Aligning Teacher Improvement Strategies: A Mixed Method Study of Teaching Reform in Minnesota.

Despite consensus that teachers vary considerably in their effectiveness, researchers have had little success identifying strategies to increase teacher quality at scale. Policymakers often call for isolated reforms such as teacher performance bonuses, notwithstanding the poor track record of previous efforts. This dissertation investigates a new generation of human capital programs that combine incentive reform with teacher development. These efforts enjoy support from research within a variety of fields. If teachers do not have the capabilities to improve, revised incentives are unlikely to cause meaningful change, just as increased opportunities to learn will not translate into better instruction if teachers lack incentives to apply concerted effort to this task. However, we know little about how to translate such research into designs for teacher and student learning. I draw on evidence from a program in Minnesota known as Quality Compensation for Teachers or “Q Comp.” The program, which began in 2005, includes many features that can be found in several more recent state-level reforms, including requirements for teacher evaluation, pay reform, and teacher-led professional development. The first essay evaluates the impacts of Q Comp on school practices and student achievement, drawing on several sources of quantitative data. While I find that Q Comp caused changes to teacher-reported school practices, I find little evidence that the program produced meaningful improvement in student learning. The second essay considers program implementation at the state level, describing the interactions between the legislature, the union, and the Minnesota Department of Education, which created a program that included relatively effective structural oversight with weak instructional guidance and training. The final essay focuses on district implementation, illustrating how three districts’ design choices around teacher support and development produced programs that differed considerably in their ultimate significance for teachers even as they maintained a rough structural similarity. As a group, these essays explore a series of concerns associated with a new generation of state reform programs. They raise doubts about the likelihood that these programs will lead to large-scale instructional improvement, and they illustrate the difficulty of setting up large-scale human capital systems at the state level.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96100/1/nschwart_1.pd

The Relationship between Tobacco Retailer Density and Neighborhood Demographics in Ohio

Introduction: Studies from various parts of the country suggest that tobacco-related health disparities are exacerbated by disparitiesin the distribution of tobacco retailers (convenience stores, tobacco shops, etc.). The purpose of the present study was to use advancedspatial modeling techniques for count data to estimate current disparities in tobacco retailer density in Ohio.Methods: We identified and geocoded 11,392 tobacco retailers in Ohio. Next, we obtained census tract-level information on race/ethnicity, poverty, and age and obtained county-level information on whether an area was Urban, Suburban, or Rural. Finally, we used negative binomial generalized linear models, adapted for residual spatial dependence, to determine the association between per capita tobacco retailer density and demographic characteristics—summarized by adjusted rate ratios.Results: There were more (from 1.4-1.9 times as many) retailers per capita in high-poverty vs. low-poverty tracts. Poverty also interacted with age: the association between high poverty and high retailer density was stronger for tracts with a low youth population. Density was also greater in tracts with a high (vs. low) prevalence of African Americans (1.1 times as many) and Hispanics (1.2 times as many). Finally, density was generally greater in rural (vs. suburban or urban) tracts, although the effect was modified by a three-way interaction: density was particularly high for rural tracts that also had both a high prevalence of poverty and a low youth population.Discussion: Overall, our findings indicate that Ohio’s vulnerable populations are exposed to a greater per capita density of tobaccoretailers. There is a need for state and local-level tobacco control policies that will improve equity and reduce health disparities

Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) observations of biomass burning products in the stratosphere from Canadian forest fires in August 2017

Forest fires in British Columbia in August 2017 caused a pyrocumulonimbus event that injected a polluted air mass into the lower stratosphere. The Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on the Aura satellite first observed the polluted air mass on 14 August 2017 and continued to observe it for 60 d (100 d in water vapour). We estimate the mass of CO injected into the stratosphere to be 2400 Gg. Events in which a fire injects its burning products directly into the stratosphere are rare: this is the third of four such events in the 16 years since the launch of Aura, the second largest of the four events, and the only one in the Northern Hemisphere. The other three events occurred in Australia in December 2006, February 2009 and from December 2019 to January 2020. Unlike the 2006 and 2009 events, but like the 2019–2020 event, the polluted air mass described here had a clearly elevated water vapour content: between 2.5 and 5 times greater than that in the surrounding atmosphere. We describe the evolution of the polluted air mass, showing that it rose to an altitude of about 24 km (31 hPa) and divided into several identifiable parts. In addition to CO and H2O, we observe enhanced amounts of HCN, CH3CN, CH3Cl and CH3OH with mixing ratios in the range to be expected from a variety of measurements in other biomass burning plumes. We use back trajectories and plume-dispersion modelling to demonstrate that the pollutants observed by MLS originated in the British Columbia fires, the likeliest source being at 53.2∘ N, 121.8∘ W at 05:20 UTC on 13 August 2017.</p

The association of prescription opioid use with suicide attempts: An analysis of statewide medical claims data

