Professional Concerns: Reading and the Vocational/Industrial Arts Teacher

Professional Concerns is a regular column devoted to the interchange of ideas among those interested in reading instruction. Send your comments and contributions to the editor. If you have questions about reading that you wish to have answered) the editor will find respondents to answer them. Address correspondence to R. Baird Shuman) Department of English) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Urbana) Illinois) 61801

Integrating Management, Research, and Monitoring: Balancing the 3-Legged Stool

Research and monitoring programs are often thought of as competing with “on the ground management” for attention and funding. This is false trichotomy; instead, it is more appropriate to view management, research, and monitoring as complementary endeavors, in which loss of any 1 of the 3 is disruptive to the remaining 2. There is often significant or even profound uncertainty about the system’s likely response to management, beyond environmental and other sources of uncontrolled variation. Sometimes this uncertainty can be reduced through directed research studies, including experimentation. However, management decisions usually cannot await the completion of elaborate, multiple-year studies. Adaptive resource management (ARM) provides managers a way to make optimal decisions with respect to resource objectives, given the current level of uncertainty about system response, and in anticipation that learning will improve decision-making through time. Under ARM, resource goals and objectives are always paramount and research and monitoring programs exist to provide managers with the tools they need to make better decisions. The essentials of ARM are clear, compelling, and critically needed in natural resource management. We can no longer afford the luxury, if we ever could, of management divorced from research and monitoring, and vice versa. By keeping the focus on management decision-making and resource objective outcomes, ARM places an explicit value on research and monitoring that then can be used to justify monitoring and research programs

A theoretical framework for combining techniques that probe the link between galaxies and dark matter

We develop a theoretical framework that combines measurements of galaxy-galaxy lensing, galaxy clustering, and the galaxy stellar mass function in a self-consistent manner. While considerable effort has been invested in exploring each of these probes individually, attempts to combine them are still in their infancy despite the potential of such combinations to elucidate the galaxy-dark matter connection, to constrain cosmological parameters, and to test the nature of gravity. In this paper, we focus on a theoretical model that describes the galaxy-dark matter connection based on standard halo occupation distribution techniques. Several key modifications enable us to extract additional parameters that determine the stellar-to-halo mass relation and to simultaneously fit data from multiple probes while allowing for independent binning schemes for each probe. In a companion paper, we demonstrate that the model presented here provides an excellent fit to galaxy-galaxy lensing, galaxy clustering, and stellar mass functions measured in the COSMOS survey from z=0.2 to z=1.0. We construct mock catalogs from numerical simulations to investigate the effects of sample variance and covariance on each of the three probes. Finally, we analyze and discuss how trends in each of the three observables impact the derived parameters of the model. In particular, we investigate the various features of the observed galaxy stellar mass function (low-mass slope, plateau, knee, and high-mass cut-off) and show how each feature is related to the underlying relationship between stellar and halo mass. We demonstrate that the observed plateau feature in the stellar mass function at Mstellar~2x10^10 Msun is due to the transition that occurs in the stellar-to-halo mass relation at Mhalo ~ 10^12 Msun from a low-mass power-law regime to a sub-exponential function at higher stellar mass.Comment: 21 pages. Accepted to Ap

How Common are the Magellanic Clouds?

We introduce a probabilistic approach to the problem of counting dwarf satellites around host galaxies in databases with limited redshift information. This technique is used to investigate the occurrence of satellites with luminosities similar to the Magellanic Clouds around hosts with properties similar to the Milky Way in the object catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our analysis uses data from SDSS Data Release 7, selecting candidate Milky-Way-like hosts from the spectroscopic catalog and candidate analogs of the Magellanic Clouds from the photometric catalog. Our principal result is the probability for a Milky-Way-like galaxy to host N_{sat} close satellites with luminosities similar to the Magellanic Clouds. We find that 81 percent of galaxies like the Milky Way are have no such satellites within a radius of 150 kpc, 11 percent have one, and only 3.5 percent of hosts have two. The probabilities are robust to changes in host and satellite selection criteria, background-estimation technique, and survey depth. These results demonstrate that the Milky Way has significantly more satellites than a typical galaxy of its luminosity; this fact is useful for understanding the larger cosmological context of our home galaxy.Comment: Updated to match published version. Added referenc

Biomarkers of Systemic Inflammation in Ugandan Infants and Children Hospitalized With Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection

Background: Optimizing outcomes in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) pneumonia requires accurate diagnosis and determination of severity that, in resource-limited settings, is often based on clinical assessment alone. We describe host inflammatory biomarkers and clinical outcomes among children hospitalized with RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) in Uganda and controls with rhinovirus and pneumococcal pneumonia. Methods: 58 children hospitalized with LRTI were included. We compared 37 patients with RSV, 10 control patients with rhinovirus and 11 control patients with suspected pneumococcal pneumonia. Results: Patients in the RSV group had significantly lower levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and chitinase-3-like protein 1 (CHI3L1) than the pneumococcal pneumonia group (P < 0.05 for both). Among children with RSV, higher admission levels of CRP predicted prolonged time to resolution of tachypnea, tachycardia and fever. Higher levels of CHI3L1 were associated with higher composite clinical severity scores and predicted prolonged time to resolution of tachypnea and tachycardia, time to wean oxygen and time to sit. Higher levels of lipocalin-2 (LCN2) predicted prolonged time to resolution of tachypnea, tachycardia and time to feed. Higher admission levels of all 3 biomarkers were predictive of a higher total volume of oxygen administered during hospitalization (P < 0.05 for all comparisons). Of note, CHI3L1 and LCN2 appeared to predict clinical outcomes more accurately than CRP, the inflammatory biomarker most widely used in clinical practice. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that CHI3L1 and LCN2 may be clinically informative biomarkers in childhood RSV LRTI in low-resource settings

