The Role of Culture, Ethics and Credibility in the Misuse of Anonymous Sources: Jayson Blair and The New York Times Scandal

In May 2003, The New York Times announced that a young star reporter, Jayson Blair, had made up sources and interviews and has stolen information from other reporters’ work. On May 11, the Times used four full pages to report on Blair’s mistakes and lies, printing corrections in hopes of restoring his credibility (Barry, Barstow, Glater, Liptak, & Strinberg, 2003). The scandal also led to the resignations of executive editor Howell Rains and managing editor Gerald Boyd. This was one among a series of such cases in the history of American journalism

Using Stories to Teach

By nature, human beings are drawn to stories. Even from a young age, a good story can capture our attention, engage our emotions, and build a sense of community. The contextualizing function of stories is an essential tool for making sense of information and events, and we tend to remember stories better than information communicated in other ways. These are all reasons why stories can and should have a place in classroom teaching. My project contains a portfolio of lesson plans written to be used in middle or high school language arts classrooms. These lesson plans (and other instructional materials) demonstrate various ways to utilize stories in the classroom. These lessons and materials are grounded in research from a variety of fields, and I explain these connections in an accompanying bridge document

Influence of Contact Stress Model on the Stability of Bridge Abutment

This chapter deals with the behaviour of an abutment pier on subsoil subjected to flood changes. The floods increase the cross-section of the river bed and change the properties of the foundation soil under the foundation. First, the soil saturates with water. Then, fine-grained particles will wash away and finally parts of the basement rock will be washed off. Finite element method has been used for the calculation of the interaction between the foundation and the subsoil. The foundation has been modelled in a 2D environment using spatial components. For the subsoil, an element with effects of an elastic foundation has been used. The stiffness of the bedrock has been characterized by the C parameter. The chapter describes situations related to the collapse of the structure

High-Order Lowpass Filters Using DVCC Elements

Special cells using a differential voltage current conveyor are presented. The use of these cells for high-order lowpass filter design is described. The filters can be designed to operate in different modes

Generation and quality control of lipidomics data for the alzheimers disease neuroimaging initiative cohort.

Alzheimers disease (AD) is a major public health priority with a large socioeconomic burden and complex etiology. The Alzheimer Disease Metabolomics Consortium (ADMC) and the Alzheimer Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) aim to gain new biological insights in the disease etiology. We report here an untargeted lipidomics of serum specimens of 806 subjects within the ADNI1 cohort (188 AD, 392 mild cognitive impairment and 226 cognitively normal subjects) along with 83 quality control samples. Lipids were detected and measured using an ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography quadruple/time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF MS) instrument operated in both negative and positive electrospray ionization modes. The dataset includes a total 513 unique lipid species out of which 341 are known lipids. For over 95% of the detected lipids, a relative standard deviation of better than 20% was achieved in the quality control samples, indicating high technical reproducibility. Association modeling of this dataset and available clinical, metabolomics and drug-use data will provide novel insights into the AD etiology. These datasets are available at the ADNI repository at http://adni.loni.usc.edu/

MS-DIAL: data-independent MS/MS deconvolution for comprehensive metabolome analysis.

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) in liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) provides comprehensive untargeted acquisition of molecular data. We provide an open-source software pipeline, which we call MS-DIAL, for DIA-based identification and quantification of small molecules by mass spectral deconvolution. For a reversed-phase LC-MS/MS analysis of nine algal strains, MS-DIAL using an enriched LipidBlast library identified 1,023 lipid compounds, highlighting the chemotaxonomic relationships between the algal strains

The Rights of Conscience: The Rise of Tradition in America's Age of Fracture, 1940-1990

Thesis advisor: James M. O'TooleIn the 1960s and 1970s American Catholics invoked conscience inordinately. They claimed to possess “sacred rights of conscience.” Catholics produced a thick psychological literature on the “formation of conscience.” They also made clear that conscience could never be handed over to an authority figure, whether in the church or state. The term conscience then became a keyword in the rights discourse of late twentieth century America. This dissertation seeks to explain why Catholics invoked conscience so frequently in the 1960s and 1970s, and it aims to chart how conscience became important to the rights vernacular of the late twentieth century. Catholics invoked conscience frequently in an effort to remain in and expand tradition. The theology of conscience had roots in the thirteenth century work of Thomas Aquinas -- a tradition American Catholics studied in the 1940s and 1950s. This study also shows how the human rights advocates of Amnesty International and a community of mainline Protestants appropriated the Catholic theology of conscience and used it for their own purposes. The 1960s and 1970s, rather than witnessing the end of tradition, facilitated its growth

Comparative Evaluation of Mechanical Properties of Fibre-Reinforced Concrete and Approach to Modelling of Bearing Capacity Ground Slab

The use of steel fibre-reinforced concrete is becoming gradually widespread in the engineering design of buildings. Typical cases include concrete foundations or floors. The actual design approach is often different. The proposal significantly encompasses the knowledge and range of the material properties of steel fibre-reinforced concrete. This article presents a comprehensive research programme, which has been focused on extensive laboratory testing, in situ testing and advanced numerical modelling using computing models and nonlinear models of concrete. It aims at a comprehensive description of the material properties of concrete, according to the degree of reinforcement, using 8 types of laboratory tests for description. In total, over 74 specified laboratory tests and four slab tests in situ are carried out. Selected evaluated material properties are also provided for the regression curve according to the degree of reinforcement, 0 to 3%. Subsequently, the detailed description of steel fibre is used in advanced modelling of tests of concrete slabs in situ. Numerical models simulate the behaviour of the steel fibre-reinforced concrete base structure in the interaction with the subsoil, where the objective was to verify the total carrying capacity of the slab structure