High school preparation and experience in oral communication: Do they affect communication apprehension levels?

English, mathematics, sciences both social and natural, history, and music are all skills children learn in school. Parents put their faith in the state and local school districts to properly prepare children for their academic and professional lives. Important preparation of any beyond-secondary education endevor includes speaking skills

“You should be more cute, you know”: cuteness and negotiations of power in Japanese vocal jazz

Der Jazz war lange Zeit ein von Männern dominiertes Feld und wird auch heute noch zu einem großen Teil als hegemoniales männliches Projekt produziert. In dieser Studie konzentrieren wir uns auf den sozialen Kontext der Musik Performance in Japan, anstatt die Jazzmusik selbst zu analysieren. Wir versuchen, die Prozesse der Bedeutungskonstruktion der Musiker:innen zu verstehen: die Art und Weise, wie sie über ihre Musik sprechen, wie sie mit identitätsbezogenen Spannungen umgehen und schließlich, wie Musikerinnen ihren Erfahrungen auf und abseits der Bühne einen Sinn geben. Die Untersuchung des sozialen Kontextes, in dem die Musik stattfindet, bietet daher Einblicke in die Sozialgeschichte selbst und in die verschiedenen Konstellationen der Geschlechterorganisation, die zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt verfügbar sind, unabhängig davon, ob diese hegemonial sind oder Widerstand leisten.Jazz has for a long time been a male dominated field and is to a great extend produced as a hegemonic masculine project still today. In this study, our focus is on the social context of music performance in Japan, rather than on an analysis of jazz music itself. We attempt to understand musicians’ meaning making processes: the ways in which they talk about their music, manage identity-related tensions, and ultimately how musicians make sense of their experiences on and off stage. Studying the social context around music therefore provides insight into social history itself, into different constellations of gender organization available at any given moment, whether these are hegemonic or resistant

Monitoring the Alteration and Natural Recovery of a Monsoon-Dominated Stream System after a Wild Fire Disturbs its Watershed, Stout Canyon, Utah

The alteration of a stream’s morphology and recovery following a watershed fire is well documented in streams where high flow events occur during spring runoff. However, there are very little data regarding the alteration and natural recovery of streams that have high flow events during the late summer monsoon rains. Stout Canyon, a tributary to the East Fork of the Virgin River, is located approximately 30 miles southeast of Cedar City, Utah, and is a monsoon-dominated stream system whose watershed was burned by the Shingle Fire of 2012. Employees of the Dixie National Forest have monitored Stout Canyon since 2002, using Rosgen Field Methods. The alteration and recovery of Stout Canyon after the fire were documented using the same methods. The comparison of the pre-fire and post-fire data demonstrates how the fire altered the morphology of Stout Canyon. The data were also compared to similarly collected data from three snow-melt-runoff-dominated streams in the Rocky Mountain area whose watersheds have also been disturbed by fires. Bank full indicators began to reappear at Stout Canyon three years after the fire, suggesting that the stream is just beginning to redevelop its floodplain. Some results match the general trends that occur in spring runoff-dominated systems. However, major differences between Stout Canyon and other streams appear in bank geometry. In most streams, the largest changes in bank geometry occur within the first year after the fire with minor alteration occurring in the subsequent years, with bank re-stabilization within about three years. Stout Canyon’s banks, however, saw the most alteration during the second year after the fire and it is continuing to undergo major alteration with no signs of stabilizing three years after the fire. This may be a result of the fact that monsoon-caused high-water-events vary greatly from year to year, whereas snowmelt-runoff-caused high-water-events are generally more consistent. Through the course of the study, monsoonal rains led to erosion rates that were ten times greater than spring runoff. The inconsistent high water events on streams like Stout Canyon make it difficult for the stream banks to stabilize as efficiently and quickly as observed on other streams in the Rocky Mountain Region. The information presented here may be applied to other monsoon-dominated-systems to determine proper preventative and restoration methods

Forever Plastics: Saving the Great Lakes (and ourselves) from America’s love affair with plastics

The Complete Forever Plastics Earth Day Project. The Forever Plastics invited exhibit was multi-disciplinary, collaborative project sponsored by The School of Arts and Science. Contributors include students enrolled in Spring 2019 classes in Art, Environmental Science and Ecology, and History. The physical display was exhibited at Drake Memorial Library, April-June, 2019

How Well Have Practices Followed Guidelines in Prescribing Antihypertensive Drugs: The Role of Health Insurance

