Community Planning with the Village Bloggurls- Incorporating planning concepts and inquiry into community programs with girls and youth

This report documents four months of study with the Village Bloggurls, a community group foryoung girls in Lotherton Pathway, North York. The purpose of this project was to investigate the potential for community programs to be places of learning about planning and space. This research relied upon feminist methodology and methods, and occurred through three main workshop activities with the Village Bloggurls. Results found that young girls are interested in and capable of ning processes, though they lack formal opportunities to do so. The participants also felt empowered to make changes in their community stemming from the work of this research. The report concludes with an assessment of challenges of working with youth in the context of planning as well as recommendations for future research in this area

State of Obesity 2023: Better Policies for a Healthier America

This 2023 version is the 20th annual report on the antecedents and rates of obesity in the U.S. as well as policy solutions. Since TFAH first published the State of Obesity report in 2004, rates of adult and child and adolescent obesity are up sharply, particularly in communities experiencing barriers to healthy eating and few opportunities for physical activity

The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Better America (2022) - Special Feature: Food and Nutrition Insecurity Among Youth and Families

Obesity rates have been rising for decades across states, ages, sexes, and racial/ethnic groups, with continued increases during the COVID-19 pandemic. These long-term, cross-population trends underscore the nature of the crisis as a population-level problem tied to social, economic, and environmental factors in the United States, most of which are outside of an individual's control. Some of these factors affect available choices and habits directly related to diet, nutrition, and physical activity—for example, the availability, cost, marketing, taste, and accessibility of nutrient-rich foods like fruits and vegetables versus calorie-rich foods like junk food and soda, and the availability, safety, and convenience of active transportation, parks, playgrounds, and facilities for exercise and physical activity. It is also important to consider the role other factors—like stress, discrimination, poverty, economic opportunity, and food insecurity— play in determining the health and well-being of every AmericanThis is the 19th annual report by Trust for America's Health on the obesity crisis in the United States. This year, our special feature highlights food and nutrition insecurity among youth and families. This report, as in previous years, also includes a section that reviews the latest data available on adult and childhood obesity rates, a section that examines key current and emerging policies, and, finally, a section that outlines recommended policy actions

Chapter 6: Essays from the Courage and Moral Choice Project

In this chapter, participants from the Courage and Moral Choice Project share personal essays about their experiences with the project. Teachers describe the ways in which they sought to connect the stories of moral courage with a deepened awareness of the needs and challenges in the school and wider community. One teacher described the stories as “reminders” that courage and goodness exist in the world, a world often filled with stories of despair. Another teacher, who was once described as an “at risk” student herself, also noted that the stories provide a perspective of hope. One student described how meaningful it was for her to hear stories about the many Danish citizens to shelter and transport their neighbors during the Nazi occupation. She notes, “I think more people need to be like that.

DEVELOPMENT OF A RELIABILITY DATA COLLECTION FRAMEWORK FOR HYDROGEN FUELING STATION QRA

The wider adoption of hydrogen in multiple sectors of the economy requires that safety and risk issues be rigorously investigated. Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is an important tool for enabling safe deployment of hydrogen fueling stations and is increasingly embedded in the permitting process. However, QRA needs reliability data, and currently the available hydrogen safety databases are not in a format conducive for use in QRA. A review of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy articles on hydrogen fueling station QRA found that lack of hydrogen reliability data is the most common knowledge gap in this field. This study explores what QRA and reliability data currently look like in the context of hydrogen systems. It then presents a new reliability data collection framework for hydrogen systems that overcomes gaps in existing hydrogen safety databases. Current hydrogen safety data collection tools, H2Tools, HIAD, NREL CDPs, and CHS are analyzed and compared for applicability to QRA. Lessons learned from these data collection tools are extracted and combined with best practices from reliability engineering to create an improved database framework for hydrogen reliability data. This framework aims to standardize the hydrogen fueling stations component hierarchy, failure mode taxonomy, and outline high level elements necessary for adequate reliability data collection suitable for use in QRA. This research establishes the groundwork for a collaborative hydrogen reliability database and the future development of data driven hydrogen safety tools

