The Effect of Gender and Age on PPST Performance in an Urban Teacher Education Program

This study examined PPST scores for 318 College of Education students in a midsized, midwestern, urban university. Factors of gender and age were used to compare performance on the three PPST subtests of Reading, Writing and Mathematics. Findings tended to support some gender-stereotypical beliefs with regard to math and verbal abilities. The study\u27s findings did not support the often perceived belief that traditional students outperform nontraditional students. Inferences for urban colleges of Education are discussed

Genetic variation among inland and coastal populations of Distichlis spicata sensu lato (poaceae) in the western United States

2010 Fall.Includes bibliographic references.Covers not scanned.The taxonomic status of the North American endemic grass Distichlis spicata subsp. striata has been in flux for more than a century. Distichlis spicata hosts the larval stage of a federally endangered butterfly and is being investigated for use in restoration and recreation, so the relationship between the species and its subspecies merits clarification. Although the subspecies stricta was once recognized as a species {Distichlis stricta), most current treatments either consider it an inland subspecies within Distichlis spicata or decline to recognize it at all. Two recent studies did not find genetic or morphological evidence differentiating the subspecies stricta from Distichlis spicata. Genetic variation among 13 coastal and inland populations of Distichlis spicata sensu lato was characterized using chromosome counts, chloroplast DNA segments, microsatellite alleles, RAPD bands, and DNA C-values. Plants grown in a common garden were evaluated for date of first flowering. The results suggest the existence of two genetically segregated lineages that differ for chromosome number, molecular sequences in cpDNA and nuclear DNA, DNA C-value, and flowering time. One lineage has a somatic chromosome number of 2n = 40 and encompasses plants from the West Coast and several inland locations in Nevada, Utah, and southern New Mexico. The other lineage has a somatic chromosome number of 2n = 38 and consists of plants distributed only inland among the populations surveyed. Genetic distances among populations were closer within each lineage than between the two lineages, even when different lineages occurred in geographic proximity. The 38-chromosome lineage should be recognized as a distinct species corresponding to the previously recognized Distichlis stricta. The 40- chromosome lineage is Distichlis spicata

Free-standing Chardaks of the Balkans and Anatolia

Chardaks – tiny structures built for repose beside farmers' fields – abound throughout the Balkan and Anatolian countryside. Across many languages and cultures, this word and building form remain surprisingly consistent, adopted by peoples of differing religions and languages. The modest chardak invites us to speculate about broad cross-cultural themes that link diverse architectural cultures. Over the past fifteen years we have collaborated in the study of vernacular wooden architecture of the Balkans. This study has covered not only artifacts of the Balkans but also those of the Venetian, Austro-Hungarian, Slavic, Ottoman and Greek neighbors who contributed both population and settlements to this diverse cultural region. The goals of this research are a survey and comparative analysis of settlement types, building elements, and variations in form, construction and detail, to reveal patterns and similarities. Extensive fieldwork has yielded a multitude of data, but the task of analysis remains incomplete. The chardak is a pervasive building type that has emerged as a particularly provocative artifact for concentrated study. Both the architectural idea and the word came from the East -- c˘ardak is defined in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries as of Turkish origin, with Persian roots from the word cartaq, in which the root car means "four” and taq means "arch.” Words from these roots with similar meanings exist today in Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and even farther east in Aramaic and Farsi. It is thought that the earliest chardak structure of the ancient middle east was made by farmers near their fields, by joining together four adjacent saplings in order to form a platform for sitting above the ground, exposed to breeze and shaded by foliage overhead. Over time, this temporary, agricultural structure (this "primitive hut”) grew to be part of houses, first as an exterior arbor and then built into the body of the dwelling itself, always maintaining its essential qualities of elevation, repose, sociability, and connection with nature. Along the way, the concept of chardak entered folk culture and acquired its most vivid definition as "a place between heaven and earth.” What accounts for the temporal endurance and geographic spread of this tiny building type? How has its essential meaning survived? Perhaps we cannot answer these questions, but in recording and comparing the easily overlooked chardaks (everyday structures, outside the mainstream of cultural themes) we can make a convincing argument for the importance of such inquiry. With the chardak as a focus for this presentation and paper, our objective is to define approaches of the larger project on Balkan vernacular architecture. Examples (photographs, drawings and analytic diagrams) will describe environmental settings, spatial characteristics and details of materials and assemblages that have been recorded across the landscapes of the Balkans and Anatolia

