Land Rights and Socio-Economic Development of Afro-Brazilian Communities

Law students and recent graduates who spent the Spring 2010 semester studying the land rights of Afro-Brazilian communities have submitted their final report to community leaders and Brazilian government officials, institutions, and non-government organizations engaged in the issue. Written under the supervision of Laurence R. Helfer, the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law, the report contains insights gleaned from the students’ intense study and research, both at Duke Law and on the ground in Brazil. Along with Helfer, the students spent their 2010 Spring break in Brazil as part of the seminar. They met with members of quilombos -- Afro-Brazilians communities descended from slaves -- who are seeking to secure legal title to lands they have long occupied. The students also interviewed government officials, civil society groups, anthropologists, and legal scholars who work on land rights issues in Brazil. The report outlines the difficulties Afro-Latino communities have had in obtaining land rights in Central and South America, where six countries recognize some form of collective rights. The problems are especially stark in Brazil. “Nowhere are the connections between Afro-Latinos, access to land, and socioeconomic development more apparent than in Brazil,” the report states. “Afro-Brazilians comprise 45 percent of the Brazilian population, yet constitute 69 percent of those living in extreme poverty. Land ownership remains sharply concentrated, with 3.5 percent of landowners controlling over half of the arable land.” Brazil’s 1988 constitution included a provision allowing quilombos to apply for collective title to lands where they have long resided. But implementation has been problematic. Applications filed by many quilombos are enmeshed in a bureaucratic quagmire, the report found

Visual Response: A Curriculum Unit Integrating Book Arts and Literature in the Elementary Classroom

This study focused on the integration of book arts in a fifth grade classroom. As an art teacher turned regular education teacher I was interested in the effects of integrating art into the area of reading. The curriculum unit consists of two lessons in which the students were invited to use books arts as a means of expression and comprehension. The lessons correlated with the novel Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. The results include my observations and reflections as a practicing elementary teacher

Development and evaluation of a method for enriching the writing vocabulary of children at the seventh grade level

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1946. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Reading with Understanding: A Global Expectation

Abstract: This article outlines the complexity of reading with understanding, what is required for full and deep comprehension, the state of affairs with regard to reading comprehension in developed countries, possible etiologies for low performances, and suggestions for instruction in specific skills and strategies to improve students’ demonstrated achievement in daily lessons as well as on global assessments. Recognizing the commonality of this concern among nations, a need to examine universally accepted tenets for successful reading comprehension as well as local etiologies that impede it becomes increasingly important. Such tenets are skills and strategies that address all of Irwin’s micro and macro aspects of reading for understanding as well as Bloom’s revised taxonomy for higher-level thinking

Closing the Divide: How Medical Homes Promote Equity in Health Care

Presents findings from the Commonwealth Fund 2006 Health Care Quality Survey, and demonstrates how having stable insurance, a regular provider and, in particular, a medical home, improves health care access and quality among vulnerable populations

Identification of SNPs Associated with Variola Virus Virulence

Background: Decades after the eradication of smallpox, its etiological agent, variola virus (VARV), remains a threat as a potential bioweapon. Outbreaks of smallpox around the time of the global eradication effort exhibited variable case fatality rates (CFRs), likely attributable in part to complex viral genetic determinants of smallpox virulence. We aimed to identify genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with CFR. We evaluated unadjusted and outbreak geographic location-adjusted models of single SNPs and two- and three-way interactions between SNPs. Findings: Using the data mining approach multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR), we identified five VARV SNPs in models significantly associated with CFR. The topper forming unadjusted model and adjusted models both revealed the same two-way gene-gene interaction. We discuss the biological plausibility of the influence of the SNPs identified these and other significant models on the strain-specific virulence of VARV. Conclusions: We have identified genetic loci in the VARV genome that are statistically associated with VARV virulence as measured by CFR. While our ability to infer a causal relationship between the specific SNPs identified in our analysis and VARV virulence is limited, our results suggest that smallpox severity is in part associated with VARV strain variation and that VARV virulence may be determined by multiple genetic loci. This study represents the first application of MDR to the identification of pathogen gene-gene interactions for predicting infectious disease outbreak severity

Transferable Output ASCII Data (TOAD) editor version 1.0 user's guide

The Transferable Output ASCII Data (TOAD) editor is an interactive software tool for manipulating the contents of TOAD files. The TOAD editor is specifically designed to work with tabular data. Selected subsets of data may be displayed to the user's screen, sorted, exchanged, duplicated, removed, replaced, inserted, or transferred to and from external files. It also offers a number of useful features including on-line help, macros, a command history, an 'undo' option, variables, and a full compliment of mathematical functions and conversion factors. Written in ANSI FORTRAN 77 and completely self-contained, the TOAD editor is very portable and has already been installed on SUN, SGI/IRIS, and CONVEX hosts

Engaging Medical Students in Research or Scholarly Activities as Part of the Curriculum at Indiana University

Presented as a poster at 2020 IUSM Education Day