The Making of Nova Southeastern University: A Tradition of Innovation, 1964-2014

Nova Southeastern University is a flourishing university with a fascinating past. Arising from the shared dream of local community businessmen in Broward County, Florida, the university was chartered in 1964. At the time, it had no buildings to its name--just an empty plot of land and a dedicated group of visionary advocates. On the fiftieth anniversary of NSU’s founding, this book tells the amazing story of what is now one of the largest not-for-profit universities in the United States. Today, Nova Southeastern University serves more than 27,000 students and has produced more than 150,000 alumni. Its main campus in Fort Lauderdale is beautifully landscaped, with modern classroom buildings, an array of student housing options, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, and a unique joint-use library, the largest library building in the state of Florida. Through distance-learning and travel study programs, NSU’s presence extends throughout the United States and around the world. Using interviews with present and past NSU presidents, faculty, administrators, staff, students, and even NSU’s original founders, award-winning historian Dr. Julian Pleasants provides an insider\u27s view of the story behind the school. He re-creates the scene of a meeting one night in the 1960s when local businessman Jack Hines pounded on a dining room table and said, We\u27ve just got to have a university. Against all odds, they succeeded. Dr. Pleasants describes the arrival of NSU\u27s very first graduate students, reveals the internal conflicts that challenged the school’s program development, and related the frightening brush with bankruptcy that threatened to close the doors of the young university forever. The personal testimonies are backed by a wealth of primary sources, including board of trustees minutes, unpublished manuscripts, administrative documents, and presidential papers from the NSU archives. Rare photographs offer a glimpse into the early history, culture, and architecture of the university. The Making of Nova Southeastern University shows how this unique school overcame tremendous odds in just five decades to become an innovative leader in higher education and ushers in NSU’s next fifty years of growth and creativity.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nsu_books/1000/thumbnail.jp

Claude Pepper, Strom Thurmond, and the 1948 Presidential Election in Florida

In his book, The Loneliest Campaign, Irwin Ross called Harry S. Truman’s victory in the presidential election of 1948 “the most astonishing political upset in modern times.“1 Truman achieved this victory despite a three-way split in the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina and presidential candidate for the States’ Rights Democratic Party, and Henry Wallace, former secretary of agriculture and vice president, and nominee of the Progressive Party, both denounced Truman and opposed his election

Cheating on Unproctored Online Exams: Prevalence, Mitigation Measures, and Effects on Exam Performance

As online courses become increasingly common at the college level, an ongoing concern is how to ensure academic integrity in the online environment. One area that has received particular attention is that of preventing cheating during unproctored online exams. In this study, we examine students’ behavior during unproctored exams taken in an online introductory biology course. A feature of the learning management platform used for the course gave us the ability to detect cheating behavior involving students leaving the test page and viewing other material on their computers. This allowed us to determine what proportion of students cheated and examine the efficacy of various measures to mitigate cheating. We also explored the relationship between cheating behavior and exam performance. We found that 70% of students were observed cheating, and most of those who cheated did so on the majority of test questions. Appealing to students’ honesty or requiring them to pledge their honesty were found to be ineffective at curbing cheating. However, when students received a warning that we had technology that could detect cheating, coupled with threats of harsh penalties, cheating behavior dropped to 15% of students. Unexpectedly, we did not find evidence that students’ exam performance changed when their cheating behavior changed, indicating that this common form of cheating might not be as effective as students, or their instructors believe it to be

Influence of native roadside plants on biological control of Iowa crop pests

Boundaries between cropland and natural plant communities provide food, water, and cover for wildlife. Similarly, field borders com­ posed of natural plant communities, especially those that include flowering plants, may have a marked effect on natural enemies of crop pests within crop fields. Monoculture crops typical of much of the Midwest do not provide adequate sources of food (nectar, pollen) or shelter and breeding sites for these natural enemies. Nectar and pollen are produced by a variety of native Midwestern plants; as these plants flower in succession throughout the growing season, they provide a continuous food source for the natural enemies (parasites) of pests attacking adjacent crops

Seminole Voices

In a series of interviews conducted from 1969 to 1971 and again from 1998 to 1999, more than two hundred members of the Florida Seminole community described their lives for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Some of those interviews, now showcased in this volume, shed light on how the Seminoles’ society, culture, religion, government, health care, and economy had changed during a tumultuous period in Florida’s history. In 1970 the Seminoles lived in relative poverty, dependent on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tourist trade, cattle breeding, handicrafts, and truck farming. By 2006 they were operating six casinos, and in 2007 they purchased Hard Rock International for $965 million. Within one generation, the tribe moved from poverty and relative obscurity to entrepreneurial success and wealth. Seminole Voices relates how economic changes have affected everyday life and values. The Seminoles’ frank opinions and fascinating stories offer a window into the world of a modern Native community as well as a useful barometer of changes affecting its members at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Multiple planar coincidences with N-fold symmetry

Planar coincidence site lattices and modules with N-fold symmetry are well understood in a formulation based on cyclotomic fields, in particular for the class number one case, where they appear as certain principal ideals in the corresponding ring of integers. We extend this approach to multiple coincidences, which apply to triple or multiple junctions. In particular, we give explicit results for spectral, combinatorial and asymptotic properties in terms of Dirichlet series generating functions.Comment: 13 pages, two figures. For previous related work see math.MG/0511147 and math.CO/0301021. Minor changes and references update

Monarch Butterflies and Bt Corn: Replacing Hoopla with Science

A correspondence to Nature three years ago reported a preliminary laboratory study that suggested pollen from from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) com could be hazardous to the larvae of the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus. Losey et al. (1999) showed that young monarch larvae given no choice but to feed on milkweed, Asclepias curassavica, leaves dusted with pollen from Bt corn hybrid ate less, grew more slowly, and had a significantly higher mortality rate than larvae feeding on leaves dusted with nontransgenic pollen. Based on this study, the authors questioned the environmental safety of Bt com and called for scientific investigations

Defining and Targeting Health Disparities in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

The global burden of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) continues to grow in part due to better outcomes in other major diseases and in part because a substantial portion of the worldwide population continues to be exposed to inhalant toxins. However, a disproportionate burden of COPD occurs in people of low socioeconomic status (SES) due to differences in health behaviors, sociopolitical factors, and social and structural environmental exposures. Tobacco use, occupations with exposure to inhalant toxins, and indoor biomass fuel (BF) exposure are more common in low SES populations. Not only does SES affect the risk of developing COPD and etiologies, it is also associated with worsened COPD health outcomes. Effective interventions in these people are needed to decrease these disparities. Efforts that may help lessen these health inequities in low SES include 1) better surveillance targeting diagnosed and undiagnosed COPD in disadvantaged people, 2) educating the public and those involved in health care provision about the disease, 3) improving access to cost-effective and affordable health care, and 4) markedly increasing the efforts to prevent disease through smoking cessation, minimizing use and exposure to BF, and decreasing occupational exposures. COPD is considered to be one the most preventable major causes of death from a chronic disease in the world; therefore, effective interventions could have a major impact on reducing the global burden of the disease, especially in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations

The Entropy of Square-Free Words

Finite alphabets of at least three letters permit the construction of square-free words of infinite length. We show that the entropy density is strictly positive and derive reasonable lower and upper bounds. Finally, we present an approximate formula which is asymptotically exact with rapid convergence in the number of letters.Comment: 18 page