Sr. Sarah Grace: The Common Good

This paper includes part of an interview with Sr. Sarah Grace from January 2, 2018. She is a women religious who has worked in education for 25 years. This paper includes a portion of the interview where she shared her perspective on the common good

The Beautiful Game as a Soviet Game: Sportsmanship, Style, and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Soviet Soccer

At the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union occupied a new global position and found itself in a Cold War with the West. Cold War conflict occurred in a variety of areas, including military, political, and economic. Additionally, athletics became an arena of direct competition between capitalist and communist nations. Victory in the Olympics, World Cup, and other international tournaments became just as important as economic success or advancements in military technology. In many sports, such as ice hockey, the Soviet Union achieved superiority over the West, but regarding soccer, the nation’s most popular sport, the USSR struggled to accomplish consistent success. The first national team of the Soviet Union lost early in its first tournament, but then brought in new players and coaches. The rebuilt roster won the next tournament and ushered in the most successful years of Soviet soccer, also known as the Golden Age. The period lasted from 1956 through 1966 and witnessed the only two international championships ever won by the Soviet Union. Many of the greatest soccer players in Soviet soccer history played during this era and propelled the national team to its greatest victories. Despite the success on the field, questions and conflicts off the field continually transformed the characteristics of Soviet soccer. How did an influx of non-Russian soccer stars change the concept of masculinity in the Soviet Union? What types of behavior did Soviet authorities consider inappropriate and how did they propose to remedy such conduct? How did Soviet coaches integrate Soviet cultural values into their tactics and strategies while remaining competitive with Western nations? In what ways did political and military conflict affect how Soviet soccer was played and who they competed against? Overall, the Golden Age of Soviet soccer was an era not only of athletic success, but also a period of transformation that mirrored changes in Soviet society as a whole during the same years

Ongoing and Visually-Evoked Cortical Activity Measured Across Multiple Spatial Scales

The visual cortex is a densely-interconnected network of neurons, which receives sensory input from the early visual pathway, and represents information about the visual world in the resulting spatiotemporal activity patterns. These patterns are mediated by cortical interactions that span multiple spatial scales (i.e., neuron-neuron, neuron-population, and population-population). Such interactions are a fundamental property of cortical function, and capture the contribution of the cortex to sensory coding. Yet these interactions are only beginning to be understood, in part because of the challenge of recording ongoing and visually-evoked activity across multiple spatial scales in individual studies. In this thesis, we present the results of such a study. Using the ex vivo turtle eye-attached whole-brain preparation, we simultaneously recorded the membrane potentials from pairs of cortical pyramidal neurons, as well as the nearby local field potential (LFP). In a parallel set of experiments, we recorded the LFP from multiple locations using a microelectrode array. To identify relevant cortical properties, we supplemented our experimental approach with network simulations. Our results quantify cortical interactions using a variety of coordination measures, and suggest that ongoing cortical activity, synaptic clustering, synaptic adaptation, and emergent network phenomena fundamentally shape the distribution and dynamics of coordination levels. Together, these results contribute to a clearer picture of cortical visual processing, and the roles of specific anatomical and emergent cortical properties in network function

Faculty Recital: Trey Wright Trio

Trey Wright Trio features KSU faculty members Trey Wright and Marc Miller.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1078/thumbnail.jp

Guiding Future Practices: A Review of Parent and Family Services

Working with college students often includes working with their parents and families. Higher education institutions across the US have addressed this cultural shift with the creation of parent and family services. As research illustrates continued relationships between students and their parents, student affairs practitioners will need to address this need. This article is a call for student affairs professionals to be creative and proactive when focusing on the future needs of parents and families of college students. Innovations for parent and family services, including the use of technology and the need for collaboration between on-campus departments, are shared

Modification of Caloris ejecta blocks by long-lived mass-wasting: A volatile-driven process?

