Review of the New Communities Program: Toward Effective Implementation of Neighborhood Plans

Evaluates the progress of the New Communities Program, an initiative to revitalize sixteen Chicago neighborhoods, and recommends extending the MacArthur Foundation's financial support through another five-year grant

Inference in Hidden Markov Models with Explicit State Duration Distributions

In this letter we borrow from the inference techniques developed for unbounded state-cardinality (nonparametric) variants of the HMM and use them to develop a tuning-parameter free, black-box inference procedure for Explicit-state-duration hidden Markov models (EDHMM). EDHMMs are HMMs that have latent states consisting of both discrete state-indicator and discrete state-duration random variables. In contrast to the implicit geometric state duration distribution possessed by the standard HMM, EDHMMs allow the direct parameterisation and estimation of per-state duration distributions. As most duration distributions are defined over the positive integers, truncation or other approximations are usually required to perform EDHMM inference

Rest-related consolidation protects the fine detail of new memories

Newly encoded memories are labile and consolidate over time. The importance of sleep in memory consolidation has been well known for almost a decade. However, recent research has shown that awake quiescence, too, can support consolidation: people remember more new memories if they quietly rest after encoding than if they engage in a task. It is not yet known how exactly this rest-related consolidation benefits new memories, and whether it affects the fine detail of new memories. Using a sensitive picture recognition task, we show that awake quiescence aids the fine detail of new memories. Young adults were significantly better at discriminating recently encoded target pictures from similar lure pictures when the initial encoding of target pictures had been followed immediately by 10 minutes of awake quiescence than an unrelated perceptual task. This novel finding indicates that, in addition to influencing how much we remember, our behavioural state during wakeful consolidation determines, at least in part, the level of fine detail of our new memories. Thus, our results suggest that rest-related consolidation protects the fine detail of new memories, allowing us to retain detailed memories

Non-aboriginal teachers' perspectives on teaching native studies

Since the mid-1980s, the Saskatchewan Department of Education has approved the instruction of Native Studies courses in provincial high schools. In hope of enhancing the instruction of these courses, this study focused on the perspectives of Non-Aboriginal teachers who were assigned to teach Native Studies. Through a questionnaire, personal interviews, and a focus group, nine Non-Aboriginal high-school teachers examined the following aspects of the courses: formal and informal training of instructors , goals of the courses, key content and pedagogical methodologies, major challenges, and recommendations for improving the delivery of the classes.The literary context for the research was based upon three major areas: Non-Aboriginal teachers' perspectives on teaching Aboriginal students, preparing teachers to teach Native Studies, and preparing teachers to instruct Native Studies to Aboriginal students. Due to the 'single-group' nature of Native Studies curricula, considerable literature examination was focused on multicultural education models. The research data of the study revealed that the majority of interviewees have minimal formal education experience with Aboriginal content or epistemology. In addition, most of the study participants indicated little, if any, informal cultural contact with Aboriginal peoples. Study participants generally acknowledged the limitations of their scant academic and experiential interaction with Aboriginal cultures, and recommended means of various education stakeholders improving the situation.The study also exposed a variety of teacher perspectives about the goals of the courses. While there was unanimity regarding the efficacy of the courses, most teachers believed the goals of Native Studies varied depending on the cultural composition of the class. In addition, a couple of teachers inferred that a major objective of Native Studies courses is the promotion of an anti-establishment' political message. Some teachers also indicated a quandary regarding whether the course curricula required them to "teach Aboriginal culture, or teach about Aboriginal culture."In terms of course content and teaching methodologies, there were numerous opinions on `what was important'. All the interviewees viewed history as a significant ingredient to a `good' Native Studies class, but some of the teachers expressed a reluctance to delve into such issues as Aboriginal spirituality, racism, and 'white-privilege'. There was also hesitation amongst many of the respondents to incorporate traditional Aboriginal epistemologies into course methodologies because they wanted to personalize instruction, not base it upon cultural generalizations.In addition to the aforementioned issues and corresponding challenges associated with the background training for the courses, the goals of the courses, and the content and methodology of the courses, the study participants highlighted other concerns with the teaching of Native Studies: irrelevant curricula, lack of materials, poor course funding, student absenteeism, student perception that the courses are for 'non-academics', lack of flexible timetabling for experiential learning, and lack of staff knowledge and appreciation of Aboriginal cultures. All administrative levels of the education system were identified by the interviewees as influential in helping to mitigate the difficulties associated with the instruction of Native Studies

