Age 5 cognitive development in England

Children’s development in the early years has been shown to be related to their success in later life in a range of areas including education, employment and crime. Determining why some children do better than others in the early years is a key issue for policy and is crucial in attempts to reduce inequalities. This research examines differences in early child development by examining the factors associated with the cognitive ability of children up to age 5 using cognitive assessments administered as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and teacher reports of child ability. The results show that younger children, those with low birth weight, lower parental education, lower income and living in social housing is related both to lower achievement, on average. and the probability of being at the bottom of the distribution of cognitive scores at age 5

Comparative and Functional Genomic Analysis of the Methanobrevibacter smithii Pan Genome

The human gastrointestinal tract hosts trillions of microorganisms that impact human health. Although members of the domain Bacteria dominate our gut bioreactors, members of Archaea and Eukarya, and their viruses, are also represented. Methanobrevibacter smithii is the dominant Archaeon found in human gut, although only a subset of humans harbor this methanogen. Together with other hydrogen-consuming organisms: acetogens, sulfate reducing bacteria), M. smithii plays an important role in determining the efficiency of fermentation of dietary polysaccharides. Thus, deciphering the interactions between methanogens, acetogens and SRB and other members of the gut microbiota offers an important opportunity to gain new insights about how host energy balance is regulated, and new approaches for microbiome-directed attempts to control the partitioning of energy and nutrients from diet to host. This thesis addresses a number of basic questions: what forces determine if M. smithii is in a human gut microbiota; what other species in the gut microbial community co-occur with it; how does its genome evolve within an individual and between individuals within and between families. To address these questions, I used qPCR and 16S rRNA-directed pyrosequencing plus a variety of computational tools to examine the representation of M. smithii and SRB and other taxa in the fecal microbiota of healthy adult female monozygotic: MZ) and dizygotic: DZ) twin pairs, developed methods for isolating M. smithii from their frozen fecal samples, sequenced the genomes of 20 isolates recovered from two families, one composed of a MZ twin pair and the other of DZ twin pair, and characterized the isolates’ transcriptomes using RNA-Seq during in vitro growth under a variety of conditions. My studies revealed: i) carriage and levels of colonization correlate to a significant degree in MZ but not DZ twins,: ii) a core set of genes conserved between isolates;: iii) that based on variations in SNP and gene content/function, strains cluster according to individual host and then family, and: iv) suites of genes, including adhesin-like proteins, that are likely elements driving the evolutionary adaptation of this organism within and between human gut ecosystems. These results should help future efforts to develop strategies for manipulating the hydrogen economy of the gut in ways that promote health

Poll Favors Music Shop

Elizabeth Hansen reveals that replies to questionnaire show appreciation of Music Sho

Coming Together: Exploring Peer Verbal Abuse and Combating Conflict

Elizabeth Hansen (Hastings College) will provide an outline for a protection policy that students can adopt into their team handbooks. The handout will provide common themes of verbal abuse, an established system towards ending verbal abuse, and ways coaches can support students

Prison Songs

Prison Songs is an installation of drawings and videos portraying the artist's struggle in reassessing the value of innate knowledge and cultured thinking. Simple line drawings from the artist's childhood are combined with learned and practiced modes of pictorial representation. By mixing the thoughts and styles of different time periods, the artist creates a layering of consciousness and motivations. The videos are extrapolations of simple childhood actions representing different modes of understanding experienced throughout the artist's life

Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement

This report is intended to aid staff from news organizations and media entrepreneurs who wish to grow their revenue by deepening interactions with their audiences. It’s based on hundreds of conversations and interviews with journalists, managers, and members themselves, including newsroom fieldwork and observation, as well as focus groups with supporters of news sites. We use these findings to share strategic and tactical considerations for building audience revenue programs. We also share detailed examples of ways that news organizations around the world are experimenting with new approaches to raising funds and supporting myriad forms of audience participation

Performance of a Large-area GEM Detector Read Out with Wide Radial Zigzag Strips

A 1-meter-long trapezoidal Triple-GEM detector with wide readout strips was tested in hadron beams at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility in October 2013. The readout strips have a special zigzag geometry and run along the radial direction with an azimuthal pitch of 1.37 mrad to measure the azimuthal phi-coordinate of incident particles. The zigzag geometry of the readout reduces the required number of electronic channels by a factor of three compared to conventional straight readout strips while preserving good angular resolution. The average crosstalk between zigzag strips is measured to be an acceptable 5.5%. The detection efficiency of the detector is (98.4+-0.2)%. When the non-linearity of the zigzag-strip response is corrected with track information, the angular resolution is measured to be (193+-3) urad, which corresponds to 14% of the angular strip pitch. Multiple Coulomb scattering effects are fully taken into account in the data analysis with the help of a stand-alone Geant4 simulation that estimates interpolated track errors.Comment: 30 pages, 28 figures, submitted to NIM

Hvordan praktiserer sosialarbeidere ansatt som Nav- veiledere sitt handlingsrom for skjønnsutøvelse i saksbehandling av søknader om økonomisk sosialhjelp, og kan deres praktisering ha konsekvenser for brukerens velferd og rettssikkerhet?

Oppgaven har en kvalitativ metodisk ramme med 9 intervjupersoner fra ulike Nav kontorer. Den teoretiske tilnærmingen har hovedvekt av fenomenologi. Hensikten med denne master oppgaven har vært å få en dypere innsikt i prosessen frem til vedtak om økonomisk sosialhjelp. Jeg ønsket å belyse hvordan den faglige skjønnsvurderingen kunne påvirke behandling av søknader om økonomisk sosialhjelp. Videre ønsket jeg å løfte frem faktorer som kunne hemme og/eller fremmer brukernes velferd og rettsikkerhet. Denne forskningen viser at handlefriheten gjør det mulig for sosialarbeideren å ta beslutninger til en viss grad ettersom sosialtjenesteloven åpner opp for skjønnsutøvelse. Samtidig fremkommer det i denne undersøkelsen at veilederne står i et krysspress, og veiledernes handleevne reguleres og påvirkes av ulike faktorer. Disse funnene viser at sosialarbeiderrollen utfordres av politiske og organisatoriske føringer som bærer preg av NPM prinsipper. Funn viser også at det er vanskeligere for sosialarbeidere å praktisere i samsvar med sine profesjonelle standarder ettersom sosialarbeidere stilles overfor økte forventninger om å standardisere for å forenkle arbeidet. Denne studien har bidratt til å belyse kompleksiteten av veiledernes skjønnsutøvelsen i NAV