Connecting communities - Contextualising literacies

Over time, the Meanjin local council of ALEA, has been running a series of Key Teacher inservice days for teachers in the Brisbane and Ipswich area, and more recently further north in Yandina for Sunshine Coast teachers. Teachers who are ALEA members or whose schools are institutional members are able to attend up to three of these inservice days each year for a nominal cost. In the first part of this article Beryl Exley reviews the sessions presented on Friday 17 October, 2003 at Ipswich, a region mentored by ALEA Queensland State President, Nikki King. The sessions all dealt with the theme of connecting communities and contextualising literacies. In the second part Sandra Wright, a key teacher at Hatton Vale State School, details the experiences of her school’s attempt to connect with its community and to contextualise children’s multiple literacies

Vascular anatomy of the tibiofibular syndesmosis

This Open Access Publication is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons@Becker. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ope

Scaling Community Health Coalitions: The Well Connected Communities Pilot Initiative

We outline the process and development of the Well Connected Communities health initiative as undertaken in three Utah communities. This transformative community-focused alternative to addressing public health issues through Extension situates local communities as the origin for health decision making. The initiative recognizes the need for varied community statuses (i.e., planner, implementer, and innovator) based on varying levels of readiness and diversity of populations. We concluded that the Utah Well Connected Communities initiative aligns well with the 2014 Extension Committee on Organization and Policy National Framework for Health and Wellness. Replication requirements and implications for other Extension programs are presented

Lower extremity-specific measures of disability and outcomes in orthopaedic surgery

Outcome measures may consist of simple questions or they may be more complex instruments that evaluate multiple interrelated domains that influence patient function. Outcome measures should be relevant to patients, easy to use, reliable, valid, and responsive to clinical changes. The Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand score can be used to measure disability for any region of the upper limb. Joint and disease-specific outcome measures have been developed for the shoulder, the elbow, and the wrist and hand. Many of these measures would benefit from further research into their validity, reliability, and optimal applicability

DEFINING AND REDUCING WILDLIFE HAZARDS TO AVIATION IN THE USA

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC), through an interagency agreement with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), conducts a national research program to define and reduce bird and other wildlife hazards to aircraft. The goal is to provide the FAA and airports nationwide with a scientific foundation for policies and recommendations related to wildlife and aviation safety. Research tasks conducted by NWRC under the agreement include: 1) investigations of habitat management and land-use practices on and near airports to reduce bird activity; 2) development and evaluation of bird repellent and frightening methods for airports; 3) management and analysis of the National Wildlife Strike Database for civil aviation; and 4) development of publications, including a manual on wildlife hazard management, for use by airport operators nationwide. The research, coordinated by NWRC’s Sandusky, Ohio Field Station, has resulted in over 100 scientific publications since 1992. Recent highlights include 1) development of a wildlife strike database for civil aviation with about 28,000 strike reports, 1990-1999; 2) publication of a report, based on analyses of data in the bird strike database, which indicated wildlife collisions with aircraft cost U.S. civil aviation over $300 million/year, 1990-1998; 3) partnership with private industry to develop chemical repellents for use against Canada geese on airports; 4) development of management program at JFK International Airport, New York, that resulted in a 90% reduction in gull-aircraft collisions; and 5) publication of a comprehensive manual for airport personnel entitled “Wildlife Hazard Management at Airports”

A Radial Velocity Study of Composite-Spectra Hot Subdwarf Stars with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

Many hot subdwarf stars show composite spectral energy distributions indicative of cool main sequence companions. Binary population synthesis (BPS) models demonstrate such systems can be formed via Roche lobe overflow or common envelope evolution but disagree on whether the resulting orbital periods will be long (years) or short (days). Few studies have been carried out to assess the orbital parameters of these spectroscopic composite binaries; current observations suggest the periods are long. To help address this problem, we selected fifteen moderately-bright (V~13) hot subdwarfs with F-K dwarf companions and monitored their radial velocities (RVs) from January 2005 to July 2008 using the bench-mounted Medium Resolution Spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). Here we describe the details of our observing, reduction, and analysis techniques and present preliminary results for all targets. By combining the HET data with recent observations from the Mercator telescope, we are able to calculate precise orbital solutions for three systems using more than 6 years of observations. We also present an up-to-date period histogram for all known hot subdwarf binaries, which suggests those with F-K main sequence companions tend to have orbital periods on the order of several years. Such long periods challenge the predictions of conventional BPS models, although a larger sample is needed for a thorough assessment of the models' predictive success. Lastly, one of our targets has an eccentric orbit, implying some composite-spectrum systems might have formerly been hierarchical triple systems, in which the inner binary merged to create the hot subdwarf.Comment: Published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 758, Issue 1, article id. 58 (2012). References updated and Equation (5) corrected. 12 pages, 5 figures, 5 table

Book Reviews

Book Reviews: the Water of Life, a Jungian Journey Through Hawaiian Myth by Rita Knipe; Before the Horror: the Population of Hawai'i on the Eve of Western Contact by David E. Stannard; Observations and Interpretation of Hawaiian Volcanism and Seismicity 1779-1955. An Annotated Bibliography and Subject Index by Thomas L. Wright and Taeko Jane Takahashi; An Account of Two Voyages to the South Seas, to Australia, New Zealand, Oceania 1826-1829 in the Corvette Astrolabe; and to the Straits of Magellan, Chile, Oceania, Southeast Asia, Australia, Antarctica, New Zealand, and the Torres Strait 1837-1840 in the Corvettes Astrolabe and Zelee. by Jules S. C. Dumont d'Urville, Translated and edited by Helen Rosenman; Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii by Patricia Grimshaw; Journal of Stephen Reynolds Edited by Pauline King; Moramona: the Mormons in Hawaii by R. Lanier Britsch; the Peopling of Hawai'i by Eleanor C. Nordyk

Functional characterization of C. elegans Y-box-binding proteins reveals tissue-specific functions and a critical role in the formation of polysomes

The cold shock domain is one of the most highly conserved motifs between bacteria and higher eukaryotes. Y-box-binding proteins represent a subfamily of cold shock domain proteins with pleiotropic functions, ranging from transcription in the nucleus to translation in the cytoplasm. These proteins have been investigated in all major model organisms except Caenorhabditis elegans. In this study, we set out to fill this gap and present a functional characterization of CEYs, the C. elegans Y-box-binding proteins. We find that, similar to other organisms, CEYs are essential for proper gametogenesis. However, we also report a novel function of these proteins in the formation of large polysomes in the soma. In the absence of the somatic CEYs, polysomes are dramatically reduced with a simultaneous increase in monosomes and disomes, which, unexpectedly, has no obvious impact on animal biology. Because transcripts that are enriched in polysomes in wild-type animals tend to be less abundant in the absence of CEYs, our findings suggest that large polysomes might depend on transcript stabilization mediated by CEY protein