The Shifting Gears Approach to Systems Change

Evaluates the Shifting Gears initiative to strengthen state postsecondary, adult basic education, and skills development systems through data, policy change, engagement, and communications. Focuses on the logic model and the policy agenda and action plan

Strengthening State Financial Aid Policies for Low-Income Working Adults

Explains the need to expand state financial aid programs to help the working poor enroll in college. Recommends funding new aid for working adults as well as strengthening existing aid to meet their needs, and describes recent state initiatives

Improving Student Success by Strengthening Developmental Education in Community Colleges: The Role of State Policy

Outlines the need to strengthen community college students' basic English and math skills as required for college courses in order to meet workforce needs. Describes promising approaches to improving developmental education and recommends state policies

Exploring the Roper wave function in Lattice QCD

Using a correlation matrix analysis consisting of a variety of smearings, the CSSM Lattice collaboration has successfully isolated states associated with the Roper resonance and other "exotic" excited states such as the $\Lambda(1405)$ on the lattice at near-physical pion masses. We explore the nature of the Roper by examining the eigenvectors that arise from the variational analysis, demonstrating that the Roper state is dominated by the $\chi_1$ nucleon interpolator and only poorly couples to $\chi_2.$ By examining the probability distribution of the Roper on the lattice, we find a structure consistent with a constituent quark model. In particular, the Roper $d$-quark wave function contains a single node consistent with a $2S$ state. A detailed comparison with constituent quark model wave functions is carried out, validating the approach of accessing these states by constructing a variational basis composed of different levels of fermion source and sink smearing.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, German

Is intra-abdominal hypertension a missing factor that drives multiple organ dysfunction syndrome?

In a recent issue of Critical Care, Cheng and colleagues conducted a rabbit model study that demonstrated that intra-abdominal hypertension (IAH) may damage both gut anatomy and function. With only 6 hours of IAH at 25 mmHg, these authors observed an 80% reduction in mucosal blood flow, an exponential increase in mucosal permeability, and erosion and necrosis of the jejunal villi. Such dramatic findings should remind all caring for the critically ill that IAH may severely damage the normal gut barrier functions and thus may be reasonably expected to facilitate bacterial and mediator translocation. The potential contribution of IAH as a confounding factor in the efficacy of selective decontamination of the digestive tract should be considered

Wave Functions of the Proton Ground State in the Presence of a Uniform Background Magnetic Field in Lattice QCD

We calculate the probability distributions of quarks in the ground state of the proton, and how they are affected in the presence of a constant background magnetic field. We focus on wave functions in the Landau and Coulomb gauges. We observe the formation of a scalar u-d diquark clustering. The overall distortion of the quark probability distribution under a very large magnetic field, as demanded by the quantisation conditions on the field, is quite small. The effect is to elongate the distributions along the external field axis while localizing the remainder of the distribution.Comment: 15 pages, 18 figure

A community in transition: Analysis of health and well‐being in people living during and following aridification

This paper considers skeletal and dental lesions to assess the effects of aridification on two skeletal samples from the Bronze Age in what is now the United Arab Emirates (UAE), located on the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula. This paper hypothesized that the sample from Qarn al-Harf (QAH) Tomb 6 would show a greater prevalence of skeletal and dental lesions in comparison with that from QAH Tomb 5, because QAH Tomb 6 dates to a period of aridification when compared with the wetter Wadi Suq period (~2000 B.C.). The skeletal remains from two tombs from QAH cemetery are studied: one dated to the transition period from the Umm an-Nar to Wadi Suq period (~2000 B.C.) (Tomb 6, n = 141) and one Wadi Suq period tomb (Tomb 5, n = 44; 2000–1600 B.C.). Skeletal and dental lesions, including carious lesions, antemortem tooth loss, dental enamel hypoplasia, periosteal new bone formation, cribra orbitalia, and porotic hyperostosis, were recorded and used to assess differential lived experience. Findings from the two tombs are compared with five contemporary sites of the Umm an-Nar and Wadi Suq periods. Fisher's exact tests found more statistically significant differences in the prevalence of cribra orbitalia (p = 0.0050) and non-adult mortality (p = 0.0118) for the QAH Tomb 6 skeletal sample than that from QAH Tomb 5. No other skeletal or dental lesions were significantly different according to Fisher's exact tests. While not significant, periosteal new bone formation rates in QAH 6 in conjunction with cribra orbitalia rates suggest individuals were experiencing stressors that were not impacting QAH Tomb 5 individuals. Skeletal and dental lesion rates are not directly attributable to climate change; however, we argue that intense aridification around 2000 B.C. caused desiccated crops and an increased reliance on marine sources for QAH Tomb 6. This reliance likely promoted nutritionally deficient diets manifesting as observed higher rates of cribra orbitalia and periosteal new bone formation

Accessing High Momentum States In Lattice QCD

Two measures are defined to evaluate the coupling strength of smeared interpolating operators to hadronic states at a variety of momenta. Of particular interest is the extent to which strong overlap can be obtained with individual high-momentum states. This is vital to exploring hadronic structure at high momentum transfers on the lattice and addressing interesting phenomena observed experimentally. We consider a novel idea of altering the shape of the smeared operator to match the Lorentz contraction of the probability distribution of the high-momentum state, and show a reduction in the relative error of the two-point function by employing this technique. Our most important finding is that the overlap of the states becomes very sharp in the smearing parameters at high momenta and fine tuning is required to ensure strong overlap with these states.Comment: 10 page