The Damage Done

Conde, Kelly, M.A., Spring 2013 Journalism The Damage Done Chairperson: Dennis Swibold The water that ran from Helen Ricker’s faucet stank of rotten eggs and of chemicals. It ran orange and greasy. It stained her clothes and clung to her skin. Ricker lives on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, three miles north of Poplar, Mont. From Ricker’s home, the oil wells from the East Poplar oilfields can be seen in the distance. Her water started to change in the early 1970’s, twenty years after the first oil well was drilled. It took about that long for the contamination from poorly regulated drilling practices and leaking wells to reach her water supply. Since then, Ricker and her neighbors have struggled for clean water. Twenty years after the contamination turned Ricker’s water undrinkable, it reached Poplar. It went from contaminating the water of 20 homes, to poisoning an entire city water supply. Poised on the edge of the highly productive Bakken formation, Poplar was caught straddling two eras. As the town scrambled for a solution to their water problems brought on by oil practices from decades ago, the prospect of rapid oil production flickered in the near future. And just as the town’s water was saved by way of a new water treatment plant funded by American taxpayers, the Bakken started to boom. If the boom reaches the reservation, it means a way out of economic hardship, but for those still dealing with the consequences of the last boom, it means fresh wounds on an already scarred land. The Damage Done sheds light on the long-term effects of unharnessed oil and gas production. It also tells the scientific story of oil production and some ways the industry and regulatory agencies have changed to prevent such environmental disasters from happening in the future

Text Difficulty and Bilingual Student Interactions in Informational Book Discussions

This qualitative analysis of small-group book discussions documents how bilingual third-grade students interacted around informational books at their reading levels and books one year ahead of their reading levels. The interactions included: answering the teacher, building on previous ideas, asking questions, introducing new topics, answering own or peer’s questions, disagreeing, agreeing, and peer coaching. The last three of these interactions occurred rarely. Each group adopted opposite interaction patterns in relation to text difficulty. Group 1 predominately asked questions with matched texts, and with difficult texts they introduced new topics and built up related previous ideas. Group 2 mostly asked questions with difficult texts, and they introduced new topics and built them up mostly when speaking about matched texts. It is not clear that one interaction pattern is “better” than the other, and differences in the levels may explain some of the interactions adopted

Bilingual Children\u27s Talk about Informational Text: Focus on Ideas, Images, and Print

Current standards push for elementary students to have text-based and text-centric discussions of what they read. This study explored what bilingual third-grade students talked about during small-group text-based discussions of informational texts. The author conducted a qualitative analysis of 10 video-recorded discussions, five of books matched to students’ reading levels and five of complex texts one year ahead of students’ reading levels. Two groups of three students participated. All students needed additional support to read successfully at grade level. Findings show that only a quarter of student talk clearly connected to printed text. Their talk oriented toward ideas, images, and texts. Ideas and images provided an accessible entry point into the discussion for all students and in some cases facilitated interactions with text. When students did talk about text, it did not always further develop the discussion topic. For the students needing the most support to read at grade level, more talk about text and ideas occurred with difficult books, whereas matched books led to more conversations oriented toward images. Implications include the need for teachers and researchers to value responses beyond overtly text-oriented ones in discussions

Why read the Newsletter? A survey of the IAMSLIC Newsletter readers

pp. 257-6

Quantifying the Tibiofemoral Joint Space Using X-ray Tomosynthesis

Purpose: Digital x-ray tomosynthesis (DTS) has the potential to provide 3D information about the knee joint in a load-bearing posture, which may improve diagnosis and monitoring of knee osteoarthritis compared with projection radiography, the current standard of care. Manually quantifying and visualizing the joint space width (JSW) from 3D tomosynthesis datasets may be challenging. This work developed a semiautomated algorithm for quantifying the 3D tibiofemoral JSW from reconstructed DTS images. The algorithm was validated through anthropomorphic phantom experiments and applied to three clinical datasets. Methods: A user-selected volume of interest within the reconstructed DTS volume was enhanced with 1D multiscale gradient kernels. The edge-enhanced volumes were divided by polarity into tibial and femoral edge maps and combined across kernel scales. A 2D connected components algorithm was performed to determine candidate tibial and femoral edges. A 2D joint space width map (JSW) was constructed to represent the 3D tibiofemoral joint space. To quantify the algorithm accuracy, an adjustable knee phantom was constructed, and eleven posterior–anterior (PA) and lateral DTS scans were acquired with the medial minimum JSW of the phantom set to 0–5 mm in 0.5 mm increments (VolumeRadTM, GE Healthcare, Chalfont St. Giles, United Kingdom). The accuracy of the algorithm was quantified by comparing the minimum JSW in a region of interest in the medial compartment of the JSW map to the measured phantom setting for each trial. In addition, the algorithm was applied to DTS scans of a static knee phantom and the JSW map compared to values estimated from a manually segmented computed tomography (CT) dataset. The algorithm was also applied to three clinical DTS datasets of osteoarthritic patients. Results: The algorithm segmented the JSW and generated a JSW map for all phantom and clinical datasets. For the adjustable phantom, the estimated minimum JSW values were plotted against the measured values for all trials. A linear fit estimated a slope of 0.887 (R2¼0.962) and a mean error across all trials of 0.34 mm for the PA phantom data. The estimated minimum JSW values for the lateral adjustable phantom acquisitions were found to have low correlation to the measured values (R2¼0.377), with a mean error of 2.13 mm. The error in the lateral adjustable-phantom datasets appeared to be caused by artifacts due to unrealistic features in the phantom bones. JSW maps generated by DTS and CT varied by a mean of 0.6 mm and 0.8 mm across the knee joint, for PA and lateral scans. The tibial and femoral edges were successfully segmented and JSW maps determined for PA and lateral clinical DTS datasets. Conclusions: A semiautomated method is presented for quantifying the 3D joint space in a 2D JSW map using tomosynthesis images. The proposed algorithm quantified the JSW across the knee joint to sub-millimeter accuracy for PA tomosynthesis acquisitions. Overall, the results suggest that x-ray tomosynthesis may be beneficial for diagnosing and monitoring disease progression or treatment of osteoarthritis by providing quantitative images of JSW in the load-bearing knee

Salmonella Interaction with and Passage through the Intestinal Mucosa: Through the Lens of the Organism

Salmonella enterica serotypes are invasive enteric pathogens spread through fecal contamination of food and water sources, and represent a constant public health threat around the world. The symptoms associated with salmonellosis and typhoid disease are largely due to the host response to invading Salmonella, and to the mechanisms these bacteria employ to survive in the presence of, and invade through the intestinal mucosal epithelia. Surmounting this barrier is required for survival within the host, as well as for further dissemination throughout the body, and subsequent systemic disease. In this review, we highlight some of the major hurdles Salmonella must overcome upon encountering the intestinal mucosal epithelial barrier, and examine how these bacteria surmount and exploit host defense mechanisms

Newsletter production into a marine science portal.

pp. 199-20

Assessing spectator response to sponsorships at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have a strong tradition and football following, yet they struggle financially and lack sponsorship revenue. HBCU fans are understudied, and investigating their behavior would help athletic departments. The purpose of this study was to determine HBCU football consumers’ response to sponsorships. Spectators’ team and university identification, awareness, attitude, loyalty, goodwill, gratitude, and trust of sponsors were examined in relation to purchase intentions and positive word of mouth (WOM) of sponsors. Brand loyalty and gratitude led to increased purchase intentions. Brand attitude, brand awareness, brand loyalty, and goodwill led to positive WOM