Campus Environment 2008: A National Report Card on Sustainability in Higher Education

Presents survey findings on national and regional trends among colleges in environmental leadership in management, academic courses in sustainability, and conservation efforts in operations. Profiles exemplary programs and notes areas for improvement

Alpha9 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and the treatment of pain

Chronic pain is a vexing worldwide problem that causes substantial disability and consumes significant medical resources. Although there are numerous analgesic medications, these work through a small set of molecular mechanisms. Even when these medications are used in combination, substantial amounts of pain often remain. It is therefore highly desirable to develop treatments that work through distinct mechanisms of action. While agonists of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been intensively studied, new data suggest a role for selective antagonists of nAChRs. α-Conotoxins are small peptides used offensively by carnivorous marine snails known as Conus. A subset of these peptides known as α-conotoxins RgIA and Vc1.1 produces both acute and long lasting analgesia. In addition, these peptides appear to accelerate the recovery of function after nerve injury, possibly through immune mediated mechanisms. Pharmacological analysis indicates that RgIA and Vc1.1 are selective antagonists of α9α10 nAChRs. A recent study also reported that these α9α10 antagonists are also potent GABA-B agonists. In the current study, we were unable to detect RgIA or Vc1.1 binding to or action on cloned GABA-B receptors expressed in HEK cells or Xenopus oocytes. We review the background, findings and implications of use of compounds that act on α9* nAChRs.11* indicates the possible presence of additional subunits.Fil: McIntosh, J. Michael. University of Utah; Estados UnidosFil: Absalom, Nathan. The University of Sydney; AustraliaFil: Chebib, Mary. The University of Sydney; AustraliaFil: Elgoyhen, Ana Belen. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Departamento de Farmacología; ArgentinaFil: Vincler, Michelle. Wake Forest University Health Sciences; Estados Unido

Heteronormative Hegemonic Gender Performances on Dating Apps

Gender is the socially constructed norms, expectations, and roles assigned based on biological sex. Thus, gender is the actions and behaviors expected of men and women, while sex is a set of biological checkboxes used to categorize bodies into the male/female binary (Lewontin, 1991; Lorber, 1993). Both sex and gender are continually constructed, maintained, and reinforced through social interactions and formative gender performances (Martin, 2004; Schwalbe, 1998; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Contemporarily, these hegemonic expectations of doing gender are perpetuated by modern technology, such as online dating and/or dating apps. When reinforcing gender norms, most dating apps establish a space of hyper-masculinity, where men must put on their best performances to attract potential partners (Eller & Walker, 2016; Hanson, 2022). On the other hand, women are given more opportunities to express their gender in nonnormative ways. For example, apps like Bumble force women to make the first move, therefore, destabilizing the heteronormative, hegemonic sexual script (Cvetkovska & Arora, 2020; Owen & Gerber, 2017). The goal of this exploratory research is to better understand the heteronormative, hegemonic gender performances on apps. Through Dr. Pryor’s Social Research Methods class, we sent an online survey to her Introduction to Sociology classes, analyzed secondary data from the ICPSR database, conducted content analysis by looking at online dating profiles, and lastly, interviewed students about their gender performance and gender expectations on dating apps. In this presentation, we will clearly explain our methodologies, processes, analyses, findings, and potential future research

Introduction: Walking the World

This collection of essays revolves around one of the oldest traditions of the world: pilgrimage. From five continents writers have contributed to the very much alive phenomenon of pilgrimage in a number of contrasting and interdisciplinary aspects, ranging from traditional religious to modern atheist practices. As one of the oldest externalisations of religion, from the mist of times, humans, have walked long distances to sacred caves and landscapes to honour the gods and to regulate our relationship with natural and supernatural forces. In the modern context, we still engage in pilgrimages, although the traditional religious aspect may also be replaced by reconciliation, peace, dialogue, social commentary or self-therapy. From five continents, the modern approach to an old practice is brought to you by a perhaps unusual mélange of writers and researchers who are involved in Walking the World

Relational Reasoning Network (RRN) for Anatomical Landmarking

Accurately identifying anatomical landmarks is a crucial step in deformation analysis and surgical planning for craniomaxillofacial (CMF) bones. Available methods require segmentation of the object of interest for precise landmarking. Unlike those, our purpose in this study is to perform anatomical landmarking using the inherent relation of CMF bones without explicitly segmenting them. We propose a new deep network architecture, called relational reasoning network (RRN), to accurately learn the local and the global relations of the landmarks. Specifically, we are interested in learning landmarks in CMF region: mandible, maxilla, and nasal bones. The proposed RRN works in an end-to-end manner, utilizing learned relations of the landmarks based on dense-block units and without the need for segmentation. For a given a few landmarks as input, the proposed system accurately and efficiently localizes the remaining landmarks on the aforementioned bones. For a comprehensive evaluation of RRN, we used cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans of 250 patients. The proposed system identifies the landmark locations very accurately even when there are severe pathologies or deformations in the bones. The proposed RRN has also revealed unique relationships among the landmarks that help us infer several reasoning about informativeness of the landmark points. RRN is invariant to order of landmarks and it allowed us to discover the optimal configurations (number and location) for landmarks to be localized within the object of interest (mandible) or nearby objects (maxilla and nasal). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first of its kind algorithm finding anatomical relations of the objects using deep learning.Comment: 10 pages, 6 Figures, 3 Table

Global Citizenship: Changing Student Perceptions Through an International Curriculum

The extent to which educational efforts change the way students view themselves and the world is important to know, particularly if curricula have an international character and claim to develop attributes aligned with global citizenship. To our knowledge, there have been few, if any, longitudinal studies that assess the impact of programmes of global citizenship. Examining students, teachers’ and alumni perceptions of an experiential element of an international education curriculum designed with this aim, we found that some of the most marked effects stress individual benefits. This raises questions about the potential of an international curriculum, such as that offered by the International Baccalaureate, to disrupt existing attitudes and behaviours

International Education::the transformative potential of experiential learning

Academic outcomes of post-16 education can be understood in terms of their value for gaining access to university and, at a time when global educational mobility is growing, internationally recognised university entrance qualifications may be considered a form of personal capital. However, narrowly measured outcomes may not reflect the breadth of the school experience nor the extent to which this breadth contributes to the development of the young person. One curriculum which aims to prepare students in ways that extend beyond the academic is the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, which incorporates an experiential element at its core. Creativity, Activity, Service attaches a transformative purpose to education, where students’ experiences in each of the three strands can support personal learning that is not confined to subject areas of an academic curriculum. This paper describes the evolution of CAS in the academically rigorous Diploma Programme and presents the findings from a review of literature which contribute towards developing an understanding of the transformative potential of this component.</p

Aspects of Fulfulde syntax and morphology.

On the basis of evidence from the Kaceccereere dialect of Southern Zaria in Northern Nigeria, this study aims to reveal some of the principles that underly Fulfulde (or Fula) verbal morphology, and thus to Improve on the ad hoc nature of earlier descriptions. It shows that many morphological issues may be resolved by reference to the syntax and phonology of the language, and that there is also a need for morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonological levels of description. In thus accounting for the morphology, certain new categories and principles are established for Fulfulde. Most important amongst these are the syntactic categories of topic and focus; and the morpho-phonologicil principle termed the 'suffixal precedence hierarchy', which determines the surface-form of certain verbal suffixes when they co-occur. An attempt Is also made first to identify morpho-syntactic properties such as active, middle and passive, positive and negative, which are terms In categories such as voice and polarity; and then to explain the principles that underly the morphological realisation of such properties in the various tenses, or 'conjugations' of Fulfulde