Mass Shootings and Mass Media: The Discrepancies Between Workplace and School Shootings

Workplace shootings and school shootings have a variety of differences and similarities. However, each are unique to other mass shooting types. This study analyzes 42 workplace shootings and 50 school shootings that were highly publicized and occurred between 1965 and 2015. Through my analysis, I was able to uncover the similarities and differences between the two sub-types of mass shootings. 100 school articles and 72 workplace articles from The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times were utilized and coded to uncover the differences in adjectives used in reports. Because workplace shootings receive much less media coverage and research, I sought to explain these discrepancies

Exploring Public Speaking Self-Efficacy in the 4-H Presentation Program

Strong communication skills are important in an individual’s personal and professional life; however, research regarding what influences youth’s public speaking self-efficacy is limited. To address this gap, we surveyed youth who participated in a statewide presentation event about their self-efficacy and sources of that self-efficacy. Results show mastery experiences have the greatest relationship to youth’s public speaking confidence. Extension can strengthen youth’s public speaking self-efficacy by increasing the number of presentation opportunities and by removing barriers from participating in existing presentation opportunities

Música patagón : navigating authenticity in Puelche music

This report examines the emergent genre of “música patagón”, or Patagonian music, in the context of music production among the Puelche, or the eastern Mapuche people of southern Argentina. By analyzing several songs produced by Puelche musicians at the music recording studio Sala Patagón, I argue that the classification “patagón” challenges both Argentine and Mapuche understandings of genre. Música patagón can be defined by three major features: the use of the native Mapuche language of Mapudungun alongside the official Spanish language, the use of lyrical content related to Mapuche traditions and territory, and the use of Mapuche sonic elements such as musical instruments and rhythms. I argue that within the body of a primarily Spanish language text, Mapudungun words serve both iconic and indexical functions, allowing Puelche musicians a means through which to perform a Mapuche identity in the case of limited language fluency within the community. The performance of this identity is complicated by linguistic and cultural ideologies regarding authenticity, both from Mapuche and non-Mapuche audiences. Through the process of writing, recording, and disseminating music in this genre, Mapuche musicians strive to shift their language and culture from the margins of Argentine society into the everyday life of both the transnational Mapuche diaspora and the non-indigenous Argentine public. In these contexts, música patagón functions not only to assert a historically-based Mapuche identity, but also serves to create a novel vision of a future-oriented Mapuche public that transcends national, linguistic, geographic, and even ethnic boundaries. Through the medium of music, Mapuche people in southern Argentina actively create and negotiate a shifting vision of what it means to be Mapuche, what it means to be Patagonian, what it means to be Argentine, and how these identities conflict and intersect in Argentina todayAnthropolog

Long-Term Outcomes of Early Adult 4-H Alumni

Very little has been published reporting on long-term outcomes experienced by young adults (aged 19 to 34 years old) who participated in 4-H youth development programs. We adopted Gambone et al.’s (2002) framework advancing three long-term outcomes for early adulthood: economic stability, health and well-being, and community involvement. With cross-sectional survey methods, we compared long-term impacts between 693 California 4-H young adult alumni and 373 young adults in a U.S. general population sample who had not participated in 4-H. The results demonstrated that 4-H alumni report more positive long-term outcomes than the U.S. general population sample. The study contributes to the dearth of research around long-term outcomes, may be useful for marketing and funding, and will help better understanding the public value of Extension

Developing a Common Global Baseline for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening

