The Relationship of Grade Span in 9th Grade to Math Achievement in High School

Purpose, Scope, and Method of Study: The purpose of this study was to determine if a correlation exists between grade span for ninth grade and gains in math achievement test scores in 10th grade and 12th grade. A quantitative, longitudinal, correlational research design was employed to investigate the research questions. The population was high school students in the United States from public and private schools who were in the ninth grade for the first time during the 1989-1990 school year. The data collection instrument was the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). Further sampling and data analysis was conducted through SPSS and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) software programs. A three-level, repeated-observations, HLM model was employed. The first level included scores and data collected over time nested within students. The second level included within schools data. Data were compared between schools for the third level of the full model. Findings and Conclusion: This study confirmed the significance of race, socioeconomic status, math courses taken, math credits earned, different rates of growth in mathematics, and school level factors that affect individual student math performance. School level factors also contributed to student learning at a significant level. Although this study did not identify a correlation between grade span and math achievement, it may have provided other researchers and practitioners’ recommendations that will guide practice and further research. This study also indicated the need, based on the unexplained variance, to identify additional factors that may contribute to improvement in learning for students

Heliophysics and Amateur Radio:Citizen Science Collaborations for Atmospheric, Ionospheric, and Space Physics Research and Operations

The amateur radio community is a global, highly engaged, and technical community with an intense interest in space weather, its underlying physics, and how it impacts radio communications. The large-scale observational capabilities of distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and radio science enthusiasts offers a tremendous opportunity to advance the fields of heliophysics, radio science, and space weather. Well-established amateur radio networks like the RBN, WSPRNet, and PSKReporter already provide rich, ever-growing, long-term data of bottomside ionospheric observations. Up-and-coming purpose-built citizen science networks, and their associated novel instruments, offer opportunities for citizen scientists, professional researchers, and industry to field networks for specific science questions and operational needs. Here, we discuss the scientific and technical capabilities of the global amateur radio community, review methods of collaboration between the amateur radio and professional scientific community, and review recent peer-reviewed studies that have made use of amateur radio data and methods. Finally, we present recommendations submitted to the U.S. National Academy of Science Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024–2033 for using amateur radio to further advance heliophysics and for fostering deeper collaborations between the professional science and amateur radio communities. Technical recommendations include increasing support for distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and citizen scientists, developing novel transmissions of RF signals that can be used in citizen science experiments, developing new amateur radio modes that simultaneously allow for communications and ionospheric sounding, and formally incorporating the amateur radio community and its observational assets into the Space Weather R2O2R framework. Collaborative recommendations include allocating resources for amateur radio citizen science research projects and activities, developing amateur radio research and educational activities in collaboration with leading organizations within the amateur radio community, facilitating communication and collegiality between professional researchers and amateurs, ensuring that proposed projects are of a mutual benefit to both the professional research and amateur radio communities, and working towards diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Supporting Information for First Observations of Large Scale Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances Using Automated Amateur Radio Receiving Networks

Introduction The supporting information for this paper consists of a movie version of Figure 2 in the main paper, comparing the high frequency (HF) amateur radio observations to differential Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements. In this revised version of the repository, the TEC data has been reprocessed such that all GNSS data with elevation angles down to 10 degrees were kept when applying the Savitzky–Golay (SG) filter. After the SG filter was applied, data with elevation angles below 30 degrees were discarded. This was done to remove artifacts observed in the original movies. Movie S1 (20171103 Ham and TEC LSTID.mp4) (Top Panel) Time series showing the TX-RX distance for 14 MHz amateur radio spots in 2 min by 25 km bins from 1200 UT 3 Nov 2017 - 0000 UT 4 Nov 2017. (Bottom Panel) differential Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements over the Continental United States corresponding to the times indicated by the moving white vertical line in the top panel. Movie S2 (20171103 Ham and TEC LSTID – With Arrow.mp4) Same as movie S1, but with a fiducial black arrow indicating an estimated LSTID horizontal wavelength of 1681 km and propagation azimuth of 163°

Chemotherapy Extravasation: Establishing a National Benchmark for Incidence Among Cancer Centers

Background: Given the high-risk nature and nurse sensitivity of chemotherapy infusion and extravasation prevention, as well as the absence of an industry benchmark, a group of nurses studied oncology-specific nursing-sensitive indicators. 
 Objectives: The purpose was to establish a benchmark for the incidence of chemotherapy extravasation with vesicants, irritants, and irritants with vesicant potential.
. Methods: Infusions with actual or suspected extravasations of vesicant and irritant chemotherapies were evaluated. Extravasation events were reviewed by type of agent, occurrence by drug category, route of administration, level of harm, follow-up, and patient referrals to surgical consultation.
. Findings: A total of 739,812 infusions were evaluated, with 673 extravasation events identified. Incidence for all extravasation events was 0.09%