Athletic Connections: An Athletic Learning Outreach Program

This essay discusses a service-learning program to fulfill the UNCP Honors College requirements. The program is based on academic research initiated in the author’s freshman year at UNCP, studying the impact of and positive correlation between athletics and academics in youth. The research suggests an effective athletic learning outreach program may contain four core competencies: teambuilding, communication, goal setting, and self-confidence or positive self. Based on the research, an important factor in creating a one-day program is to foster mentorship (student-athletes and youth participants) in order to allow the youth participants to see their possible selves. Athletic Connections emerged out of this research with its goals to help build basic communication, leadership, and goal-setting skills for young student-athletes so that they can have stronger, more meaningful interactions with their teachers, parents, and peers; to help students build self-esteem and self-confidence through sports activities; and to include possible selves programming (Hock, 2011) for their cultivation of interpersonal relationships and high self-esteem crucial to a student’s long term success. Athletic Connections has progressed since its inaugural year, earning multiple awards and accolades. Athletic Connections is an annual, all-day, high intensity event composed of six different activity stations focused on the core competencies previously mentioned. This program brings together student athletes, university departments, local organizations, and businesses to partake in an athletic field day exemplifying the connection and importance between athletics and academics. The third annual Athletic Connections event, April 16, 2016, served forty-four youth participants from six different local youth organizations

A survey of lay opinion of teachers conduct and obligations in Clemmons, North Carolina

There is a general need for teachers to know what people of the community expect of them. The term community, as used here, includes parents, citizens, taxpayers, and all people who live within the boundary lines of the community itself—those people, in fact, whose support helps to make a good school system. Bowsher says: Public opinion in a community will determine whether that community will have a good school or a poor one. Any community can have the type of school system which it desires and is willing to support. The community has a definite obligation in providing educational opportunity for its children, and the personnel of the school system has a definite obligation to its community.1 Inasmuch as the school needs the support of this vast group of people, teachers certainly cannot be insensitive to its wishes. It is also needless to say teachers cannot comply with standards of a community unless they know what the standards are

RNA-binding proteins to assess gene expression states of co-cultivated cells in response to tumor cells

BACKGROUND: Tumors and complex tissues consist of mixtures of communicating cells that differ significantly in their gene expression status. In order to understand how different cell types influence one another's gene expression, it will be necessary to monitor the mRNA profiles of each cell type independently and to dissect the mechanisms that regulate their gene expression outcomes. RESULTS: In order to approach these questions, we have used RNA-binding proteins such as ELAV/Hu, poly (A) binding protein (PABP) and cap-binding protein (eIF-4E) as reporters of gene expression. Here we demonstrate that the epitope-tagged RNA binding protein, PABP, expressed separately in tumor cells and endothelial cells can be used to discriminate their respective mRNA targets from mixtures of these cells without significant mRNA reassortment or exchange. Moreover, using this approach we identify a set of endothelial genes that respond to the presence of co-cultured breast tumor cells. CONCLUSION: RNA-binding proteins can be used as reporters to elucidate components of operational mRNA networks and operons involved in regulating cell-type specific gene expression in tissues and tumors

A Value Function Approach to Information Operations MOE\u27s: A Preliminary Study

A value focused thinking approach is applied to information operations. A preliminary value hierarchy for information operations is constructed by extracting the values of senior military leadership from existing doctrine. To identify these key values for information operations, applicable existing doctrine was reviewed and summarized. Additionally, hierarchical representations of the values represented within each reviewed doctrine are developed. A value hierarchy requires that supporting objectives be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Within this analysis, these requirements are enforced, in part, by developed definitions which serve as tests to maintain mutual exclusivity. An exhaustive set of supporting values is also guaranteed by identifying a spanning set of values that directly support the overall objective of information operations. This preliminary value hierarchy serves as the basis for continuing research. The implications for this research include the construction of a prescriptive model in which the effectiveness of current and future systems can be assessed on a common scale. Further, the effectiveness of developing technologies can be assessed and the value of these technologies determined with respect to the values of senior military leadership. With this, the value of holes in our suite of information warfare systems can also be assessed in terms of their effectiveness in fulfilling the values of military leadership