Scale for Academic Performance Anxiety

The current study aims to develop a valid and reliable measure of academic performance anxiety. In our scale, we defined performance anxiety as the anxiety/fear of being unable to perform a task or of performing the task in such a way that creates positive expectations they can not continuously meet. Previous research has shown that a person’s educational experiences can have associations with their mental health and anxiety levels, both short-term and later in life (Blanco et al., 2015; Pizzie & Kraemer, 2019). However, there is currently no scale that specifically measures academic performance anxiety. Therefore, we developed the Academic Performance Anxiety Scale (APAS) to better explore the complex connections between academics and anxiety. The participants for our study were Belmont University students enrolled in General and Introductory Psychology classes. Our study had different measures to measure academic performance anxiety and related constructs. The first being our newly developed, twenty-question Academic Performance Anxiety Scale. We then included other scales to help validate our scale ensuring it is valid in measuring performance anxiety. The other scales were Westside Test Anxiety Scale (Driscoll, 2007), College Adjustment Scale Anxiety sub-scale (Anton & Reed, 1991), Brief Symptom Inventory Anxiety sub-scale (Derogatis, 2004), and General Academic Self-Efficacy Scal[JH1] e (Van Zyl et al. 2022). We tested three hypotheses. First, we hypothesized that our scale would demonstrate reliability through internal consistency, split-half reliability, inter-item correlations, and item-total correlations. Second, we hypothesized that our scale would demonstrate convergent validity by being significantly associated with generalized anxiety, test anxiety, and general academic self-efficacy. Third, we hypothesized that our scale would significantly predict GPA, in which a higher score on the performance anxiety scale would correlate with a lower GPA score and vice versa. Results and discussion are forthcoming. Results and discussion are forthcoming

Diabetes, Periodontitis and The Oral Microbiome

The association between diabetes mellitus and periodontitis has been studied thoroughly. However, the role of the oral microbiome in linking these two diseases still is not clear. The objective of this literature review is to search the current studies on oral dysbiosis in the two diseases and find out whether the oral microbiome could be a possible biomarker indicating diabetes in periodontal patients

A conserved filamentous assembly underlies the structure of the meiotic chromosome axis.

The meiotic chromosome axis plays key roles in meiotic chromosome organization and recombination, yet the underlying protein components of this structure are highly diverged. Here, we show that 'axis core proteins' from budding yeast (Red1), mammals (SYCP2/SYCP3), and plants (ASY3/ASY4) are evolutionarily related and play equivalent roles in chromosome axis assembly. We first identify 'closure motifs' in each complex that recruit meiotic HORMADs, the master regulators of meiotic recombination. We next find that axis core proteins form homotetrameric (Red1) or heterotetrameric (SYCP2:SYCP3 and ASY3:ASY4) coiled-coil assemblies that further oligomerize into micron-length filaments. Thus, the meiotic chromosome axis core in fungi, mammals, and plants shares a common molecular architecture, and likely also plays conserved roles in meiotic chromosome axis assembly and recombination control

Design as Art: Packing the Box to Unpack Sensory Design

How does an interior design educator make applicable and exciting theories, models, and perspectives of environmental psychology for interior design students? In reviewing a Human Environments of Interior Design lecture-based course at a land-grant institution, the instructor of record attempted to revitalize a residential mapping project to engage upper-level interior design students in the principles of basic sensory design. While the basic elements and principles of design heavily include sensory design information and are instructed in many lower-division courses, it is observed that upper-division students lose interest in these basic elements as they progress to more complicated design studios. In this project, students are forced to unpack and reevaluate design decisions made in a previous design studio project into theories, models, and perspectives of environmental psychology - specifically Stimulation Theory, Pleasure-arousal-dominance hypothesis, and Behavior-setting theory, basic sensory representation. The resulting boxes, however, moved beyond a vessel for student learning and into contained pieces of art that engaged all the senses and prompted various student reactions. This installation combines imagery from several successful boxes along with student’s reflections