Municipal Corporations: Liability of Counties for Negligent Acts and Omissions of Their Employees and Officers

Municipal Corporations: Liability of Counties for Negligent Acts and Omissions of Their Employees and Officer

Multi-Variant analysis of real-world environmental variables affecting image fading on outdoor synthetic inkjet substrates

The permanence of large format, outdoor inkjet signs is a concern for many advertisers and companies creating signs that will be displayed for years or months in such an environment. The permanence industry has focused their research on using equipment to simulate these outdoor conditions the prints face to gauge their fading properties. This research took a more direct approach by placing the prints in an actual outdoor environment and tracking the rate of color change (∆Eab), and the environmental variables. A multiple regression analysis of the data was then used to create prediction models and to eliminate environmental variables which did not affect the fading. The multiple regression analysis was able to create a prediction model for only two of the patches tested on one of the substrates. The test included three substrates (uncoated vinyl, coated vinyl and Tyvek (DuPont)) and ten color patches (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, red, green, blue, two grays, and plain substrate). The successful models were for the measured substrate patch and the cyan patch on the ESM (uncoated vinyl) substrate. The model showed that the substrate patch was affected by the average high and low temperatures and by the amount of time exposed in weeks. A second model showed that the cyan patch on the ESM substrate was affected by the UV index and the amount of time exposed in weeks. Further examination of the study showed that the ESM substrate was the most stable under the experiment conditions out of the three substrates. Cyan ink was the least stable ink on the Tyvek (DuPont) and coated vinyl and that the coatings on the substrates play a role in their ability to maintain color integrity of the print

Municipal Corporations: Liability of Counties for Negligent Acts and Omissions of Their Employees and Officers

Municipal Corporations: Liability of Counties for Negligent Acts and Omissions of Their Employees and Officer

Aligning Existing Library Services to Disciplinary Discourse Practices: Mapping the Intellectual Journeys of Graduate Students

As universities struggle to find ways to attract top graduate students, one strategy colleges and departments often employ is to create new graduate program offerings. These new graduate program offerings are often driven by a need to support growth in multi-disciplinary areas and the need to stay cutting edge, as well as concerns related to changes in staffing and pressures in the marketplace. As a means of supporting campus, libraries strive to develop new services to support evolving research needs. However, despite developing user driven library offerings, library users are often unaware of said services and, by extension, unaware of the value librarians can offer graduate students throughout their research journey. Likely this lack of awareness is due in large part to a language gap between librarians and users, not due to the relevance of services. In the spring of 2019, the Research & Learning department recruited faculty and conducted interviews as a means of uncovering the critical intellectual journeys of graduate students in different disciplines. These interviews allowed UAL library researchers to gather information to map the intellectual journeys of graduate students in different departments and identify how faculty describe their graduate student needs. This data is being used to guide librarians to address the language gap that exists between users and find key places within their intellectual journeys to communicate the value and relevance of library services to graduate students. This presentation will review some top disciplinary discourse findings and a preliminary exploration of ways libraries can respond

Sex Differences Among Adult Influenza Hospitalizations Associated With Age, Race, And Socioeconomic Status In 14 Us Sites, 2010-2012

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown sex differences in influenza hospitalizations, but sex differences across the United States by demographic characteristics have not been well-established. We investigated potential sex differences across 14 FluSurv-NET (FSN) sites that conduct active population-based surveillance for laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations among residents of 76 counties in 2010-2012, stratifying by age, race, and census tract-level poverty. METHODS: We used 6,292 laboratory-confirmed adult (\u3e18 years) cases collected by the 14 FSN sites during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 influenza seasons linked to 2010 Census data to calculate overall age-adjusted and age-specific incidence and incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for sex by four race/ethnic and four census-tract poverty (SES) categories. Analyses were repeated excluding pregnant women, with denominator pregnancy adjustments calculated by subtracting the percentage of women 18-49 years old with live births in 2010. RESULTS: Overall, 55.5% of cases were female. Females were more likely to be hospitalized than males (IRR 1.17, 95% CI 1.11-1.22), but this difference did not remain after age adjustment. Females at highest risk were 18-49 years old (IRR 1.32, 95% 1.20-1.44), which was fully accounted for by pregnancy. Females were at lower risk in the ≥85 year old category (IRR 0.67, 95% CI 0.59-0.77). IRRs varied by race and SES, but in no SES group was the aIRR significantly greater than 1. White females were less likely to be hospitalized than white males (aIRR 0.91, 95% CI 0.85-0.98) while Hispanic females were more likely to be hospitalized than Hispanic males (aIRR 1.25, 95% CI 1.06-1.44). Of the 14 sites examined, 12 had crude incidence rate ratios greater than 1, but none were significant after age adjustment. CONCLUSIONS: In 2010-2012, there were sex differences in influenza-associated hospitalizations that were highly dependent upon age, but varied by race/ethnicity and US site. Further research is needed to understand the drivers behind these differences, and analysis of data from different years is needed to determine the consistency of these findings

