Putting Community First: A Promising Approach to Federal Collaboration for Environmental Improvement: An Evaluation of the Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) Demonstration Program

This report is an independent evaluation of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) Demonstration Program, a community-driven process that uses the best available data to help communities set priorities and take action on their greatest environmental risks. CARE fosters local partnerships that seek participation from business, government, organizations, residents and EPA staff. It also supports a public, transparent planning and implementation process based on collaborative decision-making and shared action.Key FindingsThe National Academy Panel overseeing this effort was impressed by the dedication of the EPA staff to this unique initiative and commended the EPA for its efforts to partner with communities in achieving important long-term and sustainable environmental improvements at the local level. Recommended actions for the CARE Program include: (1) develop and implement a multifaceted information sharing approach; (2) coordinate and refine internal program management activities; and (3) develop a strategic plan and a business plan for CARE

Going forth: a thesis presented to the faculty of the Humanities and Teacher Education Division, Pepperdine University

Essay: Going forth -- Script 1: Geronimo -- Script 2: Monster Moscow

Teen Stress and the High School Experience: Fostering the Adaptive Abilities to Survive and Advance

The purpose if this study is to examine the stress experience of teenagers during their high school years. The study uses existing research to identify causes of stress and stress- management techniques and then gathers students’ perceptions through surveys and a group interview to provide student voice on the issue of stress. Recent nation-wide efforts have been made in schools to provide more supports for the social and emotional well-being of students, but despite these efforts, stress levels of high school students remain elevated. Understanding the ways in which students identify stress and the adaptive abilities they use to manage stress will help schools to design environments and programming to meet the mental, social, emotional and physiological needs of their students

The Voodoo Gospel and The Christian Gospel

When on September 4, 1950 I went to the Republic of Haiti as a missionary for the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, U.S.A., I found Voodoo to be far more prevalent there than I had been led to believe, and I was very ill-prepared to cope with it in the rural area where I was assigned to work. I knew also that after two years I was to go to Liberia, \u27 West Africa, where I would find a similar situation. I then set about to learn all that I could about Voodoo. Two main reasons, then, led me to attempt an investigation of the Voodoo religion: (1) My own people here in America, and indeed I myself, have been influenced by the Voodoo tradition. To understand Voodoo is to understand better the American Negro. (2) The prospect of going to West Africa to work where Voodoo still flourishes called forth the need of understanding as much as possible of this primitive religion in order that my ministry among the people who practice it might be as effective as possible. My aim in making this study has been to describe Voodoo in its historical setting, to depict it in its relation to Catholic and Protestant Christianity in the Republic of Haiti, Voodoo\u27s last Western stronghold, to show that Voodoo is a genuine religion which contains values worthy to be preserved, but that it is essentially an inferior religion which ought to be superseded by Christianity, and finally to suggest- and only to suggest- a general Christian strategy for dealing with Voodoo

The growth and decline of transportation studies in undergraduate business education from the 1890s to the age of supply chain management in the 1990s

The study of transportation in business undergraduate higher education has grown and declined in the one hundred-year period from the 1890s to the age of supply chain management in the 1990s. This research focuses on freight transportation education.The research develops the evolutionary patterns of transportation education by examining 178 , transportation and related textbooks’ tables of contents and the transportation and related undergraduate business school course listings of nine selected universities from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. In addition, propositions are created to address the factors and drivers that influenced and shaped the patterns of transportation studies in business schools. Thisresearch utilizes archival methodologies with tools and methods from content analysis and grounded theory to create and organize approximately nine thousand text units. The textbook chapters and the courses are analyzed within two basic categories, transportation modes and business functions, each of which further sub-categorized by decade. Factors shaping transportation education include the size of transportation companies both in revenues and employment, the regulatory process that existed for most of the time frame researched, and demand for transportation as the UnitedStates economy moved from the industrial to the consumer age. Drivers that shaped transportation studies were early academic economists, the 1959 Ford and Carnegie studies of business school structure, and academics who focused on logistics near the end of the period studied. Transportation education was found to be highly descriptive and focused on the pragmatic requirements of hiring companies and the extensive regulatory environment. Transportation studies werenotwellgroundedin concepts and theories and so were ill-equipped to respond to the significant shifts caused by deregulation and the growth of comprehensive supply chain management approaches. Future research should include assessments of transportation knowledge and skills required by the global supply chain environment, as well as the academic relationship between transportation and logistics and supply chain education. In addition, an interdisciplinary framework for transportation studies which includes such fields as engineering, geography, planning and public policy, and netcentric technologies should be pursued

Parental Involvement in Minnesota Online Schools

Abstract The purpose of this study was to determine the existence of parental involvement practices and successes or difficulties experienced with those practices–as reported by directors–in selected Minnesota online schools. The study was undertaken because, in a review of the research and related literature, it was clear that the resources and knowledge to implement quality parental involvement practices existed, but this may not have meant they were being implemented. Student achievement in Minnesota Online Schools appeared lower than traditional schools. However, no studies existed that documented the parental involvement practices that were in place or the successes and difficulties experienced with parental involvement in Minnesota’s Online Schools. The study utilized Epstein’s (1995; Epstein et al., 2008) framework of six types of involvement to classify and examine collected data. The study was designed as a comparative case study, which examined a total of seven online school sites in Minnesota that served students in grades K-12. Data was collected through the use of case study and interview protocols, and included document collection and examination. The study was designed and conducted with a joint researcher to form a case study team. Some of the study findings included; the prevalence of Communication and Learning at Home parental involvement types–taken from Epstein’s (1995; Epstein et al., 2008) framework, numerous newly documented practices and also common shared practices–such as required numbers of teacher-parent contacts and conferences, and reported successful involvement practices for online schools–such as in person meetings or orientation sessions, as well as reported difficulties. Notably, a major difficulty across the study’s school sites was revealed in the area of county truancy support. Recommendations for future research and current practice are made in the final chapter of the study

The Voodoo Gospel and The Christian Gospel

When on September 4, 1950 I went to the Republic of Haiti as a missionary for the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, U.S.A., I found Voodoo to be far more prevalent there than I had been led to believe, and I was very ill-prepared to cope with it in the rural area where I was assigned to work. I knew also that after two years I was to go to Liberia, \u27 West Africa, where I would find a similar situation. I then set about to learn all that I could about Voodoo. Two main reasons, then, led me to attempt an investigation of the Voodoo religion: (1) My own people here in America, and indeed I myself, have been influenced by the Voodoo tradition. To understand Voodoo is to understand better the American Negro. (2) The prospect of going to West Africa to work where Voodoo still flourishes called forth the need of understanding as much as possible of this primitive religion in order that my ministry among the people who practice it might be as effective as possible. My aim in making this study has been to describe Voodoo in its historical setting, to depict it in its relation to Catholic and Protestant Christianity in the Republic of Haiti, Voodoo\u27s last Western stronghold, to show that Voodoo is a genuine religion which contains values worthy to be preserved, but that it is essentially an inferior religion which ought to be superseded by Christianity, and finally to suggest- and only to suggest- a general Christian strategy for dealing with Voodoo

Using genotype abundance to improve phylogenetic inference

Modern biological techniques enable very dense genetic sampling of unfolding evolutionary histories, and thus frequently sample some genotypes multiple times. This motivates strategies to incorporate genotype abundance information in phylogenetic inference. In this paper, we synthesize a stochastic process model with standard sequence-based phylogenetic optimality, and show that tree estimation is substantially improved by doing so. Our method is validated with extensive simulations and an experimental single-cell lineage tracing study of germinal center B cell receptor affinity maturation