Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic with a Wolf Pack and the Marco Polo App

This narrative nonfiction essay explores the ways in which a group of academic mothers used Marco Polo, a video instant messaging app, to remain tethered to each other and to their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mothers, who are a combination of millennial and Gen Xers with children aged two to twenty-three, hail from a range of academic disciplines (e.g., theatre, education, environmental science, community health, counseling, psychology, and hospitality administration). We were all well into our careers and accustomed to grappling with the myriad ways in which the things we were raised to believe—that we could do anything we put our minds to and could definitely be mothers and career women—sometimes still felt like a pipe dream. And then COVID-19 came barreling into our lives, laying waste to all the usual coping and time management strategies upon which we typically rely. Since mid-March, we have exchanged an average of between fifty and seventy-five Marco Polo messages per day and have covered a wide range of topics—from spice storage methods, to preferred Cheeto shapes, to teaching our children to do long division while attending Zoom meetings, and to watching our male colleagues soar in terms of research productivity while we struggle to find five minutes of uninterrupted time to respond to an email. The essay offers some speculative ideas as to the role Marco Polo played in a larger story about connections between adult women during challenging times

Enhancing the Capacity of Community Health Centers to Achieve High Performance

Based on a survey of community health centers, assesses access to care, care coordination, quality improvement efforts, health information technology adoption, and ability to serve as patient-centered medical homes. Suggests policy to strengthen clinics

Closing the Divide: How Medical Homes Promote Equity in Health Care

Presents findings from the Commonwealth Fund 2006 Health Care Quality Survey, and demonstrates how having stable insurance, a regular provider and, in particular, a medical home, improves health care access and quality among vulnerable populations

Accessory to dissipate heat from transcranial magnetic stimulation coils

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) produces magnetic pulses by passing a strong electrical current through coils of wire. Repeated stimulation accumulates heat, which places practical constraints on experimental design. New Method: We designed a condensation-free pre-chilled heat sink to extend the operational duration of transcranial magnetic stimulation coils. Results: The application of a pre-chilled heat sink reduced the rate of heating across all tests and extended the duration of stimulation before coil overheating, particularly in conditions where heat management was problematic. Comparison with Existing Method: Applying an external heat sink had the practical effect of extending the operational time of TMS coils by 5.8 to 19.3 minutes compared to standard operating procedures. Conclusion: Applying an external heat sink increases the quantity of data that can be collected within a single experimental session

Creating an Organization to Support SFA’s Women Employees

The purpose of this session is two-fold. First, we wish to introduce the SFA OWLE (Organization for Women’s Leadership and Equity), the newly created professional women’s organization, to interested members of our campus community. Second, we wish to share experiences that we believe are relevant to others on our campus, in our community, and at other institutions, who might seek to create organizations through which to advocate for the unique needs of their marginalized or underrepresented group. To that end, this session will include a panel of female employees at SFA who have worked for more than a year to plan for, create, and implement a professional women’s organization for our campus. The panel will begin the session by sharing the reasons why a professional women’s organization is needed on our campus (as well as many similar institutions nationwide) and will describe the steps taken to create the organization. The committees constituted in the organization’s by-laws reflect the challenges faced by women in academia. We will share challenges we faced as we sought to create an organization that would provide support to women of differing types of employment (e.g., both staff and faculty), from different academic disciplines and areas of the university, in different stages of their personal and professional lives, and from diverse positionalities (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, parenthood status, etc.). We will also identify some of the successes our organization has achieved in its early stages

Activist 101 Activities for Pre-Service Teachers

This Teaching Note briefly describes three activities that can easily be integrated into any teacher education course

Art Looking within MotherScholarhood: Art Elicitation for Self-Reflections and Sense Making

This study continues the ongoing collaborative autoethnographic, arts-based scholarship of three MotherScholars (Burrow et al.). This study presents both the critical self-reflections resulting from and advocacy for the process of art elicitation (Burrow and Burrow), which is a valid and effective methodology to allow MotherScholars a vital pause for valuable personal self-interrogation and renewed clarity within their scholarship. Like our previous research, this study reaffirms that MotherScholars need space and time to reflect on the fluidity and flexibility of their personal-professional identity as it is affected by natural life changes (e.g., children leaving home for college), unexpected transitions (e.g., divorce), and trauma (e.g., global pandemics). The necessity to find malleability in the MotherScholar identity can help women in academia name what they need and recognize what they are already uniquely suited to handle

The Floor of the Arctic Ocean: Geographic Names

A table listing 54 major features of the ocean floor in the Arctic, gives the final suggested name, approx location, and the status of the name with the US Board on Geographic Names and the Intl. Hydrographic Bureau. Recommendations are based on decisions made at a meeting called by the US Navy Electronics Laboratory, San Diego, Calif, Jan 1966. The criteria for decisions were: consistency with Undersea terms and definitions (US Board on Geographic Names, 1964) and Limits of oceans and seas (Intl Hydrographic Bureau 1953), common usage, priority of discovery or naming, association with established geographic features, and minimizing ambiguity. It is suggested that a straight line across the narrowest constriction of Bering Strait should mark the southern boundary of Chukchi Sea, rather than the Arctic Circle, as recommended by the I.H.B., and that, in the absence of any hydrographic or physiographic features designating a unique region, the name Beaufort Sea should be dropped. The opinions ar those of the writers personally

ARHGEF18/p114RhoGEF Coordinates PKA/CREB Signaling and Actomyosin Remodeling to Promote Trophoblast Cell-Cell Fusion During Placenta Morphogenesis

Coordination of cell-cell adhesion, actomyosin dynamics and gene expression is crucial for morphogenetic processes underlying tissue and organ development. Rho GTPases are main regulators of the cytoskeleton and adhesion. They are activated by guanine nucleotide exchange factors in a spatially and temporally controlled manner. However, the roles of these Rho GTPase activators during complex developmental processes are still poorly understood. ARHGEF18/p114RhoGEF is a tight junction-associated RhoA activator that forms complexes with myosin II, and regulates actomyosin contractility. Here we show that p114RhoGEF/ARHGEF18 is required for mouse syncytiotrophoblast differentiation and placenta development. In vitro and in vivo experiments identify that p114RhoGEF controls expression of AKAP12, a protein regulating protein kinase A (PKA) signaling, and is required for PKA-induced actomyosin remodeling, cAMP-responsive element binding protein (CREB)-driven gene expression of proteins required for trophoblast differentiation, and, hence, trophoblast cell-cell fusion. Our data thus indicate that p114RhoGEF links actomyosin dynamics and cell-cell junctions to PKA/CREB signaling, gene expression and cell-cell fusion

The Skits, Sketches, and Stories of MotherScholars

“MotherScholars” are those who creatively weave their maternal identities into their scholarly spaces. With this article we invite readers along a collaborative friendship study of our own participatory arts-based journey to understand, reclaim, and identify personal and professional benefits only realized once we acknowledged and embraced the blended reality of Mother Scholarhood. Our work is presented as a curation of individual skits, sketches, and short stories that were created during a collective 8-week time span in a shared virtual space. We open our story to interpretation and interaction through the lenses of our readers