Sixth-Grade Sight-Singing for Low Vision Students: A Course to Enhance Confidence and Music Reading Ability

Students enter the private or public-school system with a wide variety of emotional, mental, and physical impairments that impact their confidence, self-esteem, and overall path to their future. One misunderstood and under-represented population of students are those who are not fully blind but fall under the category of low vision. Since the low vision spectrum is wide, students must advocate for themselves according to their unique visual condition. While some students may be nearsighted, others may experience color blindness, tunnel vision, a wide variety of partial blindness in one or both eyes, and more. If educators are not aware of a student\u27s slight visual impairment and students are not comfortable advocating for themselves, students could be missing out on fully exploring their passion and aptitude for music. This study will examine the existing research on the array of low vision impairments and how to help sixth-grade students understand and overcome their impairments using tailored techniques to successfully meet their goals of sight-singing music. A twelve-week curriculum is provided to guide music educators as they help low vision sixth-grade students meet musical goals despite their visual impairment

Does Low-Density Grazing Affect Butterfly (Lepidoptera) Colonization of a Previously Flooded Tallgrass Prairie Reconstruction?

Conservation of wildlife in managed landscapes can be facilitated by partnering with livestock producers to introduce grazing disturbances. The effects of grazing in grassland systems, however, are often a function of other disturbances that may occur simultaneously. The goal of this study was to determine how grazing and flooding disturbances interacted to affect butterfly communities on wetland reserve program easements. We sampled butterflies from 2008-2011 in two large grassland habitats, one exposed to low density cow-calf grazing and one maintained as a control. Both grassland habitats were severely flooded in 2008. Repeated-measures ANOVA suggested that time since flooding and the interaction between flooding and grazing were important predictors of butterfly richness at these sites. Grazing may have delayed the post-flood recolonization by butterflies, but by 2011, the grazed system contained a slightly higher species richness of butterflies than the ungrazed system. The grazed and ungrazed grasslands converged in butterfly species composition over the course of four years. Our results suggest that grazing may be a useful tool for managing wetland reserve program easement habitats and that both flood- ing and grazing did not appear to have lasting negative impacts on butterfly communities at our sites

Hotel Industry Demand Curves

This research extends previous work on understanding hotel demand by focusing on the demand curve. Specifically, attention is directed toward the slope of the curve indicating the relationship between average daily rate (ADR) and the number of rooms sold - the price elasticity. Also, we investigate shifts in the curve caused by demand determinants such as changes in income, the extent is represented by income elasticity. Our findings are consistent with estimates produced by others for short-run elasticity, but we report sometimes noticeable differences between long-run and short-run elasticity. Price and income elasticity are considerably larger for higher quality hotels as indicated by the chain scale in which they operate. Elasticity tends to increase with data dis-aggregation. Higher elasticity is generally found for individual chain scales and cities compared to the nation

Housing Barriers and Resources for African Americans in East St Paul

Conducted on behalf of East Side African American Task Force. Supported by the East Side Community Outreach Partnership Center coordinated through the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota

Hotel Industry Demand Curves

This research extends previous work on understanding hotel demand by focusing on the demand curve. Specifically, attention is directed toward the slope of the curve indicating the relationship between average daily rate (ADR) and the number of rooms sold - the price elasticity. Also, we investigate shifts in the curve caused by demand determinants such as changes in income, the extent is represented by income elasticity. Our findings are consistent with estimates produced by others for short-run elasticity, but we report sometimes noticeable differences between long-run and short-run elasticity. Price and income elasticity are considerably larger for higher quality hotels as indicated by the chain scale in which they operate. Elasticity tends to increase with data disaggregation. Higher elasticity is generally found for individual chain scales and cities compared to the nation

Transforming Growth Factor-ß3 Signaling during Palatogenesis.

The formation of the palate (palatogenesis) is a complex developmental process that when disrupted results in cleft palate, a common human birth defect, occurring in 1 out of every 2000 babies. The palate is formed from a pair of palatal shelves composed of a mesenchymal core covered by a layer of surface epithelium. Additionally, prefusion palatal shelves are covered by a thin layer of transient peridermal cells. The shelves grow downwards along each side of the tongue, elevate and fuse forming the midline epithelial seam (MES), which is subsequently removed to form a fused palate. The TGF-β superfamily plays an essential role in MES removal as well as in craniofacial growth and patterning. Here we examine the mechanism of Smad-dependent (canonical) and Smad-independent (non-canonical) signaling in the palatal mesenchyme and epithelium, and the regulation of Tgfb3 palatal expression.PHDCellular and Molecular BiologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110462/1/jelemus_1.pd

Noninvasive Assessment of Preclinical Atherosclerosis

Initially considered as a semipermeable barrier separating lumen from vessel wall, the endothelium is now recognised as a complex endocrine organ responsible for a variety of physiological processes vital for vascular homeostasis. These include the regulation of vascular tone, luminal diameter, and blood flow; hemostasis and thrombolysis; platelet and leucocyte vessel-wall interactions; the regulation of vascular permeability; and tissue growth and remodelling. The endothelium modulates arterial stiffness, which precedes overt atherosclerosis and is an independent predictor of cardiovascular events. Unsurprisingly, dysfunction of the endothelium may be considered as an early and potentially reversible step in the process of atherogenesis and numerous methods have been developed to assess endothelial status and large artery stiffness. Methodology includes flow-mediated dilatation of the brachial artery, assessment of coronary flow reserve, carotid intimamedia thickness, pulse wave analysis, pulse wave velocity, and plethysmography. This review outlines the various modalities, indications, and limitations of available methods to assess arterial dysfunction and vascular risk

A categorical framework for the quantum harmonic oscillator

This paper describes how the structure of the state space of the quantum harmonic oscillator can be described by an adjunction of categories, that encodes the raising and lowering operators into a commutative comonoid. The formulation is an entirely general one in which Hilbert spaces play no special role. Generalised coherent states arise through the hom-set isomorphisms defining the adjunction, and we prove that they are eigenstates of the lowering operators. Surprisingly, generalised exponentials also emerge naturally in this setting, and we demonstrate that coherent states are produced by the exponential of a raising morphism acting on the zero-particle state. Finally, we examine all of these constructions in a suitable category of Hilbert spaces, and find that they reproduce the conventional mathematical structures.Comment: 44 pages, many figure

Investigating APOKASC Red Giant Stars with Abnormal Carbon to Nitrogen Ratios

The success of galactic archaeology and the reconstruction of the formation history of our galaxy critically relies on precise ages for large populations of stars. For evolved stars in the red clump and red giant branch, the carbon to nitrogen ratio ([C/N]) has recently been identified as a powerful diagnostic of mass and age that can be applied to stellar samples from spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS/APOGEE. Here, we show that at least 10\% of red clump stars and %$\approx 10\%$ of red giant branch stars deviate from the standard relationship between [C/N] and mass. {We use the APOGEE-\kepler\ (APOKASC) overlap sample to show that binary interactions are %the majority contributors to these responsible for the majority of these outliers and that stars with %any indicators of current or previous binarity should be excluded from galactic archaeology analyses that rely on [C/N] abundances to infer stellar masses. We also show that the %standard DR14 APOGEE analysis overestimates the surface gravities for even moderately rotating giants (vsini$>2$ km/s)}Comment: Accepted at the Astrophysical Journal, in process of publicatio