Public Policy, Women, and Confinement: A Plea for Reasonableness

This veteran correctional administrator reviews the explosion of numbers of female offenders confined in the United States today. The article explores the myriad causes and effects of this shift in public policy and notes the negative impact of today\u27s policy outcomes on individual offenders, correctional systems, and our society. The author argues for a modification of policy to a more rational approach to judicial sentencing

Session A-4: Project-Based Methods for Teaching NGSS Engineering Standards in your Physics or Engineering Course

The NGSS Engineering standards require that students work in groups to analyze, break-down, and model real-world problems in order to fully understand the challenges that these problems pose. In this session, we present a few ideas for short-term engineering/technology-based problems that can be completed in the classroom within about 2 weeks. The projects are linked to concepts of physics such as forces, momentum and torque

Session E-3: Addressing NGSS Engineering Standards with an Alternative Energy Module

In our Engineering class at IMSA, we have taught an Alternative Energy unit over the last four semesters. We will discuss how the 4 engineering NGSS standards are addressed through the various activities involved with this unit. We will also discuss how the unit has evolved over the last 2 years

Teaching Physics and Engineering Remotely (and What We Plan to Keep When We’re in Person)

Physics and engineering pose special challenges for remote learning, but the process of re-inventing a class provides an opportunity for looking at teaching and assessment in a new light. We share some of the techniques we used, including analysis of the physics of YouTube clips, pursuing hands-on projects and labs at home, and submitting videos explaining problems--some of which worked, some of which didn’t, and some of which were good enough to continue even when we’re back in person

Session E-5: DIY Microbial Fuel Cells

Energy is a ubiquitous concept that cuts across scientific disciplines and is well represented among standards. As part of a unit on alternative energy we use to satisfy NGSS Engineering standards, we build microbial fuel cells. While standard kits exist, their cost can become significant. We will lead participants in the creation of their own microbial fuel cells. They will also be given some of the more inaccessible electrode material to take with them

Session A-6: Alternative Energy

We will describe how our newly-revised, month-long alternative energy unit in Engineering addresses the 4 NGSS standards. We will map the activities in our IMSA schedule to a traditional high school bell schedule. These activities address not only performance goals and the underlying scientific principles of power generation but also process skills relating to surveying technology, prioritizing criteria, and assessing societal impact. We will reflect on our first round of offering this unit and suggest modifications for future implementations

Thrifty Food Plan, 2006

The Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), a fundamental part of the U.S. food guidance system and the basis for maximum food stamp allotments, has been revised by USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP), with assistance from USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), Economic Research Service (ERS), and Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The TFP provides a representative healthful and minimal cost meal plan that shows how a nutritious diet may be achieved with limited resources. The Plan assumes that all purchased food is consumed at home. The TFP was last revised in 1999. The newly revised (2006) TFP differs from, and improves upon, the previous TFP in a number of ways. The 2006 TFP: • Is based on the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans as well as the 2005 MyPyramid Food Guidance System. • Uses the prices low-income people paid for many foods. • Uses the latest data on food consumption, nutrient content, and food prices: the 2001- 2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and 2001-2002 Food Price Database. • Offers a more realistic reflection of the time available for food preparation, especially with increased expectations for work in assistance programs. Hence, it allows more prepared foods and requires somewhat fewer preparations from scratch. Although different from the previous TFP, the revised TFP is similar in one important respect: It is set at the same inflation-adjusted cost as the previous TFP. CNPP determined it was possible, for the 2001-2002 period, to obtain a healthful diet meeting current nutritional standards at a cost equal to the previous TFP’s cost.Thrifty Food Plan, USDA Food Plans, Diet Quality, Food Stamps, Cost of Food, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

Resolving structural variability in network models and the brain

Large-scale white matter pathways crisscrossing the cortex create a complex pattern of connectivity that underlies human cognitive function. Generative mechanisms for this architecture have been difficult to identify in part because little is known about mechanistic drivers of structured networks. Here we contrast network properties derived from diffusion spectrum imaging data of the human brain with 13 synthetic network models chosen to probe the roles of physical network embedding and temporal network growth. We characterize both the empirical and synthetic networks using familiar diagnostics presented in statistical form, as scatter plots and distributions, to reveal the full range of variability of each measure across scales in the network. We focus on the degree distribution, degree assortativity, hierarchy, topological Rentian scaling, and topological fractal scaling---in addition to several summary statistics, including the mean clustering coefficient, shortest path length, and network diameter. The models are investigated in a progressive, branching sequence, aimed at capturing different elements thought to be important in the brain, and range from simple random and regular networks, to models that incorporate specific growth rules and constraints. We find that synthetic models that constrain the network nodes to be embedded in anatomical brain regions tend to produce distributions that are similar to those extracted from the brain. We also find that network models hardcoded to display one network property do not in general also display a second, suggesting that multiple neurobiological mechanisms might be at play in the development of human brain network architecture. Together, the network models that we develop and employ provide a potentially useful starting point for the statistical inference of brain network structure from neuroimaging data.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, supplementary material