The political economy of growing a rural university in the USA using online education: An examination of incentives for educational imperialism and academic capitalism

Rural colleges and universities in the USA struggle to recruit new students as their geographic region is depopulating and cost to attend classes on campus are increasing. Online education using the Internet is rapidly expanding as an effective growth strategy to reach new groups of students. In this paper we take the position that online education is a form of cultural imperialism and academic capitalism where curriculum developers and professors are motivated to enroll new students in order to maintain the credibility and strength of their programmes and host institutions. We argue that it is not our intent to be educational imperialists or capitalists. Rather these are unintended consequences of our actions. This argument is supported by political economy theory in that we are marketing a technical rational form of online education without awareness of its long‐term cultural, economic, or political ramifications. Even though we pride ourselves on developing a high quality programme that in our eyes meet the needs of our students, understanding the political economy of online education is essential if our programme that has access to the global market is to go beyond the individual needs of students and address social, cultural and political needs. We conclude that one way out of this malaise is to understand our role as instructors and course designers as a first step toward understanding the intended and unintended consequences of online education

Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R

This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE explicitly assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function, where the parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the legislators and the votes can all be estimated on the basis of observed voting behavior. Building on software written by Poole in Fortran, the new wnominate package in R facilitates easier data input and manipulation, generates bootstrapped standard errors, and includes a new suite of graphics functions to display the results. We demonstrate the functionality of this package by conducting a natural experiment using roll calls -- an experiment which is greatly simplified by the data manipulation capabilities of the wnominate package in R

Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in<i>R</i>

Basicspace is an R package that conducts Aldrich-McKelvey and Blackbox scaling to recover estimates of the underlying latent dimensions of issue scale data. We illustrate several applications of the package to survey data commonly used in the social sciences. Monte Carlo tests demonstrate that the procedure can recover latent dimensions and reproduce the matrix of responses at moderate levels of error and missing data

Migraine Care Challenges and Strategies in US Uninsured and Underinsured Adults: A Narrative Review, Part 1

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142940/1/head13286_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142940/2/head13286.pd

The genomic landscape of Ménière's disease: a path to endolymphatic hydrops

BackgroundMénière's disease (MD) is a disorder of the inner ear that causes episodic bouts of severe dizziness, roaring tinnitus, and fluctuating hearing loss. To date, no targeted therapy exists. As such, we have undertaken a large whole genome sequencing study on carefully phenotyped unilateral MD patients with the goal of gene/pathway discovery and a move towards targeted intervention. This study was a retrospective review of patients with a history of Ménière's disease. Genomic DNA, acquired from saliva samples, was purified and subjected to whole genome sequencing.ResultsStringent variant calling, performed on 511 samples passing quality checks, followed by gene-based filtering by recurrence and proximity in molecular interaction networks, led to 481 high priority MD genes. These high priority genes, including MPHOSPH8, MYO18A, TRIOBP, OTOGL, TNC, and MYO6, were previously implicated in hearing loss, balance, and cochlear function, and were significantly enriched in common variant studies of hearing loss. Validation in an independent MD cohort confirmed 82 recurrent genes. Pathway analysis pointed to cell-cell adhesion, extracellular matrix, and cellular energy maintenance as key mediators of MD. Furthermore, the MD-prioritized genes were highly expressed in human inner ear hair cells and dark/vestibular cells, and were differentially expressed in a mouse model of hearing loss.ConclusionBy enabling the development of model systems that may lead to targeted therapies and MD screening panels, the genes and variants identified in this study will inform diagnosis and treatment of MD

Migraine Care Challenges and Strategies in US Uninsured and Underinsured Adults: A Narrative Review, Part 2

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144288/1/head13321_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144288/2/head13321.pd

Extracting decision-making features from the unstructured eye movements of clinicians on glaucoma OCT reports and developing AI models to classify expertise