BACKGROUND: The US Joint National Committee (JNC) on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure issues guidelines on the optimal first-line drug therapy in treating hypertension. Despite broad dissemination of these guidelines, prescribing practices have long remained discrepant with recommendations. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of insurance type in the selection of drugs for hypertension treatment in light of the JNC guidelines. METHODS: Subjects were derived from the 1996 Medical Expenditures Panel Survey who had a diagnosis of essential hypertension and who were prescribed a diuretic, beta-blocker, calcium channel blocker (CCB), or ACE inhibitor (ACEI) as monotherapy. Using the nationally representative sample, this study presents the first estimates of the impact of insurance policies on the choice of antihypertensive drugs while controlling for predisposing, enabling, and need variables in the context of a logistic health-care utilization model. RESULTS: Nationally in 1996, more than twice as many subjects (7.3 million) were taking ACEIs or CCBs compared to diuretics or beta-blockers (3.1 million) as the first-line drug therapy, a sharp contrast to the JNC guidelines. Patients with health maintenance organization (HMO) insurance were much less likely than fee for service (FFS) patients to follow the JNC guidelines in this respect (odds ratio 0.50, P <.01), controlling for all other factors. Individuals with all other public insurance and no insurance were not statistically different from the FFS group in the use of the study drugs. Other significant factors in the regression model were being of African American descent, being unmarried, having higher out-of-pocket payment, being in excellent physical health, having diabetes, and being diagnosed with essential hypertension after 1988. Each was associated with a decreased likelihood of following the JNC recommendations for the use of diuretics or beta-blockers. CONCLUSIONS: After controlling for other predisposing, enabling, and need variables, patients who had HMO coverage were significantly more likely than FFS patients to receive ACEIs or CCBs. Given a popular public perception of HMOs being most cost conscious in providing health care, further research is needed to understand why prescribing patterns associated with HMOs have poorly followed the JNC recommendations

Female adolescents identified with emotional disturbance and adjudicated female adolescents: A comparison of self-concepts.

This study addresses the academic, social, and self-image self-concepts of females ages 13-17 who are labeled emotionally and behaviorally disordered by their public school systems and are in residential treatment, and females ages 13-17 who are adjudicated, or labeled “juvenile offenders” and are involved with the juvenile justice system. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the self-concepts of these populations of adolescent females. Research questions focus on whether or not there is a difference in the confidence scores of self-image, academic, and social self-concepts, the importance scores of self-image, academic, and social self-concepts, and the confidence composite and outcome composite scores among female adolescents according to whether or not the female is adjudicated. Results show no statistically significant differences on seven of the eight measures. On the eighth measure, a statistically significant difference was found, with the non-offenders having a higher Outcome Confidence Composite score than the offenders

Pre - Service Teachers’ Perceptions of Disability as Represented in Children’s Television Programs--RESEARCH

As colleges and universities prepare pre-service teachers to teach in inclusive classrooms, it is important to understand college students’ schema of diversity. Part of creating an inclusive classroom culture is to understand how children view similarities and differences in others, and how to create a culture of acceptance. One way to create a culture of understanding is to use media representations and popular children’s television shows as a springboard for conversation and acceptance, but before pre-service teachers can use media, they have to first understand the characteristics and qualification criteria for students with disabilities, and also how the community at large perceives children with disabilities. This research investigated pre-service teachers’ understanding of proportionality and equality in children’s television programming. University undergraduate students applying to or already admitted into teacher education programs watched several hours of children’s television programs and answered questions about the number of characters they observed with disabilities, as well as the way these characters and their disabilities were presented in the show. The research showed that pre-service teachers disproportionately identified more television characters as having disabilities. Implications for practice include increasing early knowledge of IDEA categories and focusing on positive inclusive models in children’s programming and media

Maternal age differences in cognitive regulation: examination of associations and interactions between RSA and EEG frontoparietal alpha power coherence

Strong cognitive regulation is advantageous for flexible, responsive parenting. Optimal cognitive regulation is reliant on associations between physiological mechanisms of central and peripheral nervous system functioning. Across middle adulthood there may be shifts in how cognitive regulation functions, reflecting changes in the associations and interactions between these physiological mechanisms. Two physiological indicators of cognitive regulation are autonomic regulation of the heart (e.g., respiratory sinus arrhythmia, RSA) and activity of the brain’s frontoparietal network (e.g., frontoparietal EEG alpha power coherence, FPc). In the current study we examined maternal age differences (N = 90, age M = 32.35 years, SD = 5.86 years) in correlations and interactions between RSA and FPc in the statistical prediction of cognitive regulation [i.e., executive function (EF), effortful control (EC), cognitive reappraisal (CR)]. Age-related patterns involving interaction between RSA and FPc were found, pointing to a potential shift from optimization to compensation for changes with aging or alternately, the effects of age-based decrements in functioning. Findings are discussed in the context of adult developmental changes in maternal caregiving