Frontostriatal Maturation Predicts Cognitive Control Failure to Appetitive Cues in Adolescents

Adolescent risk-taking is a public health issue that increases the odds of poor lifetime outcomes. One factor thought to influence adolescents' propensity for risk-taking is an enhanced sensitivity to appetitive cues, relative to an immature capacity to exert sufficient cognitive control. We tested this hypothesis by characterizing interactions among ventral striatal, dorsal striatal, and prefrontal cortical regions with varying appetitive load using fMRI scanning. Child, teen, and adult participants performed a go/no-go task with appetitive (happy faces) and neutral cues (calm faces). Impulse control to neutral cues showed linear improvement with age, whereas teens showed a nonlinear reduction in impulse control to appetitive cues. This performance decrement in teens was paralleled by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum. Prefrontal cortical recruitment correlated with overall accuracy and showed a linear response with age for no-go versus go trials. Connectivity analyses identified a ventral frontostriatal circuit including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal striatum during no-go versus go trials. Examining recruitment developmentally showed that teens had greater between-subject ventral-dorsal striatal coactivation relative to children and adults for happy no-go versus go trials. These findings implicate exaggerated ventral striatal representation of appetitive cues in adolescents relative to an intermediary cognitive control response. Connectivity and coactivity data suggest these systems communicate at the level of the dorsal striatum differentially across development. Biased responding in this system is one possible mechanism underlying heightened risk-taking during adolescence

Safe Zone: 101 Training Manual

Goals of the DUOC Safe Zone Program: • To increase the overall campus community’s understanding and awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues • To provide a greater sense of safety for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender student community • To offer information to straight allies in positions where they may be in contact with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (as classmates, roommates, friends, residents, students, staff, faculty, etc.) • To act as a resource of information regarding homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia and LGBTQ issues on the DUOC campus

The Boundaries of Team Production of Corporate Governance

We examine the cooperative production of corporate governance. We explain that this production does not occur exclusively within a “team” or “firm.” Rather, several aspects of corporate governance are quintessentially market products. Like Blair and Stout, we view the shareholder as but one of many stakeholders in a corporation. Where we depart from their analysis is in our view of the boundaries of a firm. We suggest that they overweight the intrafirm production of control. Focusing on the primacy of a board of directors, Blair and Stout posit a hierarchical team that governs the economic enterprise. We observe, however, that for many of the most important governance decisions there is, in fact, no hierarchy. In those cases, governance emerges from an intertwined series of market transactions. To use the nomenclature of Blair and Stout, there are many players, but there is no coach, and thus, no “team.” Rather, the firm is controlled by a series of relationships—some of which are governed within the firm and some of which are governed and enforced externally. Ours, then, is a true Coasean framework, suggesting that important implications arise when we differentiate cases where the value of market discipline on stakeholders exceeds the large transaction costs that could be reduced by integration or team creation from cases where the opposite is true. We provide some preliminary conclusions on those implications

Building a Culture of Evidence for Community College Student Success: Early Progress in the Achieving the Dream Initiative

Achieving the Dream is a multiyear, national initiative, launched by Lumina Foundation for Education, to help community college students stay in school and succeed. The 82 participating colleges commit to collecting and analyzing data to improve student outcomes, particularly for low-income students and students of color. This baseline report describes the early progress that the first 27 colleges have made after just one year of implementation

Behavioral Assessment of Emotion Discrimination, Emotion Regulation, and Cognitive Control in Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood

Emotion discrimination, emotion regulation, and cognitive control are three related, yet separable processes that emerge over the course of development. The current study tested 100 children, adolescents, and adults on an Emotional Go/Nogo task, illustrating the ability of this paradigm to identify the unique developmental patterns for each of these three processes in the context of both positive (happy) and negative emotions (fear, sad, and anger), across three different age groups. Consistent with previous literature, our findings show that emotion discrimination and regulatory abilities (both cognitive control and emotion regulation) improve steadily for each age group, with each age group showing unique patterns of performance. The findings suggest that emotion regulation is constructed from basic cognition control and emotion discrimination skills. The patterns of behavior from the Emotional Go/Nogo task provide normative benchmark data across a wide range of emotions that can be used for future behavioral and neuroimaging studies that examine the developmental construction of emotion regulatory processes

Comparison of Bull Kelp coverage survey methods over time in the San Juan Archipelago

Bull Kelp forests are an important habitat in the Salish Sea. They provide critical habitat for a wide variety of species including newly listed rockfish. Yet little data currently exists to determine overall canopy coverage or trends in kelp coverage. In 2017, the Samish Indian Nation initiated a project to compare baseline kelp coverage with Traditional Ecological Knowledge from Tribal Fishermen and a 2006 remote sensing survey conducted by Friends of the San Juans. Using a combination of aerial photography analysis, boat based surveys and NASA satellite imagery, this project seeks to gain a unique perspective on kelp forest trends in the San Juan Islands portion of the Salish Sea. Information gathered will be utilized to inform kelp restoration activities as a part of the rockfish recovery plan sponsored by NOAA and others to enhance this critical habitat and its occupants

Technology ready use of single layer graphene as a transparent electrode for hybrid photovoltaic devices

Graphene has been used recently as a replacement for indium tin oxide (ITO) for the transparent electrode of an organic photovoltaic device. Due to its limited supply, ITO is considered as a limiting factor for the commercialization of organic solar cells. We explored the use of large-area graphene grown on copper by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and then transferred to a glass substrate as an alternative transparent electrode. The transferred film was shown by scanning Raman spectroscopy measurements to consist of >90% single layer graphene. Optical spectroscopy measurements showed that the layer-transferred graphene has an optical absorbance of 1.23% at a wavelength of 532 nm. We fabricated organic hybrid solar cells utilizing this material as an electrode and compared their performance with ITO devices fabricated using the same procedure. We demonstrated power conversion efficiency up to 3.98%, higher than that of the ITO device (3.86%), showing that layer-transferred graphene promises to be a high quality, low-cost, flexible material for transparent electrodes in solar cell technology.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Influence of Diet on Total and Acid Resistant \u3ci\u3eE. coli\u3c/i\u3e and Colonic pH

Nine steers were fed finishing diets in a replicated 3x3 Latin square design to determine if dietary manipulation would alter total and acid resistant E. coli populations. Manipulating diet by limit-feeding of finishing diets did not affect total or acid-resistant E. coli populations. Altering dietary ingredients did not affect total E. coli populations; however, steers fed diets containing dry-rolled or high-moisture corn had lower acid-resistant E. coli populations. Following completion of the Latin Square, all animals were fed alfalfa hay ad libitum for five days. Switching steers to alfalfa hay lowered both total and acid-resistant E. coli populations