Covering Kids & Families Evaluation: Areas of CKF Influence on Medicaid and SCHIP Programs

Examines how RWJF's initiative to raise enrollment in children's public health insurance programs by expanding outreach, simplifying procedures, and improving coordination changed state policies and procedures; in which areas; and how permanently

Local Broadcast Reporters Maintaining Social Responsibility and Mental Health While Serving a Community Under Lockdown

This study looks at local broadcast news reporters working in Northwest Arkansas before, at the start, and during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Research for this study includes a content study of the tweets and Twitter accounts of eleven local reporters. This study considers the social responsibility theory and examines how these eleven local reporters use the theory in their everyday work. Research found, though these reporters don’t credit the theory by name, they are still putting its guidelines into effect as a sort of moral compass when creating objective and representative news for their communities. The research also found that the COVID-19 pandemic added a sense of urgency for reporters to uphold the social responsibility theory by getting potentially life-altering news to the public in a timely manner. These reporters consider themselves as community servants, their service being educating and alerting their audience on what’s happening around them. By taking upon this role the reporters sometimes face criticism from their audience leading to the reporters needing to defend themselves and their intentions. This study explores the mental health of local reporters. These reporters don’t talk about personal mental health issues, but they often cite symptoms like fatigue and stress as being active factors in their professional and personal lives. As reporters this group is expected to be punctual and timely in all aspects of their career. They also heavily discuss safety as being an issue within the journalism world. These local reporters are often alone while they are in the field covering their stories, something that many find issue with. The local reporters support other reporters outside of the area by sharing or “retweeting” their stories and adding their opinions that advocate for the presence of another person on the scene no matter the time, place, or story being covered. When looking at self-care and self-appreciation among the reporters studied, the research found these reporters go about achieving this is many ways. Some reporters find their self-worth from within, while others turn outward to family or religion. Many of the reporters studied embrace self-appreciation by sharing life or career events with their Twitter audience. They often share work milestones which are typically met with celebration from other journalists within and outside their respective news station. Reporters exercising self-appreciation and self-care through their Twitter platform are also experiencing a sense of support from others by doing so in most cases. The global COVID-19 pandemic made up the majority of the news shared by local reporters during the studied time period. These reporters acknowledge the repetition of the stories they were producing daily. The pandemic changed the way reporters everywhere were able to do their jobs. Social distancing and the mask mandates limited face-to-face interviews and gave reporters less access to people or places than they had before. Many of these reporters used their Twitter platforms to educate the public on changes in the pandemic, while also promoting vaccination and social distancing. Some reporters shared their own vaccination experience with their followers

Covering Kids & Families Evaluation: Strategies for Sustaining CKF: Interim Synthesis of Evaluation Findings

Explores state grantees' and coalitions' views on the sustainability of their efforts to help eligible families enroll in public health insurance after RWJF funding ends, the permanence of the changes effected, and their implications for CKF activities

Dangerous education : the occupational hazards of teaching transgender

This article sets out the ways in which primary schools have come to bear significant risks in making decisions over whether, how and when to reflect transgender issues. We examine press reporting that arose in relation to a recent incident in the UK in which a primary school in East Sussex was widely criticised for instigating such a ‘transgender education’ initiative. We argue that despite tacit indications that UK government supports ‘transgender education’ as a learning area for children as young as five years old, there is an ongoing risk to primary schools who implement such initiatives. The nature of this risk is located within the usage of equalities terminology within governmental discussions and official guidance that effectively acts to gloss over the enduringly controversial nature of transgender issues. The vague and non-specific nature of equalities terminology allows for both heteronormative and transgressive interpretation, thereby locating the risk of public criticism with primary schools, and headteachers in particular

Nashville-basin tornadoes: using storm types to elucidate the local climatology and forecasting challenges

Early 3 March 2020 was a devastating night for many middle Tennessee residents. A strong EF-3 tornado tore through Nashville at 65 mph, and another EF-4 killed 18 in Baxter and Cookeville alone. Residents of the Southeastern United States are particularly vulnerable to tornadoes. This study aims to better understand local forecasting challenges by looking at the types of storms that produce tornadoes. Storm types, also known as convective modes, divide tornado-producing storms into categories by length, shape, multiplicity, and intensity. Distinguishing storms by these modes allows for a broader understanding of their occurrences and impacts. This study specifically evaluates three forecasting success metrics for the Nashville county warning area from 2012–2018. This includes probability of detection (POD), false alarm ratio (FAR), and average lead time for four convective modes: cell in line, cell in cluster, discrete supercell, and quasi-linear convective system (QLCS). Three models were created to predict warnings, false alarms, and lead time with convective mode, nocturnality, and multiple-tornado days as predictors. The results affirm current literature findings that QLCSs are far more common to the Nashville basin than its surrounding areas, and QLCSs tend to occur at night as outbreaks. For this study period, QLCSs also have the best POD, FAR, and lead time, compared to other convective modes, which creates a unique climatological tornado profile that centers around QLCSs.

