By chance or by design: structures of opportunity for college-bound African Americans

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston UniversityThis exploratory qualitative study investigated the college choice processes of 25 African American college students. Individual interviews that asked the students to look back on their college choice processes during high school provided the data for the study. The goals of the study were to (1) identify the difficulties that these students encountered when searching for and applying to colleges, (2) identify the factors that helped them succeed in gaining acceptance to college, and (3) develop a model of the college choice process based on the identified factors. The findings provide understandings of the positive and negative factors that African American students may encounter in the college choice process and provide a model of the optimal process. This model is designed to help counselors in high schools and colleges change organizational arrangements and procedures, both within and between institutions, to better assist African American high school students in the transition to higher education. Other wider societal and political changes that may assist students in the transition to higher education are identified and discussed

High-Resolution Analysis of the Efficiency, Heritability, and Editing Outcomes of CRISPR/Cas9-Induced Modifications of NCED4 in Lettuce (Lactuca sativa).

CRISPR/Cas9 is a transformative tool for making targeted genetic alterations. In plants, high mutation efficiencies have been reported in primary transformants. However, many of the mutations analyzed were somatic and therefore not heritable. To provide more insights into the efficiency of creating stable homozygous mutants using CRISPR/Cas9, we targeted LsNCED4 (9-cis-EPOXYCAROTENOID DIOXYGENASE4), a gene conditioning thermoinhibition of seed germination in lettuce. Three constructs, each capable of expressing Cas9 and a single gRNA targeting different sites in LsNCED4, were stably transformed into lettuce (Lactuca sativa) cvs. Salinas and Cobham Green. Analysis of 47 primary transformants (T1) and 368 T2 plants by deep amplicon sequencing revealed that 57% of T1 plants contained events at the target site: 28% of plants had germline mutations in one allele indicative of an early editing event (mono-allelic), 8% of plants had germline mutations in both alleles indicative of two early editing events (bi-allelic), and the remaining 21% of plants had multiple low frequency mutations indicative of late events (chimeric plants). Editing efficiency was similar in both genotypes, while the different gRNAs varied in efficiency. Amplicon sequencing of 20 T1 and more than 100 T2 plants for each of the three gRNAs showed that repair outcomes were not random, but reproducible and characteristic for each gRNA. Knockouts of NCED4 resulted in large increases in the maximum temperature for seed germination, with seeds of both cultivars capable of germinating >70% at 37°. Knockouts of NCED4 provide a whole-plant selectable phenotype that has minimal pleiotropic consequences. Targeting NCED4 in a co-editing strategy could therefore be used to enrich for germline-edited events simply by germinating seeds at high temperature

The Emergence and Future of Near-Surface Geophysics

Over the past 30 years, geophysical methods have assumed a much more prominent and integral role in many investigations where subsurface features have environmental and engineering importance. In fact, the field once referred to as environmental and engineering geophysics has broadened to include other applications (e.g., archeology, forensics), and is now commonly referred to more generally as near-surface geophysics. It is difficult to precisely define near-surface geophysics, and the definition will likely depend on whom you ask. However, we define it as the use of geophysical methods to investigate the zone between the surface and hundreds of meters into the Earth\u27s crust. Applications include, but are not limited to, potable water management, engineered infrastructure and construction, site clearance, gas storage, natural-hazard mitigation, mining, forensics, and archaeology. Although the same physical principles are relevant for any target depth, the high degree of near-surface heterogeneity, rapid change in physical properties, and proximity to the free surface often dictates that dominant processes and therefore key assumptions differ between the near-surface and deeper investigations. While near-surface geophysics shares many technical and cultural attributes of oil and gas exploration, the majority of near-surface geophysicists practice under different economic drivers and conditions

Schedulability Analysis for Certification-friendly Multicore Systems

This paper presents a new schedulability test for safety-critical software undergoing a transition from single-core to multicore systems - a challenge faced by multiple industries today. Our migration model, consisting of a schedulability test and execution model, is distinguished by three aspects consistent with reducing transition cost. First, it assumes externally-driven scheduling parameters, such as periods and deadlines, remain fixed (and thus known), whereas exact computation times are not. Second, it adopts a globally synchronized conflict-free I/O model that leads to a decoupling between cores, simplifying the schedulability analysis. Third, it employs global priority assignment across all tasks on each core, irrespective of application, where budget constraints on each application ensure isolation. These properties enable us to obtain a utilization bound that places an allowable limit on total task execution times. Evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of our scheduling model over competing resource partitioning approaches, such as Periodic Server and TDMA.Ope