A Focused Interview Study of 4-H Volunteer Performance Appraisals

This article describes a focused interview study used to identify effective volunteer performance appraisal criteria from the perspective of the volunteer, including methods, approaches used, purpose of performance reviews, and criteria. Participants in the study were recruited from among the certified 4-H volunteers enrolled in the Arizona 4-H Youth Development Program. The article provides a method that can be used to identify trends, concerns, and potential outcomes of 4-H volunteer performance appraisals

The Role of Extension in Assisting School Districts to Implement and Monitor Their Local Wellness Policies

This article explores the role of Extension in assisting school districts to implement and monitor Local Wellness Policies. The authors include an outline of the basic requirements of the law and a description, based on their experience, of how school districts can implement and support their wellness policies. Information on various research-based resources available to schools and teachers are provided

Towards large-cohort comparative studies to define the factors influencing the gut microbial community structure of ASD patients.

Differences in the gut microbiota have been reported between individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypical controls, although direct evidence that changes in the microbiome contribute to causing ASD has been scarce to date. Here we summarize some considerations of experimental design that can help untangle causality in this complex system. In particular, large cross-sectional studies that can factor out important variables such as diet, prospective longitudinal studies that remove some of the influence of interpersonal variation in the microbiome (which is generally high, especially in children), and studies transferring microbial communities into germ-free mice may be especially useful. Controlling for the effects of technical variables, which have complicated efforts to combine existing studies, is critical when biological effect sizes are small. Large citizen-science studies with thousands of participants such as the American Gut Project have been effective at uncovering subtle microbiome effects in self-collected samples and with self-reported diet and behavior data, and may provide a useful complement to other types of traditionally funded and conducted studies in the case of ASD, especially in the hypothesis generation phase

Species abundance information improves sequence taxonomy classification accuracy.

Popular naive Bayes taxonomic classifiers for amplicon sequences assume that all species in the reference database are equally likely to be observed. We demonstrate that classification accuracy degrades linearly with the degree to which that assumption is violated, and in practice it is always violated. By incorporating environment-specific taxonomic abundance information, we demonstrate a significant increase in the species-level classification accuracy across common sample types. At the species level, overall average error rates decline from 25% to 14%, which is favourably comparable to the error rates that existing classifiers achieve at the genus level (16%). Our findings indicate that for most practical purposes, the assumption that reference species are equally likely to be observed is untenable. q2-clawback provides a straightforward alternative for samples from common environments

Common Evaluation Tools Across Multi-State Programs: A Study of Parenting Education and Youth Engagement Programs in Children, Youth, and Families At-Risk

Community-based education programs must demonstrate effectiveness to various funding sources. The pilot study reported here (funded by CYFAR, NIFA, USDA award #2008-41520-04810) had the goal of determining if state level programs with varied curriculum could use a common evaluation tool to demonstrate efficacy. Results in parenting and youth engagement indicated that with effort to select valid and reliable measures, it is possible to use common measure across curricula. Lessons learned including evaluating goodness of fit are discussed in regards to the process of conducting common measures evaluations

The Importance of Understanding Dosage When Evaluating Parenting Programs: Lessons from a Pilot Study

As government resources for community programs diminish, it is vital that Cooperative Extension make greater efforts to show program efficacy. Assessing the appropriate amount of an intervention optimal for reaching desired outcomes can help inform program development and provide for a more efficient use of limited resources. The current pilot study (funded by CYFAR, NIFA, USDA award #2008-41520-04810) focuses on dosage and its effect on outcomes in parenting education delivered in four states

Community detection in temporal multilayer networks, with an application to correlation networks

Networks are a convenient way to represent complex systems of interacting entities. Many networks contain "communities" of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to nodes in the rest of the network. In this paper, we investigate the detection of communities in temporal networks represented as multilayer networks. As a focal example, we study time-dependent financial-asset correlation networks. We first argue that the use of the "modularity" quality function---which is defined by comparing edge weights in an observed network to expected edge weights in a "null network"---is application-dependent. We differentiate between "null networks" and "null models" in our discussion of modularity maximization, and we highlight that the same null network can correspond to different null models. We then investigate a multilayer modularity-maximization problem to identify communities in temporal networks. Our multilayer analysis only depends on the form of the maximization problem and not on the specific quality function that one chooses. We introduce a diagnostic to measure \emph{persistence} of community structure in a multilayer network partition. We prove several results that describe how the multilayer maximization problem measures a trade-off between static community structure within layers and larger values of persistence across layers. We also discuss some computational issues that the popular "Louvain" heuristic faces with temporal multilayer networks and suggest ways to mitigate them.Comment: 42 pages, many figures, final accepted version before typesettin

Dark energy and curvature from a future baryonic acoustic oscillation survey using the Lyman-alpha forest

We explore the requirements for a Lyman-alpha forest (LyaF) survey designed to measure the angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter at 2~<z~<4 using the standard ruler provided by baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO). The goal would be to obtain a high enough density of sources to probe the three-dimensional density field on the scale of the BAO feature. A percent-level measurement in this redshift range can almost double the Dark Energy Task Force Figure of Merit, relative to the case with only a similar precision measurement at z~1, if the Universe is not assumed to be flat. This improvement is greater than the one obtained by doubling the size of the z~1 survey, with Planck and a weak SDSS-like z=0.3 BAO measurement assumed in each case. Galaxy BAO surveys at z~1 may be able to make an effective LyaF measurement simultaneously at minimal added cost, because the required number density of quasars is relatively small. We discuss the constraining power as a function of area, magnitude limit (density of quasars), resolution, and signal-to-noise of the spectra. For example, a survey covering 2000 sq. deg. and achieving S/N=1.8 per Ang. at g=23 (~40 quasars per sq. deg.) with an R~>250 spectrograph is sufficient to measure both the radial and transverse oscillation scales to 1.4% from the LyaF (or better, if fainter magnitudes and possibly Lyman-break galaxies can be used). At fixed integration time and in the sky-noise-dominated limit, a wider, noisier survey is generally more efficient; the only fundamental upper limit on noise being the need to identify a quasar and find a redshift. Because the LyaF is much closer to linear and generally better understood than galaxies, systematic errors are even less likely to be a problem.Comment: 18 pages including 6 figures, submitted to PR