DISCUSSION: THE SOUTHERN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION AND RESIDENT INSTRUCTION

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Global trends, changes, and implications to South African finance

Financial Economics,

MEGA TRENDS IN AGRICULTURE: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FOOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

Agribusiness,

Agri-lending Vision 2020: When Vision and Reality Meet

Agricultural Finance,

Changing Face of Agricultural Lending

Agricultural Finance,

AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION: ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS EXTENSION IN THE SOUTHEAST

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Correlation Between Student Collaboration Network Centrality and Academic Performance

We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between students indicate assistance with homework. The courses included in the study are intermediate Classical Mechanics, introductory Quantum Mechanics, and intermediate Electromagnetism. By correlating these nodal centrality measures with students' scores on homework and exams, we find four centrality measures that correlate significantly with students' homework scores in all three courses: in-strength, out-strength, closeness centrality, and harmonic centrality. These correlations suggest that students who not only collaborate often, but also collaborate significantly with many different people tend to achieve higher grades. Centrality measures between simultaneous collaboration networks (analytical vs. numerical homework collaboration) composed of the same students also correlate with each other, suggesting that students' collaboration strategies remain relatively stable when presented with homework assignments targeting different skills. Additionally, we correlate centrality measures between collaboration networks from different courses and find that the four centrality measures with the strongest relationship to students' homework scores are also the most stable measures across networks involving different courses. Correlations of centrality measures with exam scores were generally smaller than the correlations with homework scores, though this finding varied across courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. PE

Returning to Learning: Adults' Success in College Is Key to America's Future

Provides an overview of research on adult learners' characteristics, risk factors, and needs at four-year institutions and in for-credit and non-credit courses, and what changes institutions and governments can implement to help adult students succeed

Left-right dissociation of hippocampal memory processes in mice.

Left-right asymmetries have likely evolved to make optimal use of bilaterian nervous systems; however, little is known about the synaptic and circuit mechanisms that support divergence of function between equivalent structures in each hemisphere. Here we examined whether lateralized hippocampal memory processing is present in mice, where hemispheric asymmetry at the CA3-CA1 pyramidal neuron synapse has recently been demonstrated, with different spine morphology, glutamate receptor content, and synaptic plasticity, depending on whether afferents originate in the left or right CA3. To address this question, we used optogenetics to acutely silence CA3 pyramidal neurons in either the left or right dorsal hippocampus while mice performed hippocampus-dependent memory tasks. We found that unilateral silencing of either the left or right CA3 was sufficient to impair short-term memory. However, a striking asymmetry emerged in long-term memory, wherein only left CA3 silencing impaired performance on an associative spatial long-term memory task, whereas right CA3 silencing had no effect. To explore whether synaptic properties intrinsic to the hippocampus might contribute to this left-right behavioral asymmetry, we investigated the expression of hippocampal long-term potentiation. Following the induction of long-term potentiation by high-frequency electrical stimulation, synapses between CA3 and CA1 pyramidal neurons were strengthened only when presynaptic input originated in the left CA3, confirming an asymmetry in synaptic properties. The dissociation of hippocampal long-term memory function between hemispheres suggests that memory is routed via distinct left-right pathways within the mouse hippocampus, and provides a promising approach to help elucidate the synaptic basis of long-term memory.http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405648111This is the author's accepted manuscript. It will be under embargo for 6 months from the date of publication. The final version is available from PNAS at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/16/1405648111.abstract

Genomic monitoring to understand the emergence and spread of Usutu virus in the Netherlands, 2016-2018

Usutu virus (USUV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus circulating in Western Europe that causes die-offs of mainly common blackbirds (Turdus merula). In the Netherlands, USUV was first detected in 2016, when it was identified as the likely cause of an outbreak in birds. In this study, dead blackbirds were collected, screened for the presence of USUV and submitted to Nanopore-based sequencing. Genomic sequence