Sharing our Stories: A Personal Narrative Literacy Curriculum for Grades 3-5

This thesis began out of my curiosity about the ways to set up a classroom to best support growing readers and writers. As my exploration into literacy continued, I decided to create a personal narrative unit with several foundational literacy skills, strategies, and practices for students to develop. With variety, authenticity, and modeling as the key pillars in planning, alignment to skills and standards will be embedded in genuine literacy experiences. The choice to engage in a genre study of personal narrative was due to its developmental appropriateness, potential for community building, and opportunity to share a range of stories. Using resources from The No-Nonsense Guide to Teaching Writing (Davis & Hill, 2003), Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write (Cunningham & Allington, 2016), and The Continuum of Literacy Learning: Grades PreK-8 (Fountas & Pinnell, 2011) as foundations, an adaptable, six-week curriculum is suggested

A Stable Mimetic Finite-Difference Method for Convection-Dominated Diffusion Equations

Convection-diffusion equations arise in a variety of applications such as particle transport, electromagnetics, and magnetohydrodynamics. Simulation of the convection-dominated regime for these problems, even with high-fidelity techniques, is particularly challenging due to the presence of sharp boundary layers and shocks causing jumps and discontinuities in the solution, and numerical issues such as loss of the maximum principle in the discretization. These complications cause instabilities, admitting large oscillations in the numerical solution when using traditional methods. Drawing connections to the simplex-averaged finite-element method (S. Wu and J. Xu, 2020), this paper develops a mimetic finite-difference (MFD) discretization using exponentially-averaged coefficients to overcome instability of the numerical solution as the diffusion coefficient approaches zero. The finite-element framework allows for transparent analysis of the MFD, such as proving well-posedness and deriving error estimates. Numerical tests are presented confirming the stability of the method and verifying the error estimates

Electronic Health Records and Population Health Research

Adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by clinical practices and hospitals in the US has increased substantially since 2009, and offers opportunities for population health researchers to access rich structured and unstructured clinical data on large, diverse, and geographically distributed populations. However, because EHRs are intended for clinical and administrative use, the data must be curated for effective use in research. We describe EHRs, examine their use in population health research, and compare the strengths and limitations of these applications to traditional epidemiologic methods. To date, EHR data have primarily been used to validate prior findings, to study specific diseases and population subgroups, to examine environmental and social factors and stigmatized conditions, to develop and implement predictive models, and to evaluate natural experiments. Although primary data collection may provide more reliable data and better population retention, EHR-based studies are less expensive and require less time to complete. In addition, large patient samples that can be readily identified from EHR data enable researchers to evaluate simultaneously multiple risk factors and/or outcomes while maintaining study power. In addition to current advantages, improved capture of social, behavioral, environmental, and genetic data, and use of natural language processing, clinical biobanks, and personal sensing via smartphone should further enable EHR researchers to understand complex diseases with multifactorial etiologies. Integrating emerging technologies with clinical care could lead to innovative approaches to precision public health, reduce health care spending on individuals, and directly improve population health

The impact on relationships following disclosure of transgenderism : a wife's tale

What is known on the subject?: The experiences of transgender people are becoming increasingly more visible in popular culture, biographical literature and the media. The topic has received little attention within the psychiatric and mental health nursing literature. There is a paucity of literature exploring the impact on relationships following a disclosure of transgenderism. What does this paper add to existing knowledge?: A narrative account of the consequences for the wife of one transwoman and their relationships with friends and family following the disclosure of transgenderism. The article identifies a range of issues that require further attention in relation to healthcare provision. These include the mental health needs of partners and spouses; attitudes of healthcare professionals towards transgender issues; and the adequacy of the formal support offered to partners and spouses of transgender people. What are the implications for practice?: There is a need for healthcare practitioners to explore their understanding of transgender issues and how these may impact on the mental health of partners and spouses. It is important that healthcare professionals provide a hopeful and supportive environment to enable couples to explore their relationships following disclosure of transgenderism

Floral temperature and optimal foraging: is heat a feasible floral reward for pollinators?

As well as nutritional rewards, some plants also reward ectothermic pollinators with warmth. Bumble bees have some control over their temperature, but have been shown to forage at warmer flowers when given a choice, suggesting that there is some advantage to them of foraging at warm flowers (such as reducing the energy required to raise their body to flight temperature before leaving the flower). We describe a model that considers how a heat reward affects the foraging behaviour in a thermogenic central-place forager (such as a bumble bee). We show that although the pollinator should spend a longer time on individual flowers if they are warm, the increase in total visit time is likely to be small. The pollinator's net rate of energy gain will be increased by landing on warmer flowers. Therefore, if a plant provides a heat reward, it could reduce the amount of nectar it produces, whilst still providing its pollinator with the same net rate of gain. We suggest how heat rewards may link with plant life history strategies

Research Priorities for Achieving Healthy Marine Ecosystems and Human Communities in a Changing Climate

ABSTRACT: The health of coastal human communities and marine ecosystems are at risk from a host of anthropogenic stressors, in particular, climate change. Because ecological health and human well-being are inextricably connected, effective and positive responses to current risks require multidisciplinary solutions. Yet, the complexity of coupled social-ecological systems has left many potential solutions unidentified or insufficiently explored. The urgent need to achieve positive social and ecological outcomes across local and global scales necessitates rapid and targeted multidisciplinary research to identify solutions that have the greatest chance of promoting benefits for both people and nature. To address these challenges, we conducted a forecasting exercise with a diverse, multidisciplinary team to identify priority research questions needed to promote sustainable and just marine social-ecological systems now and into the future, within the context of climate change and population growth. In contrast to the traditional reactive cycle of science and management, we aimed to generate questions that focus on what we need to know, before we need to know it. Participants were presented with the question, "If we were managing oceans in 2050 and looking back, what research, primary or synthetic, would wish we had invested in today?" We first identified major social and ecological events over the past 60 years that shaped current human relationships with coasts and oceans. We then used a modified Delphi approach to identify nine priority research areas and 46 questions focused on increasing sustainability and well-being in marine social-ecological systems. The research areas we identified include relationships between ecological and human health, access to resources, equity, governance, economics, resilience, and technology. Most questions require increased collaboration across traditionally distinct disciplines and sectors for successful study and implementation. By identifying these questions, we hope to facilitate the discourse, research, and policies needed to rapidly promote healthy marine ecosystems and the human communities that depend upon them