School Lunch Consumption in Terms of Serving Method.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the offer versus serve method on school lunch consumption by students in grades 1-3 when nutrition-related achievement of students was similar. This method allows students to decline two of the five food items. The sample included students in grades 1-3 in two public schools in neighboring parishes, Lafourche and Assumption. The Lafourche Parish school was using the offer versus serve method, while the Assumption Parish school was using the traditional method of serving lunch. Nutrition achievement of students in both schools was determined; the mean scores of students in the two schools compared favorably. Food consumption data were collected from the students in grades 1-3 at one school using the traditional method of serving and from students in grades 1-3 at another school using the offer versus serve method. Comparable menus, days of the week, procedures, and food consumption raters were used. An analysis of the data revealed that there was no significant difference at the .05 level of confidence in the consumption of the meat, salad, dessert, and milk items between methods of serving, There was a significant difference in the consumption of vegetables, fruit, and bread at the .01 level of confidence and the combination dish at the .05 level of confidence. In three of the instances in which the null hypotheses were rejected, consumption of vegetables, bread, and the combination dish was greater when the offer versus serve method was used. The study indicated that food consumption was not adversely affected when offer versus serve was implemented, thus supporting the theory that neither method of serving was superior to the other in terms of food consumption. Therefore, it is recommended that the offer versus serve method be implemented with a nutrition education program involving students, parents, teachers, and food service personnel

Investigating differences in vigilance tactic use within and between the sexes in eastern grey kangaroos

Peer reviewedPostprin

ERAU Scholarly Commons, July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015

Scholarly Commons continued to grow in 2014-2015, not only in content added and downloads, but in maturity of the process. At the beginning of the second year, many of the early challenges resolved as teams that oversee the administration and new development began to understand the system and each other’s strengths. Members of the university community also developed a better understanding of Scholarly Commons and its value to many aspects of the research and academic mission. In particular, various departments turned to Scholarly Commons to host conferences and events. Also, members of the Oversight Team met with representatives of Sponsored Research, Marketing and Communications and academic administration to lay the groundwork for collaborations, such as funneling into Scholarly Commons new content from a faculty profile database expected to go live in late 2015. Scholarly Commons proceeded to build, achieving above average growth, in comparison to other Digital Commons repositories, with the largest number of contributions coming from conferences, archives and faculty submissions. Additionally, Embry-Riddle repeatedly ranked among the most popular institutions within the Digital Commons research community in three broad research disciplines; Engineering, Business, and Social and Behavioral Sciences

Claudin 1 in Breast Tumorigenesis: Revelation of a Possible Novel “Claudin High” Subset of Breast Cancers

Claudins are the major component of the tight junctions in epithelial cells and as such play a key role in the polarized location of ion channels, receptors, and enzymes to the different membrane domains. In that regard, claudins are necessary for the harmonious development of a functional epithelium. Moreover, defective tight junctions have been associated with the development of neoplastic phenotype in epithelial cells. Breakdown of cell-cell interactions and deregulation of the expression of junctional proteins are therefore believed to be key steps in invasion and metastasis. Several studies suggest that the claudins are major participants in breast tumorigenesis. In this paper, we discuss recent advances in our understanding of the potential role of claudin 1 in breast cancer. We also discuss the significance of a subset of estrogen receptor negative breast cancers which express “high” levels of the claudin 1 protein. We propose that claudin 1 functions both as a tumor suppressor as well as a tumor enhancer/facilitator in breast cancer

The Dialectic of Freedom by Maxine Greene

Maxine Greene pushes against common conceptions of what it means to be free. By exploring how various individuals and groups struggled to identify, confront, and transcend the obstacles that limited their agency, Greene shows us that resistance to oppression is essential to the pursuit of human freedom. Reflection and action upon conditions that constrain us is an “existential project” directed at achieving freedom, and as such it is “a central life task” (p. 67). Informed by philosophy, history, art and literature, Greene explores how freedom-seeking women, immigrants, minorities, and other oppressed groups have moved from private to public domains in their efforts to connect with others to reshape the realities of their lives

Dissipating the fuzziness around interdisciplinarity: The case of climate change research

