Academic Brands and Online Education

Online education both does and does not radically transform higher education and higher education brands. On the one hand, providing courses online potentially allows universities to reach a worldwide audience, helps them globalize their brand, changes the cost structure for both students and institutions, and could reshape the competitive branding landscape among universities. On the other hand, university brands are surprisingly regional, low student–faculty ratios are still necessary for truly high-quality education, and the online competitive landscape might ultimately simply replicate reputational hierarchies forged over decades in the world of on-campus education. Thus, although the idea that online learning will completely “disrupt” the higher education model and existing university branding hierarchies is almost certainly overstated, online education will inevitably become more and more integral to universities, and over time the distinction between on-campus and online education is likely to become increasingly blurred. As a result, online education brings both promise and peril for universities as they manage their brands while increasingly adopting online education modalities. This chapter first provides an overview of the online education landscape in higher education. Then, it outlines some of the core issues that universities must address as they consider and implement online education strategies while managing their brand

DEMOCRACY AND DEMOGRAPHY

American democracy is under siege. This is so because of the confluence of three trends: (1) demographic change and residential segregation, which increasingly have placed more racially diverse Democratic Party voters in cities and suburbs, while rural areas have become more white and Republican; (2) a constitutional structure—particularly the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and the use of small, winner-take-all legislative districts—that gives disproportionate representation to rural populations; and (3) the willingness of this rural Republican minority to use its disproportionate power to further entrench counter-majoritarian structures, whether through extreme partisan gerrymandering, increased voter suppression efforts, court-packing, or outright rebellion against the results of democratic elections. These three trends create the very real prospect that for the foreseeable future a mostly white rural Republican minority wields disproportionate, structurally locked-in, power over a more diverse urban and suburban Democratic majority. A democracy cannot survive long under those conditions. In order to rescue the possibility of democratic self-government, we argue that judges must begin to apply heightened scrutiny to legislation or executive action that seeks to entrench the political power of a rural electoral minority or that discriminates against urban and suburban populations. In making this argument, we seek to revive the political process rationale for heightened judicial scrutiny that has long been associated with constitutional scholar John Hart Ely and his interpretation of Chief Justice Stone’s famous footnote 4 of the decision in United States v. Carolene Products Company. Both Stone and Ely were particularly focused on the potential ways the political system was skewed to deny Black people effective political representation, as well as the many circumstances through which de jure racial discrimination denied racial minorities equal rights. But there is no reason that the Carolene Products theory as elaborated by Ely needs to be confined only to this context. To the contrary, the whole point of Ely’s theory of judicial review is that it contemplates judicial intervention whenever the prevailing political system is systematically disadvantaging one group in order to lock in political advantages to another group. In such circumstances the democratic process is not functioning properly, and judicial intervention is not a threat to democracy, but a necessity in order to preserve democracy. We argue that our current political moment calls for a robust application of the Carolene/Ely principles of judicial review, and we provide examples of situations where heightened judicial review is appropriate. The democracy-protecting approach advocated in this Article also provides an additional basis for criticizing the newly minted, ahistorical “independent state legislature” theory embraced by some Supreme Court justices because it would allow minority factions to further disenfranchise the majority of the population by severely reducing, if not eliminating, the possibility for meaningful judicial review by state or federal courts

Analysis of the results of the Washington County District 15 elementary school vision screening program: The Abbo study (volume II)

Analysis of the results of the Washington County District 15 elementary school vision screening program: The Abbo study (volume II

Momentum transfer using chirped standing wave fields: Bragg scattering

We consider momentum transfer using frequency-chirped standing wave fields. Novel atom-beam splitter and mirror schemes based on Bragg scattering are presented. It is shown that a predetermined number of photon momenta can be transferred to the atoms in a single interaction zone.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Non-Vacuum Bianchi Types I and V in f(R) Gravity

In a recent paper \cite{1}, we have studied the vacuum solutions of Bianchi types I and V spacetimes in the framework of metric f(R) gravity. Here we extend this work to perfect fluid solutions. For this purpose, we take stiff matter to find energy density and pressure of the universe. In particular, we find two exact solutions in each case which correspond to two models of the universe. The first solution gives a singular model while the second solution provides a non-singular model. The physical behavior of these models has been discussed using some physical quantities. Also, the function of the Ricci scalar is evaluated.Comment: 15 pages, accepted for publication in Gen. Realtiv. Gravi