The Spitfire Grill

Kennesaw State University’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies (TPS) will present “The Spitfire Grill” November 16-20 at the Onyx Theater on the Kennesaw campus. “The Spitfire Grill” offers a heartwarming story about finding redemption and building meaningful relationships in one’s new home. A parolee arrives in a small Wisconsin town and struggles to find her place in a community of troubled souls who gather at a well-worn diner. Her presence sparks re-connections and reconciliations that bring the community together.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/theatreprograms/1000/thumbnail.jp

Size matters: An empirical study of neural network training for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

We have trained and tested a number of large neural networks for the purpose of emission probability estimation in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. In particular, the problem under test is the DARPA Broadcast News task. Our goal here was to determine the relationship between training time, word error rate, size of the training set, and size of the neural network. In all cases, the network architecture was quite simple, comprising a single large hidden layer with an input window consisting of feature vectors from 9 frames around the current time, with a single output for each of 54 phonetic categories. Thus far, simultaneous increases to the size of the training set and the neural network improve performance; in other words, more data helps, as does the training of more parameters. We continue to be surprised that such a simple system works as well as it does for complex tasks. Given a limitation in training time, however, there appears to be an optimal ratio of training patterns to parameters of around 25:1 in these circumstances. Additionally, doubling the training data and system size appears to provide diminishing returns of error rate reduction for the largest systems

Probing Quantum Decoherence with High-Energy Neutrinos

We consider the prospects for observing the effects of quantum decoherence in high-energy (TeV-PeV) neutrinos from astrophysical sources. In particular, we study Galactic sources of electron anti-neutrinos produced in the decay of ultra-high energy neutrons. We find that next generation neutrino telescopes should be capable of placing limits on quantum decoherence effects over multi-kiloparsec baselines, surpassing current bounds by a factor of $10^{12}$ to $10^{33}$, depending on the model considered.Comment: 4 page

Out & Proud Film Series flyer and Wish List 2008

This post contains the flyer for the Out & Proud Film Series that shared the movies watched for that 2008/2009 Academic year. It also contains a wish list generated by the students attending the GLBT Center (including staff) of possible movies to be included for the future

Grouping dynamics of lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii) in Amazonian Ecuador

Predator avoidance, resource distribution, and reproductive strategies all play a crucial role in shaping the social structure of animal societies. The fission-fusion dynamics of some animal societies – where core social units are able to break apart or coalesce into parties of variable size and composition – can allow individuals to mediate the cost-benefit tradeoffs of varying party size according to particular environmental or social conditions. Here, I couple ecological, behavioral, and spatial data with molecular genetic methods and analytical techniques (Social Network Analysis) to examine spatiotemporal association patterns among woolly monkeys from four social groups at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS) in Amazonian Ecuador. The woolly monkeys in this populations demonstrated relatively high degrees of fission-fusion dynamics, with groups dividing frequently into subgroups and showing temporally variable cohesion among group members. I found no evidence, however, that subgroups consistently and repeatedly comprised the same sets of individuals. Spatial associations and social interactions were not limited to members of a single social group, and tolerant associations between members of some social groups occurred with relatively high frequency. Genetic analyses revealed no difference in the average relatedness of male and female same-sex dyads, although, adult males tended to have more close relatives both within and between social groups than adult females. Regardless of sex, animals were no more likely to associate with genetic relatives than with to non-relatives. This study also corroborated earlier suggestions that woolly monkeys exhibit some degree of bisexual dispersal, with some males leaving their natal group, in contrast to the pattern that characterizes closely related species of primates. Genetic data also suggest that woolly monkeys live in a dispersed network of kin, where both males and females had first order relatives in neighboring groups. Kinship ties among animals in different groups may play a role in facilitating tolerant mixed group associations, which are common in the study population. As observed in other studies, home range overlap between neighboring groups was extensive, with particular pairs of groups showing higher degrees of overlap than others. Finally, woolly monkeys demonstrated strong reproductive seasonality, with births and conceptions confined to a few months out of the year. My finding that seasonal variation in group cohesion and ranging patterns was not related to fruit availability, but did covary with a behavioral index of mating opportunities, suggest that grouping and ranging dynamics in woolly monkeys may not primarily be driven by competition over food, but rather by competition over mates.Anthropolog