Striking a Balance: Evidence Synthesis Support for Graduate Students

Evidence synthesis (ES) is the process of systematically collecting studies and synthesizing the findings using strict protocols and criteria. Common examples of ES include systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and scoping reviews. While ES has been commonplace in health sciences for many years, it has recently gained traction in non-health sciences fields such as the social sciences. In response to this growing trend, the IMLS-funded Evidence Synthesis Institute was created to offer librarians in-depth training on how to best provide ES support to disciplines outside the health sciences. This presentation draws on the insights of two liaison librarians who work at public R1 universities and who recently attended the Evidence Synthesis Institute. After completing the Institute and gaining a deeper understanding of ES, both librarians have grappled with the best way to implement an ES service in their organizations. The presenters will share two different approaches: one will discuss their word-of-mouth approach to those in their liaison areas, and the other will discuss their role in building a brand new ES program that serves many disciplines. By comparing and contrasting their programs, the presenters will share practical insights into the workflows, relationships, and considerations of providing ES support. Some topics that will be explored include the type of service model (ad hoc versus institutional), getting buy-in from library staff, training, time management, and promotion of the service. The discussion will focus on graduate students in particular and offer advice on how librarians can provide ES support to a contingency that is both researcher and student. The presenters will discuss how they have managed to strike a balance between guiding graduate students on their ES projects while leaving room for graduate students to learn the process themselves. This session will be of interest to librarians who are excited to learn about a new research area and interested in how to support their users, library staff who lack institutional infrastructure and find themselves at an impasse when trying to identify where they fit in this new functional area, and for administrators responsible for setting strategic directions

Money Matters: Academic Library Scholarship and Funding Initiatives for Graduate Students

Graduate programs in all disciplines view external funding as a benchmark of success. For students on research teams and for those seeking academic careers, faculty role models demonstrate the need for funding as an integral part of the research cycle. Closer to home, the increasing cost of graduate education requires students seek supplemental funding. This session, divided into two segments (internal and external funding), will present experiential case studies for how academic libraries can design scholarships and fellowships to serve graduate students in this often overlooked phase of their graduate education. Sherrod Library at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) has developed two internal graduate student scholarships. The Outstanding Graduate Assistant Scholarship provides a mechanism to reward library graduate assistant employees who have excelled in performance of their job duties. The second award, the Graduate Student Scholarship for Excellence in Research, is open to all graduate students and recognizes individuals who demonstrate research acumen and a successful, strategic search strategy in utilizing library resources to conduct research. Unlike other ETSU graduate scholarships, which are awarded for thesis, dissertation, or capstone, this scholarship focuses on research done in foundational coursework and requires careful reflection and examination of the research process itself. This scholarship provides the library an opportunity to support graduate education and raises the library’s profile at the university level via the annual Graduate Awards Ceremony. At the University of Arizona Libraries, a new initiative provides successful candidates a $1500 stipend through the Digital Scholarship & Data Science Fellowship Program. The focus is to train graduate students in pedagogical best practices, a unique area where the library contributes to teacher training, and also provides a forum where the students provide training for in-demand digital and computational skills to a community of interested learners. The second half of the presentation will focus on external funding, the ruling funding force for those in academic training. Grant writing has traditionally been left to an experienced principal investigator since, even for trained scholars, securing federal funding can be quite challenging. Increasingly, doctoral students are leading the development of research proposals and competing for external funding. Incorporating training for grant funding as part of graduate education provides students with a training exercise aimed to introduce them to the reality and process of writing competitive research grants. We will explore possible ways that libraries can serve graduate students navigating this aspect of graduate education. The analysis on external funding will share observations of new grant writing training occurring in academic disciplinary programs, including examples of how these practices contribute to meeting comprehensive exam requirements in some programs at the University of Arizona. Session participants will leave with a model for structuring an in-house scholarship program. This includes opportunities for funding; putting together a team; scheduling, marketing and promotion; rubrics; and software. This session strives to have an interactive component. Participants will be invited to share their own scholarship and fellowship initiatives so that we may learn from each other

Collaboration Between the Special Education Teacher, Paraeducator, and the General Education Teacher to Promote Inclusion for Students with Disabilities

One barrier to successful inclusion of students with disabilities in general education is lack of communication between the special educator, paraeducator, and general educator. This problem of practice occurred in a public, suburban school district in a Life Skills and Autistic Support grades three, four, and five classrooms. The school did not have a system of communication in place between the special education teacher, general education teachers, and paraeducators in order to improve inclusion of students with severe disabilities. The main stakeholders were students, the director of student support services, paraeducators, general education teachers, and special education teachers. The goal was for students with disabilities to have rich learning experiences while they are included in their general education classrooms. Quantitative and qualitative measures of professional and student behavior were collected and analyzed to examine the effects of the implemented change. The results demonstrated a correlation between communication between the adults and meeting student needs in the classroom. Data from the study provided evidence that the intervention increased engagement in the inclusive setting, but there is still more work to be done