Do Low Income Youth of Color See "The Bigger Picture" When Discussing Type 2 Diabetes: A Qualitative Evaluation of a Public Health Literacy Campaign.

As Type 2 diabetes spikes among minority and low-income youth, there is an urgent need to tackle the drivers of this preventable disease. The Bigger Picture (TBP) is a counter-marketing campaign using youth-created, spoken-word public service announcements (PSAs) to reframe the epidemic as a socio-environmental phenomenon requiring communal action, civic engagement and norm change. METHODS:We examined whether and how TBP PSAs advance health literacy among low-income, minority youth. We showed nine PSAs, asking individuals open-ended questions via questionnaire, then facilitating a focus group to reflect upon the PSAs. RESULTS:Questionnaire responses revealed a balance between individual vs. public health literacy. Some focused on individual responsibility and behaviors, while others described socio-environmental forces underlying risk. The focus group generated a preponderance of public health literacy responses, emphasizing future action. Striking sociopolitical themes emerged, reflecting tensions minority and low-income youth experience, such as entrapment vs. liberation. CONCLUSION:Our findings speak to the structural barriers and complexities underlying diabetes risk, and the ability of spoken word medium to make these challenges visible and motivate action. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS:Delivering TBP content to promote interactive reflection has potential to change behavioral norms and build capacity to confront the social, economic and structural factors that influence behaviors

Cyber-Republicanism

In 1787 at the dawn of our nation, the Founding Fathers were embroiled in a raging debate over the role citizens and special interest groups should play in our political system. The Founding Fathers viewed influence from interest groups as a threat to government decision making, but they differed in their responses to this perceived problem. Proponents of republicanism, one of the dominant conceptions of politics at that time, adopted an optimistic approach. They anticipated that government leaders and citizens, guided by their education and civic virtue, would not allow factional tyranny to flourish. This republican optimism continues to markedly influence ongoing debates about the ability of rent-seeking actors to influence or “capture” government policymakers today. This Article examines how the revolution in social media communications reshapes the centuries-old debate about capture. I argue that social media communications hold the potential to create two fundamental, but previously overlooked, benefits for our government system. Social media sites can create breeding grounds for so-called republican moments—periods in which an agitated public overcomes the power of special interest groups—to arise. This is true even though research suggests that social media communications tend to be shallow and unreliable. The social media age also holds the potential to upgrade the relationships between citizens, government actors, and special interest groups during periods of politics-as-usual, the periods between republican moments. The threat of a viral uprising can motivate government actors and special interest groups to listen more closely to public concerns. It can further entice them to spend more resources on educating the public about issues of national, regional, and local concern. Such dialogue and education promotes the development of the republicans’ utopian citizenry—citizens instilled with education and civic virtue. These two phenomena have profound implications for a variety of issues in public policy and government affairs

Pathfinder Lander Rover Recharge System, and MARCO POLO Controls and ACME Regolith Feed System Controls and Integration

This project stems from the Exploration, Research, and Technology Directorate (UB) Projects Division, and one of their main initiatives is the "Journey to Mars". Landing on the surface of Mars which is millions of miles away is an incredibly large challenge. The terrain is covered in boulders, deep canyons, volcanic mountains, and spotted with sand dunes. The robotic lander is a kind of spacecraft with multiple purposes. One purpose is to be the protective shell for the Martian rover and absorb the impact from the landing forces; another purpose is to be a place where the rovers can come back to, actively communicate with, and recharge their batteries from. Rovers have been instrumental to the Journey to Mars initiative. They have been performing key research on the terrain of the red planet, trying to unlock the mysteries of the land for over a decade. The rovers that will need charging will not all have the same kind of internal battery either. RASSOR batteries may differ from the PbAC batteries inside Red Rover's chassis. NASA has invested heavily in the exploration of the surface of Mars. A driving force behind further exploration is the need for a more efficient operation of Martian rovers. One way is to reduce the weight as much as possible to reduce power consumption given the same mission parameters. In order to reduce the mass of the rovers, power generation, communication, and sample analysis systems currently onboard Martian rovers can be moved to a stationary lander deck. Positioning these systems from the rover to the Lander deck allows a taskforce of smaller, lighter rovers to perform the same tasks currently performed by or planned for larger rovers. A major task in transferring these systems to a stationary lander deck is ensuring that power can be transferred to the rovers