Flavour Symmetries and Kahler Operators

Any supersymmetric mechanism to solve the flavour puzzle would generate mixing both in the superpotential Yukawa couplings and in the Kahler potential. In this paper we study, in a model independent way, the impact of the nontrivial structure of the Kahler potential on the physical mixing matrix, after kinetic terms are canonically normalized. We undertake this analysis both for the quark sector and the neutrino sector. For the quark sector, and in view of the experimental values for the masses and mixing angles, we find that the effects of canonical normalization are subdominant. On the other hand, for the leptonic sector we obtain different conclusions depending on the spectrum of neutrinos. In the hierarchical case we obtain similar conclusion as in the quark sector, whereas in the degenerate and inversely hierarchical case, important changes in the mixing angles could be expected.Comment: 22 pages, LaTe

Essential Readings in E-Science

The amount of data that scientists produce continues to increase every year. People are needed to handle, preserve, describe, and organize that data, and, because many of these tasks are similar to what librarians have done with publications for centuries, it makes sense that librarians would have a role in the emerging task of managing scientific data. It is the purpose of this paper to give librarians a core set of readings to turn to in order to begin learning about this new task in our field; to help us, as individuals and as a profession, understand what our roles will be in the area of e-Science

Seesaw mechanism in the sneutrino sector and its consequences

The seesaw-extended MSSM provides a framework in which the observed light neutrino masses and mixing angles can be generated in the context of a natural theory for the TeV-scale. Sneutrino-mixing phenomena provide valuable tools for connecting the physics of neutrinos and supersymmetry. We examine the theoretical structure of the seesaw-extended MSSM, retaining the full complexity of three generations of neutrinos and sneutrinos. In this general framework, new flavor-changing and CP-violating sneutrino processes are allowed, and are parameterized in terms of two $3\times 3$ matrices that respectively preserve and violate lepton number. The elements of these matrices can be bounded by analyzing the rate for rare flavor-changing decays of charged leptons and the one-loop contribution to neutrino masses. In the former case, new contributions arise in the seesaw extended model which are not present in the ordinary MSSM. In the latter case, sneutrino--antisneutrino mixing generates the leading correction at one-loop to neutrino masses, and could provide the origin of the observed texture of the light neutrino mass matrix. Finally, we derive general formulae for sneutrino--antisneutrino oscillations and sneutrino flavor-oscillations. Unfortunately, neither oscillation phenomena is likely to be observable at future colliders.Comment: 69 pages, 5 figures, uses axodraw.sty. Version accepted for publication in JHEP: some comments and one more Appendix with additional discussion added, references update

The future prospects of Lithuanian family physicians: a 10-year forecasting study

BACKGROUND: When health care reform was started in 1991, the physician workforce in Lithuania was dominated by specialists, and the specialty of family physician (FP) did not exist at all. During fifteen years of Lithuania's independence this specialty evolved rapidly and over 1,900 FPs were trained or retrained. Since 2003, the Lithuanian health care sector has undergone restructuring to optimize the network of health care institutions as well as the delivery of services; specific attention has been paid to the development of services provided by FPs, with more health care services shifted from the hospital level to the primary health care level. In this paper we analyze if an adequate workforce of FPs will be available in the future to take over new emerging tasks. METHODS: A computer spreadsheet simulation model was used to project the supply of FPs in 2006–2015. The supply was projected according to three scenarios, which took into account different rates of retirement, migration and drop out from training. In addition different population projections and enrolment numbers in residency programs were also considered. Three requirement scenarios were made using different approaches. In the first scenario we used the requirement estimated by a panel of experts using the Delphi technique. The second scenario was based on the number of visits to FPs in 2003 and took into account the goal to increase the number of visits. The third scenario was based on the determination that one FP should serve no more than 2,000 inhabitants. The three scenarios for the projection of supply were compared with the three requirement scenarios. RESULTS: The supply of family physicians will be higher in 2015 compared to 2005 according to all projection scenarios. The largest differences in the supply scenarios were caused by different migration rates, enrolment numbers to training programs and the retirement age. The second supply scenario, which took into account 1.1% annual migration rate, stable enrolment to residency programs and later retirement, appears to be the most probable. The first requirement scenario, which was based on the opinion of well-informed key experts in the field, appears to be the best reflection of FP requirements; however none of the supply scenarios considered would satisfy these requirements. CONCLUSION: Despite the rapid expansion of the FP workforce during the last fifteen years, ten-year forecasts of supply and requirement indicate that the number of FPs in 2015 will not be sufficient. The annual enrolment in residency training programs should be increased by at least 20% for the next three years. Accurate year-by-year monitoring of the workforce is crucial in order to prevent future shortages and to maintain the desired family physician workforce