Effective Technology Integration: A Plan for Professional Development

Is educational technology effective in increasing student learning? If technology is an effective tool in the classroom, how can teachers best be trained to use it appropriately? An experiment was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a constructivist math class utilizing computer technology as well as other tools. The study occurred in a Christian school in Northern Kentucky using fifty-one sixth grade students. One class comprised the control group, with math instruction that differed little from the traditional background of the school. The other class was the experimental group, which used the Internet, spread sheets, word processors, and measuring devices to learn in a hands-on environment. Two math units were used in the six-week study. A one-way ANOVA test showed no significant difference in the first unit scores. The one-way ANOVA test of the second unit showed a significant difference in favor of the control group. Despite these results, the researcher was not discouraged, primarily because chi-square tests of a survey given to students in the experimental group overwhelmingly showed positive motivation in math during the study

Effective Technology Integration: A Plan for Professional Development

Is educational technology effective in increasing student learning? If technology is an effective tool in the classroom, how can teachers best be trained to use it appropriately? An experiment was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a constructivist math class utilizing computer technology as well as other tools. The study occurred in a Christian school in Northern Kentucky using fifty-one sixth grade students. One class comprised the control group, with math instruction that differed little from the traditional background of the school. The other class was the experimental group, which used the Internet, spread sheets, word processors, and measuring devices to learn in a hands-on environment. Two math units were used in the six-week study. A one-way ANOVA test showed no significant difference in the first unit scores. The one-way ANOVA test of the second unit showed a significant difference in favor of the control group. Despite these results, the researcher was not discouraged, primarily because chi-square tests of a survey given to students in the experimental group overwhelmingly showed positive motivation in math during the study

Twitter as a formal and informal language learning tool: from potential to evidence

Twitter can be used as a language learning tool and this potential has been identified by a number of scholars. This chapter presents an overview of the identified potential of Twitter as a language learning tool and presents an overview of different studies carried out to provide evidence of language learning using Twitter in different contexts. It concludes that, although there is evidence of language acquisition in formal contexts, more research is needed to inform how Twitter is used in informal settings

Selected plasma fatty acid levels in subsistence fed sled dogs along the Yukon River: a pilot study for biomonitoring

The introduction of the ‘western diet' marked a decline in omega-3 fatty acids rich foods and a concurrent increase in saturated and omega-6 fatty acids that persists today. Historically, circumpolar people have had a low incidence of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and this has been largely attributed to polyphenolic compounds and omega-3 fatty acids offered from subsistence foods. In this report, we studied sled dogs as an Arctic sentinel species for monitoring the effect of a changing diet on lipid profiles along the Yukon River. Subsistence fed village sled dogs along the Yukon River, maintained largely on salmon were compared with a control kennel maintained on commercial food. Profiles showed higher levels for long chain omega-3 fatty acids in village subsistence fed dogs compared to control dogs and an opposite trend for omega-6 fatty acids, establishing baseline levels for follow up studies. A comparison with data for previously published mercury levels from the same cohort of dogs revealed a positive correlation with alpha-linolenic fatty acid and a negative correlation with linoleic fatty acid. Food and nutritional security is a concern in the Arctic as the impacts of climate change and transport of contaminants become obvious. This study supports not only the nutritional value of a subsistence diet but also the utility of sled dogs as a sentinel for human dietary chang

Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) of adrenal gland metastases in oligometastatic and oligoprogressive disease

BACKGROUND: Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) as a form of noninvasive treatment that is becoming increasingly used to manage cancers with adrenal gland metastases. There is a paucity of data on safety and efficacy of this modality. The aim of the study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of adrenal gland SBRT in oligometastatic and oligoprogressive disease. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this retrospective study, we performed a single-institution analysis of 26 adrenal lesions from 23 patients with oligometastatic or oligoprogressive disease treated from 2013 to 2019 with the goal of achieving durable local control. Palliative cases were excluded. Radiation dosimetry data was collected. Kaplan Meier product estimator and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: The median dose was 36 Gy in 3 fractions (range: 24–50 Gy and 3–6 fractions) with a median biologically effective dose (BED10) of 72 (range: 40–100). 1-year local control rate was 80% and median local control was not achieved due to a low number of failures. 1- and 2-year overall survival rates were 66% and 32%. Toxicity was mild with only one case of grade 2 nausea and no grade 3–5 toxicity. Higher neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio was associated with worse overall survival and a trend toward worse progression-free survival. In addition, worse performance status and lower BED10 were associated with worse survival. No such association could be shown for primary tumor location, histology, size or stage. CONCLUSION: Adrenal SBRT for oligometastatic or oligoprogressive disease is a safe and effective form of treatment

A Multi-Institutional Partnership Catalyzing the Commercialization of Medical Devices and Biotechnology Products.

The commercialization of medical devices and biotechnology products is characterized by high failure rates and long development lead times particularly among start-up enterprises. To increase the success rate of these high-risk ventures, the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) partnered to create key academic support centers with programs to accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation in this industry. In 2008, UML and UMMS founded the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center (M2D2), which is a business and technology incubator that provides business planning, product prototyping, laboratory services, access to clinical testing, and ecosystem networking to medical device and biotech startup firms. M2D2 has three physical locations that encompass approximately 40,000 square feet. Recently, M2D2 leveraged these resources to expand into new areas such as health security, point of care technologies for heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders, and rapid diagnostics to detect SARS-CoV-2. Since its inception, M2D2 has vetted approximately 260 medical device and biotech start-up companies for inclusion in its programs and provided active support to more than 80 firms. This manuscript describes how two UMass campuses leveraged institutional, state, and Federal resources to create a thriving entrepreneurial environment for medical device and biotech companies

Data Assimilation Enhancements to Air Force Weathers Land Information System

The United States Air Force (USAF) has a proud and storied tradition of enabling significant advancements in the area of characterizing and modeling land state information. 557th Weather Wing (557 WW; DoDs Executive Agent for Land Information) provides routine geospatial intelligence information to warfighters, planners, and decision makers at all echelons and services of the U.S. military, government and intelligence community. 557 WW and its predecessors have been home to the DoDs only operational regional and global land data analysis systems since January 1958. As a trusted partner since 2005, Air Force Weather (AFW) has relied on the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA/GSFC to lead the interagency scientific collaboration known as the Land Information System (LIS). LIS is an advanced software framework for high performance land surface modeling and data assimilation of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) information

Widely variable endogenous retroviral methylation levels in human placenta

It is generally assumed that transposable elements, including endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), are silenced by DNA methylation/chromatin structure in mammalian cells. However, there have been very few experimental studies to examine the methylation status of human ERVs. In this study, we determined and compared the methylation status of the 5′ long terminal repeats (LTRs) of different copies of the human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) family HERV-E, which are inserted in various genomic contexts. We found that three HERV-E LTRs which function as alternative gene promoters in placenta are unmethylated in that tissue but heavily methylated in blood cells, where these LTRs are not active promoters. This difference is not solely due to global hypomethylation in placenta, since two general measures of methylation levels of HERV-E and HERV-K LTRs suggest only 10–15% lower overall HERV methylation in placenta compared to blood. Comparisons between methylation levels of the LTR-derived gene promoters and six random HERV-E LTRs in placenta showed that the former display significantly lower methylation levels than random LTRs. Moreover, the differences in methylation between LTRs cannot always be explained by their genomic environment, since methylation of flanking sequences can be very different from methylation of the LTR itself