An African-American Resources and Needs Assessment of the West Bloomington Area, Phase 1

Over the course of the Fall 2009 semester, students in the Community Project Design and Management class worked with members of West Bloomington to recognize the growing needs within the community. Along with the African-American Focus Workgroup (AAFW) and the West Bloomington Revitalization Partnership (WBRP), the students completed Phase 1 of an African-American resources and needs assessment resulting in this report. This document reflects needs, wants, and hopes of the West Bloomington community and the AAFW. Comprehensively, this document is meant to serve as a bridge between community members and AAFW members. As Bloomington as a whole continues to grow and expand, some members within the community feel the difficulty of being left out of development. Therefore, the project‟s purpose was to help ascertain the assets and deficiencies within the West Bloomington neighborhood with the participation of community members, and to help the AAFW integrate their goals with those of the WBRP. This report can aid future efforts and provide useful information in the development of the West Bloomington area. The report includes a brief review of the literature considering race, education, income, age, public space, housing, civil society, and community-based participatory research. The report also includes sections outlining the research methods used, the research findings along the same themes used in the literature review, a discussion of limitations and barriers to research, and conclusions and recommendations. Appendices include Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol for ethical treatment and protection of research participants, definition of the study area for drawing out Census data, and a Survey Design and Administration Protocol Handbook to aid in administering surveys drafted for AAFW member organizations to use with their staff and volunteers, patrons, and the general public. Student researchers analyzed public data and local reports to understand the background and demographics of the West Bloomington community. Reports consulted include these topics: housing conditions and issues; food justice; Census data on race, income, and age; community and economic development; and education statistics for District 87 and West Bloomington schools. Through various focus groups, four common themes appeared: the need for greater communication between and among local organizations and community members; the need for additional activities, especially for young people; a lack of accessibility to various services offered by (or in) the City of Bloomington and surrounding areas; and distressed amenities. Communication can be strengthened between the WBRP and the AAFW, between West Bloomington community members and the City of Bloomington, and among all of these groups and members. Focus group findings also show that the West Bloomington community and organizations serving it do not offer activities to people of all age ranges. In addition, all focus groups shared comments about transportation issues within West Bloomington. Regarding distressed amenities, focus group participants brought up issues concerning poor housing conditions, inadequate amenities at local parks, and old infrastructure in need of repair or replacement. Findings from key informant interviews also acknowledged several areas for enhancement within the West Bloomington community. Within the community, apathy and a lack of respect among residents were identified as negative attributes coupled with a perceived lack of police presence in the area. Residents linked these attributes to a fear of crime, and specifically, drug dealing, prostitution, and gang activity and recruitment. Resource collaboration and greater awareness of available resources also are viewed as necessary enhancements within the community and those serving it. West Bloomington residents serving as key informant interviewees identified issues of homelessness, overcrowded housing facilities, and a lack of affordable housing. Some interviewees expressed a desire for better notification of neighborhood events. Several interviewees mentioned a desire for better communication between the City of Bloomington and West Bloomington community and a better working relationship with the police department. Additionally, multiple interviewees discussed the importance of education, including the need for more job training and literacy programs. This report includes conclusions and recommendations based on findings from key informant interviews, focus groups, local and public data review, and past and future surveys. These recommendations are broken down into three categories focusing on the City of Bloomington, the West Bloomington neighborhood, and youth. City-related recommendations include the following: The Bloomington Police Department can increase its visible presence in the West Bloomington neighborhood by providing foot patrol. The City of Bloomington should develop a plan for addressing infrastructure needs in the West Bloomington area. The Bloomington-Normal Public Transit System can evaluate the current mass transit bus routes for West Bloomington. Improved civic awareness and education can increase residents‟ skills and abilities to address grievances and development issues within their community. Neighborhood recommendations advise the following: Primarily, communication among all stakeholders needs to be improved. Stakeholders can increase awareness of available services, programs, and resources that can benefit community members. A community fair can be held within the West Bloomington neighborhood. A feasibility study should be performed for a multi-purpose community center to be located in the West Bloomington neighborhood. The youth recommendations suggest the following: Encourage The Bloomington Boys and Girls Club to determine if additional services could be added to benefit the teen youth of West Bloomington. Increase the availability of summer programs to benefit both working parents and children. Explore effective strategies for identifying and dealing with barriers to development, especially those that apply to youth and crime. Stakeholders can collaborate on a campaign to bring awareness and encourage action around the need for more volunteer mentors, especially male mentors who are needed for West Bloomington male youth. In conclusion, this report sheds some light on the needs, wants, assets, and resources of the West Bloomington community. It is our hope that this report will serve as an impetus for enhanced relationships among the AAFW, the WBRP, West Bloomington residents, and the City of Bloomington, as well as provide information and materials to aid in future development