Integrating the strengths of the web-based and traditional models of teaching

The Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate and created new paradigms for innovation in education. This paper discusses the pedagogical issues conforming to constructivism that educators may consider in the delivery of instruction in post-secondary vocational education. The roles of both the students and teachers must be redefined in the new paradigm. An intellectually exciting learning experience can happen in a classroom, a laboratory or the cyberspace. The art of combining the strengths of classroom face-to-face teaching and Web-based self-directed instruction will be a challenge to educators. In addition to management support and a fair reward system as drivers for improvement, success in the integration of information technology in teaching will rely on teams of teachers who are committed to learning, experimenting, collaborating and sharing their knowledge

Local Norms and Gifted and Talented Identification in Arkansas: Can it Help Improve Student Diversity?

In the past decades, the gifted and talented (G/T) community has wrestled with an important question about improving equity: How can we best use research to increase student diversity in G/T education? There are many suggestions for answering this question but using local norms, where students are selected based on comparisons with others from a similar school context using traditional measures, has attracted much attention. In some districts, using local norms and universal screening has greatly improved student diversity, whereas, in other districts, the findings have been unclear. Thus it seems useful to study local contexts. In this study, we leveraged Arkansas’ administrative data to answer a similar question: “Would using district/school assessment norms improve student diversity in G/T identification in Arkansas?” We found no consistent evidence that using district/school norms would improve racial and programmatic diversity (i.e., special education students, English language learners, and students from low-come and minority backgrounds). We still urge school districts, however, to consider employing local norms in identifying G/T students as it would limit human errors in identification and increase the alignment between students’ academic aptitude and G/T services, especially for students of racial and demographic groups that the current system has identified successfully

Gifted Education in Arkansas: A Longitudinal Study of Gifted Status and Academic Growth

This study assesses the effectiveness of gifted programs in Arkansas by leveraging student-level achievement and demographic data of students who scored at or above the 95th percentile on state assessments in third grade. We follow five independent cohorts of these high-achieving students through eighth grade and examine the difference between the longer-term academic performance of the students that were exposed to gifted and talented services compared to similarly high achieving peers that were not identified as gifted. Using regression analyses controlling for student and district characteristics, we find that students who received gifted services demonstrated statistically significantly greater academic growth on mathematics and literacy achievement across the time period examined than similarly high achieving peers that were not identified as gifted. The study is among the few research studies conducted on gifted education programs across the state. We discuss these findings in the context of the gifted programming literature and conclude with policy suggestions

Coccidioidomycosis Complement Fixation Titer Trends in the Age of Antifungals.

Coccidioidomycosis is associated with a broad spectrum of illness severity, ranging from asymptomatic or self-limited pulmonary infection to life-threatening manifestations of disseminated disease. Serologic studies before the widespread availability of antifungals established current understanding of serologic kinetics and dynamics. Chart histories and complement fixation (CF) titer trends were analyzed for 434 antifungal-treated coccidioidomycosis patients, who were classified by three infectious disease physicians as having either pulmonary uncomplicated coccidioidomycosis (PUC) (n = 248), pulmonary chronic coccidioidomycosis (PCC) (n = 64), disseminated coccidioidomycosis (DC) not including meningitis (n = 86), or coccidioidal meningitis (CM) (n = 36). The median maximal CF titers were 1:4 for PUC patients, 1:24 for PCC patients, 1:128 for DC patients, and 1:32 for CM patients. Approximately 25.4% of PUC patients, 6.2% of PCC patients, 2.3% of DC patients, and 8.3% of CM patients did not develop detectable titers during the study period. Maximal titers developed a mean of 31 days (95% confidence interval [CI], 13 to 50 days) after initial serologic positivity, with no significant differences between groups. Serologic recurrence occurred in 9% of PUC patients, 36% of PCC patients, 50% of DC patients, and 52% of CM patients. Median titer improvement rates were 91 days/dilution for PUC patients, 112 days/dilution for PCC patients, 136 days/dilution for DC patients, and 146 days/dilution for CM patients. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that CF testing retains moderate classification value for disseminated infections (area under the curve [AUC], 0.82 [95% CI, 0.78 to 0.87]) and complicated infections (AUC, 0.82 [95% CI, 0.77 to 0.86]). A suitable cutoff value for complicated infections is ≥1:32. Findings update serologic parameters that are relevant for clinical assessment of coccidioidomycosis patients in the triazole era

