First in My Family: Perceived Family Support and Impact on First-Generation College Students within a Community College Cohort Program Setting

Given the vast increase in the number of jobs predicted to require a post-secondary credential, it has never been more important to earn a college degree in America. Yet for first-generation college students (FGs), the chances of dropping before reaching graduation hover around 89%. While a variety of factors influence this stark reality, family support plays a central role. By definition, FG students face an identity shift away from the familiar family construct toward a new economic and social class, and yet, family support has been shown to be critical in helping FGs make the college choice. At the same time, once the student enters college, family has a tendency to become a source of anxiety due to lack of academic experience.While many studies have examined support needs of FGs, few have been conducted within a community college setting, and even fewer within community college cohort programs designed for FGs specifically. This study examines the relationship between perceived family support and adaptation to college within such a setting. Participants included 59 students answering a survey based on the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) scale, and the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ). Findings showed that there was no significant correlation between family support and adaptation to college, which raises questions about the differing needs of FGs at community colleges, and emphasizes the need to conduct research in community college cohort programs specifically. The author discusses these results in light of the nation\u27s Completion Agenda call for educational reform aimed at increasing college success rates

Zero Energy of Plane-Waves for ELKOs

We consider the ELKO field in interaction through contorsion with its own spin density, and we investigate the form of the consequent autointeractions; to do so we take into account the high-density limit and find plane wave solutions: such plane waves give rise to contorsional autointeractions for which the Ricci metric curvature vanishes and therefore the energy density is equal to zero identically. Consequences are discussed.Comment: 7 page

Cyber Security Awareness Among College Students

This study reports the early results of a study aimed to investigate student awareness and attitudes toward cyber security and the resulting risks in the most advanced technology environment: the Silicon Valley in California, USA. The composition of students in Silicon Valley is very ethnically diverse. The objective was to see how much the students in such a tech-savvy environment are aware of cyber-attacks and how they protect themselves against them. The early statistical analysis suggested that college students, despite their belief that they are observed when using the Internet and that their data is not secure even on university systems, are not very aware of how to protect their data. Also, it appears that educational institutions do not have an active approach to improve awareness among college students to increase their knowledge on these issues and how to protect themselves from potential cyber-attacks, such as identity theft or ransomware

Raising Aid Efficiency with International Development Aid Monitoring and Evaluation Systems

Background: Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or more specifically perhaps the Monterrey Consensus, there has been a distinct shift in the conversation around assessing the development effectiveness of international aid programs.  Initially, the focus had been on establishing monitoring and evaluation systems that served the needs to bilateral and multilateral donors to demonstrate the effectiveness of their assistance vis-à-vis their own constituencies. Today, there is an increasing recognition that recipient countries should be equally concerned with the effectiveness of donor resources as they are with the use of national resources devoted to development programs.    Purpose: This article reveals the current efforts of the sovereign new and traditional donors in establishing and operationalizing the international development assistance (IDA) monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to raise the efficiency of IDA programs.   Setting: N/A   Intervention: N/A   Research Design: A review of previous studies and international practicies of IDA M&E.   Data Collection and Analysis: Employing game theory the authors identify the choice of particular IDA M&E system by traditional and new donors and analyze key elements and factors affecting M&E systems operationalization. They elaborate a set of policy recommendations on how to use M&E systems both in donor and recipient countries to raise aid effectiveness.   Findings: The authors conclude that in spite of donor and recipient countries having different purposes and approaches in implementing IDA projects, the use of the M&E is usually helpful to bridge their interests and to increase aid effectiveness

Minimally disruptive medicine: the evidence and conceptual progress supporting a new era of healthcare

Patients with chronic conditions or multimorbidity, and often their caregivers, have to adjust their lives and mobilise their capacity (ability) to respond to the workload (demands) imposed by treatments and the care of their conditions. There is a continuous and complex interaction between workload and capacity. When capacity proves insufficient to address the treatment workload, creating a burden, patients may place a lower priority on other aspects of their lives, or reduce engagement with healthcare. Guidelines usually focus on disease centred outcomes without consideration of limited capacity or demanding workload (burden) from treatment regimens. It seems reasonable to consider that healthcare needs reshaping so that care that pursues goals important to patients as well as those suggested by evidence-based medicine. This can be achieved by using shared decision approaches guided by the expertise of clinicians to deliver optimal care while minimising the burden of treatment on patients, their caregivers, and the healthcare system. What we need is minimally disruptive medicine

The RhoA transcriptional program in pre-T cells

The GTPase RhoA is essential for the development of pre-T cells in the thymus. To investigate the mechanisms used by RhoA to control thymocyte development we have used Affymetrix gene profiling to identify RhoA regulated genes in T cell progenitors. The data show that RhoA plays a specific and essential role in pre-T cells because it is required for the expression of transcription factors of the Egr-1 and AP-1 families that have critical functions in thymocyte development. Loss of RhoA function in T cell progenitors causes a developmental block that pheno-copies the consequence of losing pre-TCR expression in Recombinase gene 2 (Rag2) null mice. Transcriptional profiling reveals both common and unique gene targets for RhoA and the pre-TCR indicating that RhoA participates in the pre-TCR induced transcriptional program but also mediates pre-TCR independent gene transcription

Palatini formulation of modified gravity with a nonminimal curvature-matter coupling

We derive the field equations and the equations of motion for massive test particles in modified theories of gravity with an arbitrary coupling between geometry and matter by using the Palatini formalism. We show that the independent connection can be expressed as the Levi-Civita connection of an auxiliary, matter Lagrangian dependent metric, which is related with the physical metric by means of a conformal transformation. Similarly to the metric case, the field equations impose the non-conservation of the energy-momentum tensor. We derive the explicit form of the equations of motion for massive test particles in the case of a perfect fluid, and the expression of the extra-force is obtained in terms of the matter-geometry coupling functions and of their derivatives. Generally, the motion is non-geodesic, and the extra force is orthogonal to the four-velocity.Comment: 7 pages, no figures; v2, revised and corrected version; new Section adde

Relativistic Compact Objects in Isotropic Coordinates

We present a matrix method for obtaining new classes of exact solutions for Einstein's equations representing static perfect fluid spheres. By means of a matrix transformation, we reduce Einstein's equations to two independent Riccati type differential equations for which three classes of solutions are obtained. One class of the solutions corresponding to the linear barotropic type fluid with an equation of state $p=\gamma \rho$ is discussed in detail.Comment: 9 pages, no figures, accepted for publication in Pramana-Journal of Physic