The importance of community colleges to the Tenth District economy

The recent recession and now the recovery have caused enrollment at many community colleges to soar as unemployed workers retrain for new occupations and students who might otherwise attend a four-year college choose to save money. In the Tenth District, the importance of community colleges is likely to rise even further as the economy continues to evolve and industries demand workers with new skills. ; Labor market projections over the next decade suggest that new jobs in the district will be filled more by workers with an associate’s degree or some college than by those with any other type of education. In the short run, with state and local government funding still falling, many community colleges will be challenged to educate a growing number of students. In the long run, evolving industries will likely further challenge community colleges to produce even more workers with newer skills--both nationwide and in the Tenth District. ; Felix and Pope describe how community colleges contribute to economic development in the Tenth District and the challenges they face in economic downturns. They then examine the implications of long-run job projections in district states for the demand for community colleges graduates--and whether the states’ current level of provision of community college education appears adequate.

Information literacy education in the UK: reflections on perspectives and practical approaches of curricular integration

This paper has two main aims, to present the current position of information literacy education in UK-based academic institutions and to propose a strategy that ensures the integration of this phenomenon in learning and teaching institutional practices. The first part of the paper offers an insight into the perceptions of information literacy by exploring four distinct perspectives, including the institutional angle and the views associated with faculty staff, library staff and students. What transpires from the findings is that information literacy from an institutional perspective is dominated by the need to measure information skills within the context of information as a discipline in its own right. Another issue that is raised by the data points to a great deal of misinformation regarding information literacy, and that, as a result, a clear marketing strategy must be adopted by information professionals to address the misconceptions held by faculty staff and students alike. We aim to address these points by drawing on recent scholarship and research in the field which demonstrates the validity of information literacy as a process for fostering independent learning. The second part of the paper explains how a Fellowship project has placed information literacy on the pedagogical agenda of the University of Staffordshire in the UK by promoting information literacy education as an integrated element of the curriculum

Storing fungicides safely

Growers who stocked up on fungicides for the 2005 growing season due to the threat of Asian soybean rust will likely be facing fungicide storage issues this winter, especially since it is likely that most products cannot be returned. The good news is that most fungicides have a shelf life of at least two years--and probably longer--assuming they are stored correctly. Optimum storage conditions are cool, dry conditions, away from sunlight. Storage temperatures should not go below freezing; however, if a fungicide does freeze, then slowly thaw it out at room temperature

Beyond Broadcasting? To What Extent are Digital Technologies Enabling Progressive Uses of Media in a Post-Broadcasting Television Landscape?

This study is an attempt to explore the changes digital technologies are having on the experience of watching television. When new technologies are introduced, revolutionary claims are often made for the new media they help form. A frequent claim is that new media are more ‘progressive’ than older media forms, and encourage more democratic participation in the production and circulation of media content. This study aims to compare this claim with evidence of how viewing experiences are actually changing in practice. A further aspect of my inquiry is to consider the implications of this for broadcasting as currently constituted

Inform to Perform: Using Domain Analysis to Explore Amateur Athlete Information Resources and Behaviour

Sporting information has been relatively unexamined in library and information science (LIS) literature with most research concentrating on collection management or archival functions. User studies in LIS have covered some aspects of outdoor recreation and hobbies, but only one study has been found explicitly researching amateur athletes. This project builds contributes a definition of sport as an information domain and an exploratory user study of amateur athletes. The research takes a socio-cognitive approach and uses domain analysis linked to serious leisure, information communication chain and information behaviour theories to provide the research context. These foundational theories are used to define sport as an information domain more formally, noting both degrees of specialisation within it and intersections with related disciplines. Four domain analysis approaches are then used to illustrate the potential of the approach for researching different dimensions within the domain. Three of these approaches involve desk research into different aspects of amateur sport information. By discussing the role of documents, computer science and discourses in sport these approaches show that sport is a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary domain with many topics of interest for the information researcher and practitioner. The fourth approach is a user study of athlete information behaviour that collected data on information sources, tasks and attitudes via an online questionnaire

