Beyond Tutoring: Mapping The Invisible Landscape of Writing Center Work

In their call for papers for this special issue of Praxis, the editors speculate that most writing centers assume various roles beyond those implied by the triage model of fix-it consultations. We agree. As the call suggests, writing centers have long sought to “carve out a broader purview” for themselves—to extend writing center efforts both beyond the center’s physical space and beyond enduring writing center master narratives about the primacy of individual instruction. Still, much of the writing center’s extra curriculum, or what we call here non-tutoring work, remains hidden: for example, writing center scholarship provides anecdotal evidence of writing centers’ work with faculty, but the scholarship rarely tells us just how prevalent such efforts are across the board or what other kinds of non-tutoring work we are engaged in. To borrow from the field of landscape architecture, what our field lacks is an aerial—and ultimately generative—vision of our non-tutoring activities, one that would “reveal aspects of the landscape that are invisible from the ground and offer an alternative to pictorial [read “local”] practices so common in landscape representation” (Czerniak 111). There are consequences to invisibility. We cannot theorize what we cannot see, although theories are always already there, shaping our identities and practices in ways that might or might not be acceptable to us if only we could see and name their contours. Viewing the writing center landscape from a different vantage point, then, gives us much more than an updated map: it challenges us to re-theorize who we are and what makes our work valuable.University Writing Cente

Performance in Calculus II for students in CLEAR Calculus: A causal comparative study

Calculus is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the world and is the main gateway for students that are heading into the fields that will power the economy of the 21st century. However, over 25% of students fail U.S. calculus courses each year and end up changing majors. It is important for educators and researchers to try to improve student success and find ways to increase STEM major retention. The purpose of this study was to compare the performance between students that are in traditional and non-traditional calculus II courses based on their preparation in either traditional or non-traditional calculus I. By the end of the study, non-traditional calculus II students performed approximately the same on every test and overall in the class. On the other hand, traditional calculus II students that took traditional calculus I performed better on the three tests, but their overall performance in the course was approximately the same as the students that took non-traditional calculus I

Evaluating water resource management in transboundary river basins using cooperative game theory: The Rio Grande/Bravo basin

Center for Research in Water Resource

MH-60 Seahawk / MQ-8 Fire Scout interoperability

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimitedAs part of a Naval Postgraduate School's capstone project in Systems Engineering, a project team from Cohort 311-0911 performed a Systems Engineering analysis. This Project focused on defining alternatives for enhanced Anti-Surface Warfare (ASUW) mission effectiveness through increased interoperability and integration for the Fire Scout Unmanned Air Vehicle and Seahawk helicopter. Specifically, the Project explored the available trade space for enhancing communications back to the ship for analysis and decision-making. Modeling and Simulation (MandS) was used to assess the impact of enhanced communication on specific Key performance Parameters (KPPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) associated with the ASUW mission. Once the trade space was defined, alternatives were analyzed and a recommendation provided that supports near-, mid-, and long-term mission enhancement

COLLABORATIVE MODELING TO EVALUATE WATER MANAGEMENT SCENARIOS IN THE RIO GRANDE BASIN 1

ABSTRACT: This article describes the collaborative modeling process and the resulting water resources planning model developed to evaluate water management scenarios in the transboundary Rio Grande basin. The Rio Grande is a severely water stressed basin that faces numerous management challenges as it crosses numerous jurisdictional boundaries. A collaborative process was undertaken to identify and model water management scenarios to improve water supply for stakeholders, the environment, and international obligations of water delivery from Mexico to the United States. A transparent and open process of data collection, model building, and scenario development was completed by a project steering committee composed of university, nongovernmental, and governmental experts from both countries. The outcome of the process was a planning model described in this article, with data and operations that were agreed on by water planning officials in each country. Water management scenarios were created from stakeholder input and were modeled and evaluated for effectiveness with the planning model. (KEY TERMS: Rio Grande; decision support systems; planning; geographic information system; water resources management.

