The Community Safety Net and Prescription Drug Access for Low-Income, Uninsured People

Examines strategies adopted by hospitals and community health centers to maintain access to affordable brand name and generic prescription drugs. Based on site visits to twelve nationally representative communities

Diary

Photocopied article from the newspaper New Statesman and Society about the new formation of the Brotherhood of Breath after the death of three of the key members Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana and Johnny Dyani

Text and Data Mining Applications for Teaching Music Bibliography

Text and data mining (TDM) is a process of increasing interdisciplinary potential and one with many practical applications for music graduate students. TDM, however, remains a topic rarely introduced in the music bibliography course. Understandably, talk of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and programming languages are intimidating to music students, but thanks to software applications, knowledge about these computer science topics are not required to participate in research using TDM. This presentation explores ways to introduce digital humanities to music students through TDM. In our presentation, we will discuss two approaches to incorporating TDM into the music bibliography course, focusing on two student objectives: increasing ease and engagement with finding research information and discovering patterns and underlying topics of music research. Our experience suggests that students find these tools and approaches both useful and accessible. Presenter A will discuss their approach to teaching the Google Ngram Viewer and JSTOR Text Analyzer in the graduate music bibliography course at an R1 public institution. Their assignments engage students in new approaches to finding research with these easy-to-use tools. They will update their recently-published survey results regarding student attitudes to these tools that combine powerful TDM with simple interfaces. Presenter B will discuss the TDM assignment they assigned to students in their Research Methods for Performers course, a small seminar taught at a private, medium-sized R2 institution. Using ProQuest’s TDM Studio tool, this assignment capped off two weeks spent discussing digital humanities and text and data mining research methods and involved using the method of topic mapping to uncover hidden tropes in the dissertations and theses on a given research area. The learning outcomes for attendees include the following: gaining an understanding of how text and data mining relates to graduate music students’ research practices; understanding some methods for text and data analysis; and learning specific tools that can be easily incorporated into teaching music research methods for graduate students

MassMine: Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers

The MassMine project team representing participants from the Department of English, George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), and Research Computing at the University of Florida (UF) requests $60,000 to finish the version 1.0 release, develop a robust training program, and promote the MassMine open source software. MassMine enables researchers to collect their own social media data archives and supports data mining, thus providing free access to big data for academic inquiry. MassMine further supports researchers in creating and defining methods and measures for analyzing cultural and localized trends, and developing humanities research questions and data mining practices. The primary aims of this project are to: 1) refine the MassMine tools to support collection, acquisition, and use of available social media and web data; and, 2) develop a training program and corresponding online resources for supporting the broad use of MassMine by humanities researchers, regardless of experience

The Evolution of Active Droplets in Chemorobotic Platforms

There is great interest in oil-in-water droplets as simple systems that display astonishingly complex behaviours. Recently, we reported a chemorobotic platform capable of autonomously exploring and evolving the behaviours these droplets can exhibit. The platform enabled us to undertake a large number of reproducible experiments, allowing us to probe the non-linear relationship between droplet composition and behaviour. Herein we introduce this work, and also report on the recent developments we have made to this system. These include new platforms to simultaneously evolve the droplets’ physical and chemical environments and the inclusion of selfreplicating molecules in the droplets

Ensuring a Quality Honors Experience through Learning Contracts: Success beyond Our Wildest Dreams

