Community Service Learning and School Improvement in Springfield, Massachusetts

Calls for changes in the education system continually issue forth from various segments of society. Each outpouring of public concern challenges educators to address the needs of young people and to achieve school renewal. The current literature on school reform advocates an agenda of improvement efforts aimed at creating effective, caring schools that will provide active learning opportunities for students. develop learning communities, expand learning into the community. foster collegiality among staff members, and enable teachers to become orchestra conductors in the classroom rather than lecturers. But educators ask, How can all of this be achieved

Paediatric cardiac surgery for a continent – The experience of the Walter Sisulu Paediatric Cardiac Centre for Africa

Very few African countries have the resources to provide optimum paediatric cardiac services to their largely indigent populations. In the current era, in countries with access to modern paediatric cardiac care, mortality for congenital heart disease occurs more often in adulthood than in childhood. This level of care is largely unavailable in Africa. The Walter Sisulu Paediatric Cardiac Centre for Africa was set up in 2003 as a public-private collaborative initiative to extend modern paediatric cardiac care to the continent. Three core functions form the basis of our operations: service delivery, training, and research. This communication reviews our experience with this effort over an eight-year period. We have performed 2 023 procedures on 1 738 patients including a large proportion of neonates and infants with an overall mortality of 7.1%. Our charity arm sponsored 21.5% of these patients. We have encountered problems peculiar to the African context which we discuss. We also describe innovative techniques in management of specific patient populations. Our training efforts yielded two qualified paediatric cardiac surgeons who now work at the centre and two additional surgeons are in training. We have participated in research leading to publication of papers in peer-reviewed journals. In spite of our achievements, we recognise the enormous challenges faced by the continent in terms of paediatric cardiac care. An attempt has been made to quantify the burden of congenital disease in Africa to guide planning and training. We offer recommendations on how to address some of these pressing health issues for children of the continent

Changes in biological productivity along the northwest African margin over the past 20,000 years

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Paleoceanography 31 (2016): 185–202, doi:10.1002/2015PA002862.The intertropical convergence zone and the African monsoon system are highly sensitive to climate forcing at orbital and millennial timescales. Both systems influence the strength and direction of the trade winds along northwest Africa and thus directly impact coastal upwelling. Sediment cores from the northwest African margin record upwelling-related changes in biological productivity connected to changes in regional and hemispheric climate. We present records of 230Th-normalized biogenic opal and Corg fluxes using a meridional transect of four cores from 19°N–31°N along the northwest African margin to examine changes in paleoproductivity since the last glacial maximum. We find large changes in biogenic fluxes synchronous with changes in eolian fluxes calculated using end-member modeling, suggesting that paleoproductivity and dust fluxes were strongly coupled, likely linked by changes in wind strength. Opal and Corg fluxes increase at all sites during Heinrich Stadial 1 and the Younger Dryas, consistent with an overall intensification of the trade winds, and changes in the meridional flux gradient indicate a southward wind shift at these times. Biogenic fluxes were lowest, and the meridional flux gradients were weakest during the African Humid Period when the monsoon was invigorated due to precessional changes, with greater rainfall and weaker trade winds over northwest Africa. These results expand the spatial coverage of previous paleoproxy studies showing similar changes, and they provide support for modeling studies showing changes in wind strength and direction consistent with increased upwelling during abrupt coolings and decreased upwelling during the African Humid Period.NSF Grant Numbers: OCE-1103262, OCE-1030784, OCE-0402348; Center for Climate and Life2016-07-2

Glacial to Holocene changes in trans-Atlantic Saharan dust transport and dust-climate feedbacks

© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Science Advances 2 (2016): e1600445, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600445.Saharan mineral dust exported over the tropical North Atlantic is thought to have significant impacts on regional climate and ecosystems, but limited data exist documenting past changes in long-range dust transport. This data gap limits investigations of the role of Saharan dust in past climate change, in particular during the mid-Holocene, when climate models consistently underestimate the intensification of the West African monsoon documented by paleorecords. We present reconstructions of African dust deposition in sediments from the Bahamas and the tropical North Atlantic spanning the last 23,000 years. Both sites show early and mid-Holocene dust fluxes 40 to 50% lower than recent values and maximum dust fluxes during the deglaciation, demonstrating agreement with records from the northwest African margin. These quantitative estimates of trans-Atlantic dust transport offer important constraints on past changes in dust-related radiative and biogeochemical impacts. Using idealized climate model experiments to investigate the response to reductions in Saharan dust’s radiative forcing over the tropical North Atlantic, we find that small (0.15°C) dust-related increases in regional sea surface temperatures are sufficient to cause significant northward shifts in the Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone, increased precipitation in the western Sahel and Sahara, and reductions in easterly and northeasterly winds over dust source regions. Our results suggest that the amplifying feedback of dust on sea surface temperatures and regional climate may be significant and that accurate simulation of dust’s radiative effects is likely essential to improving model representations of past and future precipitation variations in North Africa.This study was supported, in part, by NSF awards OCE-1030784 (to D.M. and P.B.d.) and OCE-09277247 (to P.B.d.); NASA grant NN14AP38G (to C. Heald, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which supports D.A.R.; and the Columbia University Center for Climate and Life. A.F. is supported by the NSF grant AGS-1116885 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant NA14OAR4310277. S.H. is supported by the NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship. We also acknowledge computational support from the NSF/NCAR Yellowstone Supercomputing Center and the Yale University High Performance Computing Center

Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata”. The article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the modalities through which supposedly blank surfaces are, in fact, textured depths that can be read

Immunological insights into COVID-19 in Southern Nigeria

Introduction: One of the unexpected outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the relatively low levels of morbidity and mortality in Africa compared to the rest of the world. Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, accounted for less than 0.01% of the global COVID-19 fatalities. The factors responsible for Nigeria's relatively low loss of life due to COVID-19 are unknown. Also, the correlates of protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and the impact of pre-existing immunity on the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa are yet to be elucidated. Here, we evaluated the natural and vaccine-induced immune responses from vaccinated, non-vaccinated and convalescent individuals in Southern Nigeria throughout the three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. We also examined the pre-existing immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 from samples collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We used spike RBD and N- IgG antibody ELISA to measure binding antibody responses, SARS-CoV-2 pseudotype assay protocol expressing the spike protein of different variants (D614G, Delta, Beta, Omicron BA1) to measure neutralizing antibody responses and nucleoprotein (N) and spike (S1, S2) direct ex vivo interferon gamma (IFNγ) T cell ELISpot to measure T cell responses. Result: Our study demonstrated a similar magnitude of both binding (N-IgG (74% and 62%), S-RBD IgG (70% and 53%) and neutralizing (D614G (49% and 29%), Delta (56% and 47%), Beta (48% and 24%), Omicron BA1 (41% and 21%)) antibody responses from symptomatic and asymptomatic survivors in Nigeria. A similar magnitude was also seen among vaccinated participants. Interestingly, we revealed the presence of preexisting binding antibodies (N-IgG (60%) and S-RBD IgG (44%)) but no neutralizing antibodies from samples collected prior to the pandemic. Discussion: These findings revealed that both vaccinated, non-vaccinated and convalescent individuals in Southern Nigeria make similar magnitude of both binding and cross-reactive neutralizing antibody responses. It supported the presence of preexisting binding antibody responses among some Nigerians prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, hybrid immunity and heterologous vaccine boosting induced the strongest binding and broadly neutralizing antibody responses compared to vaccine or infection-acquired immunity alone

Zircon U-Pb, O, and Hf isotopic constraints on Mesozoic magmatism in the Cyclades, Aegean Sea, Greece

Compared to the well-documented Cenozoic magmatic and metamorphic rocks of the Cyclades, Aegean Sea, Greece, the geodynamic context of older meta-igneous rocks occurring in the marble-schist sequences and mélanges of the Cycladic Blueschist Unit is as y