Preparing Humanities Students for Employment: Reimagining Career Exploration and Education through Ignatian Spirituality and Discernment

Graduate students in the humanities are hungry for career exploration as they face limited academic career options and feel called to work beyond the academy. Career preparation is typically left to graduate advisors, and then, the focus tends to be on academic career preparation. This article details how a required, introductory graduate class was reimagined to integrate career exploration using a framework at the heart of Ignatian spirituality and education: discernment. The authors outline the course and two assignments that can be adapted and applied to any graduate course. The authors share reflections on how the class has impacted their own professional and personal formation, and they end with heuristics for educators to use when preparing to teach similar graduate courses

No. 01 November, 2020

1. Approximately one-half of the students enrolled in a rural dropout-recovery school had experienced child maltreatment, which is generally higher than comparable national estimates. 2. Nearly 90% of these students had experienced household challenges (e.g., parental separation, incarceration, mental illness, and family violence), a percentage that is several times higher than national estimates. 3. Over 70% of students were exposed to three or more Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs), a percentage that far exceeds national estimates. 4. The COVID-19 pandemic and measures to contain it present serious mental and behavioral health challenges for at-risk youths such as those in the current sample

Stable Pulse Solutions for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Higher Order Dispersion Management

The evolution of optical pulses in fiber optic communication systems with strong, higher order dispersion management is modeled by a cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation with periodically varying linear dispersion at second and third order. Through an averaging procedure, we derive an approximate model for the slow evolution of such pulses and show that this system possesses a stable ground state solution. Furthermore, we characterize the ground state numerically. The results explain the experimental observation of higher order dispersion managed solitons, providing theoretical justification for modern communication systems design

Impact of research activity on performance of general practices: a qualitative study

Background: There is evidence that engaging in research is directly associated with better performance. If this relationship is to be strengthened, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms which might underlie that relationship. Aim: To explore the perspectives of staff and wider stakeholders about mechanisms by which research activity might impact on the performance of general practices. Design & Setting: Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with general practice professionals and wider stakeholders in England. Method: Individual interviews with purposively sampled staff in ‘research ready’ or ‘research active’ general practices and other stakeholders. Interviews were analysed using a Framework approach. Results: Participants described potential ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ impacts on their work. ‘Direct’ impacts included research changing practice work (e.g. additional records searches for particular conditions), bringing in additional resources (e.g. access to investigations or staff) and improving relationships with patients. ‘Indirect’ impacts included job satisfaction (e.g. perception of practice as a centre of excellence and innovation, and the variety afforded by research activity reducing burnout) and staff recruitment (increasing the attractiveness of the practice as a place to work). Respondents identified few negative impacts. Conclusions: Staff and stakeholders identified a range of potential impacts of research activity on practice performance, with impacts on their working lives most salient. Negative impacts were not generally raised. Nevertheless, respondents generally discussed potential impacts rather than providing specific examples of those impacts. This may reflect the type of research activity conducted in general practice, often led by external collaborators

Impact of research activity on performance of general practices: a qualitative study

Background There is evidence that engaging in research is directly associated with better performance. If this relationship is to be strengthened, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms which might underlie that relationship. Aim To explore the perspectives of staff and wider stakeholders about mechanisms by which research activity might impact on the performance of general practices. Design & Setting Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with general practice professionals and wider stakeholders in England. Method Individual interviews with 41 purposively sampled staff in ‘research ready’ or ‘research active’ general practices and with 21 other stakeholders. Interviews were independently coded by three researchers using a Framework approach. Results Participants described potential ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ impacts on their work. ‘Direct’ impacts included research changing practice work (e.g. additional records searches for particular conditions), bringing in additional resources (e.g. access to investigations or staff) and improving relationships with patients. ‘Indirect’ impacts included job satisfaction (e.g. perception of practice as a centre of excellence and innovation, and the variety afforded by research activity reducing burnout) and staff recruitment (increasing the attractiveness of the practice as a place to work). Respondents identified few negative impacts. Conclusions Staff and stakeholders identified a range of potential impacts of research activity on practice performance, with impacts on their working lives most salient. Negative impacts were not generally raised. Nevertheless, respondents generally discussed potential impacts rather than providing specific examples of those impacts. This may reflect the type of research activity conducted in general practice, often led by external collaborators

Scale-dependent spatial patterns in benthic communities around a tropical island seascape

Understanding and predicting patterns of spatial organization across ecological communities is central to the field of landscape ecology, and a similar line of inquiry has begun to evolve sub-tidally among seascape ecologists. Much of our current understanding of the processes driving marine community patterns, particularly in the tropics, has come from small-scale, spatially-discrete data that are often not representative of the broader seascape. Here we expand the spatial extent of seascape ecology studies and combine spatially-expansive in situ digital imagery, oceanographic measurements, spatial statistics, and predictive modeling to test whether predictable patterns emerge between coral reef benthic competitors across scales in response to intra-island gradients in physical drivers. We do this around the entire circumference of a remote, uninhabited island in the central Pacific (Jarvis Island) that lacks the confounding effects of direct human impacts. We show, for the first time, that competing benthic groups demonstrate predictable scaling patterns of organization, with positive autocorrelation in the cover of each group at scales \u3c ~1 km. Moreover, we show how gradients in subsurface temperature and surface wave power drive spatially-abrupt transition points in group dominance, explaining 48–84% of the overall variation in benthic cover around the island. Along the western coast, we documented ten times more sub-surface cooling-hours than any other part of the coastline, with events typically resulting in a drop of 1–4°C over a period of \u3c 5 h. These high frequency temperature fluctuations are indicative of upwelling induced by internal waves and here result in localized nitrogen enrichment (NO 2 + NO 3 ) that promotes hard coral dominance around 44% of the island\u27s perimeter. Our findings show that, in the absence of confounding direct human impacts, the spatial organization of coral reef benthic competitors are predictable and somewhat bounded across the seascape by concurrent gradients in physical drivers

New tools and methods for direct programmatic access to the dbSNP relational database

Genome-wide association studies often incorporate information from public biological databases in order to provide a biological reference for interpreting the results. The dbSNP database is an extensive source of information on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for many different organisms, including humans. We have developed free software that will download and install a local MySQL implementation of the dbSNP relational database for a specified organism. We have also designed a system for classifying dbSNP tables in terms of common tasks we wish to accomplish using the database. For each task we have designed a small set of custom tables that facilitate task-related queries and provide entity-relationship diagrams for each task composed from the relevant dbSNP tables. In order to expose these concepts and methods to a wider audience we have developed web tools for querying the database and browsing documentation on the tables and columns to clarify the relevant relational structure. All web tools and software are freely available to the public at http://cgsmd.isi.edu/dbsnpq. Resources such as these for programmatically querying biological databases are essential for viably integrating biological information into genetic association experiments on a genome-wide scale

Acceleration of relativistic beams using laser-generated terahertz pulses

Dielectric structures driven by laser-generated terahertz (THz) pulses may hold the key to overcoming the technological limitations of conventional particle accelerators and with recent experimental demonstrations of acceleration, compression and streaking of low-energy (sub-100 keV) electron beams, operation at relativistic beam energies is now essential to realize the full potential of THz-driven structures. We present the first THz-driven linear acceleration of relativistic 35 MeV electron bunches, exploiting the collinear excitation of a dielectric-lined waveguide driven by the longitudinal electric field component of polarization-tailored, narrowband THz pulses. Our results pave the way to unprecedented control over relativistic electron beams, providing bunch compression for ultrafast electron diffraction, energy manipulation for bunch diagnostics, and ultimately delivering high-field gradients for compact THz-driven particle acceleration.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure