African-American Male Initiatives: Collaborating for Success

This article provides guidance for those looking to establish an African-American Male Initiative (AAMI) on their campus. The hallmark of a strong AAMI is collaboration. This article explores contextual factors that influence the recruitment, retention, and graduation rates of African-American males in higher education. It includes the development and growth of the University of Georgia’s African-American Male Experience. Reflections and recommendations are provided along with an in-depth review of collaborative challenges and questions to ask in launching an AAMI collaboration on any campus

Trying to Act Rightly

My research focuses on the moral evaluation of people’s motivations. A popular recent view in Philosophy is that good people are motivated by the considerations that make actions morally right (the “right-making features”). For example, this view entails that a Black Lives Matter protester can be a good person if she is motivated to engage in protest by the thought that it will bring about equality, or justice, since this is what makes engaging in protest morally right. But this view entails that the protester cannot be a good person if she engages in protest because it is morally right. I think that this is a serious mistake. My view is that it is good to be explicitly committed to acting rightly and motivated by the moral rightness of one’s actions. More specifically, I explore the nature and defend the value of a complex state that I call "trying to act rightly". This comprises (a) wanting to act rightly, (b) thinking about which actions are right, and (c) doing the things that you think are right, because they are right. The three papers of my Dissertation each make part of the case for trying to act rightly. My first paper, “Praiseworthy Motivations”, addresses the view that it is good to be motivated by the right-making features but not good to be motivated to act rightly. I argue that this view rests on poorly-drawn comparison cases that are not genuine minimal pairs, and that well-constructed cases show these two types of motivation to be equally good. I address the worry that trying to act rightly leads people with false moral beliefs to act wrongly, by noting that this also applies to motivation by right-making features, since people can be motivated by a right-making feature while being mistaken about which acts have this feature. I then argue that we should distinguish carefully between motivations, actions, and beliefs when evaluating these well-meaning but morally mistaken agents. The second paper, “We Can Have Our Buck and Pass It, Too”, addresses the view that the fact that an act is morally right is not a genuine reason to perform it, and that our reasons for action are instead provided by the right-making features. I argue that this view rests on a confused picture of moral metaphysics, which would rule out any case in which one reason to perform an act is partially metaphysically constituted by another fact that is also a reason to perform the same act – as, for example, when a salad both is healthy and contains vegetables. I then sketch an alternative picture of moral metaphysics, on which genuine reasons for action can be metaphysically related to one another. My third paper, “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing”, uses general reflections on the nature of deliberate action and its relationship to praiseworthiness to argue that someone is only praiseworthy for acting rightly if she was trying to act rightly. I apply this idea to the philosophical debate on moral worth, defending the Kantian view that actions have moral worth just in case they are instances of someone’s trying to act rightly and succeeding. This is a radical departure from the most popular contemporary view on moral worth, and requires a re-evaluation of the main case discussed in this literature: that of Huckleberry Finn.PHDPhilosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145973/1/zoejk_1.pd

Information Literacy and Drama Academics

The information practices of academics supporting the teaching of theatre and drama subjects were investigated at a UK university. Using semi-structured interviews to gather data, all the academics within the relevant university department discussed issues around their information literacy behaviours. These twelve academics were recorded discussing issues such as how they search for information, make notes, organise information both for their own research and their teaching, which included filtering information into appropriate forms for undergraduates. The academics included technical specialists, who may have worked in theatre for many years before returning to academia, as well as more traditional theoretical academics with international experience. They were given a general definition of information literacy before being interviewed to give an overview of how librarians may see information literacy, but the interviews were wide ranging and only loosely structured to extract the information that the interviewees saw as most relevant. The definition they were given was: “The ability to identify, assess, retrieve, evaluate, adapt, organise and communicate information within an iterative context of review and reflection.” JISC iSkills. The interviews resulted in 16 hours and 32 minutes of recorded data which was transcribed and analysed using a grounded theory approach. Codes emerged over several iterations that described areas that interviewees saw as important. These were grouped into wider areas, such as “searching”, “reading”, “organising”, “note taking”, “types of information”, “links between experience and practice”, “acting versus technical theatre”, and more. The theoretical background of the researchers has much in sympathy with the experiential or relational approaches of Information Literacy, and as such this paper explores the richness of information literacy behaviour in drama academics. Variation and context dependent behaviours are explored and described. This paper concentrates on a discrete number of themes identified during the analysis. That is, how the academics interviewed search for information, extract that information for teaching and research, and organise it for future use. Patterns of behaviour emerged from these interviews, which are presented here. They will be used by the researchers to inform their own teaching practice and provision of library services within their university. Similar behaviours are expected to be exhibited by other groups of subject specialists, especially within the creative industries, and some transferable information from the analysis of these interviews is expected to be of use in other institutional and subject contexts

Natural conditions and adaptive functions of problem-solving in the Carnivora

Physical problem-solving paradigms are popular for testing a variety of cognitive abilities linked with intelligence including behavioral flexibility, innovation, and learning. Members of the mammalian order Carnivora are excellent candidates for studying problem-solving because they occupy a diverse array of socio-ecological niches, allowing researchers to test competing hypotheses on the evolution of intelligence. Recent developments in the design of problem-solving apparatuses have enhanced our ability to detect inter-specific and intra- specific variation in problem-solving success in captive and wild carnivores. These studies suggest there may be some links between variation in problem-solving success and variation in urbanization, diet, and sociality

Public Transportation in Central Florida: Setting the Tone for Public Rail Use

The purpose of this research is to analyze the use of the public train usage in Central Florida to determine the feasibility of high-speed rail usage in the future. This study will be split into parts and expanded upon. The first part will observe rider perspective, values, and issues regarding rail transportation as is available in Central Florida. In further installations, which will be conducted separately from this thesis, there will be an analysis of the providers of rail transportation. It is hypothesized that there will be a moderate demand for rail transportation used by the public. Original: The main purpose of this descriptive research is to describe the feasibility of high speed rail in the United States. Feasibility is defined as the determining factor in the sustainability of a project. In the case of this research study, high speed rail is the project and is defined as a specialized railroad system, including dedicated tracks and specialized rolling stock, that travels upward of 125mph. It is hypothesized that the feasibility in high speed rail is high due to the current functioning transportation systems in Florida

The cost-effectiveness of nivolumab monotherapy for the treatment of advanced melanoma patients in England

Background: Nivolumab was the first programmed death receptor 1 (PD-1) immune checkpoint inhibitor to demonstrate long-term survival benefit in a clinical trial setting for advanced melanoma patients. Objective: To evaluate the cost effectiveness of nivolumab monotherapy for the treatment of advanced melanoma patients in England. Methods: A Markov state-transition model was developed to estimate the lifetime costs and benefits of nivolumab versus ipilimumab and dacarbazine for BRAF mutation-negative patients and versus ipilimumab, dabrafenib, and vemurafenib for BRAF mutation-positive patients. Covariate-adjusted parametric curves for time to progression, pre-progression survival, and post-progression survival were fitted based on patient-level data from two trials and long-term ipilimumab survival data. Indirect treatment comparisons between nivolumab, ipilimumab, and dacarbazine were informed by these covariate-adjusted parametric curves, controlling for differences in patient characteristics. Kaplan–Meier data from the literature were digitised and used to fit progression-free and overall survival curves for dabrafenib and vemurafenib. Patient utilities and resource use data were based on trial data or the literature. Patients are assumed to receive nivolumab until there is no further clinical benefit, assumed to be the first of progressive disease, unacceptable toxicity, or 2 years of treatment. Results: Nivolumab is the most cost-effective treatment option in BRAF mutation-negative and mutation-positive patients, with incremental cost-effectiveness ratios of £24,483 and £17,362 per quality-adjusted life year, respectively. The model results are most sensitive to assumptions regarding treatment duration for nivolumab and the parameters of the fitted parametric survival curves. Conclusions: Nivolumab is a cost-effective treatment for advanced melanoma patients in England

Wonder Women

This project seeks to explore the female microbiome through a series of artistic renderings of vaginal swab slides from female volunteers. The goal is to encourage a connection between people and their bodies through an understanding of their microflora and cultivate respect and curiosity about women\u27s health

Estimating the economic net returns of Oregon & Washington forests with regard to climate change

Little work has been conducted regarding the net returns of forest lands. The Ricardian model is ripe with potential to estimate the effects of climate on net returns to forestry. Multiple linear regression allows each climate variable to measure its effect of net returns with the assumption of all other factors being fixed. Independent variables of average temperature (°C), average temperature squared (°C²), average precipitation (mm), average precipitation squared (mm2), maximum August temperature (°C), and minimum December temperature (°C) were scaled by year using dummy variables to output the dependent variable of real net returns (USD 2010) per county of tree species. This OLS linear regression showed annual precipitation, marginal precipitation, and maximum temperature experienced by forests to affect the net returns they produced. Increased precipitation is expected to increase net returns to forests while higher maximum temperatures will negatively impact net returns in Douglas Fir regions and positively affect pine regions. Precipitation is linearly related to forest net returns, while temperature is not linearly related. With this finding, various areas of Oregon and Washington that are expected to experience heavier precipitation due to climate change should expect more net returns from their forestlands. Key Words: linear regression, econometrics, forest net return

Rational development and evaluation of novel formulations for urinary health

Urinary tract infections (UTI) among women form a substantial part of medical practice and both patients and medical professionals have an interest in non-antibiotic treatments and preventative measures. This research provides preliminary data on a multi-functional composition, DAPAD, which explored several biologic activities of relevance to UTI