BACKGROUND: Suicides and opioid overdose deaths are among the most pressing public health concerns in the US. However direct evidence for the association between opioid use and suicidal behavior is limited. The objective of this article is to examine the association between frequency and dose of prescription opioid use and subsequent suicide attempts. METHODS AND FINDINGS: This retrospective cohort study analyzed 4 years of statewide medical claims data from the Connecticut All-Payer Claims Database. Commercially insured adult patients in Connecticut (n = 842,773) who had any medical claims beginning in January 2012 were followed through December 2015. The primary outcome was suicide attempt identified using International Classification of Diseases (ICD 9) diagnosis codes. Primary predictor variables included frequency of opioid use, which was defined as the number of months with claims for prescription opioids per year, and strength of opioid dose, which was standardized using morphine milligram equivalent (MME) units. We also controlled for psychiatric and medical comorbidities using ICD 9 codes. We used Cox proportional hazards regression to examine the association between frequency, dose, and suicide attempts, adjusting for medical and psychiatric comorbid conditions. Interactions among measures of opioid use and comorbid conditions were analyzed. In this cohort study with follow-up time up to 4 years (range = 2-48 months, median = 46 months), the hazard ratios (HR) from the time-to-event analysis indicated that patients prescribed opioid medications for at least 6 months during the past year and at 20-50 MME levels or higher had 4.44 (95% CI: [3.71, 5.32]) to 7.23 (95% CI: [6.22, 8.41]) times the risk of attempted suicide compared to those not prescribed opioids. Risk of suicide attempt was sharply elevated among patients with psychiatric conditions other than anxiety who were prescribed more frequent and higher opioid doses. In contrast, more frequent and higher doses of prescription opioids were associated with lower risk of suicide attempts among patients with medical conditions necessitating pain management. This study is limited by its exclusive focus on commercially insured patients and does not include patients covered by public insurance. It is also limited to patients\u27 receipt of prescription opioids and does not take into account opioids obtained through other means, nor does it include measures of actual patient opioid use. CONCLUSIONS: This analysis provides evidence of a complex relationship among prescription opioids, mental health, pain and other medical comorbidities, and suicide risk. Findings indicate the need for proactive suicide surveillance among individuals diagnosed with affective or psychotic disorders who are receiving frequent and high doses of opioids. However, appropriate opioid treatment may have significant value in reducing suicide risk for those without psychiatric comorbidities

Molecular Phenotypes Distinguish Patients with Relatively Stable from Progressive Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF)

BACKGROUND: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive, chronic interstitial lung disease that is unresponsive to current therapy and often leads to death. However, the rate of disease progression differs among patients. We hypothesized that comparing the gene expression profiles between patients with stable disease and those in which the disease progressed rapidly will lead to biomarker discovery and contribute to the understanding of disease pathogenesis. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To begin to address this hypothesis, we applied Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) to generate lung expression profiles from diagnostic surgical lung biopsies in 6 individuals with relatively stable (or slowly progressive) IPF and 6 individuals with progressive IPF (based on changes in DLCO and FVC over 12 months). Our results indicate that this comprehensive lung IPF SAGE transcriptome is distinct from normal lung tissue and other chronic lung diseases. To identify candidate markers of disease progression, we compared the IPF SAGE profiles in stable and progressive disease, and identified a set of 102 transcripts that were at least 5-fold up regulated and a set of 89 transcripts that were at least 5-fold down regulated in the progressive group (P-value</=0.05). The over expressed genes included surfactant protein A1, two members of the MAPK-EGR-1-HSP70 pathway that regulate cigarette-smoke induced inflammation, and Plunc (palate, lung and nasal epithelium associated), a gene not previously implicated in IPF. Interestingly, 26 of the up regulated genes are also increased in lung adenocarcinomas and have low or no expression in normal lung tissue. More importantly, we defined a SAGE molecular expression signature of 134 transcripts that sufficiently distinguished relatively stable from progressive IPF. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate that molecular signatures from lung parenchyma at the time of diagnosis could prove helpful in predicting the likelihood of disease progression or possibly understanding the biological activity of IPF

Aura Microwave Limb Sounder Observations of Dynamics and Transport During the Record-Breaking 2009 Arctic Stratospheric Major Warming

A major stratospheric sudden warming (SSW) in January 2009 was the strongest and most prolonged on record. Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) observations are used to provide an overview of dynamics and transport during the 2009 SSW, and to compare with the intense, long-lasting SSW in January 2006. The Arctic polar vortex split during the 2009 SSW, whereas the 2006 SSW was a vortex displacement event. Winds reversed to easterly more rapidly and reverted to westerly more slowly in 2009 than in 2006. More mixing of trace gases out of the vortex during the decay of the vortex fragments, and less before the fulfillment of major SSW criteria, was seen in 2009 than in 2006; persistent well-defined fragments of vortex and anticyclone air were more prevalent in 2009. The 2009 SSW had a more profound impact on the lower stratosphere than any previously observed SSW, with no significant recovery of the vortex in that region. The stratopause breakdown and subsequent reformation at very high altitude, accompanied by enhanced descent into a rapidly strengthening upper stratospheric vortex, were similar in 2009 and 2006. Many differences between 2006 and 2009 appear to be related to the different character of the SSWs in the two years

Processing EOS MLS Level-2 Data

A computer program performs level-2 processing of thermal-microwave-radiance data from observations of the limb of the Earth by the Earth Observing System (EOS) Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS). The purpose of the processing is to estimate the composition and temperature of the atmosphere versus altitude from .8 to .90 km. "Level-2" as used here is a specialists f term signifying both vertical profiles of geophysical parameters along the measurement track of the instrument and processing performed by this or other software to generate such profiles. Designed to be flexible, the program is controlled via a configuration file that defines all aspects of processing, including contents of state and measurement vectors, configurations of forward models, measurement and calibration data to be read, and the manner of inverting the models to obtain the desired estimates. The program can operate in a parallel form in which one instance of the program acts a master, coordinating the work of multiple slave instances on a cluster of computers, each slave operating on a portion of the data. Optionally, the configuration file can be made to instruct the software to produce files of simulated radiances based on state vectors formed from sets of geophysical data-product files taken as input