Introduction: Nucleic acid synthesis is a powerful tool that has revolutionized the life sciences. However, the misuse of synthetic nucleic acids could pose a serious threat to public health and safety. There is a need for international standards for nucleic acid synthesis screening to help prevent the misuse of this technology.Methods: We outline current barriers to the adoption of screening, which include the cost of developing screening tools and resources, adapting to existing commercial practices, internationalizing screening, and adapting screening to benchtop nucleic acid synthesis devices. To address these challenges, we then introduce the Common Mechanism for DNA Synthesis Screening, which was developed in consultation with a technical consortium of experts in DNA synthesis, synthetic biology, biosecurity, and policy, with the aim of addressing current barriers. The Common Mechanism software uses a variety of methods to identify sequences of concern, identify taxonomic best matches to regulated pathogens, and identify benign genes that can be cleared for synthesis. Finally, we describe outstanding challenges in the development of screening practices.Results: The Common Mechanism is a step toward ensuring the safe and responsible use of synthetic nucleic acids. It provides a baseline capability that overcomes challenges to nucleic acid synthesis screening and provides a solution for broader international adoption of screening practices.Conclusion: The Common Mechanism is a valuable tool for preventing the misuse of synthetic nucleic acids. It is a critical step toward ensuring the safe and responsible use of this powerful technology

Gauge your phage: benchmarking of bacteriophage identification tools in metagenomic sequencing data

BackgroundThe prediction of bacteriophage sequences in metagenomic datasets has become a topic of considerable interest, leading to the development of many novel bioinformatic tools. A comparative analysis of ten state-of-the-art phage identification tools was performed to inform their usage in microbiome research.MethodsArtificial contigs generated from complete RefSeq genomes representing phages, plasmids, and chromosomes, and a previously sequenced mock community containing four phage species, were used to evaluate the precision, recall, and F1 scores of the tools. We also generated a dataset of randomly shuffled sequences to quantify false-positive calls. In addition, a set of previously simulated viromes was used to assess diversity bias in each tool’s output.ResultsVIBRANT and VirSorter2 achieved the highest F1 scores (0.93) in the RefSeq artificial contigs dataset, with several other tools also performing well. Kraken2 had the highest F1 score (0.86) in the mock community benchmark by a large margin (0.3 higher than DeepVirFinder in second place), mainly due to its high precision (0.96). Generally, k-mer-based tools performed better than reference similarity tools and gene-based methods. Several tools, most notably PPR-Meta, called a high number of false positives in the randomly shuffled sequences. When analysing the diversity of the genomes that each tool predicted from a virome set, most tools produced a viral genome set that had similar alpha- and beta-diversity patterns to the original population, with Seeker being a notable exception.ConclusionsThis study provides key metrics used to assess performance of phage detection tools, offers a framework for further comparison of additional viral discovery tools, and discusses optimal strategies for using these tools. We highlight that the choice of tool for identification of phages in metagenomic datasets, as well as their parameters, can bias the results and provide pointers for different use case scenarios. We have also made our benchmarking dataset available for download in order to facilitate future comparisons of phage identification tools

Prospectus, September 16, 2004

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2004/1019/thumbnail.jp

Regional sweat distribution in young and older individuals

Regional sweat distribution in young and older individual

Ten simple rules for the sharing of bacterial genotype—Phenotype data on antimicrobial resistance

The increasing availability of high-throughput sequencing (frequently termed next-generation sequencing (NGS)) data has created opportunities to gain deeper insights into the mechanisms of a number of diseases and is already impacting many areas of medicine and public health. The area of infectious diseases stands somewhat apart from other human diseases insofar as the relevant genomic data comes from the microbes rather than their human hosts. A particular concern about the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has driven the collection and reporting of large-scale datasets containing information from microbial genomes together with antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) results. Unfortunately, the lack of clear standards or guiding principles for the reporting of such data is hampering the field's advancement. We therefore present our recommendations for the publication and sharing of genotype and phenotype data on AMR, in the form of 10 simple rules. The adoption of these recommendations will enhance AMR data interoperability and help enable its large-scale analyses using computational biology tools, including mathematical modelling and machine learning. We hope that these rules can shed light on often overlooked but nonetheless very necessary aspects of AMR data sharing and enhance the field's ability to address the problems of understanding AMR mechanisms, tracking their emergence and spread in populations, and predicting microbial susceptibility to antimicrobials for diagnostic purposes