Critical behavior in the variation of GDR width at low temperature

We present the first experimental giant dipole resonance (GDR) width systematics, in the temperature region 0.8 $\sim$ 1.2 MeV for $^{201}$Tl, a near Pb nucleus, to investigate the evolution of the GDR width in shell effect & pairing dominated region. The extracted GDR widths are well below the predictions of shell effect corrected thermal shape fluctuation model (TSFM) and thermal pairing included phonon damping model. A similar behavior of the GDR width is also observed for $^{63}$Cu measured in the present work and $^{119}$Sb, measured earlier. This discrepancy is attributed to the GDR induced quadrupole moment leading to a critical point in the increase of the GDR width with temperature. We incorporate this novel idea in the phenomenological description based on the TSFM for a better understanding of the GDR width systematics for the entire range of mass, spin and temperature.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B, 7 pages, 4 figure

Grouping of tooth surfaces by susceptibility to caries: a study in 5–16 year-old children

BACKGROUND: The decline in caries has slowed and this may be indicative of variation in the susceptibility of differing teeth to caries. This study tests the hypothesis that in children, there are groups of tooth sites that exhibit differences in caries susceptibility. METHODS: Probit analysis of caries data collected from a 4-year longitudinal study of 20,000 schoolchildren aged between 5 and 16 years in 10 differing locations in the United States. RESULTS: The development of dental caries within the mouth followed a fixed hierarchy indicating that tooth surfaces show variation in caries susceptibility. Certain teeth and tooth sites have similar susceptibilities and can be grouped, the sizes of the groups vary. The most susceptible group consists of six tooth surfaces: the buccal pits and occlusal fissured surfaces of the first molar teeth. The second group consisted of 12 sites on the second molar and premolar teeth. The group formed by the least susceptible sites included the largest number of tooth surfaces and consists of the majority of the lower anterior teeth and canines. CONCLUSION: Variation in the caries susceptibility of tooth surfaces exists. Surfaces can be grouped according to caries susceptibility. An effect that reduces the cariogenic challenge of one of the sites within a group is likely to affect all the other sites within the particular group

Conduction delays in the visual pathways of progressive multiple sclerosis patients covary with brain structure

In developed countries, multiple sclerosis (MS) is the leading cause of non-traumatic neurological disability in young adults. MS is a chronic demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, in which myelin is attacked, changing white matter structure and leaving lesions. The demyelination has a direct effect on white matter conductivity. This effect can be examined in the visual system, where damage is highly prevalent in MS, leading to substantial delays in conduction, commonly measured with visual evoked potentials (VEPs). The structural damage to the visual system in MS is often estimated with MRI measurements in the white matter. Recent developments in quantitative MRI (qMRI) provide improved sensitivity to myelin content and new structural methods allow better modeling of the axonal structure, leading researchers to link white matter microstructure to conduction properties of action potentials along fiber tracts. This study attempts to explain the variance in conduction latencies down the visual pathway using structural measurements of both the retina and the optic radiation (OR). Forty-eight progressive MS patients, participants in a longitudinal stem-cell therapy clinical trial, were included in this study, three and six months post final treatment. Twenty-seven patients had no history of optic neuritis, and were the main focus of this study. All participants underwent conventional MRI scans, as well as diffusion MRI and qMRI sequences to account for white matter microstructure. Optical coherence tomography scans were also obtained, and peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (pRNFL) thickness and macular volume measurements were extracted. Finally, latencies of recorded VEPs were estimated. Our results show that in non-optic neuritis progressive MS patients there is a relationship between the VEP latency and both retinal damage and OR lesion load. In addition, we find that qMRI values, sampled along the OR, are also correlated with VEP latency. Finally, we show that combining these parameters using PCA we can explain more than 40% of the inter-subject variance in VEP latency. In conclusion, this study contributes to understanding the relationship between the structural properties and conduction in the visual system in disease. We focus on the visual system, where the conduction latencies can be estimated, but the conclusions could be generalized to other brain systems where the white matter structure can be measured. It also highlights the importance of having multiple parameters when assessing the clinical stages of MS patients, which could have major implications for future studies of other white matter diseases