In 1997, when Julia A. Haseleu started teaching at Kirkwood Community College (KCC) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, her charge as a psychology instructor with honors experience was to develop an honors program based on learning contracts. Other faculty and administrators had attempted to offer honors courses at KCC, but these efforts had failed. Rhonda Kekke, KCC Dean of Arts and Humanities, determined that the problem was the honors course format. At small to medium-sized colleges and universities, especially two-year campuses, finding a group of honors students who are interested in the same subjects, able to work the same courses into their schedules, and synchronized enough across courses to justify a full honors curriculum in any given semester is often difficult. Kekke was convinced that it would be better to use an honors project format, and she was right. Now, twenty years later, Haseleu has developed two such programs at two flagship two-year colleges in two midwestern states: first at KCC and then at her current institution, Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin. In Chapter One of this volume, Richard Badenhausen outlines and discusses the problems and pitfalls of using learning contracts, especially as “add-ons” to non-honors courses or in lieu of formal honors classes. Badenhausen comes from the perspective of one who leads a “fully developed and flexible stand-alone honors curriculum” (6), an environment in which learning contracts understandably would not be the first choice—or even necessary— as a way of developing an honors curriculum. In smaller programs, however, with a much wider variety of departments, programs, and disciplines (e.g., liberal arts, automotive technology, dental hygiene, business and marketing, construction, culinary arts, engineering, protective services, graphic design, information technology, music, nursing, welding, and veterinary technician), offering an ongoing course-based honors curriculum is often not possible. In such cases, a project-based approach that is structured with comprehensive learning contracts is a flexible way to give students honors-level learning experiences in lieu of honors classes. This situation existed at both KCC and Madison College. In project-based learning, students develop a question to explore and are guided through the research and analysis process under the supervision of a faculty member. Project-based learning is neither a supplemental activity nor an “add-on” to a traditional course. Rather, it is the basis of the curriculum in and of itself (Bell 39). Students who engage in project-based learning experience a deeper level of learning and understanding about a topic and enjoy greater opportunity to hone problem-solving and critical-thinking skills than they would in a more passive learning environment

Preparation strategies used by American Sign Language- English interpreters to render President Barack Obama’s inaugural address

A fundamental principle held by professional American Sign Language-English interpreters is the critical importance of preparing for assignments; however, neither preparation strategies nor their efficacy have been studied in depth. For this study, six experienced ASL-English conference interpreters were interviewed about the preparation process they used to render President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address into ASL. The participants were given the full script of Obama’s speech and 20 minutes of preparation time. After completing their interpretations, the participants engaged in a retrospective verbal report regarding their preparation strategies. The descriptive findings suggest that even ASL-English interpreters with experience in conference settings do not have standard strategies for preparing with written material, especially when interpreting a dense text under time constraints. A systematic approach to teaching preparation may improve the quality of the interpretations of scripted speeches, and other discourse genres, by ASL-English interpreters

Maintaining the Boundaries: Teacher Preparation Program Admission Criteria for Screening Quality Candidates

This study examines several Texas university-based teacher preparation program screening measures and admission criteria. The researchers examined those measures stipulated in the Texas Administrative Code, as well as criteria that exceeded those required by the state. Identifying these measures and criteria will allow programs to maintain the boundaries of who becomes a teacher, thus providing the quality teachers required to educate productive members of society

When Can the Child Speak for Herself? The Limits of Parental Consent in Data Protection Law for Health Research.

Draft regulatory guidance suggests that if the processing of a child's personal data begins with the consent of a parent, then there is a need to find and defend an enduring consent through the child's growing capacity and on to their maturity. We consider the implications for health research of the UK Information Commissioner's Office's (ICO) suggestion that the relevant test for maturity is the Gillick test, originally developed in the context of medical treatment. Noting the significance of the welfare principle to this test, we examine the implications for the responsibilities of a parent to act as proxy for their child. We argue, contrary to draft ICO guidance, that a data controller might legitimately continue to rely upon parental consent as a legal basis for processing after a child is old enough to provide her own consent. Nevertheless, we conclude that data controllers should develop strategies to seek fresh consent from children as soon as practicable after the data controller has reason to believe they are mature enough to consent independently. Techniques for effective communication, recommended to address challenges associated with Big Data analytics, might have a role here in addressing the dynamic relationship between data subject and processing. Ultimately, we suggest that fair and lawful processing of a child's data will be dependent upon data controllers taking seriously the truism that consent is ongoing, rather than a one-time event: the core associated responsibility is to continue to communicate with a data subject regarding the processing of personal data