Differences in Job Satisfaction Between Special Educators When Controlling for Sense of Community

Attrition among educators is a continuing concern in the area of special education. Job satisfaction has been associated with teacher burnout and teacher attrition. Many times, multiple educators work in a close environment creating a need for community in special education. The purpose of this study is to identify differences in job satisfaction among special educator roles, including collaborative general education teachers and inclusive special education teachers, as well as self-contained special education teachers and paraprofessionals, when controlling for sense of community. A quantitative, causal comparative design was used to determine differences among job satisfaction between special educators. The study involved 93 participants with 34 collaborative general education teachers, 30 inclusive special education teachers, 14 self-contained special education teachers, and 15 paraprofessionals. Participants were selected from public school districts in Virginia containing elementary, middle, and high schools. Variables were collected using two survey instruments, including Paul Spector’s Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS), to determine educator satisfaction, and Wilfried Admiraal and Ditte Lockhorst’s Sense of Community in School Scale (SCSS) to identify educator’s perception of community. Data was gathered using SurveyMonkey. In addition, data was analyzed using an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to determine if there were significant differences in job satisfaction between educator roles while controlling for the covariate, perceived sense of community

Molecular Mechanism of Ferricsiderophore Transport via the Outer Membrane Receptor FhuA in \u3cem\u3eEscherichia coli\u3c/em\u3e.

Iron is essential for life and growth in most organisms. Although it is abundant, iron exists mostly as insoluble iron-oxyhydroxide. Bacteria secrete siderophores to chelate iron and transport it into the cell via specific outer membrane receptors. The FhuA receptor protein transports ferrichrome, a siderophore produced by Ustilago sphaerogena. We determined the binding affinity of variants from the conserved \u27lock region\u27 of FhuA and also created and characterized variants of the highly conserved R452 to determine its role in ferrichrome transport. We hypothesize that during transport the plug domain of FhuA does not leave the barrel; rather it undergoes a conformational change to form a channel. We mutated selected amino acids to cysteine to form disulfide bonds to tether the plug, preventing its displacement or unfolding during transport. The tetra-cysteine mutant 72/615/109/356C was able to bind and transport radiolabeled ferrichrome. One double-cysteine mutant, 104/149C, was purified for crystallization

The violations of empathy

This article questions the assumption that empathy is a positive, politically beneficial emotion through two examples of poetry about deaths with sensitive political dimensions. I begin by returning to the origins of ‘empathy’ in English, as written about by Vernon Lee in the earlytwentieth-century, to show how far the word has drifted from Lee’s sense of it as an embodied aesthetic response to an artwork. Rob Halpern’s book of poems Common Room refuses imaginative empathy with its subject, a dead Guantanamo Bay detainee, and yet, I show, surprisingly aligns with Lee’s sense of empathy through the author’s erotic and imaginative response to the man’s autopsy report. What results in this revivification of Lee’s empathy is a violation of the religious beliefs of the detainee. In contrast, Andrea Brady’s poem ‘Song for Florida 2’ takes up a more contemporary sense of empathy in its focus upon the killing of the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Brady’s poem presents several possibilities for empathising with Martin’s mother - by imagining being her, or imagining similarly losing a son - but eventually draws back from this as a limit. Empathy here risks erasing the specificity of the racialized context which led to Martin’s unjust death. The white poet’s son cannot ‘replace’, even imaginatively, the black mother’s son without effacing the difference which saw Martin targeted in the first place. Brady’s poem, I argue, marks how empathy can violate through supplanting the grief and political context for that grief of the person to whom empathy is extended. What is needed instead of empathy is a commitment to political change

CO diffusion and desorption kinetics in CO2_2 ices

Diffusion of species in icy dust grain mantles is a fundamental process that shapes the chemistry of interstellar regions; yet measurements of diffusion in interstellar ice analogs are scarce. Here we present measurements of CO diffusion into CO$_2$ ice at low temperatures (T=11--23~K) using CO$_2$ longitudinal optical (LO) phonon modes to monitor the level of mixing of initially layered ices. We model the diffusion kinetics using Fick's second law and find the temperature dependent diffusion coefficients are well fit by an Arrhenius equation giving a diffusion barrier of 300 $\pm$ 40 K. The low barrier along with the diffusion kinetics through isotopically labeled layers suggest that CO diffuses through CO$_2$ along pore surfaces rather than through bulk diffusion. In complementary experiments, we measure the desorption energy of CO from CO$_2$ ices deposited at 11-50 K by temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) and find that the desorption barrier ranges from 1240 $\pm$ 90 K to 1410 $\pm$ 70 K depending on the CO$_2$ deposition temperature and resultant ice porosity. The measured CO-CO$_2$ desorption barriers demonstrate that CO binds equally well to CO$_2$ and H$_2$O ices when both are compact. The CO-CO$_2$ diffusion-desorption barrier ratio ranges from 0.21-0.24 dependent on the binding environment during diffusion. The diffusion-desorption ratio is consistent with the above hypothesis that the observed diffusion is a surface process and adds to previous experimental evidence on diffusion in water ice that suggests surface diffusion is important to the mobility of molecules within interstellar ices

