Second Generation Parenting: Raising Grandchildren or Adult Children with Disabilities

This issue of Making the Link will touch on some of the reasons why grandparents become primary caregivers for their grandchildren, the joys and challenges associated with raising grandchildren and support services currently in place to assist "grandfamilies" emotionally, financially and legally. We will also discuss ways funders can help reduce the gaps in these services and provide other forms of support for grandparents raising their grandchildren

Town of Bethlehem, New Hampshire 2023 annual report.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

Strategies For Sustainable Food Programs In Ethiopia: Creating A Space For Sustainable Food Systems

Food security is the ability to obtain consistent access to food needed for a healthy life. Access to food deeply affects the standard of living for countries, households, and individuals, and needs to be viewed as an important element of the geographical, economic, and political landscape of both the developed and the developing world. In Ethiopia, Addis Ababa represents an urban environment where issues of food security and sovereignty often surface in the debates around social development and urban renewal. While examining the case study of food security, this paper suggests that Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) represents a powerful tool to understand, and overcome food insecurity. However, will the current discourse around sustainable food and ESE recognise the power of organising communities to take control of their own development and take ownership of the process in a concerted effort to create a sustainable food system for all? This paper explores issues behind persisting food insecurity and foreign aid dependency in Ethiopia, and in the developing countries at large. It begins by examining the links between poverty and food insecurity in today’s globalized world, in the local context of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It then discusses the state of sustainable development and environmental education, community engagement and issues of power and social justice. The analysis focuses on the activities of one non-governmental organization (NGO) as a case study, namely the International Fund for Africa’s (IFA) Sustainable School Health and Nutrition program, and its plant-based school feeding program. It highlights the IFA’s efforts to strengthen a community’s ability to overcome poverty and achieve food security through its capacity building trainings. The paper demonstrates how community development and sustainable food production are practiced in urban agriculture, and where ESE fits into this process. It concludes with reflections on what can be done when trusting and lasting relationships are built, especially with local leadership in the NGO

EVALUATION OF CHURCH PLANT TRAINING METHODS WITHIN THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD

The steady decline of churches in America is a cause of great concern among spiritual leaders (Stetzer & Im, 2016). Missiologists agree that church planting is vital to presenting the gospel to unreached people groups. If church planting is the vehicle to deliver the life-giving message of Jesus to the world, church planters are the drivers who actively accomplish the purpose of healthy multiplication. Recent data on the health of church planters indicates many of them are not adequately prepared and desire long-term support to be successful. The Assemblies of God denomination has tasked the Church Multiplication Network with leading the charge in the area of national church planting. Launch church plant training is the primary avenue to prepare church planters. The study surveyed 91 Launch participants to evaluate their perceptions of the training they received. An evaluation of Launch participants indicated they perceived the training itself to include relevant and helpful content. However, indicators of post-Launch support was significantly low on the survey results, which included coaching, parent church backing, and the help of the local denominational network. The research data highlights the need for post-launch support for church planters following the start of a new church. Church planters who perceived they had post-launch support, were 66% more likely to plant a church, compared to those who did not perceive they had ongoing support. The data indicated the perception of post-launch support was a predictor of the launch of a church. Keywords: church planting, training church plant leaders, professional development of church planters, church plant training, launching new churches

Design & generation of an efficient <i>E. coli</i> cell-factory for the overproduction of the compatible solutes ectoine & hydroxyectoine

The compatible solutes ectoine and hydroxyectoine are produced by halophilic or halotolerant bacteria in order to balance and adapt to osmotic alterations in their habitat. Besides this, the potent ability of these compounds to stabilize protein and cellular structures has led to significant interest in the scientific and industrial community over the last two decades. Successful marketing of especially ectoine in various skin-care and medical products has been achieved and the field of application is further growing through new implementations in critical medical fields like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or Alzheimer’s disease. The industrial production of these compatible solutes, however, remains inefficient and costly, due to the limitations of the natural producer strain Halomonas elongata. The world-wide effort to develop an industrially relevant and cost-effective heterologous overproduction strain, has been moderately successful so far. The low productivities of these strains could be related to a poor activity of the employed halophilic enzymes to produce ectoine and hydroxyectoine in their non-halophilic heterologous host systems. To overcome these obstacles, I transferred the hydroxyectoine gene cluster from the non-halophilic Acidiphilium cryptum into Escherichia coli. The design of an optimized expression plasmid led to very high product titers and exceptional productivities in shake flask experiments. Overproduction could be performed at low salt conditions (0% NaCl) leading to the natural excretion of > 99% of the produced ectoines into the culture medium. The scale-up of the production in bioreactor experiments, however, revealed an insuperable halt in production after only 10 hours, hence limiting ectoine titers. By qPCR and mass-spectrometry analysis we observed a rapid loss of ectoine biosynthesis enzymes over time, caused by plasmid instability in combination with the high productivity of the heterologous strain. We were able to solve this issue by the addition of a β-lactam inhibitor into the culture medium, ultimately resulting in high product titers (10 g/L) and the most effective heterologous ectoine overproduction process described in literature to date (3 gectoine/gdcw). The low salt conditions of this cell factory facilitate downstream processes and reduce the costs of waste-water treatment and equipment maintenance. By performing detailed 13C-flux analysis of the strain’s metabolic activity we further identified potential bottle-necks of the here established protocol, eventually allowing for additional metabolic engineering processes that could even enhance strain productivity and efficiency

Contributing Factors Promoting Success for Females in Computing: A Comparative Study

Despite the growing global demand for Computer Science (CS) professionals, their high earning potential, and diversified career paths (U.S. BLS 2021, UNESCO 2017), a critical gap exists between enrollment and graduation rates among female students in computing fields across the world (Raigoza 2017, Hailu 2018, UNESCO 2017, Bennedsen and Caspersen 2007). The largest dropout point occurs during the first two years of their CS studies (Giannakos, et al., 2017). The purpose of this parallelly convergent mixed-methods research was to comparatively investigate, describe and analyze factors correlated to the experiences and perceptions of female undergraduates as it relates to their persistence in CS/Software Engineering (SE) degrees, conducted in two public universities in the U.S. & Ethiopia. Anchored in Tinto?s theory of retention, the quantitative part of the study examined three possible predictive factors of success for students who were enrolled in the first two CS/SE courses and evaluated differences between genders and institutions on those factors. Pearson?s correlation coefficient tests were applied to test the hypothesis that the perceptions of Degree?s Usefulness (DU), Previously Acquired Knowledge (PAK) and Cognitive Attitude (CA) correlate to the decision to persist for the research participants. The results showed a statistically significant positive correlation between perceptions of DU, the influence of PAK, and the decision to persist. Two sample t-tests revealed gender and institutional differences exhibited in the influence of PAK and CA. The qualitative part of the study reported 12 contributing factors of success for graduating class of females in CS/SE using a unique approach of sentiment analysis and topic modeling from the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) through the interpretation of auto transcribed interview responses

Quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of mother tongue-based education on reading skills and early labour market outcomes

Prior to the introduction of mother tongue based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia's primary schools was the offcial language (Amharic) - the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual's exposure to the policy change across birth cohorts and mother tongues to estimate the effects of language of instruction on reading skills and early labour market outcomes. The results indicate that the reading skills of birth cohorts that gained access to mother tongue-based primary education after 1994 improved significantly by about 11 percentage points. The provision of primary education in mother tongue halved the reading skills gap between Amharic and non-Amharic mother tongue users. The improved reading skills seem to translate into gains in the labour market in terms of the skill contents of jobs held and the type of payment individuals receive for their work. An increase in school enrollment and enhanced parental educational investment at home are identified as potential channels linking mother tongue instruction and an improvement in reading skills

Annual report of the town of Bethlehem, N.H. and the Bethlehem Village District for the fiscal year ended December 31, 1962 and the Bethlehem school district for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1962.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire