Positive Youth Development in the 21st Century: Exploring Online Environment

The manner that young people and adults are communicating with each other is rapidly changing in society that is, in part, driven by the latest technology. As a youth-driven program, we must engage in new strategies and methods by which we communicate with youth members, volunteers, families, and the community at large. Social and mobile media are a growing and popular venue for much of our target audience and youth development practitioners must learn how to leverage these networks to create positive youth development in online environments. If we ignore and don’t engage in the opportunity to be connected to youth online, then youth are left to make their own paths online and set the online norms. As youth organizations, we also must seize the opportunity to be online mentors and use the resources that are available and being used by our target population

A method for pattern application based on concrete solutions

Patterns and pattern languages have become valuable tools in many domains for representing proven solutions to frequently recurring problems. However, the use of patterns presents some challenges in practice. For example, it is often difficult to find the right patterns for a problem at hand. In addition, the application of patterns often involves a lot of manual effort, since the abstraction of implementation details when writing the patterns means that pattern implementations cannot be systematically reused. As a result, although patterns provide proven knowledge for conceptual solutions, they always have to be manually transformed into concrete implementations when a pattern is used in a specific use case. In particular, the interaction of patterns in pattern languages, thus, leads to high manual effort when implementing complex use cases. Therefore, in this thesis an approach is presented which aims at facilitating the use of patterns in practice. The approach is based on the idea that implementations of patterns are kept available as Concrete Solutions that can be directly reused in the implementation of use cases. To this end, the EINSTEIN-Method provides a framework for systematically storing concrete solutions for their reuse. The method uses Pattern-based Design Models to model conceptual solutions, which can subsequently be transformed into concrete solutions in a semi-automated way. This involves supporting the refinement of abstract patterns via more technologically specific patterns towards concrete solutions. Based on a formalization of pattern languages as graphs, Pattern Graphs with connected Concrete Solutions are introduced, which enable the systematic reuse of concrete solutions. Since patterns are often used in combination to solve complex problems, an approach for automating the aggregation of concrete solutions using Aggregation Operators is presented. In addition, the principle of pattern languages is also projected to the space of concrete solutions and, thus, with Solution Languages an approach is presented that also supports the manual aggregation of concrete solutions to an overall solution. For the reuse of concrete solutions, an iterative IT-supported approach is presented that allows to replace patterns in design models with concrete solutions. Resulting Solution Models can then be aggregated to an overall solution using aggregation operators. For automating the aggregation of concrete solutions, Solution Algebras are introduced that allow mathematical structures to be defined over the set of concrete solutions. For automating the aggregation of concrete solutions, it is also shown how the concept of aggregation operators can be implemented as Solution Aggregation Programs. These allow solution models to be aggregated into overall solutions in a semi-automated manner controlled by the user. For the identification of potential aggregation steps in a solution model, an algorithm is presented that supports the user in the selection of concrete solutions to be aggregated in the solution model. For the transferability of the EINSTEIN-Method into different domains, a tool environment is conceptually described. The practical feasibility of the presented approaches as well as the tool environment is demonstrated by an overall architecture and various tool prototypes. Finally, the feasibility of the presented concepts is shown by means of validation scenarios in different domains

Cosmogenic ³⁵S measurements in the Tibetan Plateau to quantify glacier snowmelt

The cosmogenic radionuclide ³⁵S (t₁/₂ ~ 87 days) is a unique tracer for high-altitude air mass and has been used extensively to understand stratospheric air mass mixing. In this paper, we investigate if ³⁵S can be utilized as an independent tracer to quantify glacier melt. We report the first measurements of ³⁵S in samples collected from the Tibetan Plateau during 2009–2012 with an aim to interpret ³⁵S in atmospheric particles and their deposition over glacier and snowmelts. Our measurements show that ³⁵S activity in the aerosol phase varies from 116 ± 13 to 2229 ± 52 atoms/m³ resulting in higher values during winter–spring and lower values during summer–autumn. This seasonality is likely due to higher mixing of ³⁵S-rich stratospheric air masses during winter–spring and ³⁵S-poor air masses from the Bay of Bengal during the Asian summer monsoon. The average ³⁵S activity in the Zhadang glacier was found to be 3–8 times higher relative to the nearby lake water. The main source of ³⁵S activity in the Zhadang glacier is atmospheric deposition, whereas both atmospheric deposition and glacier snowmelt are the primary sources in the Nam Co Lake. The focus of this study is to quantitatively determine the spatial and temporal variations in glacier snowmelt. In the future, extensive sampling of aerosols and snow is required for determining ³⁵S in combination with stable oxygen isotopes in sulfate to better understand the glacier melt process and hydrological cycle on the Tibetan Plateau

Positive Youth Development in the 21st Century: Exploring Online Environments

The manner that young people and adults are communicating with each other is rapidly changing in society that is, in part, driven by the latest technology. As a youth-driven program, we must engage in new strategies and methods by which we communicate with youth members, volunteers, families, and the community at large. Social and mobile media are a growing and popular venue for much of our target audience and youth development practitioners must learn how to leverage these networks to create positive youth development in online environments. If we ignore and don’t engage in the opportunity to be connected to youth online, then youth are left to make their own paths online and set the online norms. As youth organizations, we also must seize the opportunity to be online mentors and use the resources that are available and being used by our target populations

Pattern Views: Concept and Tooling for Interconnected Pattern Languages

Patterns describe proven solutions for recurring problems. Typically, patterns in a particular domain are interrelated and organized in pattern languages. As real-world problems often require patterns of multiple domains, different pattern languages have to be considered to address these problems. However, cross-domain knowledge about how patterns of different languages relate to each other is either hidden in individual pattern descriptions or not documented at all. This makes it difficult to identify relevant patterns across pattern languages. Therefore, we introduce a concept and tooling that enables to capture patterns and their relations across pattern languages for a particular problem context

Developmental variations in the splicing pattern of transcripts from the Drosophila gene encoding myosin alkali light chain result in different carboxyl-terminal amino acid sequences

The total sequence of the Drosophila melanogaster gene encoding the myosin light chain dissociated by alkali (MLC-ALK) has been determined. By sequence comparisons with an MLC-ALK cDNA clone and by S1 nuclease analyses, the pattern of introns and exons within the gene has been deduced. There are multiple polyadenylylation signals that can account for most of the observed heterogeneity in the lengths of mRNAs. In the 3' half of the gene, there are two alternative splicing patterns which result in mRNAs that translate to give proteins with two alternative 14 amino acid carboxyl-terminal sequences. There is developmental regulation of the selection of the above splicing sites. One splicing pattern produces an mRNA that translates into a protein used for both larval and adult musculature, whereas the other splicing pattern is used for the latter stage only