A Late Holocene community burial area: Evidence of diverse mortuary practices in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Over several decades, human skeletal remains from at least twelve individuals (males, females, children and infants) were recovered from a small area (ca. 10 x 10 m) on the eastern shore of Table Bay, Cape Town, near the mouth of the Diep River where it empties into the sea. Two groups, each comprising four individuals, appear to have been buried in single graves. Unusually for this region, several skeletons were interred with large numbers of ostrich eggshell (OES) beads. In some cases, careful excavation enabled recovery of segments of beadwork. One collective burial held items including an ostrich egg-shell flask, a tortoise carapace bowl, a fragmentary bone point or linkshaft and various lithic artefacts. This group appears to have died together and been buried expediently. A mid-adult woman from this group sustained perimortem blunt-force trauma to her skull, very likely the cause of her death. This case adds to the developing picture of interpersonal violence associated with a period of subsistence intensification among late Holocene foragers. Radiocarbon dates obtained for nine skeletons may overlap but given the uncertainties associated with marine carbon input, we cannot constrain the date range more tightly than 1900-1340 calBP (at 2 sigma). The locale appears to have been used by a community as a burial ground, perhaps regularly for several generations, or on a single catastrophic occasion, or some combination thereof. The evidence documents regional and temporal variation in burial practices among late Holocene foragers of the south-western Cape

Sensational SuperCupboards

While the nation\u27s investment in nutrition assistance is an important and effective tool in fighting hunger and food insecurity, improving the diet quality of low-income Americans remains a major challenge. The SuperCupboard program is a successful community-based approach for educating low-income adults with families, thereby enabling them to prepare and consume healthy, nutritious, and safe diets and to become better managers of their food dollars

Legislative Redistricting in 1991-1992: The Texas Bill of Rights v. the Voting Rights Act.

Every decade, after the federal government has taken the census, Americans endure the process of redistricting Congress, state legislatures, county commissioner precincts, school boards, city councils, and a host of other elected bodies. Governed by the interplay of federal, state, and local law, the reapportionment process would seem to be a relatively easy task in theory. Yet, overriding forces unique to the political arena and the judiciary’s voice in redistricting questions undermine the implementation of such a simple system. Narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the United State Supreme Court and lower federal courts further intensify this controversy. In contrast, Texas state courts, relying on the equal rights provisions in the Texas Bill of Rights, have attempted to safeguard the voting rights of those claiming racial bias in reapportionment. To date, only one state court appellate decision has squarely addressed the effect of the Texas Bill of Rights on the redistricting process. Texas’ initial legislation reapportionment scheme violated both the Texas Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the equal rights section of the state bill of rights. The redistricting plan violated the ERA because the effect was discrimination against Mexican Americans and African Americans on account of race and ethnicity. The state had no compelling or rational interest in maintaining a reapportionment scheme which effectively disenfranchised sizeable segments of its citizens. The reapportionment scheme also violated the equal rights section of the Texas Constitution because it burdened a fundamental right of two racial and ethnic groups which have historically suffered illegal discrimination—groups now protected by the ERA. Because the redistricting system was not reasonably designed to achieve a substantial interest, no reasonable basis existed for maintaining the reapportionment scheme. And the reapportionment scheme was therefore properly rendered unconstitutional

Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 ASCA-Liman Nationwide Survey of Time-in-Cell

