An Exploratory Study Using Participation Plans for Inclusive Social Studies Instruction

Limited research exists on teaching social studies content, including intervention research, in inclusive settings for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The purpose of this exploratory project was to evaluate the use of participation plans for supporting students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in inclusive high school social studies classrooms. The study addressed two questions: (1) To what extent can students with IDD learn prioritized social studies content and skills in inclusive secondary settings? and (2) How do participation plans support students in learning prioritized social studies content and skills in inclusive general education settings? A university research team supported a public high school staff to employ a single-case, multiple baseline design across prioritized skills (knowledge of content, vocabulary, and summarization) and participants. Results showed students’ correct responses increased across prioritized skills after the team began using the participation plans. This discreet intervention exhibits promise for school staff (i.e., teachers, paraprofessionals) needing mediating tools for effective inclusive education. We discuss implications for future research and practice

Thomas H. Moore House

Prepared by the Fall 2013 Conservation of Historic Building Materials class. This Historic Structure Report contains historical context, building chronology, physical descriptions, current conditions assessment, and recommended treatment and use for the historic property. The purpose of this report is to provide a current assessment of the condition of the property, recommendations for needed repairs and options for future consideration.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_heritagepreservation/1030/thumbnail.jp

Skunk River Review 2012, vol 24

https://openspace.dmacc.edu/skunkriver/1015/thumbnail.jp

Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectually Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting

Pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly subjected to surveillance, by medical professionals, the media and the general public; and discourses of ideal parenting are propagated alongside an admonishment of the perceived ‘failing’ maternal subject. However, despite this scrutiny, the mundane activities of parenting are often impervious to ethnographic forms of inquiry. Challenges for ethnographic researchers include the restrictions of becoming immersed in the private space of the home where parenting occurs, and an institutional structure that discourages exploratory and long-term fieldwork. This paper draws on four studies, involving 34 participants, which explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography including artefacts, photo-elicitation, timelines, collage and sandboxing. The paper argues that visual methodologies can enable access to unseen aspects of parenting, and engender forms of temporal extension, which can help researchers to disrupt the restrictions of tightly time bounded projects

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of ‘Green’ Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar

Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies ‘from above’ in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible ‘green’ self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a ‘double land grab’ to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that ‘pacification’, theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the re-ordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of ‘security’, ‘stability’ and even ‘sustainability’ that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extra-territorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Diltiazem improves contractile properties of skeletal muscle in dysferlin-deficient BLAJ mice, but does not reduce contraction-induced muscle damage

B6.A-Dysf prmd /GeneJ (BLAJ) mice model human limb-girdle muscular dystrophy 2B (LGMD2B), which is linked to mutations in the dysferlin (DYSF) gene. We tested the hypothesis that, the calcium ion (Ca 2+ ) channel blocker diltiazem (DTZ), reduces contraction-induced skeletal muscle damage, in BLAJ mice. We randomly assigned mice (N = 12; 3–4 month old males) to one of two groups – DTZ (N = 6) or vehicle (VEH, distilled water, N = 6). We conditioned mice with either DTZ or VEH for 1 week, after which, their tibialis anterior (TA) muscles were tested for contractile torque and susceptibility to injury from forced eccentric contractions. We continued dosing with DTZ or VEH for 3 days following eccentric contractions, and then studied torque recovery and muscle damage. We analyzed contractile torque before eccentric contractions, immediately after eccentric contractions, and at 3 days after eccentric contractions; and counted damaged fibers in the injured and uninjured TA muscles. We found that DTZ improved contractile torque before and immediately after forced eccentric contractions, but did not reduce delayed-onset muscle damage that was observed at 3 days after eccentric contractions