Life in Communities

Given the widely recognized danger the world’s languages face at the present time, there has been a major expansion of language documentation and linguistic description, which requires what has been traditionally referred to as linguistic fieldwork. We generally prepare our students to undertake this work through field methods courses but “[w]hile we generally do a very thorough job of teaching how to elicit and analyze data, we often forget to tell them that there is a personal and practical side to fieldwork that can very well derail their research if they are not prepared for it.” (Macauley, 2004:194). The overall goal of this workshop is, therefore, to familiarize the students with the personal and practical dimensions of fieldwork.2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language Research – ALASKA Alaska Native Language Cente

How are Precipitation Dynamics Changing in the Houston Area Under a Warming Climate?

Hurricane Harvey was devastating to the Upper Texas Coast. The storm flooded a third of Houston, caused 125 billion dollars of damages, and affected 13 million people. What made Harvey so devastating was the amount of rainfall, Harvey broke records for the amount of precipitation in one storm. The 1 in 1000 year flood event delivered 51.88 inches of rain. Understanding the distribution of rainfall is the first step to take if Houston is to be better prepared for similar storms. If we are to better prepare Houston for similar storms, we must understand Houston’s changing climate. Our project, “How is precipitation dynamics changing in the Houston area under a warming climate?”, will analyze the characteristics of precipitation since 1998. I will study two decades worth of variables:amount, duration, intensity, and spatial distribution. Models will be constructed illustrating trends in each of these variables over time. Sophisticated data analysis software is essential to methodically analyze all of this information, namely Igor. My main sources of data is the Harris County Flood Warning System (HCFWS) has readily available data on Houston’s precipitation. The HCFWS has 100+ rain gauge stations, these are remote monitoring devices that routinely upload data directly to the Harris County Flood Warning System. Additionally, the Southern Regional Climate Center, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have ancillary data. Both sources have huge repositories of data on precipitation and its characteristics on the Houston metropolitan area.Honors CollegeEarth and Atmospheric Sciences, Department o

Common Ground: Lessons Learned From Five States That Reduced Juvenile Confinement By More Than Half

After decades of expanding correctional populations in the United States, there is a growing awareness that we need to end the era of over-incarceration. Primarily this realization has formed around the adult correctional population, with less attention paid by the media or the general public to young people who are confined for delinquent behavior or prior to adjudication. This is perhaps because of the small percentage of youth that makeup the total incarcerated population: in 2010, approximately 2,270,100 adults were incarcerated in the U.S., compared to 70,792 youth.Juvenile corrections is a multi-faceted and complex topic with policies and practices that vary from state to state and sometimes from courthouse to courthouse. Finding uniform measures and comparable data can be challenging. For that reason, the current report takes the snapshot approach; examining states within a set time period across a limited number of variable

The forkhead box transcription factors, FKH1 and FKH2, along with the Anaphase-Promoting Complex regulate Saccharomyces cerevisiae lifespan

Forkhead box (Fox) transcription factors have a conserved function in regulating lifespan and onset of age related disease in organisms from worms to mammals. Key functions in this process are the regulation of the cell cycle, oxidative stress response, and apoptosis. A complex post-translational code from nutrient, growth factor, and stress induced signals regulates Fox activity, target specificity, stability, and subcellular localization; however, many of the Fox mechanisms and targets responsible for regulating lifespan remain elusive. The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a powerful model for unravelling the genetic mechanism and pathways. Yeast encodes four Fox transcription factors, Fkh1, Fkh2, Fhl1 and Hcm1, and their roles in aging are only recently being examined. In this study, we utilized the chronological lifespan and oxidative stress assays, to explore evolutionary conservation of lifespan regulation in two of the yeast Fox orthologs, FKH1 and FKH2. We observed that deletion of both FKH genes in S. cerevisiae, impedes normal lifespan and stress resistance. Furthermore, fkh1Δ fkh2Δ cells were found to be non-responsive to caloric restriction, an intervention that extends lifespan from yeast to mammals. Conversely, increased expression of the FKHs leads to extended lifespan and improved stress resistance. Additionally, we show the Anaphase-Promoting Complex (APC) genetically interacts with the FKHs, likely functioning in a linear pathway under normal conditions, as fkh1Δ fkh2Δ post-mitotic survival defect is epistatic to that observed in apc5CA mutants. However, under stress conditions, post-mitotic survival is dramatically impaired in apc5CA fkh1Δ fkh2Δ beyond either apc5CA or fkh1Δ fkh2Δ. Finally, we observed that both the FKHs and APC genetically interact with nutrient-responsive lifespan-regulating kinase encoding genes SCH9 and TOR1. This study establishes that the yeast FKHs play a role as regulators of lifespan in yeast and identifies the APC as a novel component of this mechanism. We speculate this involves combined regulation of stress response, genomic stability, and cell cycle