The Role of Social Capital, Collective Efficacy, and Webs of Support in Supporting First Year Students: Experiences From the Exploratory Studies Program at the University of Nebraska Omaha

Historically, graduation rates for students entering the University of Nebraska Omaha as “undecided” were abysmal. The Exploratory Studies Program was created to support students who enter the university without a major (Explorers), half of them being first-generation, who often equate their indecision with not belonging at the university and face an array of barriers in higher education. Explorers embedded in a “web of support” of faculty, peer mentors, and advisors help to normalize the process of finding a best-fit major and navigating the complexities of academia, well-being, and future career development. The current article employs sociological and human development paradigms to demonstrate how social capital, collective efficacy, and webs of support can improve student belonging in their first year in university and help buffer barriers to success in higher education. In addition, this framework offers educators a powerful tool to work collaboratively with “undecided” students to augment persistence toward graduation

Value for Money in Social Care : The Role of Economic Evidence in the Guideline Development Process of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in England. Journal of Long-Term Care

In England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has been responsible for developing social care guidelines since 2012. Internationally, it is the first health technology assessment and guideline agency that specifically includes social care. As is the case for NICE’s clinical and public health guidance, social care guidelines comprise recommendations based on the best available evidence of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. This paper provides an overview of how economic evidence is used within social care guideline development. Firstly, the paper describes the guideline development and quality assurance process, in addition to the roles and responsibilities of the technical team and guideline committee members. Secondly, the paper summarises how economic evidence is reviewed, generated, and used to inform recommendations, with examples given to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities that can be encountered. The paper culminates with proposals for the use of economic evidence in social care in England going forward and makes recommendations for further research in this area. The paper posits that guidelines are an important vehicle for supporting evidence-based practice in social care and that economic evidence is a critical kind of evidence to include. As economic evidence in social care becomes more widely available, it can be increasingly used to produce useful and accessible information for decision makers. Further research is needed to understand the impact of implementing economic evidence-based recommendations in social care practice

Impact of the Kenya post-election crisis on clinic attendance and medication adherence for HIV-infected children in western Kenya

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Kenya experienced a political and humanitarian crisis following presidential elections on 27 December 2007. Over 1,200 people were killed and 300,000 displaced, with disproportionate violence in western Kenya. We sought to describe the immediate impact of this conflict on return to clinic and medication adherence for HIV-infected children cared for within the USAID-Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) in western Kenya.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a mixed methods analysis that included a retrospective cohort analysis, as well as key informant interviews with pediatric healthcare providers. Eligible patients were HIV-infected children, less than 14 years of age, seen in the AMPATH HIV clinic system between 26 October 2007 and 25 December 2007. We extracted demographic and clinical data, generating descriptive statistics for pre- and post-conflict antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence and post-election return to clinic for this cohort. ART adherence was derived from caregiver-report of taking all ART doses in past 7 days. We used multivariable logistic regression to assess factors associated with not returning to clinic. Interview dialogue from was analyzed using constant comparison, progressive coding and triangulation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Between 26 October 2007 and 25 December 2007, 2,585 HIV-infected children (including 1,642 on ART) were seen. During 26 December 2007 to 15 April 2008, 93% (N = 2,398) returned to care. At their first visit after the election, 95% of children on ART (N = 1,408) reported perfect ART adherence, a significant drop from 98% pre-election (p < 0.001). Children on ART were significantly more likely to return to clinic than those not on ART. Members of tribes targeted by violence and members of minority tribes were less likely to return. In qualitative analysis of 9 key informant interviews, prominent barriers to return to clinic and adherence included concerns for personal safety, shortages of resources, hanging priorities, and hopelessness.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>During a period of humanitarian crisis, the vulnerable, HIV-infected pediatric population had disruptions in clinical care and in medication adherence, putting children at risk for viral resistance and increased morbidity. However, unique program strengths may have minimized these disruptions.</p

Standing at the Precipice: Restrained Modernism in the Fiction of E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, and Elizabeth Bowen

In the field of literary modernism, value has been assigned most often to texts that display a certain kind of innovation: aggressive, destructive, and difficult. Other, quieter texts have been relegated to the periphery of the modernist canon. This dissertation, contributing to the work of the New Modernist Studies, argues for an expansion of how critics define innovation and, by extension, modernism. Through close reading and thorough analysis of critical reception, I explore a restrained modernism in the stories and novels of E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, and Elizabeth Bowen, demonstrating how their innovation proceeds from and depends on their performance of clarity and their deconstruction of traditional forms from within. These three authors strategically deploy familiar traditions like the female bildungsroman, social satire, and the tragic mulatta tale in order to explore the queer agency of restrained subjectivities trapped inside. Forster, Larsen, and Bowen defy critical accusations of timidity, conservativism, and failure, critiquing the totalizing identity categories of nation, race, sexuality, and gender and suggesting the quiet yet radical power of a literary--and modernist--restraint

\u3ci\u3eFrom the Heartland: Critical Reading and Writing At UNO\u3c/i\u3e

A writing textbook designed for UNO students taking Composition I and features work from local writers, students, and UNO professors.https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/facultybooks/1034/thumbnail.jp