The Social and Health Service Needs of Aboriginal Peoples in Smaller Urban Centers in Southern Ontario: A Synthesis Paper for Service Agencies

The disproportionate needs of urban Aboriginal people make it important for urban social and health service providers to understand the conditions faced by this population. This synthesis paper reviews recent literature on urban Aboriginal populations in order to identify their characteristics and main areas of need. It is meant to inform those who work in health and social service planning and delivery in smaller urban centers, particularly non-Aboriginal service agencies in Southern Ontario. The existing research shows that urbanized First Nations, Métis and Inuit have greater needs for specific health, cultural, justice, financial, and educational services. Furthermore, the literature indicates that it is important that these services are provided in a way that respects, includes, and promotes pride in Aboriginal cultures and histories

Diversity and Cultural Competence in the LIS Classroom: A Curriculum Audit

In a case study examining a library and information science graduate curriculum, 18 graduate students engaged in a comprehensive diversity audit of the School of Information Science curriculum. The diversity audit was a student-generated review of 108 syllabi and permitted students to engage in an action-learning project that benefited the school and allowed them, and the school’s faculty, to see first-hand why diversity and cultural competence are important facets of library and information science curricula

Research Brief No. 13 - The Social and Health Service Needs of Aboriginal Peoples in Urban Southern Ontario

The disproportionate needs of urban Aboriginal people make it important for urban social and health service providers to understand the conditions faced by this population. This synthesis paper reviews recent literature on urban Aboriginal populations in order to identify their characteristics and main areas of need. It is meant to inform those who work in health and social service planning and delivery in smaller urban centers, particularly non-Aboriginal service agencies in Southern Ontario. The existing research shows that urbanized First Nations, Métis and Inuit have greater needs for specific health, cultural, justice, financial, and educational services. Further-more, the literature indicates that it is important that these services are provided in a way that respects, includes, and promotes pride in Aboriginal cultures and histories

Interacting with consciousness: An investigation into the neural signatures of conscious processing using the global-local auditory task

Can conscious processing be inferred from electrophysiological measurements? Bekinschtein et al. (2009) devised the global-local auditory oddball task as a way of investigating electrophysiological (EEG) responses to hierarchical violations in auditory regularity. It was argued that the detection of local violations in auditory regularity (arising within a short temporal window) occurs independently of consciousness, whilst the detection of global violations in auditory regularity (arising within a longer temporal window) occurs only with the presence of consciousness. For this to be the case, global and local effects must be assumed to be independent and thus share an additive relationship. Crucially, if a relationship is additive, then cognitive subtraction allows each effect to be understood in isolation. Within this thesis, we explore the notion that global and local effects may not be independent but actually share a multiplicative relationship, based on the principle that the brain is a non-linear system (Friston et al., 1996). We examine this by re-analysing the data of the original attention study by Bekinschtein et al. (2009) using a factorial design analysis. What is more, we extend this work to consider the presence of an interaction between global and local effects when consciousness is manipulated using healthy sedation. Our findings reveal an interaction between global and local effects that occurs within the region of the global effect and varies depending on the presence of direct attention, expectancy and sedation. The manifestation of an interaction between global and local effects is discussed in detail in relation to a predictive coding framework, whereby multiple levels of prediction exist within the brain (Auksztulewicz & Friston, 2015). Furthered analysis, directly comparing the findings of varied attention to the findings with healthy sedation is presented and discussed with a view to the brain's predictive nature. Methodological issues that were encountered, as well as a method we developed for re-aligning time-series data, are presented and explored in detail within the later Chapters of this thesis. Our research suggests that global and local effects may not be considered as independent and therefore the presence of a global effect is not sufficient to constitute a functionally isolated marker of conscious processing (as initially proposed by Bekinschtein et al. [2009]). Further research is necessary to better define the nature of an interaction between global and local effects in relation to conscious experience