PELATIHAN PENYIMPANAN BAHAN MAKANAN DAN PEMANFAATAN PEKARANGAN SEBAGAI UPAYA PENCEGAHAN STUNTING DI DESA MEKARJAYA BOGOR

Stunting merupakan salah satu masalah gizi kronis yang dicirikan dengan panjang badan atau tinggi badan balita tidak sesuai dengan usianya. Dalam upaya pencegahan stunting, penting diperhatikan antara lain akses pangan, kualitas bahan makanan, cara mengolah bahan makanan dan cara penyimpanan bahan makanan untuk menjaga mutu serta keamanan bahan makanan. Kegiatan pengabdian kepada masyarakat yang dilakukan di Desa Mekarjaya Kecamatan Ciomas, Kabupaten Bogor adalah penyuluhan tentang pencegahan stunting dan pelatihan penyimpanan bahan makanan serta pemanfaatan lahan pekarangan. Kegiatan tersebut diikuti oleh ibu hamil dan ibu menyusui sebanyak 30 orang sebagai peserta. Materi penyuluhan diberikan dengan metode ceramah dan diskusi. Berdasarkan hasil evaluasi diketahui bahwa terjadi peningkatan nilai rata-rata pre-tes post-tes sebanyak 9,7 poin dengan presentase kenaikan sebesar 12,3%, sehingga dapat dinyatakan terjadi peningkatan pengetahuan ibu hamil dan ibu menyusui setelah diberikan penyuluhan

LEARN: A multi-centre, cross-sectional evaluation of Urology teaching in UK medical schools

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the status of UK undergraduate urology teaching against the British Association of Urological Surgeons (BAUS) Undergraduate Syllabus for Urology. Secondary objectives included evaluating the type and quantity of teaching provided, the reported performance rate of General Medical Council (GMC)-mandated urological procedures, and the proportion of undergraduates considering urology as a career. MATERIALS AND METHODS: LEARN was a national multicentre cross-sectional study. Year 2 to Year 5 medical students and FY1 doctors were invited to complete a survey between 3rd October and 20th December 2020, retrospectively assessing the urology teaching received to date. Results are reported according to the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES). RESULTS: 7,063/8,346 (84.6%) responses from all 39 UK medical schools were included; 1,127/7,063 (16.0%) were from Foundation Year (FY) 1 doctors, who reported that the most frequently taught topics in undergraduate training were on urinary tract infection (96.5%), acute kidney injury (95.9%) and haematuria (94.4%). The most infrequently taught topics were male urinary incontinence (59.4%), male infertility (52.4%) and erectile dysfunction (43.8%). Male and female catheterisation on patients as undergraduates was performed by 92.1% and 73.0% of FY1 doctors respectively, and 16.9% had considered a career in urology. Theory based teaching was mainly prevalent in the early years of medical school, with clinical skills teaching, and clinical placements in the later years of medical school. 20.1% of FY1 doctors reported no undergraduate clinical attachment in urology. CONCLUSION: LEARN is the largest ever evaluation of undergraduate urology teaching. In the UK, teaching seemed satisfactory as evaluated by the BAUS undergraduate syllabus. However, many students report having no clinical attachments in Urology and some newly qualified doctors report never having inserted a catheter, which is a GMC mandated requirement. We recommend a greater emphasis on undergraduate clinical exposure to urology and stricter adherence to GMC mandated procedures

Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlates

Aim: To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser-availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits (resource-availability hypothesis). Time period: Tree-inventory plots established between 1934 and 2019. Major taxa studied: Trees with a diameter at breast height (DBH) ≥ 9.55 cm. Location: Amazonia, here defined as the lowland rain forests of the Amazon River basin and the Guiana Shield. Methods: We assigned dispersal modes to a total of 5433 species and morphospecies within 1877 tree-inventory plots across terra-firme, seasonally flooded, and permanently flooded forests. We investigated geographic patterns in the proportional abundance of dispersal modes. We performed an abundance-weighted mean pairwise distance (MPD) test and fit generalized linear models (GLMs) to explain the geographic distribution of dispersal modes. Results: Anemochory was significantly, positively associated with mean annual wind speed, and hydrochory was significantly higher in flooded forests. Dispersal modes did not consistently show significant associations with the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits. A lower dissimilarity in dispersal modes, resulting from a higher dominance of endozoochory, occurred in terra-firme forests (excluding podzols) compared to flooded forests. Main conclusions: The disperser-availability hypothesis was well supported for abiotic dispersal modes (anemochory and hydrochory). The availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits seems an unlikely explanation for the distribution of dispersal modes in Amazonia. The association between frugivores and the proportional abundance of zoochory requires further research, as tree recruitment not only depends on dispersal vectors but also on conditions that favour or limit seedling recruitment across forest types

Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora

Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness. Using only location, stratified by forest type, as predictor, our spatial model, to the best of our knowledge, provides the most accurate map of tree diversity in Amazonia to date, explaining approximately 70% of the tree diversity and species-richness. Large soil-forest combinations determine a significant percentage of the variation in tree species-richness and tree alpha-diversity in Amazonian forest-plots. We suggest that the size and fragmentation of these systems drive their large-scale diversity patterns and hence local diversity. A model not using location but cumulative water deficit, tree density, and temperature seasonality explains 47% of the tree species-richness in the terra-firme forest in Amazonia. Over large areas across Amazonia, residuals of this relationship are small and poorly spatially structured, suggesting that much of the residual variation may be local. The Guyana Shield area has consistently negative residuals, showing that this area has lower tree species-richness than expected by our models. We provide extensive plot meta-data, including tree density, tree alpha-diversity and tree species-richness results and gridded maps at 0.1-degree resolution

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Elicitation of broadly protective sarbecovirus immunity by receptor-binding domain nanoparticle vaccines

Understanding vaccine-elicited protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants and other sarbecoviruses is key for guiding public health policies. We show that a clinical stage multivalent SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor-binding domain nanoparticle vaccine (RBD-NP) protects mice from SARS-CoV-2 challenge after a single immunization, indicating a potential dose-sparing strategy. We benchmarked serum neutralizing activity elicited by RBD-NP in non-human primates against a lead prefusion-stabilized SARS-CoV-2 spike (HexaPro) using a panel of circulating mutants. Polyclonal antibodies elicited by both vaccines are similarly resilient to many RBD residue substitutions tested although mutations at and surrounding position 484 have negative consequences for neutralization. Mosaic and cocktail nanoparticle immunogens displaying multiple sarbecovirus RBDs elicit broad neutralizing activity in mice and protect mice against SARS-CoV challenge even in the absence of SARS-CoV RBD in the vaccine. This study provides proof of principle that multivalent sarbecovirus RBD-NPs induce heterotypic protection and motivates advancing such broadly protective sarbecovirus vaccines to the clinic

Rarity of monodominance in hyperdiverse Amazonian forests.

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network (ATDN). Utilizing a simple defining metric of at least half of the trees ≥ 10 cm diameter belonging to one species, we found only a few occurrences of monodominance in Amazonia, and the phenomenon was not significantly linked to previously hypothesized life history traits such wood density, seed mass, ectomycorrhizal associations, or Rhizobium nodulation. In our analysis, coppicing (the formation of sprouts at the base of the tree or on roots) was the only trait significantly linked to monodominance. While at specific locales coppicing or ectomycorrhizal associations may confer a considerable advantage to a tree species and lead to its monodominance, very few species have these traits. Mining of the ATDN dataset suggests that monodominance is quite rare in Amazonia, and may be linked primarily to edaphic factors