A study on episodic memory reconsolidation that tells us more about consolidation

Awake quiescence immediately after encoding is conducive to episodic memory consolidation. Retrieval can render episodic memories labile again, but reconsolidation can modify and re-strengthen them. It remained unknown whether awake quiescence after retrieval supports episodic memory reconsolidation. We sought to examine this question via an object-location memory paradigm. We failed to probe the effect of quiescence on reconsolidation, but we did observe an unforeseen ‘delayed’ effect of quiescence on consolidation. Our findings reveal that the beneficial effect of quiescence on episodic memory consolidation is not restricted to immediately following encoding but can be achieved at a delayed stage and even following a period of task engagement

Pif1- and Exo1-dependent nucleases coordinate resection at uncapped telomeres

Telomeres are present at the ends of most eukaryotic chromosomes and are bound by specialized telomere ‘capping’ proteins, preventing them from initiating a DNA Damage Response and cell cycle arrest analogous to that triggered by DNA Double Strand Breaks (DSBs). Resection of ‘uncapped’ telomeres and DSBs to generate extensive single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) is one of the most upstream events in this DDR, but while the nuclease activities that resect DSBs are well-defined, only a single nuclease, Exo1, is known to function at uncapped telomeres. This work establishes that the helicase Pif1, is required for a nuclease activity that resects uncapped telomeres in a parallel pathway to one defined by Exo1, Rad27 (Flap Endonuclease 1) and Rad24 (the 9-1-1 clamp loader). Following inactivation of the essential telomere capping protein Cdc13, Pif1 is shown to resect telomeres independently of Exo1 close to the chromosome end, but to play a less-crucial role in extensive resection. Furthermore, elimination of both Pif1 and Exo1 prevents the accumulation of ssDNA, thus eliminating the DDR at uncapped telomeres. Although Pif1 has no role in the resection of DSBs and has primarily been studied as a negative regulator of telomerase, it is shown to contribute to the DDR at uncapped telomeres in cells lacking telomerase and also to be crucial for telomere maintenance in telomerasedeficient cells. Cdc13 inhibits the DDR at uncapped telomeres and is believed to be required for telomerase recruitment. Astonishingly, elimination of Pif1 and Exo1 permits the viability of cells lacking Cdc13 and cdc13Δ exo1Δ pif1Δ mutants maintain and lengthen their telomeres over time, in a manner dependent on Ku, Rad52 and telomerase. Thus, Cdc13 is not a requirement for telomerase recruitment and elimination of the nuclease activities that function at uncapped telomeres can by pass the requirement for otherwise-essential telomere capping proteins.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Additivity of Bond Energies in the Light of the Maximum Overlap Approximation (MOA) and MIND0/3

Optimum parameters are determined for the use of the maximum overlap approximation (MOA) to calculate heats of atomization of a varied set of eleven hydrocarbons. The agreement with experiment is generally good. The reasons for this success are discussed in terms of an analysis by energy partitioning of MIND0/3 calculations for the same hydrocarbons

Non-existence of Ramanujan congruences in modular forms of level four

Ramanujan famously found congruences for the partition function like p(5n+4) = 0 modulo 5. We provide a method to find all simple congruences of this type in the coefficients of the inverse of a modular form on Gamma_{1}(4) which is non-vanishing on the upper half plane. This is applied to answer open questions about the (non)-existence of congruences in the generating functions for overpartitions, crank differences, and 2-colored F-partitions.Comment: 19 page