What Makes A Court Problem-Solving: Universal Performance Indicators for Problem-Solving Justice

This report identifies a set of universal performance indicators for specialized "problem-solving courts" and related experiments in problem-solving justice. Traditional performance indicators related to caseload and processing efficiency can assist court managers in monitoring case flow, assigning cases to judges, and adhering to budgetary and statutory due process guidelines. Yet, these indicators are ultimately limited in scope. Faced with the recent explosion of problem solving courts and other experiments seeking to address the underlying problems of litigants, victims, and communities, there is an urgent need to complement traditional court performance indicators with ones of a problem-solving nature. With funding from the State Justice Institute (SJI), the Center for Court Innovation conducted an investigation designed to achieve three purposes. The first was to establish a set of universal performance indicators against which to judge the effectiveness of specialized problem-solving courts, of which there are currently more than 3,000 nationwide. The second purpose was to develop performance indicators specific to each of the four major problem-solving court models: drug, mental health, domestic violence, and community courts. The third purpose was to assist traditional court managers by establishing a more limited set of indicators, designed to capture problem-solving activity throughout the courthouse, not only within a specialized court context

Business Meetings: A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Audio and Video Conferencing in Dispersed Teams

Increasing the effectiveness of meetings in dispersed teams is crucial to the success of many businesses today. The virtual aspect of meetings conducted with teams of people who are not in the same geographical space has the potential to create communication barriers. Although research has been done on face-to-face, audio, and video meetings, little has been done to compare the effectiveness of audio and video conferencing amongst these teams. Since effectiveness is such a subjective term, the effectiveness of the meetings will be determined by the four mediating constructs: level of multitasking, time management, participation and accomplishment. Participating in the study is a team of no more than ten employees from a Semiconductor company in southern Maine who regularly communicate with other team members in Singapore. A survey of twenty questions was created using SurveyMonkey.com, which was subsequently completed by those employees in attendance. Although the sample size was too small to run any statistical data, observations were made about general trends to explore in further research. From the data that was collected, it can be assumed that video conferencing is the more effective form of communication for dispersed teams, but requires a lot more preparation and practice than audio conferences

Senior Recital - Ellyn Porter

This recital is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Music in Music Performance. Ellyn Porter is a student of Bradley Ottesen.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1033/thumbnail.jp

Senior Recital - Ellyn Porter

This recital is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Music in Music Performance. Ellyn Porter is a student of Bradley Ottesen.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1033/thumbnail.jp

Understanding the Structural Scaling Relations of Early-Type Galaxies

We use a large suite of hydrodynamical simulations of binary galaxy mergers to construct and calibrate a physical prescription for computing the effective radii and velocity dispersions of spheroids. We implement this prescription within a semi-analytic model embedded in merger trees extracted from the Bolshoi Lambda-CDM N-body simulation, accounting for spheroid growth via major and minor mergers as well as disk instabilities. We find that without disk instabilities, our model does not predict sufficient numbers of intermediate mass early-type galaxies in the local universe. Spheroids also form earlier in models with spheroid growth via disk instabilities. Our model correctly predicts the normalization, slope, and scatter of the low-redshift size-mass and Fundamental Plane relations for early type galaxies. It predicts a degree of curvature in the Faber-Jackson relation that is not seen in local observations, but this could be alleviated if higher mass spheroids have more bottom-heavy initial mass functions. The model also correctly predicts the observed strong evolution of the size-mass relation for spheroids out to higher redshifts, as well as the slower evolution in the normalization of the Faber-Jackson relation. We emphasize that these are genuine predictions of the model since it was tuned to match hydrodynamical simulations and not these observations.Comment: Submitted to MNRA

Degradation of polypropylene by fungi Coniochaeta hoffmannii and Pleurostoma richardsiae

