From High School to Post-Secondary Life--Exploring the College Transition Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Youth

The current neoliberal education system often positions bilingual youth as deficient or lacking in skills. The discourse from some academic research paradigms tends to also take up this deficit orientation, focusing on the issues and needs of Latinx bilingual students, or the pedagogical strategies to “close achievement gaps.” The NYC Department of Education has attempted to address gaps in achievement by offering increased access to college and career readiness programs, positioning access as synonymous to equity. However, access alone does not lead to equity when the systems and norms that prioritize assimilation to the dominant white culture are not being challenged; moreover, increased access will not lead to equity if the voices and experiences of marginalized youth experiencing the transition to college are not amplified. This project will add to the growing body of scholarly work that aims to subvert deficit discourse around bilingual students by inviting them to author their own stories about their experiences in the transition to college. These narratives bring up various aspects of the transition to college: how first-generation Latinx bilingual youth navigate cultural and linguistic expectations in college, how they navigate the white, western, and patriarchal institutional norms of the college going process, sources of support in their educational journeys, what factors influenced their college choices, and how they have experienced college in the context of a global pandemic. This research recognizes bilingual students’ experiences and knowledges as truths, positioning them as knowledge creators. The purpose of this study is to document and explore how first-generation Latinx/ bilingual students experience the transition from high school to college, and how they navigate and question spaces in high school and college fraught with linguistic and cultural erasure. Employing Chicana Feminist epistemologies and post-positive realist perspectives of identity, this study will use pláticas to better understand the experiences of Latinx students as they transition to college, what educators can do to support their transition, and to think about how educators can work alongside Latinx students to fight erasure

The Grizzly, February 17, 1997

Window Shopping Without the Glass • Ursinus Celebrates Diversity Week • Students Benefit from Internships • Study Abroad: They Don\u27t Call \u27Em Deadlines For Nothing • Campus Apathy on the Issue of Diversity • And the Spirit Moved Them • Caplan Addresses Ethical Issues • Dr. Scott Landis\u27 Resignation Announced • So This is What Security Does: Ursinus\u27 Security Log Returns • Opinion: Greek Speaks Out; Read This if you Think Pledging is Dumb; Come Catch a Square; Perspective from Scotland; Faces of Silence • Defend Yourself! • Keep the Tutorial Program Alive! • Wrestling Bears Win Conference Championship • Women\u27s Basketball Nets Three More Wins • Men\u27s Basketball Drops Two • Gymnasts Leap to Two More Winshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1397/thumbnail.jp

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Investigating Post-sport Adjustment Experiences of Former Canadian Major Junior Hockey Players

This project explored the post-sport adjustment experiences of former Canadian major junior hockey (CHL) players in the years following their athletic retirement. This study was conducted using a qualitative, within-subjects, longitudinal research design to understand the manner by which elite CHL athletes make sense of their athletic retirement experiences across time. Four former CHL players participated in two semi-structured interviews; one occurred shortly after their athletic retirement and the next was conducted approximately 24 months later. Interviews were then analyzed in accordance with the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) method. Themes identified in each participant’s account were compared and contrasted across all participants to generate an in-depth portrayal that gave voice to participants’ athletic retirement and subsequent post-sport adjustment transitions. Results revealed that participants continued to have unresolved feelings about their athletic retirement and experienced conflicting emotions of both pride and embarrassment in relation to their athletic identity. Participants post-sport adjustment experiences focused on attempts to renegotiate self-worth and prove their worth off the ice. As the post-sport adjustment period progressed, participants described moving from avoidance-based coping strategies to increasing action-oriented coping strategies which facilitated feelings of control and autonomy. Recommendations for helping professionals are provided and highlight the need for person-centred and multi-level interventions to support athletic retirement transitions. Additional longitudinal research is required to further develop understanding of the ongoing effects of athletic retirement and elite athletes’ post-sport adjustment experiences across time

Ten-Year Review of Monitoring System on I-35W Saint Anthony Falls Bridge

The I-35W St. Anthony Falls bridge was highly instrumented with over 500 sensors to verify design assumptions, serve as a testbed to examine bridge sensing techniques, and evaluate the effectiveness of different bridge monitoring strategies. The instrumentation deployed on the bridge to investigate the structural behavior included vibrating wire strain gages (VWSGs), thermistors, fiber optic sensors (SOFO), resistance strain gages, linear potentiometers, accelerometers, and corrosion monitoring sensors. This report documented the successes and challenges of the monitoring program over the first ten years of the bridge’s life. In particular, the effectiveness of different strain measurement techniques and sensor distributions were addressed. Previous investigations of temperature-dependent and time-dependent behavior were also expanded with the larger data set to better understand the behavior of post-tensioned concrete box girder structures with the potential to impact future designs

Structure and evolution of ENTH and VHS/ENTH-like domains in tepsin.

Tepsin is currently the only accessory trafficking protein identified in adaptor-related protein 4 (AP4)-coated vesicles originating at the trans-Golgi network (TGN). The molecular basis for interactions between AP4 subunits and motifs in the tepsin C-terminus have been characterized, but the biological role of tepsin remains unknown. We determined X-ray crystal structures of the tepsin epsin N-terminal homology (ENTH) and VHS/ENTH-like domains. Our data reveal unexpected structural features that suggest key functional differences between these and similar domains in other trafficking proteins. The tepsin ENTH domain lacks helix0, helix8 and a lipid binding pocket found in epsin1/2/3. These results explain why tepsin requires AP4 for its membrane recruitment and further suggest ENTH domains cannot be defined solely as lipid binding modules. The VHS domain lacks helix8 and thus contains fewer helices than other VHS domains. Structural data explain biochemical and biophysical evidence that tepsin VHS does not mediate known VHS functions, including recognition of dileucine-based cargo motifs or ubiquitin. Structural comparisons indicate the domains are very similar to each other, and phylogenetic analysis reveals their evolutionary pattern within the domain superfamily. Phylogenetics and comparative genomics further show tepsin within a monophyletic clade that diverged away from epsins early in evolutionary history (~1500 million years ago). Together, these data provide the first detailed molecular view of tepsin and suggest tepsin structure and function diverged away from other epsins. More broadly, these data highlight the challenges inherent in classifying and understanding protein function based only on sequence and structure