This study aimed to investigate the eye movement patterns of ophthalmologists with varying expertise levels during the assessment of optical coherence tomography (OCT) reports for glaucoma detection. Objectives included evaluating eye gaze metrics and patterns as a function of ophthalmic education, deriving novel features from eye-tracking, and developing binary classification models for disease detection and expertise differentiation. Thirteen ophthalmology residents, fellows, and clinicians specializing in glaucoma participated in the study. Junior residents had less than 1 year of experience, while senior residents had 2–3 years of experience. The expert group consisted of fellows and faculty with over 3 to 30+ years of experience. Each participant was presented with a set of 20 Topcon OCT reports (10 healthy and 10 glaucomatous) and was asked to determine the presence or absence of glaucoma and rate their confidence of diagnosis. The eye movements of each participant were recorded as they diagnosed the reports using a Pupil Labs Core eye tracker. Expert ophthalmologists exhibited more refined and focused eye fixations, particularly on specific regions of the OCT reports, such as the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) probability map and circumpapillary RNFL b-scan. The binary classification models developed using the derived features demonstrated high accuracy up to 94.0% in differentiating between expert and novice clinicians. The derived features and trained binary classification models hold promise for improving the accuracy of glaucoma detection and distinguishing between expert and novice ophthalmologists. These findings have implications for enhancing ophthalmic education and for the development of effective diagnostic tools

Major flaws in conflict prevention policies towards Africa : the conceptual deficits of international actors’ approaches and how to overcome them

Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these frequently do not distinguish with sufficient clarity between the ‘root causes’ of a conflict, its aggravating factors and its triggers. Specifically, a correct assessment of conflict prolonging (or sustaining) factors is of vital importance in Africa’s lingering confrontations. Broader approaches (e.g. “structural stability”) offer a better analytical framework than familiar one-dimensional explanations. Moreover, for explaining and dealing with violent conflicts a shift of attention from the nation-state towards the local and sub-regional level is needed.Aktuelle Analysen afrikanischer Gewaltkonflikte sind häufig voller Fehlinterpretationen (Mangel an Differenzierung, Genauigkeit und konzeptioneller Klarheit, Staatszentriertheit, fehlende mittelfristige Zielvorstellungen). Breitere Ansätze (z. B. das Modell der Strukturellen Stabilität) könnten die Grundlage für bessere Analyseraster und Politiken sein als eindimensionale Erklärungen. häufig differenzieren Erklärungsansätze nicht mit ausreichender Klarheit zwischen Ursachen, verschärfenden und auslösenden Faktoren. Insbesondere die richtige Einordnung konfliktverlängernder Faktoren ist in den jahrzehntelangen gewaltsamen Auseinandersetzungen in Afrika von zentraler Bedeutung. Das Diskussionspapier stellt die große Variationsbreite dominanter Erklärungsmuster der wichtigsten internationalen Geber und Akteure gegenüber und fordert einen Perspektivenwechsel zum Einbezug der lokalen und der subregionalen Ebene für die Erklärung und Bearbeitung gewaltsamer Konflikte

Impaired extinction of learned fear in rats selectively bred for high anxiety – evidence of altered neuronal processing in prefrontal-amygdala pathways

The impaired extinction of acquired fear is a core symptom of anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias or panic disorder, and is known to be particularly resistant to existing pharmacotherapy. We provide here evidence that a similar relationship between trait anxiety and resistance to extinction of fear memory can be mimicked in a psychopathologic animal model. Wistar rat lines selectively bred for high (HAB) or low (LAB) anxiety-related behaviour were tested in a classical cued fear conditioning task utilizing freezing responses as a measure of fear. Fear acquisition was similar in both lines. In the extinction trial, however, HAB rats showed a marked deficit in the attenuation of freezing responses to repeated auditory conditioned stimulus presentations as compared with LAB rats, which exhibited rapid extinction. To gain information concerning the putatively altered neuronal processing associated with the differential behavioural response between HAB and LAB rats, c-Fos expression was investigated in the main prefrontal-amygdala pathways important for cued fear extinction. HAB compared to LAB rats showed an attenuated c-Fos response to repeated conditioned stimulus presentations in infralimbic and cingulate cortices, as well as in the lateral amygdala, but facilitated the c-Fos response in the medial part of the central amygdala. In conclusion, the present results support the notion that impaired extinction in high anxiety rats is accompanied by an aberrant activation profile in extinction-relevant prefrontal-amygdala circuits. Thus, HAB rats may represent a clinically relevant model to study the mechanisms and potential targets to accelerate delayed extinction processes in subjects with enhanced trait anxiety