Caddo Inspired Coil Pots

When my bosses, John Handley and Alisa Steed, asked me to plan an educational program to go along with the upcoming Contemporary Caddo art show at the Cole Art Center I knew I wanted to find an art lesson to teach children. Creating is a great way to teach children about history because it invites them to take an active role in their education, rather than passively listening. After learning that traditional Caddo potters created coil pots out of clay, I knew I wanted to teach this art form to children in the community. Making coil pots requires children to learn a specific technique, but also allows for endless creative expression. It is also appropriate for all ages

Impact of emotional priming on attitudes towards AMBER Alerts in student and community samples

This experiment investigated the relationship between primed emotions and attitudes toward AMBER Alerts in samples of students and community members. Differences between respondent groups were also addressed to determine if different status (i.e., student or community member) related to responses. Respondents were 34.1% students at the University of Nevada, Reno, and 65.9% MTurk workers. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of six different conditions. Each condition had a different version of a story (i.e., the prime) involving AMBER Alerts, except for the control. Each version manipulated whether or not there was an AMBER Alert and the outcome of the abduction. Respondents answered a series of pre-test questions then read the story (prime), then answered post-test questions. Responses to the post-test questions were compared to the pre-test responses to determine if there was any change in attitudes toward AMBER Alerts. There was a significant change in respondent attitudes from the pre-test to the post-test, with the post-test scores being more positive on the responses to the AMBER Alert questions. There was also a change in emotions, as measured by the PANAS, with the level of positive emotions increasing and negative emotions decreasing, but the differences between conditions were not significant. The respondent groups were significantly different with regards to the levels of emotional change, as measured by the PANAS. Differences between respondent groups were significant on the AMBER Alert scale and the "something should be done" scale, and the results indicate a significant change in attitudes from the pre-test to the post-test. The respondent groups expressed different levels of support for the AMBER Alerts, and different levels of support for what should be done. Results have implications for psychology and criminal justice policy

Quality improvement teams, super-users, and nurse champions: a recipe for meaningful use?

Objective This study assessed whether having an electronic health record (EHR) super-user, nurse champion for meaningful use (MU), and quality improvement (QI) team leading MU implementation is positively associated with MU Stage 1 demonstration

The Proof is in the Pudding: Building a Local Repository for Online Learning Objects

Libraries are increasingly building collections of learning materials in electronic formats. As the availability grows, it becomes necessary to consider the long-term discovery, access, management, and local ownership issues inherent in the development and distribution of such collections. To address these issues, the University of Waterloo Library slow-simmered a localized repository meant to house and make discoverable library-created online learning objects for broad distribution, discovery, and reuse

Academic Status Institutional Comparisons Report

This report was distributed to Librarians' and Archivists' Association of the University of Waterloo members in advance of consultations pertaining to a potential change in employment status

The Oral and Skin Microbiomes of Captive Komodo Dragons Are Significantly Shared with Their Habitat.

Examining the way in which animals, including those in captivity, interact with their environment is extremely important for studying ecological processes and developing sophisticated animal husbandry. Here we use the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) to quantify the degree of sharing of salivary, skin, and fecal microbiota with their environment in captivity. Both species richness and microbial community composition of most surfaces in the Komodo dragon's environment are similar to the Komodo dragon's salivary and skin microbiota but less similar to the stool-associated microbiota. We additionally compared host-environment microbiome sharing between captive Komodo dragons and their enclosures, humans and pets and their homes, and wild amphibians and their environments. We observed similar host-environment microbiome sharing patterns among humans and their pets and Komodo dragons, with high levels of human/pet- and Komodo dragon-associated microbes on home and enclosure surfaces. In contrast, only small amounts of amphibian-associated microbes were detected in the animals' environments. We suggest that the degree of sharing between the Komodo dragon microbiota and its enclosure surfaces has important implications for animal health. These animals evolved in the context of constant exposure to a complex environmental microbiota, which likely shaped their physiological development; in captivity, these animals will not receive significant exposure to microbes not already in their enclosure, with unknown consequences for their health. IMPORTANCE Animals, including humans, have evolved in the context of exposure to a variety of microbial organisms present in the environment. Only recently have humans, and some animals, begun to spend a significant amount of time in enclosed artificial environments, rather than in the more natural spaces in which most of evolution took place. The consequences of this radical change in lifestyle likely extend to the microbes residing in and on our bodies and may have important implications for health and disease. A full characterization of host-microbe sharing in both closed and open environments will provide crucial information that may enable the improvement of health in humans and in captive animals, both of which experience a greater incidence of disease (including chronic illness) than counterparts living under more ecologically natural conditions

Astrophysical Lasers Operating in optical Fe II Lines Lines in Stellar Ejecta of Eta Carinae

After the discovery of space masers based on OH radicals (Weaver et al, 1965) and H2O (Cheung et al, 1969) such microwave lasers have been found to work in more than 100 molecular species (Elitzur, 1992; Townes, 1997), as well as in highly excited H atoms (Strelnitski et al,1996). In the IR region (10 microns), the effect of stimulated emission of radiation in the CO2 molecule has been discovered in the Martian and Venus' atmospheres (Betz et al, 1976; Mumma et al, 1981). We report here on the discovery of laser action in the range 0.9-2 micr. in several spectral lines of Fe II, which are associated with transitions from "pseudo-metastable" states populated by spontaneous transitions from Ly-alpha pumped Fe II levels. The intense Ly-alpha radiation is formed in the HII region of gas condensations close to the star Eta Carinae. The laser transitions form together with spontaneous transitions closed radiative cycles, one of which includes the extremely bright 2507/09 A lines. Closed radiative cycles, together with an accidental mixing of energy levels, may provide an explanation of the abnormal intensities of these UV non-lasing lines. Using the complicated energy level diagram of Fe II we present those peculiar features, which are essential for the inverted population and laser effect: the pumping, the level mixing, and the "bottle neck" for spontaneous decay. The laser action is a new indicator of non-equilibrium and spatially non-homogeneous physical conditions as well as a high brightness temperature of Ly-alpha in ejecta from eruptive stars. Such conditions are very difficult to probe by existing methods, and we propose some future experiments. The fact, that the lasing near-IR lines appear in the spectrum with about the same inten- sity as non-lasing lines is discussed and compared with the situation in masers.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures; to be published in A&A; also available at http://130.235.102.158/blackhole/astrolaser.pd

The Grizzly, February 28, 2013

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