Solar-Powered Oxygen Delivery in Low-Resource Settings: A Randomized Clinical Noninferiority Trial

This randomized clinical noninferiority trial compares solar-powered oxygen delivery vs standard oxygen delivery using compressed oxygen cylinders among children younger than 13 years with hypoxemic illness at 2 resource-constrained hospitals in Uganda

The Mass Distribution and Assembly of the Milky Way from the Properties of the Magellanic Clouds

We present a new measurement of the mass of the Milky Way (MW) based on observed properties of its largest satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds (MCs), and an assumed prior of a {\Lambda}CDM universe. The large, high-resolution Bolshoi cosmological simulation of this universe provides a means to statistically sample the dynamical properties of bright satellite galaxies in a large population of dark matter halos. The observed properties of the MCs, including their circular velocity, distance from the center of the MW, and velocity within the MW halo, are used to evaluate the likelihood that a given halo would have each or all of these properties; the posterior PDF for any property of the MW system can thus be constructed. This method provides a constraint on the MW virial mass, 1.2 +0.7 -0.3(stat.) +0.3 -0.4 (sys.) x 10^12 M\odot (68% confidence), which is consistent with recent determinations that involve very different assumptions. In addition, we calculate the posterior PDF for the density profile of the MW and its satellite accretion history. Although typical satellites of 10^12 M\odot halos are accreted over a wide range of epochs over the last 10 Gyr, we find a \sim72% probability that the Magellanic Clouds were accreted within the last Gyr, and a 50% probability that they were accreted together.Comment: 9 pages, replaced with version published in ApJ. Animations available at http://risa.stanford.edu/milkyway

Evaluating the influence of land use, drought and reach isolation on the occurrence of freshwater mussel species in the lower Flint River Basin, Georgia (U.S.A.)

North American freshwater mussels have been subjected to multiple stressors in recent decades that have contributed to declines in the status and distribution of many species. However, considerable uncertainty exists regarding the relative influence of these factors on observed population declines. 2. We used an occupancy modelling approach to quantify relationships between mussel species occurrence and various site- and catchment-level factors, including land cover, stream size, the occurrence of drought and reach isolation due to impoundment for 21 mussel species native to the lower Flint River Basin, Georgia, U.S.A. 3. Our modelling approach accounted for potential biases associated with both incomplete detection and misidentification of species, which are frequently not accommodated as sources of bias in freshwater mussel studies. 4. Modelling results suggested that mussel species were, on average, four times less likely to be present following severe drought, but the negative effects of drought declined rapidly with increasing stream size. Similarly, mussel species were 15 times less likely to occupy small streams that were isolated from mainstem tributaries by impoundments. 5. This study provides insight into the effects of natural and anthropogenic factors on freshwater mussel species. Our findings add to a growing body of literature aimed at improving understanding of the predominant factors influencing freshwater mussel populations and fostering the development of more informed and effective conservation strategies.Keywords: False-Positive errors, Occupancy, Unionids, False-negative errors, Water resource managementKeywords: False-Positive errors, Occupancy, Unionids, False-negative errors, Water resource managemen

The Average Physical Properties and Star Formation Histories of the UV-Brightest Star-Forming Galaxies at z~3.7

[Abridged] We investigate the average physical properties and star formation histories of the most UV-luminous star-forming galaxies at z~3.7. Our results are derived from analyses of the average spectral energy distributions (SEDs), constructed from stacked optical to infrared photometry, of a sample of the 1,902 most UV-luminous star-forming galaxies found in 5.3 square degrees of the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey. We bin the sample according to UV luminosity, and find that the shape of the average SED in the rest-frame optical and infrared is fairly constant with UV luminosity: i.e., more UV luminous galaxies are, on average, also more luminous at longer wavelengths. In the rest-UV, however, the spectral slope (measured at 0.13-0.28 um) rises steeply with the median UV luminosity from -1.8 at L L* to -1.2 in the brightest bin (L~4-5L*). We use population synthesis analyses to derive the average physical properties of these galaxies and find that: (1) L_UV, and thus star formation rates (SFRs), scale closely with stellar mass such that more UV-luminous galaxies are also more massive; (2) The median ages indicate that the stellar populations are relatively young (200-400 Myr) and show little correlation with UV luminosity; and (3) More UV-luminous galaxies are dustier than their less-luminous counterparts, such that L~4-5L* galaxies are extincted up to A(1600)=2 mag while L L* galaxies have A(1600)=0.7-1.5 mag. Based on these observations, we argue that the average star formation histories of UV-luminous galaxies are better described by models in which SFR increases with time in order to simultaneously reproduce the tight correlation between the observed SFR and stellar mass, and the universally young ages of these galaxies. We demonstrate the potential of measurements of the SFR-M* relation at multiple redshifts to discriminate between simple models of star formation histories.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa