Identifying Student Success at a Land Grant Institution

Many higher education institutions use admission criteria to match students with the educational requirements of the institution, thereby increasing the level of success of their students and allocating limited enrollment space in some cases. This study uses two different approaches to identify the affect students’ background characteristics have on first year cumulative GPA, and whether differences exist in the impact of high school grades on success in their first year in college between high schools in the state of Washington. Results show that students’ particular high schools systematically perform better or worse than the model predicts, holding the other characteristics of the students constant including their high school GPA. This suggests the same GPA from different schools is indicating different levels of preparedness, either reflecting different curriculum available or taken by a student, or grade inflations differences across schools.Higher education, inflation, student success, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, I23,

Lattice QCD Production on Commodity Clusters at Fermilab

We describe the construction and results to date of Fermilab's three Myrinet-networked lattice QCD production clusters (an 80-node dual Pentium III cluster, a 48-node dual Xeon cluster, and a 128-node dual Xeon cluster). We examine a number of aspects of performance of the MILC lattice QCD code running on these clusters.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 8 eps figures. PSN TUIT00

Morphological development and cytochrome c oxidase activity in Streptomyces lividans are dependent on the action of a copper bound Sco protein

Copper has an important role in the life cycle of many streptomycetes, stimulating the developmental switch between vegetative mycelium and aerial hyphae concomitant with the production of antibiotics. In streptomycetes, a gene encoding for a putative Sco-like protein has been identified and is part of an operon that contains two other genes predicted to handle cellular copper. We report on the Sco-like protein from Streptomyces lividans (Sco Sl ) and present a series of experiments that firmly establish a role for Sco Sl as a copper metallochaperone as opposed to a role as a thiol-disulphide reductase that has been assigned to other bacterial Sco proteins. Under low copper concentrations, a Δ sco mutant in S. lividans displays two phenotypes; the development switch between vegetative mycelium and aerial hyphae stalls and cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) activity is significantly decreased. At elevated copper levels, the development and CcO activity in the Δ sco mutant are restored to wild-type levels and are thus independent of Sco Sl . A CcO knockout reveals that morphological development is independent of CcO activity leading us to suggest that Sco Sl has at least two targets in S. lividans . We establish that one Sco Sl target is the dinuclear Cu A domain of CcO and it is the cupric form of Sco Sl that is functionally active. The mechanism of cupric ion capture by Sco Sl has been investigated, and an important role for a conserved His residue is identified. </jats:p