The Caloris basin is the largest well-preserved impact basin on Mercury. As such, Caloris ejecta afford us an opportunity to study material from Mercury’s deep interior with remote sensing. We have made observations of the geomorphology, colour, distribution, and flank slopes of the circum-Caloris knobs. Our observations suggest that these circum-Caloris knobs are modified ejecta blocks from the Caloris impact. High-resolution MESSENGER images show that knobs are conical and relatively uncratered compared with the surrounding plains, which implies the knobs have undergone resurfacing. We have observed material that has sloughed off knobs superposing impact craters that demonstrably postdate the Caloris impact, which requires some knob modification to have been more recent. We have observed hollows, depressions in Mercury’s surface generally believed to have been caused by volatile-loss, on and closely associated with several knobs, which indicates that many knobs contain volatile material and that knob modification could extend into Mercury’s recent past. Our measurements show that knob flanks typically have slopes of ∼21°, which is steep for a mound of unconsolidated material that was originally emplaced ∼3.8 Ga. The conical shape of knobs, their steep slopes, the dearth of superposed craters on knobs, and knob superposition relationships with other landforms suggest that Caloris ejecta blocks of arbitrary original shape were modified into their present shapes by long-lived mass-wasting. Mass-wasting must have dominated over impact gardening, which would have produced domal morphologies only. We suggest that mass-wasting was probably driven by volatile-loss, in a manner analogous to terrestrial landforms called ‘molards’. If the circum-Caloris knobs are analogous to molards, then they represent a landform and a process hitherto undocumented on Mercury, with implications for the volatile content of the planet’s interior. These knobs therefore are prime targets for BepiColombo, which could search for fresh failures and volatile exposures in the knobs

Pharmacist Empathy in Smoking Cessation Counseling

Cigarette smoking and nicotine addiction are prevalent in today’s society. Approximately 19% of American adults (43.8 million people) smoke cigarettes. Smoking is associated with health risks such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), infertility, low birth weight, respiratory symptoms, heart disease, and lung cancer and is responsible for roughly $96 billion in health care costs. Provider empathy has been proven effective in other treatments like cold and cancer; however, its effectiveness in smoking cessation has not yet been studied. Empathy is defined in two realms: cognitive and affective. In the cognitive domain, individuals have the ability to understand and view the world from another’s perspective, and in the affective domain, they can connect to the experiences or feelings of others. The twofold objective of this study is (1) to validate a modified Kiersma-Chen Empathy Scale to measure patient perceptions of provider empathy and (2) to determine if patients who view their pharmacists as empathetic achieve a higher quit rate in smoking cessation. The original Kiersma-Chen Empathy Scale is a previously-validated measure of provider empathy. Patients who are utilizing smoking cessation clinical services and meet inclusion criteria and whose quit date was at least 6 months prior, will complete three surveys 6 months after their quit date. The surveys conducted will measure patient demographics, quit status, and the patient’s perceptions of their pharmacist’s empathy (modified KCES). The collected data will be analyzed via a psychometric test to show the validity of the modified empathy scale and via a Spearman correlation to demonstrate the association between provider empathy and smoking cessation rates. The results of this study will provide beneficial information about how pharmacist’s can best assist their patients in smoking cessation, specifically regarding the empathy shown to the patient

A Study On The Effects Of U.S. Events On Sentiment Relating To Minority Groups On Twitter

This is a study on how U.S. national events affect the sentiment relating to different minority groups on Twitter. First, several groups of minorities were identified for examination. Next, the relationship between hashtag usage and Tweet composition relating to various minority groups was investigated. Using the Twitter API and several Python packages, we were able to gather Tweets relating to our areas of interest over the months of June to August 2020. Average Tweet sentiment was determined to see how that sentiment changed before, during, and after selected events. Three metrics were used to draw conclusions from the collected data. These were average sentiment of the Tweets, percentage of Tweets that were “retweets” versus those composed originally, and number of Tweets that were deemed “relevant” by twitter and therefore available for sample. We found that Tweets relating to the Black Lives Matter and related movements decreased in original tweet composition and average sentiment. Overall, this indicated a negative effect on the sentiment relating to Black Lives Matter initiatives during several related events. Tweets relating to the Coronavirus and people of Asian ethnicity did not change in average sentiment and decreased in original tweet composition in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic. Overall, this also indicated a negative effect on the sentiment relating to Asians due to this world event. Finally, Tweets relating to members of the LGBTQ+ community increased average sentiment, and decreased in original tweet composition during the month of June, commonly associated with “Pride Month”. This indicated a positive effect on the sentiment relating to the LGBTQ+ community during this event. We can come to the overarching conclusion that U.S. national events do not have a direct effect on positive or negative sentiment independently, rather that these events cause a change in the sentiment that can be characterized as either more positive or more negative. People are much more likely to retweet Tweets relating to events that elicit visceral reactions from people. This is a common sign of support. Since the original Tweet often has polarized sentiment due to the emotionally charged content, we can conclude that the events of the study will result in high retweet percentages with polarized sentiment