The Caddoan Oak Hill Village Site

Rarely do prehistoric archeologists in North America have the opportunity to completely excavate and study an entire Native American community or village. To be able to expose a Native American village in its entirety provides a unique, and unprecedented, view of the past community and social arrangements that existed among Native American societies before contact with Europeans. Recently, in northeast Texas, the Oak Hill Village site (41RK214), a large village occupied by prehistoric horticultural-agricultural Caddo peoples between about A.O. 1050 and 1450, was fully uncovered under the direction of J. Brett Cruse (then of Espey, Huston & Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas) for Texas Utilities Services. The company plans to strip mine the site area in the near future for lignite coal. With the cooperation of TU Services, the investigations at the Oak Hill Village were the most extensive ever completed at a Caddo Indian site

The Caddoan Archaeology of the Sabine River Basin during the Middle Caddoan Period

Compared to the earlier and later parts of the prehistoric Caddoan archaeological record in Northeast Texas, archaeologists do not know much about the Middle Caddoan period (ca. A.D. 1200-1400) in the Sabine River basin. During the last few years, however, new archaeological information on settlements, subsistence, and the diverse material culture record suggest that the era was a time of significant cultural change for Caddoan peoples living in the upper and middle Sabine River basin

A 34-year-old man with recurrent melaena after renal transplantation

No Abstrac

Bringing Culture into the Classroom: The Impact of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy on Student Engagement and Self-Efficacy in Social Studies

The presence of the achievement gap has plagued our education system for decades. One of the most astonishing trends has resulted in the racial achievement gap as White students drastically outperform minority groups with African American males being the most affected population. Educators have studied and implemented Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) to increase the achievement of African American males. CRP contends that all students are capable of learning and should be held to high expectations while using students’ culture and interests to drive instruction. This action research study examines the impact of culturally relevant teaching on the self-efficacy and engagement of African American males in social studies. Three African American males were used as focal students in this 7-week study. This action research suggests the use of culturally relevant practices can positively impact student engagement. Such practices include holding students to high expectations while creating a classroom environment that helps students develop a sense of belonging and care

Strip intercropping systems

Economic, environmental, and biological concerns prompt the search for alternative, sustainable, agricultural production systems. Farmers need cropping systems that reduce negative impacts on the environment while maintaining or even improving farm profitabilit

Artificial nighttime light changes aphid-parasitoid population dynamics

This is the final version of the article. Available from Nature Publishing Group via the DOI in this record.Artificial light at night (ALAN) is recognized as a widespread and increasingly important anthropogenic environmental pressure on wild species and their interactions. Understanding of how these impacts translate into changes in population dynamics of communities with multiple trophic levels is, however, severely lacking. In an outdoor mesocosm experiment we tested the effect of ALAN on the population dynamics of a plant-aphid-parasitoid community with one plant species, three aphid species and their specialist parasitoids. The light treatment reduced the abundance of two aphid species by 20% over five generations, most likely as a consequence of bottom-up effects, with reductions in bean plant biomass being observed. For the aphid Megoura viciae this effect was reversed under autumn conditions with the light treatment promoting continuous reproduction through asexuals. All three parasitoid species were negatively affected by the light treatment, through reduced host numbers and we discuss induced possible behavioural changes. These results suggest that, in addition to direct impacts on species behaviour, the impacts of ALAN can cascade through food webs with potentially far reaching effects on the wider ecosystem.The research leading to this paper was funded by the European Research council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 268504 to KJG, and by NERC (grant no. NE/K005650/1) to FJFvV

Exploring the measurement of markedness and its relationship with other linguistic variables

Antonym pair members can be differentiated by each word's markedness-that distinction attributable to the presence or absence of features at morphological or semantic levels. Morphologically marked words incorporate their unmarked counterpart with additional morphs (e.g., "unlucky" vs. "lucky"); properties used to determine semantically marked words (e.g., "short" vs. "long") are less clearly defined. Despite extensive theoretical scrutiny, the lexical properties of markedness have received scant empirical study. The current paper employs an antonym sequencing approach to measure markedness: establishing markedness probabilities for individual words and evaluating their relationship with other lexical properties (e.g., length, frequency, valence). Regression analyses reveal that markedness probability is, as predicted, related to affixation and also strongly related to valence. Our results support the suggestion that antonym sequence is reflected in discourse, and further analysis demonstrates that markedness probabilities, derived from the antonym sequencing task, reflect the ordering of antonyms within natural language. In line with the Pollyanna Hypothesis, we argue that markedness is closely related to valence; language users demonstrate a tendency to present words evaluated positively ahead of those evaluated negatively if given the choice. Future research should consider the relationship of markedness and valence, and the influence of contextual information in determining which member of an antonym pair is marked or unmarked within discourse

An Immersive Virtual Reality Curriculum for Pediatric Hematology Clinicians on Shared Decision-making for Hydroxyurea in Sickle Cell Anemia

Although hydroxyurea (HU) is an effective treatment for sickle cell anemia, uptake remains low. Shared decision-making (SDM) is a recommended strategy for HU initiation to elicit family preferences; however, clinicians lack SDM training. We implemented an immersive virtual reality (VR) curriculum at 8 pediatric institutions to train clinicians on SDM that included counseling virtual patients. Clinicians’ self-reported confidence significantly improved following the VR simulations on all communication skills assessed, including asking open-ended questions, eliciting specific concerns, and confirming understanding (Ps≤0.01 for all). VR may be an effective method for educating clinicians to engage in SDM for HU

Bound States and the Special Composition Question

The Special Composition Question asks under what conditions a plurality of objects form another, composite object. We propose a condition grounded in our scientific knowledge of physical reality, the essence of which is that objects form a composite object when and only when they are in a bound state – whence our Bound State Proposal. We provide a variety of reasons in favour of a mereological theory that accommodates our Proposal. We consider but reject another proposal, which is quantum-physical in nature: the Entanglement Proposal. We close by responding to Teller’s ‘Suit Objection’

No Need for a Cognitive Map: Decentralized Memory for Insect Navigation

In many animals the ability to navigate over long distances is an important prerequisite for foraging. For example, it is widely accepted that desert ants and honey bees, but also mammals, use path integration for finding the way back to their home site. It is however a matter of a long standing debate whether animals in addition are able to acquire and use so called cognitive maps. Such a ‘map’, a global spatial representation of the foraging area, is generally assumed to allow the animal to find shortcuts between two sites although the direct connection has never been travelled before. Using the artificial neural network approach, here we develop an artificial memory system which is based on path integration and various landmark guidance mechanisms (a bank of individual and independent landmark-defined memory elements). Activation of the individual memory elements depends on a separate motivation network and an, in part, asymmetrical lateral inhibition network. The information concerning the absolute position of the agent is present, but resides in a separate memory that can only be used by the path integration subsystem to control the behaviour, but cannot be used for computational purposes with other memory elements of the system. Thus, in this simulation there is no neural basis of a cognitive map. Nevertheless, an agent controlled by this network is able to accomplish various navigational tasks known from ants and bees and often discussed as being dependent on a cognitive map. For example, map-like behaviour as observed in honey bees arises as an emergent property from a decentralized system. This behaviour thus can be explained without referring to the assumption that a cognitive map, a coherent representation of foraging space, must exist. We hypothesize that the proposed network essentially resides in the mushroom bodies of the insect brain