Visuomotor brain network activation and functional connectivity among individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Sensorimotor abnormalities are common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and predictive of functional outcomes, though their neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined both brain activation and functional connectivity during visuomotor behavior in 27 individuals with ASD and 30 typically developing (TD) controls (ages 9–35 years). Participants maintained a constant grip force while receiving visual feedback at three different visual gain levels. Relative to controls, ASD participants showed increased force variability, especially at high gain, and reduced entropy. Brain activation was greater in individuals with ASD than controls in supplementary motor area, bilateral superior parietal lobules, and contralateral middle frontal gyrus at high gain. During motor action, functional connectivity was reduced between parietal-premotor and parietal-putamen in individuals with ASD compared to controls. Individuals with ASD also showed greater age-associated increases in functional connectivity between cerebellum and visual, motor, and prefrontal cortical areas relative to controls. These results indicate that visuomotor deficits in ASD are associated with atypical activation and functional connectivity of posterior parietal, premotor, and striatal circuits involved in translating sensory feedback information into precision motor behaviors, and that functional connectivity of cerebellar–cortical sensorimotor and nonsensorimotor networks show delayed maturation

Simulations of magnetized discs around black holes: Effects of black hole spin, disc thickness and magnetic field geometry

The standard general relativistic model of a razor-thin accretion disc around a black hole, developed by Novikov & Thorne (NT) in 1973, assumes the shear stress vanishes at theradius of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) and that, outside the ISCO, the shear stress is produced by an effective turbulent viscosity. However, astrophysical accretion discs are not razor thin; it is uncertain whether the shear stress necessarily vanishes at the ISCO, and the magnetic field, which is thought to drive turbulence in discs, may contain large-scale structures that do not behave like a simple local scalar viscosity. We describe 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accretion discs around black holes with a range of spin parameters, and we use the simulations to assess the validity of the NT model. Our fiducial initial magnetic field consists of multiple (alternating polarity) poloidal field loops whose shape is roughly isotropic in the disc in order to match the isotropic turbulence expected in the poloidal plane. For a thin disc with an aspect ratio |h/r|∼0.07 around a non-spinning black hole, we find a decrease in the accreted specific angular momentum of 2.9 percent relative to the NT model and an excess luminosity from inside the ISCO of 3.5 per cent. The deviations in the case of spinning black holes are also of the same order. In addition, the deviations decrease with decreasing |h/r|. We therefore conclude that magnetized thin accretion discs in X-ray binaries in the thermal/high-soft spectral state ought to be well described by the NT model, especially at luminosities below 30 per cent of Eddington where we expect a very small disc thickness |h/ r| 0.05. We use our results to determine the spin equilibrium of black hole accretion discs with a range of thicknesses and to determine how electromagnetic stresses within the ISCO depend upon black hole spin and disc thickness. We find that the electromagnetic stress and the luminosity inside the ISCO depend on the assumed initial magnetic field geometry. We consider a second geometry with field lines following density contours, which for thin discs leads to highly radially elongated magnetic field lines. This gives roughly twice larger deviations from NT for both the accreted specific angular momentum and the luminosity inside the ISCO. Lastly, we find that the disc’s corona (including any wind or jet) introduces deviations from NT in the specific angular momentum that are comparable to those contributed by the disc component, while the excess luminosity of bound gas from within the ISCO is dominated by only the disc component. Based on these indications, we suggest that differences in results between our work and other similar work are due to differences in the assumed initial magnetic field geometry as well as the inclusion of discAstronom

Dynamic fibronectin assembly and remodeling by leader neural crest cells prevents jamming in collective cell migration

Collective cell migration plays an essential role in vertebrate development, yet the extent to which dynamically changing microenvironments influence this phenomenon remains unclear. Observations of the distribution of the extracellular matrix (ECM) component fibronectin during the migration of loosely connected neural crest cells (NCCs) lead us to hypothesize that NCC remodeling of an initially punctate ECM creates a scaffold for trailing cells, enabling them to form robust and coherent stream patterns. We evaluate this idea in a theoretical setting by developing an agent-based model that incorporates reciprocal interactions between NCCs and their ECM. ECM remodeling, haptotaxis, contact guidance, and cell-cell repulsion are sufficient for cells to establish streams in silico, however additional mechanisms, such as chemotaxis, are required to consistently guide cells along the correct target corridor. Further investigations of the model imply that contact guidance and differential cell-cell repulsion between leader and follower cells are key contributors to robust collective cell migration by preventing stream breakage. Global sensitivity analysis and simulated underexpression/overexpression experiments suggest that long-distance migration without jamming is most likely to occur when leading cells specialize in creating ECM fibers, and trailing cells specialize in responding to environmental cues by upregulating mechanisms such as contact guidance.Comment: 46 pages, 7 figures (of which 2 are supplementary