More Than Just a Job: Exploring College Media Advisers\u27 Experiences in Student Development and Higher Education

College media advisers are an incredibly involved type of staff member, often serving as a cultural navigator for their students and the organizations they advise. As used throughout this study, Strayhorn\u27s (2015) term cultural navigator indicates someone who works to guide students through an educational experience or life-chapter. As such, this concept frames the research presented in this study. This research looks at the experience of being a college media adviser, including challenges and functions of the position, through the use of a qualitative phenomenological study. Twelve self-identified college media advisers located across the United States were interviewed. From these interviews, 10 themes were identified (in relation to three research questions) as important for advising college media. The first question looks at the adviser\u27s specific experiences, including (1a) The position involves preparing students for the future, (1b) Advisers aid in student success, and (1c) Advising is more than just a job . The second research question focuses on challenges that advisers experience: (2a) The job is always changing, (2b) Past experience, not education, prepares you for this role, and (2c) The structure of the position lacks consistency. Finally, the third research question examines specific functions of the college media adviser position: (3a) Building relationships with students is integral, (3b) The position involves being a counselor, (3c) National organizations serve as a cultural navigator, and (3d) You have to let the students be in charge. Each of these themes were analyzed and yielded significant statements from advisers to offer an understanding of the place they hold within the college media organization

Conflict Resolution Skills for Elementary Teachers

The purpose of this project was to develop a conflict resolution resource for teachers to use with elementary school children. To accomplish this purpose, current research and literature related to classroom conflict, conflict resolution skills and school violence issues were reviewed. The research demonstrated that students who are taught to deal with conflict at an early age are more inclined to be peaceable problem solvers as they go through school. The goals of this project are to provide teachers with lesson plans that can integrate conflict resolution skills and concepts into their curriculum in the hope that they would prevent or decrease acts of violence

Plio-Quaternary exhumation history of the central Nepalese Himalaya: 1. Apatite and zircon fission track and apatite [U-Th]/He analyses

New apatite and zircon fission track and (U-Th)/He analyses serve to document the bedrock cooling history of the central Nepalese Himalaya near the Annapurna Range. We have obtained 82 apatite fission track (AFT), 7 zircon fission track (ZFT), and 7 apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe) ages from samples collected along the Marsyandi drainage, including eight vertical relief profiles from ridges on either side of the river averaging more than 2 km in elevation range. In addition, three profiles were sampled along ridge crests that also lie ∼2 km above the adjacent valleys, and a transect of >20 valley bottom samples spans from the Lesser Himalaya across the Greater Himalaya and into the Tethyan strata. As a consequence, these data provide one of the more comprehensive low-temperature thermochronologic studies within the Himalaya. Conversely, the youthfulness of this orogen is pushing the limits of these dating techniques. AFT ages range from >3.8 to 0 Ma, ZFT ages from 1.9 to 0.8 Ma, and AHe ages from 0.9 to 0.3 Ma. Most ridges have maximum ages of 1.3–0.8 Ma at 2 km above the valley bottom. Only one ridge crest (in the south central zone of the field area) yielded significantly older ZFT and AFT ages of ∼2 Ma; we infer that a splay of the Main Central Thrust separates this ridge from the rest of the Greater Himalaya. ZFT and AFT ages from a vertical transect along this ridge indicate exhumation rates of ∼1.5 km Myr−1 (r2 > 0.7) from ∼2 to 0.6–0.8 Ma, whereas AHe ages indicate a faster exhumation rate of ∼2.6 km Myr−1 (r2 = 0.9) over the last 0.8 Myr. Exhumation rates calculated for six of the remaining seven vertical profiles ranged from 1.5 to 12 km Myr−1 (all with low r2 values of <0.6) for the time period from ∼1.2 to 0.3 Ma, with no discernible patterns in south to north exhumation rates evident. The absence of a trend in exhumation rates, despite a strong spatial gradient in rainfall, argues against a correlation of long-term exhumation rates with modern patterns of rainfall. AFT ages in the Tethyan strata are, on average, older than in the Greater Himalaya and may be a response to a drier climate, slip on the South Tibetan Detachment, or a gentler dip of the underlying thrust ramp. These data are further evaluated with thermokinematic modeling in the companion paper by Whipp et al

Reports Of Conferences, Institutes, And Seminars

This quarter\u27s column offers coverage of multiple sessions from the 2016 Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference, held April 3–6, 2016, in Austin, Texas. Topics in serials acquisitions dominate the column, including reports on altmetrics, cost per use, demand-driven acquisitions, and scholarly communications and the use of subscriptions agents; ERMS, access, and knowledgebases are also featured

When is a bottleneck a bottleneck?