The Relationship Between Stress and Coping in Table Tennis

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between cognitive competitive anxiety intensity and coping strategies in table tennis players. One hundred and two (102) US competitive table tennis players of age range from 10 to 60 filled out a Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2R, Cox et al., 2003) at least 30 minutes before the start of their tournament match and a Modified Cope questionnaire (MCOPE; Crocker and Graham,1995) 15 minutes after they finished their match. Our study found significant differences between low and high cognitive competitive anxiety groups with regard to the use of coping strategies. The high cognitive competitive anxiety intensity group used significantly more behavioral disengagement (avoidance coping, p ≤ 0.05), denial coping strategies(emotion focused coping, p ≤ 0.01) compared to the low cognitive anxiety intensity group. Our results suggest that there is some connection between anxiety intensity and coping strategies. If the cognitive anxiety intensity (for example, intensity from worrying) is very high, an athlete might be more likely to use avoidance coping (such as behavioral disengagement) and emotion-focused coping (such as denial and venting of emotions) compared to athletes who have low cognitive competitive anxiety. Furthermore, gender differences in cognitive anxiety and direction were found. Confidence management techniques such as positive self-talk, breathing techniques and visualization should be taught to athletes to assist them in coping with their competitive anxiety better and to enhance their performance

An assessment of prospective memory retrieval in women with chronic fatigue syndrome using a virtual-reality environment: an initial study

People with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have increased rates of depression, anxiety, and illness intrusiveness; they may also suffer from cognitive problems such as retrospective memory (RM) deficits and concentration difficulties that can stem from diminished information-processing capability. We predicted that this diminished capacity may also lead to deficits in other cognitive functions, such as prospective memory (ProM). Event-, time-, and activity-based ProM was assessed in 11 women with CFS and 12 healthy women using a computer-generated virtual environment (VE). RM was assessed using a free-recall test, and subjective assessment of both ProM and RM was assessed by questionnaire. Groups were equivalent in age and measures of IQ. People with CFS performed slightly worse than healthy controls on both the event- and time-based ProM measures, although these were not statistically significant. However, the CFS group performed significantly worse than the healthy controls on both the free recall-task and on subjective assessment of both RM and ProM. Women with CFS do have some subtle decrements in memory, particularly RM. However, it is possible that the decrements found in the present sample would be greater in real life. Further studies utilizing both healthy controls and illness controls are now needed to ascertain how sensitive the VE measure is and to inform the development of tasks in the VE that place progressively increasing demands on working memory capacity

Flooding Fragility Model Development Using Bayesian Regression

Traditional component pass/fail design analysis and testing protocol drives excessively conservative operating limits and setpoints as well as unnecessarily large margins of safety. Component performance testing coupled with failure probability model development can support selection of more flexible operating limits and setpoints as well as softening defense-in-depth elements. This chapter discuses the process of Bayesian regression fragility model development using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and model checking protocol using three types of Bayesian p-values. The chapter also discusses application of the model development and testing techniques through component flooding performance experiments associated with industrial steel doors being subjected to a rising water scenario. These component tests yield the necessary data for fragility model development while providing insight into development of testing protocol that will yield meaningful data for fragility model development. Finally, the chapter discusses development and selection of a fragility model for industrial steel door performance when subjected to a water-rising scenario

Phase Retrieval and Design with Automatic Differentiation

The principal limitation in many areas of astronomy, especially for directly imaging exoplanets, arises from instability in the point spread function (PSF) delivered by the telescope and instrument. To understand the transfer function, it is often necessary to infer a set of optical aberrations given only the intensity distribution on the sensor - the problem of phase retrieval. This can be important for post-processing of existing data, or for the design of optical phase masks to engineer PSFs optimized to achieve high contrast, angular resolution, or astrometric stability. By exploiting newly efficient and flexible technology for automatic differentiation, which in recent years has undergone rapid development driven by machine learning, we can perform both phase retrieval and design in a way that is systematic, user-friendly, fast, and effective. By using modern gradient descent techniques, this converges efficiently and is easily extended to incorporate constraints and regularization. We illustrate the wide-ranging potential for this approach using our new package, Morphine. Challenging applications performed with this code include precise phase retrieval for both discrete and continuous phase distributions, even where information has been censored such as heavily-saturated sensor data. We also show that the same algorithms can optimize continuous or binary phase masks that are competitive with existing best solutions for two example problems: an Apodizing Phase Plate (APP) coronagraph for exoplanet direct imaging, and a diffractive pupil for narrow-angle astrometry. The Morphine source code and examples are available open-source, with a similar interface to the popular physical optics package Poppy