The Reception. of the St. Joseph Constitution

When Florida framed her first constitution the principle of submitting constitutions to the people had been generally established. By January 11, 1839 the St. Joseph convention was ready to submit the fruit of its labors to the people for their approval or rejection. The date set for voting on the question was the first Monday in May 1839, coincident with electing a delegate to Congress

The Criminalization of Homelessness in Chicago

Community organizations report that Chicago was experiencing a rise in homelessness before the global pandemic, which pushed more people into a state of homelessness. City leaders admit to needing more resources to address the larger number of people living on the street. History, however, shows that cities often turn towards policies the criminalize the homeless when the “problem” becomes more visible, overwhelming public spaces and spreading into wealthier spaces thereby threatening local revenues and electoral security of officials. In this study, we will examine the occurrence of these types of crime and spatial differences in the communities where these “crimes\u27\u27 occur. City governments must consider providing free housing in wealthier spaces rather than arresting and incarcerating some of the cities’ most vulnerable residents and confiscating their property

An Integrated Pipeline Architecture for Modeling Urban Land Use, Travel Demand, and Traffic Assignment

Integrating land use, travel demand, and traffic models represents a gold standard for regional planning, but is rarely achieved in a meaningful way, especially at the scale of disaggregate data. In this report, we present a new pipeline architecture for integrated modeling of urban land use, travel demand, and traffic assignment. Our land use model, UrbanSim, is an open-source microsimulation platform used by metropolitan planning organizations worldwide for modeling the growth and development of cities over long (~30 year) time horizons. UrbanSim is particularly powerful as a scenario analysis tool, enabling planners to compare and contrast the impacts of different policy decisions on long term land use forecasts in a statistically rigorous way. Our travel demand model, ActivitySim, is an agent-based modeling platform that produces synthetic origin--destination travel demand data. Finally, we use a static user equilibrium traffic assignment model based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to assign vehicles to specific network paths to make trips between origins and destinations. This traffic assignment model runs in a high-performance computing environment. The resulting congested travel time data can then be fed back into UrbanSim and ActivitySim for the next model run. This technical report introduces this research area, describes this project's achievements so far in developing this integrated pipeline, and presents an upcoming research agenda

“I was pretty appalled by this.”: Teaching Students About the Exclusive and Exclusionary Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem

This conference session is about the design and reception of a research lesson focusing on the importance of understanding biases that are inherent in the research and scholarly publication processes, and how students and faculty can be more intentional in their research process through inclusive language, asking questions about information, and thinking critically about research. The lesson provides foundational information about how the scholarly publishing ecosystem works and how it can (and does) exclude more diverse voices, encourages students to think more deeply about their own identities and how those identities can affect the research they do, and concludes with a discussion about citation justice and the importance of citing not just to avoid plagiarism but to give minoritized scholars credit for their work. It also provides students and their accompanying faculty with tools to help ensure that their research represents a more diverse field. By providing transparent information about how scholarly publishing works and how much and why the library pays for the information they are expected to use in their projects, students are trusted to understand how information has value and the world excludes those who cannot afford to engage. It also challenges them to consider their own identities and how they may have assumptions or biases that could affect the results they achieve when doing research. While more theoretical than most one-shot library instruction, this lesson (re)engaged both students and the librarians teaching it, and has been gaining popularity since its creation. The conference session will also discuss how the lesson was received by students, how it can be modified to work with any discipline, and how it will be utilized in the future. There will also be recommendations on how to do similar work with your own students

The eyes have it: Using eye-tracking to evaluate a library website

When Western New England University announced its intentions to switch over its entire website from a legacy homegrown system to a brand new CMS, we were faced with moving all content on the library’s website from one platform to another over the course of a summer. We needed to make our content fit into a strict new design scheme, but also wanted to take full advantage of the switch and use it as an opportunity to make our content work even better for our students. To determine how successfully students were able to navigate the new library website, we partnered with our engineering department to conduct a usability study using eyetracking software. In addition to useful information about how students use the website, we also learned a great deal about conducting research and working with outside partners. Through sharing our experience, we hope that anyone interested in conducting their own usability study will come away with tips, ideas, and pitfalls to avoid

Amino acid changes in the spike protein of feline coronavirus correlate with systemic spread of virus from the intestine and not with feline infectious peritonitis

Recent evidence suggests that a mutation in the spike protein gene of feline coronavirus (FCoV), which results in an amino acid change from methionine to leucine at position 1058, may be associated with feline infectious peritonitis (FIP). Tissue and faecal samples collected post mortem from cats diagnosed with or without FIP were subjected to RNA extraction and quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) to detect FCoV RNA. In cats with FIP, 95% of tissue, and 81% of faecal samples were PCR-positive, as opposed to 22% of tissue, and 60% of faecal samples in cats without FIP. Relative FCoV copy numbers were significantly higher in the cats with FIP, both in tissues (P < 0.001) and faeces (P = 0.02). PCR-positive samples underwent pyrosequencing encompassing position 1058 of the FCoV spike protein. This identified a methionine codon at position 1058, consistent with the shedding of an enteric form of FCoV, in 77% of the faecal samples from cats with FIP, and in 100% of the samples from cats without FIP. In contrast, 91% of the tissue samples from cats with FIP and 89% from cats without FIP had a leucine codon at position 1058, consistent with a systemic form of FCoV. These results suggest that the methionine to leucine substitution at position 1058 in the FCoV spike protein is indicative of systemic spread of FCoV from the intestine, rather than a virus with the potential to cause FIP

Aging and Spectro-Temporal Integration of Speech

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age on the spectro-temporal integration of speech. The hypothesis was that the integration of speech fragments distributed over frequency, time, and ear of presentation is reduced in older listeners—even for those with good audiometric hearing. Younger, middle-aged, and older listeners (10 per group) with good audiometric hearing participated. They were each tested under seven conditions that encompassed combinations of spectral, temporal, and binaural integration. Sentences were filtered into two bands centered at 500 Hz and 2500 Hz, with criterion bandwidth tailored for each participant. In some conditions, the speech bands were individually square wave interrupted at a rate of 10 Hz. Configurations of uninterrupted, synchronously interrupted, and asynchronously interrupted frequency bands were constructed that constituted speech fragments distributed across frequency, time, and ear of presentation. The over-arching finding was that, for most configurations, performance was not differentially affected by listener age. Although speech intelligibility varied across condition, there was no evidence of performance deficits in older listeners in any condition. This study indicates that age, per se, does not necessarily undermine the ability to integrate fragments of speech dispersed across frequency and time