Designing and Implementing Instruction on the World Wide Web: A Case Study

This case study describes some tips and lessons learned from a project at St. Cloud State University designed to teach information literacy over the World Wide Web. The information literacy project has two primary components: Under the auspices of LEO: Literacy Education Online (a project to disseminate resources to improve composition and writing skills), to develop content resources providing guidance in library and internet use and application in research; Under the Center for Information Media, to disseminate self-paced instructional modules on library and internet use and application in research that could be used in credit-generating courses. As the two components exhibited considerable overlap, it was decided to develop inter-related resources within a single project environment

A variety of environmentally persistent chemicals, including some phthalate plasticizers, are weakly estrogenic

Sewage, a complex mixture of organic and inorganic chemicals, is considered to be a major source of environmental pollution. A random screen of 20 organic man-made chemicals present in liquid effluents revealed that half appeared able to interact with the estradiol receptor. This was demonstrated by their ability to inhibit binding of 17 beta-estradiol to the fish estrogen receptor. Further studies, using mammalian estrogen screens in vitro, revealed that the two phthalate esters butylbenzyl phthalate (BBP) and di-n-butylphthalate (DBP) and a food antioxidant, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) were estrogenic; however, they were all less estrogenic than the environmental estrogen octylphenol. Phthalate esters, used in the production of various plastics (including PVC), are among the most common industrial chemicals. Their ubiquity in the environment and tendency to bioconcentrate in animal fat are well known. Neither BBP nor DBP were able to act as antagonists, indicating that, in the presence of endogenous estrogens, their overall effect would be cumulative. Recently, it has been suggested that environmental estrogens may be etiological agents in several human diseases, including disorders of the male reproductive tract and breast and testicular cancers. The current finding that some phthalate compounds and some food additives are weakly estrogenic in vitro, needs to be supported by further studies on their effects in vivo before any conclusions can be made regarding their possible role in the development of these condition

Developing Common Metrics for the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs): Lessons Learned.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research initiative, funded by the NIH Common Fund and offered through the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program, developed more than 60 unique models for achieving the NIH goal of accelerating discoveries toward better public health. The variety of these models enabled participating academic centers to experiment with different approaches to fit their research environment.A central challenge related to the diversity of approaches is the ability to determine the success and contribution of each model. This paper describes the effort by the Evaluation Key Function Committee to develop and test a methodology for identifying a set of common metrics to assess the efficiency of clinical research processes and for pilot testing these processes for collecting and analyzing metrics. The project involved more than one-fourth of all CTSAs and resulted in useful information regarding the challenges in developing common metrics, the complexity and costs of acquiring data for the metrics, and limitations on the utility of the metrics in assessing clinical research performance. The results of this process led to the identification of lessons learned and recommendations for development and use of common metrics to evaluate the CTSA effort

Halogenated organic compounds in archived whale oil : a pre-industrial record

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Pollution 145 (2007): 668-671, doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2006.08.022.To provide additional evidence that several halogenated organic compounds (HOCs) found in environmental samples are natural and not industrially produced, we analyzed an archived whale oil sample collected in 1921 from the last voyage of the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan. This sample, which predates large-scale industrial manufacture of HOCs, contained two methoxylated polybrominated diphenyl ethers (MeO-PBDEs), five halogenated methyl bipyrroles (MBPs), one halogenated dimethyl bipyrrole (DMBP), and one dimethoxylated polybrominated biphenyl (diMeO-PBB). This result indicates, at least in part, a natural source of the latter compounds. Capsule Nine halogenated organic compounds have been detected in archived whale oil from the 1920s.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (OCE-0221181 and OCE-0550486), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Ocean Life Institute and the Postdoctoral Scholar Program at WHOI (with funding from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. and The J. Seward Johnson Fund)

Combination of pre-adapted bacteriophage therapy and antibiotics for treatment of fracture-related infection due to pandrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae

Immunogenetics and cellular immunology of bacterial infectious disease