Reforming Restrictive Housing: The 2018 ASCA-Liman Nationwide Survey of Time-in-Cell is the fourth in a series of research projects co-authored by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and the Arthur Liman Center at Yale Law School. These monographs provide a unique, longitudinal, nationwide database. The topic is “restrictive housing,” often termed “solitary confinement,” and defined as separating prisoners from the general population and holding them in cells for an average of 22 hours or more per day for 15 continuous days or more. The 2018 monograph is based on survey responses from 43 prison systems that held 80.6% of the U.S. prison population. They reported that 49,197 individuals—4.5% of the people in their custody—were in restrictive housing. Extrapolating, we estimate that some 61,000 individuals were in isolation in U.S. prisons. This number does not include people in most jails or juvenile, military, or immigration facilities. Two areas of special concern are the impact of mental illness and the length of time individuals spend in restrictive housing. Correctional systems use a variety of definitions for serious mental illness. Using their own descriptions, jurisdictions counted more than 4,000 prisoners identified as seriously mentally ill and in restrictive housing. Within the 36 jurisdictions that reported on the length of time people had been in segregation, most people were held for a year or less. Twenty-five jurisdictions counted more than 3,500 individuals held more than three years. Reforming Restrictive Housing details policy changes tracking the impact of the 2016 American Correctional Association’s (ACA) Restrictive Housing Performance Based Standards. The ACA Standards call for limiting the use of isolation for pregnant women, juveniles, and seriously mentally ill individuals. This monograph also compares the responses of the 40 prison systems that answered the ASCA-Liman surveys in both 2015 and 2017. See ASCA-Liman, Aiming to Reduce Time-in-Cell (Nov. 2016), SSRN No. 2874492. The number in restrictive housing was reported to have decreased from 56,000 in 2015 to 47,000 in 2017. Looking at specific states, in more than two dozen systems, the numbers in segregation decreased. In 11 systems, the numbers went up. A related monograph, Working to Limit Restrictive Housing: Efforts in Four Jurisdictions to Make Changes, details the work of four correctional administrations to limit—and in one state abolish—holding people in cells 22 hours a day for 15 days or more

Depairing critical current achieved in superconducting thin films with through-thickness arrays of artificial pinning centers

Large area arrays of through-thickness nanoscale pores have been milled into superconducting Nb thin films via a process utilizing anodized aluminum oxide thin film templates. These pores act as artificial flux pinning centers, increasing the superconducting critical current, Jc, of the Nb films. By optimizing the process conditions including anodization time, pore size and milling time, Jc values approaching and in some cases matching the Ginzburg-Landau depairing current of 30 MA/cm^2 at 5 K have been achieved - a Jc enhancement over as-deposited films of more than 50 times. In the field dependence of Jc, a matching field corresponding to the areal pore density has also been clearly observed. The effect of back-filling the pores with magnetic material has then been investigated. While back-filling with Co has been successfully achieved, the effect of the magnetic material on Jc has been found to be largely detrimental compared to voids, although a distinct influence of the magnetic material in producing a hysteretic Jc versus applied field behavior has been observed. This behavior has been tested for compatibility with currently proposed models of magnetic pinning and found to be most closely explained by a model describing the magnetic attraction between the flux vortices and the magnetic inclusions.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Mobile/Modular BSL-4 Containment Facilities Integrated into a Curation Receiving Laboratory for Restricted Earth Return Missions

NASA robotic sample return missions designated Category V Restricted Earth Return by the NASA Planetary Protection (PP) Office require sample containment and biohazard testing upon return to Earth. Since the 1960s, sample containment from an unknown extraterrestrial biohazard have been related to the highest containment standards and protocols known to modern science. Today, this is Biosafety Level (BSL) 4 containment. In the U.S., the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories publication authored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health houses the primary recommendations, standards, and design requirements for all BSL labs. Past mission concept studies for constructing a NASA Curation Receiving Laboratory with an integrated BSL-4 quarantine and biohazard testing facility have been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars (USD). As an alternative option, we have conducted a trade study for constructing a mobile and/or modular sample containment laboratory that would meet all BSL-4 and planetary protection standards and protocols at a fraction of the cost. Mobile and modular BSL-2 and 3 facilities have been successfully constructed and deployed world-wide for government testing of pathogens and pharmaceutical production. Our study showed that a modular BSL-4 construction could result in ~ 90% cost reduction when compared to traditional BSL-4 construction methods without compromising the preservation of the samples or Earth. For the design/construction requirements of a mobile/modular BSL-4 containment, we used the established HHS document standards and protocols for manipulation of agents in Class III Biosafety Cabinets (BSC; i.e., negative pressure gloveboxes) that are currently followed in operational BSL-4 facilities in the U.S