Disruption, Dissent, and Dialogue: YPAR as a Pedagogical and Institutional Tool

Education reform has been at the forefront of educational research for decades, depicted by government initiatives and policy, research, and pedagogical changes and recommendations. When considering elements of educational change, policy, best practices, and individual merit and retention have also been heavily in the spotlight, such as A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind , and other policies that have been put forward. What is often left out is student voice, both within policy as well as ideas around what should be changed. Based on my pilot study, I found that students also did not feel adequately represented in the curriculum, which is what informed this study. Centering a sociological imagination within the context of praxis, I then designed a youth participatory action research (YPAR) study. By utilizing a YPAR approach to design a standards-based curriculum in the form of lessons, I worked with nine high school graduates of 2022 to analyze California State 12 th grade Social Studies standards and design curriculum that disrupts cultural capital by centering community cultural wealth. Through standards analysis, curriculum design, workshops, and dialogue, I found that this group of 9 youth had a foundational understanding of systemic influence, but had not been in a position to expand and further develop their sociological imagination. In addition, as a research team, we found many seemingly neutral findings within the California State Standards. These findings helped inform our curriculum design as it centered students’ experiences to reflect on what they had not been exposed to and incorporate ways they could include critical and sociologically imaginative concepts within lessons. Independent from the team, I found not only innovative and insightful ways to foster a sociological imagination, but that collaboration is key, and that youth do want to see social change. Bringing everything together, I have found that YPAR does have a way to disrupt cultural capital, and in turn, create an environment that help youth feel welcome, included, and heard. The outcome of these findings created deliverables in the form of a redesigned survey, lesson plans, and implications for future research

Observing a Light CP-Violating Higgs Boson in Diffraction

Light CP-violating Higgs bosons with mass lower than 70 GeV might have escaped detection in direct searches at the LEP collider. They may remain undetected in conventional search channels at the Tevatron and LHC. In this Letter we show that exclusive diffractive reactions may be able to probe for the existence of these otherwise elusive Higgs particles. As a prototype example, we calculate diffractive production cross-sections of the lightest Higgs boson within the framework of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with explicit CP violation. Our analysis shows that the challenging regions of parameter space corresponding to a light CP-violating Higgs boson might be accessible at the LHC provided suitable proton tagging detectors are installed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures, version as to appear in Phys. Rev.

Matlab application for fitting progress curves to the Equilibrium Model

The general procedures for carrying out the necessary rate determinations required for accurate determination of the Equilibrium Model parameters, and fitting this data to the mathematical model to generate the parameters, are described in "Peterson, M.E., Daniel, R.M., Danson, M.J. & Eisenthal, R. (2007) The dependence of enzyme activity on temperature: determination and validation of parameters. Biochemical Journal, 402, 331-337". It should be borne in mind that the Equilibrium Model equation contains exponentials of exponentials – quite small deviations from ideal behaviour, or a failure to obtain true Vmax values, may lead to difficulty in obtaining reliable Equilibrium Model parameters

The Meaning of \u3cem\u3eHijab\u3c/em\u3e: Voices of Muslim Women in Egypt and Yemen

This work explores how Muslim women in Egypt and Yemen understand the hijab, or head scarf. Based on data (N = 100) from a self-administered questionnaire written in Arabic, differences about the meaning of hijab are examined from the perspective of women who wear or are expected to wear the head scarf. When asked what the hijab means, Egyptian women focus on religious reasons and Yemeni women emphasize a cultural (or modesty) understanding. When probed further about their understanding of hijab, Egyptian women split between religious and gendered explanations. Significant numbers of women in our Egyptian sample report the hijab to be a symbol of oppression. On the other hand, Yemeni women rarely offer a gendered understanding of the hijab; instead, they focus on religious, domestic, and psychological reasons for wearing the head scarf

HepData and JetWeb: HEP data archiving and model validation

The CEDAR collaboration is extending and combining the JetWeb and HepData systems to provide a single service for tuning and validating models of high-energy physics processes. The centrepiece of this activity is the fitting by JetWeb of observables computed from Monte Carlo event generator events against their experimentally determined distributions, as stored in HepData. Caching the results of the JetWeb simulation and comparison stages provides a single cumulative database of event generator tunings, fitted against a wide range of experimental quantities. An important feature of this integration is a family of XML data formats, called HepML.Comment: 4 pages, 0 figures. To be published in proceedings of CHEP0

Gpr126/Adgrg6 has Schwann cell autonomous and nonautonomous functions in peripheral nerve injury and repair

Schwann cells (SCs) are essential for proper peripheral nerve development and repair, although the mechanisms regulating these processes are incompletely understood. We previously showed that the adhesion G protein-coupled receptor Gpr126/Adgrg6 is essential for SC development and myelination. Interestingly, the expression of Gpr126 is maintained in adult SCs, suggestive of a function in the mature nerve. We therefore investigated the role of Gpr126 in nerve repair by studying an inducible SC-specific Gpr126 knock-out mouse model. Here, we show that remyelination is severely delayed after nerve-crush injury. Moreover, we also observe noncell-autonomous defects in macrophage recruitment and axon regeneration in injured nerves following loss of Gpr126 in SCs. This work demonstrates that Gpr126 has critical SC-autonomous and SC-nonautonomous functions in remyelination and peripheral nerve repair. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Lack of robust remyelination represents one of the major barriers to recovery of neurological functions in disease or following injury in many disorders of the nervous system. Here we show that the adhesion class G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) Gpr126/Adgrg6 is required for remyelination, macrophage recruitment, and axon regeneration following nerve injury. At least 30% of all approved drugs target GPCRs; thus, Gpr126 represents an attractive potential target to stimulate repair in myelin disease or following nerve injury