fiction in favor of those which were at once more lifelike and coherent. But in emphasizing formal realism, as Ian Watt has pointed out, the novelists of this period raised crucial and persistent problems about matters of aesthetic and moral evaluation. How was one to achieve a tale that was both lifelike and yet an evaluation or moral assessment of that life? How was one to reconcile the different, and apparently opposing, demands of a realism of presentation and a realism of assessment?2 Smollett's solution to this problem, finally, in his last novel cannot be divorced from his search for a philosophical stance on the problem of how we come to know reality. His career can be seen as reflecting a struggle to come to terms with the implications of Lockean epistemology for both his conception of reality and his novel form.