Overflowing Cities: The State of the World's Toilets 2016

Human beings are now largely an urban species: for the first time in history, more than half of the world's population (54%, or 3.9 billion people) lives in towns, cities and megacities. By 2050, that's expected to rise to two-thirds.Many new urbanites, and particularly the poorest, are not moving into gleaming apartment blocks or regenerated postindustrial areas. They are arriving – or being born into – overcrowded, rapidly expanding slums. Economic growth is usually driven by urbanization, and all industrialized countries already have a mostly urban population. This means that nearly all the current urban population growth is happening in developing countries.UN Habitat estimates that more than one-third of the developing world's urban population – over 863 million people – live in slums.Often, city planning and infrastructure building have been unable to keep pace

Can you hear me now? Creating a Library Class in an LMS to Reach Out to Students

In the Fall of 2016, SWBTS (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) Libraries designed a Library Blackboard course into which all students would be enrolled. The course was not a class for which students were physically present and received a grade. This class served as an online resource for assisting students in building research skills as well as a place that students could discover library services. This essay covers the design and layout of this course as well as how it has impacted library services

Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network

Livingstone (2004) proposes that most discussions of new media literacy are characterised by historically unresolved tensions between 'critical' or 'enlightenment' views of literacy - polarised philosophical positions that see literacy as a normative and exclusionary construction on the one hand (the 'critical' view); or as an aid to progress and equality that we should aim to extend to all people on the other (the 'enlightenment' view). In this paper, I begin from a position that critically evaluates and balances these two available approaches. Drawing on cultural and media studies perspectives and methodological concerns, the paper historicises and analyses the emerging patterns of cultural competencies and cultural value that work to construct new media literacy for cultural participation in the Flickr photosharing network

The Effects of Cytokinin on the Transcriptional Regulation of PIN Expression in Arabidopsis thaliana

The processes of cell division and differentiation are critical to the development of any multicellular organism. During the formation of plant roots these processes take place at a region of the root tip called the meristem. Cytokinin and auxin are two plant growth hormones that influence this process. Although these two growth hormones are both necessary they also appear in many ways to have an antagonistic relationship. As meristematic root cells undergo differentiation they cease dividing. It has been proposed that the size of the root meristem and thus the overall rate of root growth are determined by the balance between the rate of cell division, determined by auxin, and the rate of cell differentiation, determined by cytokinin. One of the ways cytokinin may have an antagonistic influence on auxin regulation is by limiting auxin transport. Directed auxin transport from one part of a plant to another is controlled by a family of auxin efflux proteins called PIN proteins. To date, studies reported in the literate are inconsistent as to whether and how cytokinin influences PIN protein production at the transcriptional and/or translational level. This study was undertaken to explore the effect of cytokinin signaling on PIN gene expression using real-time quantitative PCR