Responses of Neurons in the Rat\u27s Inferior Colliculus to a Sound are Affected by Another Sound in a Temporal- and Spatial-Dependent Manner

In a natural acoustic environment, our perception to a sound of interest can be affected by an interfering sound. To understand the neural bases of this phenomenon, we used rats to study sound-driven activities in the auditory midbrain, namely the inferior colliculus. As a major central auditory processing center, the inferior colliculus receives a lion’s share of convergent inputs from other auditory structures on both sides of the brain. The neurons of the inferior colliculus are predominantly excited by stimulations to the contralateral ear and inhibited by stimulations to the ipsilateral ear. Integration of these excitatory-inhibitory inputs enable neurons in the structure to compare spatial-temporal information carried by a sound. Based on existing findings, we hypothesized that neural responses in the inferior colliculus to a sound can be suppressed by a preceding sound in a train of stimulus, with the suppressive effect being dependent on the temporal-spatial relationships between the sounds. We recorded local-field potentials from an ensemble of neurons and action potential discharges from individual neurons in the inferior colliculus in response to a pair of leading-trailing tones. The trailing tone was presented at the best frequency of the ensemble of neurons or the individual neuron and was also presented in front of the ear that was contralateral to the site of recording. The leading sound was presented either above or below the best frequency and was either colocalized with the trailing sound or spatially separated from the trailing sound. Results showed that the responses to the trailing tone were suppressed by the leading tone. The suppressive effect was reduced when 1) the leading sound was spatially separated from the trailing sound, and 2) when the two sounds had a large time gap. The effect of spatial separation was evident in neurons that generated transient firing. It is likely that these neurons are important for psychoacoustical phenomena such as spatial release from masking. Results have provided new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying recognition and localization of sounds in a complex acoustic environment

Measuring Adaptive Behaviors in Individuals with Autism Enrolled in Project-Based Therapy

As the number of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) entering adulthood increases, this population faces limited resources to foster independent living. Therefore, it is crucial to explore innovative interventions that help this population develop the skills necessary to live more independently. This exploratory prospective cohort study evaluated the effectiveness of Autistry Studios, which focuses on improving adaptive behavior skills for adults and adolescents with ASD using project-based therapy. The study used the Brief Adaptive Behavior Scale (BABS), a novel quantitative assessment, to track the development of adaptive behaviors in individuals with ASD within the domains of Executive Functioning (EF), Socialization (SOC), and Self-Regulation (SR). The BABS specifically measures Frequency of adaptive behaviors (FRQ), the Lowest Level of Assistance (LoALow) required, and the Highest Level of Assistance (LoAHigh) required while engaging in project-based therapy. Paired-samples t-tests compared the mean of BABS scores for 11 participants across nine sessions at Autistry Studios. LoALow and LoAHigh Total scores improved significantly from session one to nine. Additional analyses found significant differences in the LoALow and LoAHigh scores in the domains of EF and SOC. Cohen’s d effect sizes for the difference between session one and nine for LoALow and LoAHigh scores were large to very large, suggesting practical improvement in all domains. The results indicate that Autistry’s pre-vocational, project-based therapy program is effective in improving adaptive behavior skills in adults and adolescents with ASD, as measured by the BABS assessment