Water Supply in Developing Countries: Student Experiences in the Dominican Republic

In 2010, the United Nations established access to safe drinking water as a basic human right; however, many areas around the globe still lack access. The interdisciplinary service-learning course “Water Supply in Developing Countries” was established at Purdue in 2012 to address the complex issue of water insecurity around the world. Over the past five years, the course has produced teams involving students from nursing, engineering, agricultural economics, biology, and food science working together to develop sustainable, community-scale drinking water treatment systems. In partnership with Aqua Clara International, the student team in 2017 established a drinking water treatment system at the Ana Julia Diaz Luna primary school in the rural community of Las Cañas, Dominican Republic. In addition to the focus on a physical water system, they also collaborated with local educators to design a water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) education program. Students guided development of sustainable economic strategies to utilize the system for generation of revenue to reinvest in maintenance and improvements. The observations and lessons learned from the completed stages of this project have been applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of subsequent interventions

Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices

Related dataset is at https://doi.org/10.7302/wazb-wk46 and also listed in the dc.relation field of the full item record.Global service-learning brings students, instructors, and communities together to support learning and community development across borders. In global service-learning, practitioners act at the intersection of two fields: service-learning and international development. Critical scholarship in all service-learning and international development has highlighted the tensions inherent in defining and tracking “success” in community development. In response, service-learning and international development have turned considerable attention to documenting project characteristics, also known as best practices or success factors, that support equitable, sustainable community development. This article presents a systematic synthesis of these fields’ best practices in the context of global service-learning. The authors propose 18 guiding principles for project design to support practitioners in creating and maintaining justice-oriented, stakeholder-driven projects. The authors compare these principles to emerging best practices in global service-learning and assess the contribution of service-learning and international development research to informing the future of the field.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171267/1/Hawes et al_2021_Global Service-Learning.pdfSEL

Make EU trade with Brazil sustainable

Brazil, home to one of the planet's last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment

A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing

The 1000 Genomes Project aims to provide a deep characterization of human genome sequence variation as a foundation for investigating the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Here we present results of the pilot phase of the project, designed to develop and compare different strategies for genome-wide sequencing with high-throughput platforms. We undertook three projects: low-coverage whole-genome sequencing of 179 individuals from four populations; high-coverage sequencing of two mother-father-child trios; and exon-targeted sequencing of 697 individuals from seven populations. We describe the location, allele frequency and local haplotype structure of approximately 15 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, 1 million short insertions and deletions, and 20,000 structural variants, most of which were previously undescribed. We show that, because we have catalogued the vast majority of common variation, over 95% of the currently accessible variants found in any individual are present in this data set. On average, each person is found to carry approximately 250 to 300 loss-of-function variants in annotated genes and 50 to 100 variants previously implicated in inherited disorders. We demonstrate how these results can be used to inform association and functional studies. From the two trios, we directly estimate the rate of de novo germline base substitution mutations to be approximately 10−8 per base pair per generation. We explore the data with regard to signatures of natural selection, and identify a marked reduction of genetic variation in the neighbourhood of genes, due to selection at linked sites. These methods and public data will support the next phase of human genetic researc