Bottlenecks, i.e. local reductions of capacity, are one of the most relevant scenarios of traffic systems. The asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) with a defect is a minimal model for such a bottleneck scenario. One crucial question is "What is the critical strength of the defect that is required to create global effects, i.e. traffic jams localized at the defect position". Intuitively one would expect that already an arbitrarily small bottleneck strength leads to global effects in the system, e.g. a reduction of the maximal current. Therefore it came as a surprise when, based on computer simulations, it was claimed that the reaction of the system depends in non-continuous way on the defect strength and weak defects do not have a global influence on the system. Here we reconcile intuition and simulations by showing that indeed the critical defect strength is zero. We discuss the implications for the analysis of empirical and numerical data.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in the proceedings of Traffic and Granular Flow '1

Relaxation time in a non-conserving driven-diffusive system with parallel dynamics

We introduce a two-state non-conserving driven-diffusive system in one-dimension under a discrete-time updating scheme. We show that the steady-state of the system can be obtained using a matrix product approach. On the other hand, the steady-state of the system can be expressed in terms of a linear superposition Bernoulli shock measures with random walk dynamics. The dynamics of a shock position is studied in detail. The spectrum of the transfer matrix and the relaxation times to the steady-state have also been studied in the large-system-size limit.Comment: 10 page

ADAPTr Exhibition

The book is one of the outcomes of the grant (funded by the EU seventh framework Programme grant number 317325. Period of grant 01.01.2013 to 31.12.20160. It describes the exhibition held in Ambika P3. It includes a double page statement from each of the seven partners and from each of the 42 research fellows employed under the scheme. There are four new essays (Prof Richard Blythe, Prof Kester Rattenbury, Prof Leon van Schaik, Dr Fleur Watson) a preface by Prof John Verbeke, and introduction by Prof Katharine Heron. It is included on the ADAPTr website and submitted to the EU as one of the deliverable outputs

Dyck Paths, Motzkin Paths and Traffic Jams

It has recently been observed that the normalization of a one-dimensional out-of-equilibrium model, the Asymmetric Exclusion Process (ASEP) with random sequential dynamics, is exactly equivalent to the partition function of a two-dimensional lattice path model of one-transit walks, or equivalently Dyck paths. This explains the applicability of the Lee-Yang theory of partition function zeros to the ASEP normalization. In this paper we consider the exact solution of the parallel-update ASEP, a special case of the Nagel-Schreckenberg model for traffic flow, in which the ASEP phase transitions can be intepreted as jamming transitions, and find that Lee-Yang theory still applies. We show that the parallel-update ASEP normalization can be expressed as one of several equivalent two-dimensional lattice path problems involving weighted Dyck or Motzkin paths. We introduce the notion of thermodynamic equivalence for such paths and show that the robustness of the general form of the ASEP phase diagram under various update dynamics is a consequence of this thermodynamic equivalence.Comment: Version accepted for publicatio

An introduction to phase transitions in stochastic dynamical systems

We give an introduction to phase transitions in the steady states of systems that evolve stochastically with equilibrium and nonequilibrium dynamics, the latter defined as those that do not possess a time-reversal symmetry. We try as much as possible to discuss both cases within the same conceptual framework, focussing on dynamically attractive `peaks' in state space. A quantitative characterisation of these peaks leads to expressions for the partition function and free energy that extend from equilibrium steady states to their nonequilibrium counterparts. We show that for certain classes of nonequilibrium systems that have been exactly solved, these expressions provide precise predictions of their macroscopic phase behaviour.Comment: Pedagogical talk contributed to the "Ageing and the Glass Transition" Summer School, Luxembourg, September 2005. 12 pages, 8 figures, uses the IOP 'jpconf' document clas