Late last century saw an increasing realisation of significant environmental changes on a global scale, characterised by high levels of dynamism and complexity, and important stakes. Perhaps foremost among these global changes is the issue of climate change, which will form the context of this paper. The complexity that accompanies climate change translates into a need for scientific interdisciplinary approaches, first to achieve a more integrated and comprehensive vision of the issues, and second to better inform the decision-making processes. However, achieving an interdisciplinary setting can be an elusive goal, owing particularly to the contextual nature of interdisciplinary dynamics, which makes it difficult to follow any means of 'best-practice'. Nevertheless, a common understanding of interdisciplinarity is important for researchers and practitioners to ask comparable questions and explore similar hypotheses, thus enabling them to build on what they already know, and advance the practice and scholarship of interdisciplinarity. To this end, both the scholarship and practice of interdisciplinarity have shown the need for actors who commit to interdisciplinarity to reflect on four complex features. They are its definition, origins, objectives and means. The purpose of this paper is to explore and clarify these four features in order to provide route-markers to a more effective and long-lasting implementation and structuring of complex interdisciplinary dynamics. Mobilising dialogue between theory and practice, this paper will draw from both an overview of the literature, and qualitative research undertaken in the Ile-de-France region within the Scientific Consortium for Climate, Environment and Society (GIS CES), which is attempting to conduct interdisciplinary research on the impact of climate change on society

p53-dependent stimulation of redox-related genes in the lymphoid organs of γ-irradiated mice—identification of Haeme-oxygenase 1 as a direct p53 target gene

Recent data showed that p53 stimulates the expression of genes encoding not only pro- but also antioxidant enzymes. It was suggested that antioxidant genes could be induced under physiologic levels of stress while the prooxidant ones respond to higher level of stress. Results presented in this article illustrate an additional degree of complexity. We show that the expression of Haeme-oxygenase 1 (HO-1), a stress-inducible gene that codes for an enzyme having antioxidant properties, is stimulated in a p53-dependent manner in the thymus and spleen of irradiated mice. We prove that HO-1 is a direct p53 target gene by showing that the p53RE identified within human and mouse genes is specifically bound by p53. The threshold of irradiation dose required to induce a significant response of HO-1 in the lymphoid organs of the irradiated mice is higher than that for Waf1/p21 that encodes an universal inhibitor of cell cycle. Moreover, induction of HO-1 occurs later than that of Waf1/p21. Finally, the higher stimulation of HO-1 is reached when Waf1/p21 stimulation starts to decrease

Characterisation of Structural Proteins from Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV) Using Mass Spectrometry

International audienceChronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) is the etiological agent of chronic paralysis, an infectious and contagious disease in adult honeybees. CBPV is a positive single-stranded RNA virus which contains two major viral RNA fragments. RNA 1 (3674 nt) and RNA 2 (2305 nt) encode three and four putative open reading frames (ORFs), respectively. RNA 1 is thought to encode the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) since the amino acid sequence derived from ORF 3 shares similarities with the RdRP of families Nodaviridae and Tombusviridae. The genomic organization of CBPV and in silico analyses have suggested that RNA 1 encodes non-structural proteins, while RNA 2 encodes structural proteins, which are probably encoded by ORFs 2 and 3. In this study, purified CBPV particles were used to characterize virion proteins by mass spectrometry. Several polypeptides corresponding to proteins encoded by ORF 2 and 3 on RNA 2 were detected. Their role in the formation of the viral capsid is discussed

A probabilistic approach to Zhang's sandpile model

The current literature on sandpile models mainly deals with the abelian sandpile model (ASM) and its variants. We treat a less known - but equally interesting - model, namely Zhang's sandpile. This model differs in two aspects from the ASM. First, additions are not discrete, but random amounts with a uniform distribution on an interval $[a,b]$. Second, if a site topples - which happens if the amount at that site is larger than a threshold value $E_c$ (which is a model parameter), then it divides its entire content in equal amounts among its neighbors. Zhang conjectured that in the infinite volume limit, this model tends to behave like the ASM in the sense that the stationary measure for the system in large volumes tends to be peaked narrowly around a finite set. This belief is supported by simulations, but so far not by analytical investigations. We study the stationary distribution of this model in one dimension, for several values of $a$ and $b$. When there is only one site, exact computations are possible. Our main result concerns the limit as the number of sites tends to infinity, in the one-dimensional case. We find that the stationary distribution, in the case $a \geq E_c/2$, indeed tends to that of the ASM (up to a scaling factor), in agreement with Zhang's conjecture. For the case $a=0$, $b=1$ we provide strong evidence that the stationary expectation tends to $\sqrt{1/2}$.Comment: 47 pages, 3 figure