Climate change, riverine flood risk and adaptation for the conterminous United States

Riverine floods are among the most costly natural disasters in the United States, and floods are generally projected to increase in frequency and magnitude with climate change. Faced with these increasing risks, improved information is needed to direct limited resources toward the most cost-effective adaptation actions available. Here we leverage a newly available flood risk dataset for residential properties in the conterminous United States to calculate expected annual damages to residential structures from inland/riverine flooding at a property-level; the cost of property-level adaptations to protect against future flood risk; and the benefits of those adaptation investments assuming both static and changing climate conditions. Our modeling projects that in the absence of adaptation, nationwide damages from riverine flooding will increase by 20%–30% under high levels of warming. Floodproofing, elevation and property acquisition can each be cost-effective adaptations in certain situations, depending on the desired return on investment (i.e. benefit cost ratio), the discount rate, and the assumed rate of climate change. Incorporation of climate change into the benefit-cost calculation increases the number of properties meeting any specified benefit-cost threshold, as today’s investments protect against an increasing frequency of future floods. However, because future expected damages are discounted relative to present-day, the adaptation decisions made based on a static climate assumption are very similar to the decisions made when climate change is considered. If the goal is to optimize adaptation decision making, a focus on quantifying present-day flood risk is therefore at least as important as understanding how those risks might change under a warming climate

Addressing Financial Sustainability of Drinking Water Systems with Declining Populations: Lessons from Pennsylvania

Many cities across the United States have declined in population over recent decades, creating numerous challenges to providing safe drinking water to their residents. Such “shrinking cities” are particularly prevalent in the Northeast and upper Midwest, (i.e., the “Rust Belt”) where globalization of the economy, particularly manufacturing, has shifted employment opportunities away from these once vital centers of the American economy. Drinking water systems serving cities with declining populations face the challenge of maintaining adequate service on smaller revenues. Fewer, poorer residents are left to pay for repairing and rebuilding infrastructure that was designed to support larger populations and commercial industries. As this infrastructure ages, increases in water rates to finance the necessary maintenance of these outsized systems may become unaffordable for many customers. Proper upkeep of a city’s water infrastructure is critical to public health yet requires considerable funding that can be difficult to secure. The compounding nature of these challenges can lead to unsustainable and unaffordable water systems. This report focuses on the challenges facing water utilities in areas where population has declined in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A total of 16 water systems were broadly analyzed, with in-depth analyses of four municipal water systems in the cities of Altoona, Chester, Johnstown, and Reading. These four cases highlight some of the overall trends and complications faced by shrinking cities. Challenges to the utilities are explored and each system is quantified based on a set of financial indicators, credit rating assessments, rates and affordability metrics, borrowing behavior, and drinking water violations to fully capture current performance. An analysis of the incentives and impediments of current policies and agencies in place to assist water utilities in the financing of their endeavors is also included, as well as recommended policy modifications to better address water system challenges

Building a Federated Data Catalog with Client Implementations - Meeting Data Where It is

Much of the dialog and technical advancement surrounding the use of earth observation data is centered on data creators and providers, whose official responsibilities end at data delivery. While providers like NOAA, NASA, the USGS have taken critical steps to collect and publicly host data; they are spread across a range of data locations Requiring varying type of data access protocols. Finding, accessing, and extracting subsets of data from these varied providers is a burdensome and often challenging task that could be minimized with a automatically refreshing (“Automatic Refresh”), federated data catalog (“Federated Flat Catalog”) with common language software for access (“Programmatic Access”). This combination of a auto-refreshing catalog paired with multi language implementations (R and Python), allowed the catalog to grow its data holdings from 11 to over 2,000 data providers and share the catalog as JSON and parquet files from a github.io page. To highlight how they might be used, “Examples: Figure (A)” shows how one might extract elevation from the USGS National Map A3 account, POLARIS soils data from Duke FTP server, Landcover from the USGS LCMAP team over HTTPS, and a derived wetness index from a Lynker s3 bucket for the city of Fort Collins using the catalog and generic dap() function. In “Examples: Figure (B)”, we are able to subset 4 days of rainfall data for the state of Florida using a climatePy shortcut for TerraClimate data.</p

Sex education and the problematization of teenage pregnancy: a genealogy of law and governance

This essay provides a theoretical examination of the law regulating sex education and focuses in particular on the way in which it responds to teenage pregnancies. Adopt- ing a post-structural approach, it seeks to demystify the ’common-sense’ political consensus in Britain that the current rate of teenage pregnancies is a ’problem’, by examining how they are problematized by the social constructions, and moral and economic values and calculations within dominant political discourses. It then demonstrates how these constructions translate into conflicting solutions, or programmes, of health education and moral education. In demonstrating how these programmes are deployed to govern child sexuality, this essay identifies a variety of techniques of government, such as how different meanings and attributes are given to words like ’children’ and ’parents’ and ’health’ and ’biology’; how the knowledge and expertise of health professionals are legitimized within a particular location and how the curriculum structure itself performs a particular function. In examining the role of law throughout this process, this essay demonstrates how the law concerning sex education operates outside of a repressive juridical model and is able to connect the aspirations and aims of the state with more positive uses of power