This study was supported by funding from the Slovenian Research Agency to Infrastructural Centre Mycosmo (MRIC UL, I0-0022) , programmes P2-0084, P4-0432, and P1-0198, project J4-2549 and L2-1830, the Young Researcher Grant to A. Cernosa, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to R. Porter (DGE-1656518) , and the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent official views of the Fulbright Program or US government. FTIR-ATR analyses were supported by funding by Xunta de Galicia (Grupos de Referencia Competitiva ED431C 2021/32) . We acknowledge the CENN Nanocenter for the use of the Confocal Raman spectrometer. EA acknowledges Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN/AEI/PID2021-123164OB-I00/FEDER Una Manera de hacer Europa).The urgent need for better disposal and recycling of plastics has motivated a search for microbes with the ability to degrade synthetic polymers. While microbes capable of metabolizing polyurethane and polyethylene terephthalate have been discovered and even leveraged in enzymatic recycling approaches, microbial degradation of additive-free polypropylene (PP) remains elusive. Here we report the isolation and characterization of two fungal strains with the potential to degrade pure PP. Twenty-seven fungal strains, many isolated from hydrocarbon contaminated sites, were screened for degradation of commercially used textile plastic. Of the candidate strains, two identified as Coniochaeta hoffmannii and Pleurostoma richardsiae were found to colonize the plastic fibers using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Further experiments probing degradation of pure PP films were performed using C. hoffmannii and P. richardsiae and analyzed using SEM, Raman spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance (FTIR-ATR). The results showed that the selected fungi were active against pure PP, with distinct differences in the bonds targeted and the degree to which each was altered. Whole genome and transcriptome sequencing was conducted for both strains and the abundance of carbohydrate active enzymes, GC content, and codon usage bias were analyzed in predicted proteomes for each. Enzymatic assays were conducted to assess each strain’s ability to degrade naturally occurring compounds as well as synthetic polymers. These investigations revealed potential adaptations to hydrocarbon-rich environments and provide a foundation for further investigation of PP degrading activity in C. hoffmannii and P. richardsiae.Slovenian Research Agency - Slovenia I0-0022, P2-0084, P4-0432, P1-0198, J4-2549, L2-1830National Science Foundation (NSF) DGE-1656518Fulbright U.S. Student ProgramU.S. Department of StateXunta de Galicia ED431C 2021/32Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN/AEI PID2021-123164OB-I00/FEDE

Clubroot

Rachel Lancaster, Caroline Donald and Ian Palmer, outline some control measures for clubroot, one of the most serious diseases of crucifers world wide

Effectiveness of speech intervention methods in children with speech delays

Speech delays in children is a common issue that can be treated by a wide variety of interventions. Our PICOT question is, in children, ages six months to thirteen years, with speech/language delays, how does the addition of innovative and supplemental interventions, compared with standard interventions alone, effect improvements in the delays. All three group members have known someone who has suffered from a speech delay, and we want to research the best possible methods to overcome that obstacle to answer our questions, we will begin to take on the task of creating and writing a systematic review. This review will include selecting, reviewing, and critically appraising a minimum of twenty primary, scientific and/or academic research articles on different speech interventions that have been utilized to help children overcome their speech delays. We are looking forward to going on this adventure of completing our very first official research project It is something that will be challenging but help us grow in our education and assist in making us better and well-rounded students

SOME POLITICS ARE STILL LOCAL: STRATEGIC POSITION TAKING IN CONGRESS & ELECTIONS

In today's congressional elections, politicians are increasingly presumed to run on the same party-driven platforms, offering voters the same choices throughout the country. Many argue that "local" issues---policy priorities important to a specific constituency---barely register. My dissertation challenges this expectation. I demonstrate that---even though House elections attend more to national issues than before---candidates still often "go local." To measure the degree to which a candidate's campaign is locally-oriented, I employ text data on policy positions extracted from campaign websites for candidates who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives across the 2018 and 2020 elections. Pairing this original data collection with a variety of methods for quantitative text analysis, I show that our theories of strategic candidate behavior must be updated to better reflect what locally-oriented campaigning looks like in today's era of nationalized politics. I go on to demonstrate that politicians who employ locally-oriented rhetoric in their campaigns carry forward this same position taking behavior into the legislative arena. This finding underscores a critical, but underemphasize, continuity between an incumbent's electoral and legislative behavior. In sum, this dissertation aims to refocus the discipline's attention in an era of nationalized expectations back towards local considerations, reminding scholars that local politics are still relevant in modern campaigns.Doctor of Philosoph