Chapter 16- If at First You Don\u27t Succeed: Promoting a Growth Mindset by Quelling Student Fear of Failure

In response to a colleague’s dismay over failing to successfully design their invention, Thomas Edison famously replied that their efforts were not a failure, but an opportunity to learn. Edison said: I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed “to find out anything.” I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of. (Forbes, 1921) What Edison understood was the role that failure played in his ultimate success. Failure as a means to increase understanding is a powerful tool. Just as Edison harnessed failure to be a successful inventor, students can learn from failure to be successful learners. As teachers, we can facilitate this process through course design. By providing examples from two Criminal Justice courses, this chapter focuses on how students can learn from their failures

Going Public: How The Government Assumed The Authority To Prosecute In The Southern United States

This research explores factors that may have influenced the transition from private prosecution to public prosecution in Georgia during the late-eighteenth century—a transition that eventually happened in every jurisdiction in the United States. There are numerous people, both inside and outside academia, who are calling for a change to the current system of prosecution in the United States. One possible change that is being advocated is a return to a system of private prosecution. Understanding the reasons the system changed from a system of private prosecution in the first instance is important when determining whether such a return is appropriate. The little research that does exist in this area has focused on northern states. This research focuses on Georgia—a southern state—to determine if the factors that influenced the transition there were similar or dissimilar to those in the North. The nature of this research is primarily qualitative. Where the subject matter is historical, the primary method of data collection was through the compilation and analysis of historical documents. These include court records, census records, tax records, newspaper articles, personal correspondences, county histories and other histories. The findings of this research indicate that slavery abolition societies’ willingness and financial ability to prosecute slaveholders posed a threat to slaveholders that a system of private prosecution was not adequate to protect against. Public prosecution appears to have been initiated in Georgia—at least in part—to safeguard those slaveholder interests by taking away the ability of private parties to prosecute and vesting that authority in an appointed government official—the public prosecutor. The method of appointing public prosecutors in Georgia from its inception in the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century appears to have been designed to create a corps of public prosecutors that were sympathetic to slaveholder interests. There is evidence to show that public prosecutors in Georgia during this time were in fact sympathetic to slaveholder interests and that they enforced the law in a way that favored slaveholders

Show Me, Don’t Tell Me: A Picturesque View of Perceptions of Police

A positive relationship between law enforcement and the public is critical for the effective operation of the agency and continued safety of the community. The public’s perception of law enforcement officers is one indication of the nature of that relationship. Past research on perception of the police has used questionnaires to untangle how the public views officers. This research uses an alternative method to measure the public’s perceptions of the police by asking respondents to draw a picture of a police officer. By analyzing the drawings, it can be seen what characteristics people identify with law enforcement. This study analyzed the drawings of 443 respondents. The findings show that there are differences in perceptions of the police based on the respondent’s gender and race, but not age. Other findings show that female respondents are likely to draw female officers, but male respondents are not. Items included in the drawings (e.g., a badge, gun, facial hair) were also examined. Future research using this method of measuring perceptions of the police with different demographic groups will help us more fully understand the public’s insight into law enforcement

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationN-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors are members of the ionotropic glutamate receptor family that have critical functions in neural plasticity as well as a number of nervous system pathologies. NMDA receptors have a great deal of diversity in the subtypes expressed in different regions of the nervous system throughout the course of development. A greater understanding of NMDA receptor functioning in the nervous system is therefore highly desirable to researchers and clinicians, but this understanding is limited by the current set of selective pharmacological tools. The goal of the work in this dissertation is to gain a greater understanding of how highly selective NMDA receptor antagonists can be developed from a distinct group of peptides derived from the venom of marine cone snails known as the Conantokins, natural products that block NMDA receptors in a subtype-selective manner. The work in this dissertation aims to further this objective through three separate approaches. In Chapter 2, a novel conantokin, Conantokin-Br, is functionally characterized, and structure-activity relationship studies are performed to identify sequence determinants of subtype selectivity. In Chapter 3, NMDA receptor NR2 subunit chimeras are generated and used to identify determinants of selectivity towards Conantokin-R and ConantokinRl-B on the glutamate binding subdomains of the NR2 subunits. In Chapter 4 the selective conantokin ConantokinRl-B is used to identify NR2B-containing NMDA receptor subtypes present in dissociated Ventral Respiratory Column cells. In Chapter 5, these results are summarized, and the overall significance of the work is described. It is hoped that the experiments performed in this work will one day lead to highly selective compounds that will further the frontiers of investigating the underlying functions and therapeutic potential of targeting NMDA receptors

The Advent of University-Level Packaging Scholarship: The Time, the Place and the People

In 1952, Michigan State College (MSC), now Michigan State University (MSU), was the first university in the world to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in Packaging. Other universities had previously offered related courses like canning (as part of a food science degree) or military packaging (in wartime), but MSU was the first to propose packaging as its own academic field of scholarship. Other universities followed, sharing faculty and curriculum models developed at MSU. As a result, graduates’ careers in packaging now have a higher professional status, and universities play a key role in developing our international community of packaging scholars. Sixty-five years later, the purpose of this manuscript is to explore the unique circumstances that led to the creation of the Michigan State University School of Packaging. This historical manuscript documents the convergence of the time, place and people, and it shows MSU’s role in cultivating packaging scholarship around the world

Play and Creativity

Can students learn to be more creative? Creativity may not be a matter of learning but of unlearning. We have in us a natural innate built-in drive designed to push us to learn and experience important principles of creativity, things like; curiosity, discovery, exploration, experimentation, communicating, and socializing. This instinctive drive is called play. Play attributes are like creative attributes but are not sufficiently comprehensive as to be considered synonymous. What can be learned from play and what can be unlearned from our training to be more creative. It is time to push back and provide opportunities for unlearning those things that limit our creativity and relearn those important attributes gained through principles of play

Modularity, Noise and natural selection

Most biological systems are formed by component parts that to some degree are inter-related. Groups of parts that are more associated among themselves and are relatively autonomous from others are called modules. One of the consequences of modularity is that biological systems usually present an unequal distribution of the genetic variation among variables. Estimating the covariance matrix that describes these systems is a difficult problem due to a number of factors such as poor sample sizes and measurement errors. We show that this problem will be exacerbated whenever matrix inversion is required, as in directional selection reconstruction analysis. We explore the consequences of varying degrees of modularity and signal-to-noise ratio on selection reconstruction. We then present and test the efficiency of available methods for controlling noise in matrix estimates. In our simulations, controlling matrices for noise vastly improves the reconstruction of selection gradients. We also perform an analysis of selection gradients reconstruction over a New World Monkeys skull database in order to illustrate the impact of noise on such analyses. Noise- controlled estimates render far more plausible interpretations that are in full agreement with previous results

Habits of Mind: Designing Courses for Student Success

Although content knowledge remains at the heart of college teaching and learning, forward-thinking instructors recognize that we must also provide 21st-century college students with transferable skills (sometimes called portable intellectual abilities) to prepare them for their futures (Vazquez, 2020; Ritchhart, 2015; Venezia & Jaeger, 2013; Hazard, 2012). To “grow their capacity as efficacious thinkers to navigate and thrive in the face of unprecedented change” (Costa et al., 2023), students must learn and improve important study skills and academic dispositions throughout their educational careers. If we do not focus on skills-building in college courses, students will not be prepared for the challenges that await them after they leave institutions of higher education. If students are not prepared for these postsecondary education challenges, then it is fair to say that college faculty have failed them

The Terebridae and teretoxins: Combining phylogeny and anatomy for concerted discovery of bioactive compounds

The Conoidea superfamily, comprised of cone snails, terebrids, and turrids, is an exceptionally promising group for the discovery of natural peptide toxins. The potential of conoidean toxins has been realized with the distribution of the first Conus (cone snail) drug, Prialt (ziconotide), an analgesic used to alleviate chronic pain in HIV and cancer patients. Cone snail toxins (conotoxins) are highly variable, a consequence of a high mutation rate associated to duplication events and positive selection. As Conus and terebrids diverged in the early Paleocene, the toxins from terebrids (teretoxins) may demonstrate highly divergent and unique functionalities. Recent analyses of the Terebridae, a largely distributed family with more than 300 described species, indicate they have evolutionary and pharmacological potential. Based on a three gene (COI, 12S and 16S) molecular phylogeny, including ~50 species from the West-Pacific, five main terebrid lineages were discriminated: two of these lineages independently lost their venom apparatus, and one venomous lineage was previously unknown. Knowing the phylogenetic relationships within the Terebridae aids in effectively targeting divergent lineages with novel peptide toxins. Preliminary results indicate that teretoxins are similar in structure and composition to conotoxins, suggesting teretoxins are an attractive line of research to discover and develop new therapeutics that target ion channels and receptors. Using conotoxins as a guideline, and innovative natural products discovery strategies, such as the Concerted Discovery Strategy, the potential of the Terebridae and their toxins are explored as a pioneering pharmacological resource

Characterization of the Conus bullatus genome and its venom-duct transcriptome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The venomous marine gastropods, cone snails (genus <it>Conus</it>), inject prey with a lethal cocktail of conopeptides, small cysteine-rich peptides, each with a high affinity for its molecular target, generally an ion channel, receptor or transporter. Over the last decade, conopeptides have proven indispensable reagents for the study of vertebrate neurotransmission. <it>Conus bullatus </it>belongs to a clade of <it>Conus </it>species called <it>Textilia</it>, whose pharmacology is still poorly characterized. Thus the genomics analyses presented here provide the first step toward a better understanding the enigmatic <it>Textilia </it>clade.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have carried out a sequencing survey of the <it>Conus bullatus </it>genome and venom-duct transcriptome. We find that conopeptides are highly expressed within the venom-duct, and describe an <it>in silico </it>pipeline for their discovery and characterization using RNA-seq data. We have also carried out low-coverage shotgun sequencing of the genome, and have used these data to determine its size, genome-wide base composition, simple repeat, and mobile element densities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results provide the first global view of venom-duct transcription in any cone snail. A notable feature of <it>Conus bullatus </it>venoms is the breadth of A-superfamily peptides expressed in the venom duct, which are unprecedented in their structural diversity. We also find SNP rates within conopeptides are higher compared to the remainder of <it>C. bullatus </it>transcriptome, consistent with the hypothesis that conopeptides are under diversifying selection.</p