Facilitating Feedback: The Benefits of Automation in Monitoring Completion of Honors Contracts

As we have seen in this volume so far, contract courses are an increasingly valuable pedagogical strategy for maintaining access to and demand for honors education. Administered with the “[i]ntentionality, transparency, [and] consistency” that Richard Badenhausen proposes in his opening essay (17), they can even, as Margaret Walsh suggests, help “shift [students’] focus from getting out of course requirements to getting into new and different courses to advance their capacity to learn” (40). While good reasons to offer contracts clearly exist, administering them nevertheless presents challenges. This essay considers process and pedagogy, with the aim of empowering both students and faculty to explore the pedagogical possibilities of contracts. At the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), we identified two interrelated challenges with the contract process: 1) the approval and assessment of contracts and 2) the impact of contracts on faculty members’ workloads. The UNR Honors Program streamlined the approval and assessment of honors contracts for students and faculty by updating our contract form and introducing a qualitative online assessment tool to help faculty evaluate student progress on honors learning outcomes. Our quantitative and qualitative data suggest that such changes make a positive impact on both student learning and faculty engagement for honors programs and colleges considering contract automation and streamlining

CHIP Expansions to Higher-Income Children in Three States: Profiles of Eligibility and Insurance Coverage

Summarizes findings on how changes in eligibility rules for children's public health insurance programs affected 2002-09 coverage rates and the number of uninsured children in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Compares results by scope of reform

The design and implementation of a CBT-based intervention for sensory processing difficulties in adolescents on the autism spectrum

Background: Unusual reactions to sensory input now form part of the diagnostic criteria for autism. These features are common and can have an often-devastating impact on autistic individuals and their families. Yet there are few validated interventions that help to remediate or support autistic individuals’ adverse sensory experiences. To date, both measurement of sensory experiences and the resulting interventions have been based on assumptions of neurological sensitivities and largely ignored the role of cognition. This study therefore sought to assess the feasibility of a new 8-week CBT-based group intervention for self-regulation of sensory processing difficulties. / Method: Seven cognitively able adolescents diagnosed with autism aged 11–16 years from one mainstream secondary school received the 8-week intervention. Measures of sensory reactivity, anxiety and repetitive behaviours were taken at baseline, post-intervention and follow-up, 8 weeks after the intervention had ceased. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were also conducted with adolescents and their parents to examine further the acceptability of the intervention. / Results: The results showed that the intervention itself was feasible – both in its implementation and its acceptability to participants. Qualitative analysis clearly showed that the intervention was effective in raising meta-conscious awareness and self-regulation in these autistic adolescents. Analysis of outcome variables showed no significant change over the intervention period, although effect sizes were moderate-to-large. / Conclusions: These preliminary results are encouraging and should inform the design of a future pilot randomized controlled trial to test its efficacy with a larger group of participants

Making the Global Familiar: Building an International Focus into the Honors Curriculum

Increasingly, American colleges and universities are seeking to prepare their students not only for professional success but also for life in a world whose interconnectedness and, indeed, interdependency, will require them to live as global citizens. That the term “global citizen,” or one of its many synonyms, now appears in numerous institutional mission and values statements suggests the significance that institutions of higher education attach to cultivating individuals able to navigate the transnational and intercultural complexities of twenty-first-century economics, politics, and ethics. Honors programs and colleges have enthusiastically adopted a global education orientation along with the larger institutions that house them; a quick internet search for “global honors” returns thousands of results, which include global honors programs, specialized pathways, and seminars. Although the prevalence of such global honors options is growing, many honors programs and colleges are still grappling with the challenge of developing honorslevel offerings suited to the internationalizing landscape of higher education. Happily, integrating aspects of global studies into an honors program or college curriculum need not come at a premium. While institutional mandates calling for increased emphasis on the world beyond the campus tend not to be accompanied by across-the-board increases in resources to aid in their implementation, honors programs and colleges can nevertheless reap the benefits of such mandates if they act strategically and in accordance with defined institutional objectives. This article first describes the context in which the University of Nevada, Reno Honors Program has embedded global studies into its curriculum and then provides curricular and co-curricular options that can be adapted and modified to fit the needs of any honors program or college to enhance or deepen students’ global awareness and engagement

Take-Up of Public Insurance and Crowd-out of Private Insurance Under Recent CHIP Expansions to Higher Income Children

We analyze the effects of states’ expansions of CHIP eligibility to children in higher income families during 2002-2009 on take-up of public coverage, crowd-out of private coverage, and rates of uninsurance. Our results indicate these expansions were associated with limited uptake of public coverage and only a two percentage point reduction in the uninsurance rate among these children. Because not all of the take-up of public insurance among eligible children is accounted for by children who transfer from being uninsured to having public insurance, our results suggest that there may be some crowd-out of private insurance coverage; the upper bound crowd-out rate we calculate is 46 percent.

Immunofluorescent Examination of Biopsies from Long-Term Renal Allografts

Immunofluorescent examination of open renal biopsies revealed clear-cut glomerular localization of immunoglobulins not related clearly to the quality of donor-recipient histocompatibility in 19 of 34 renal allografts. The biopsies were obtained 18 to 31 months after transplantations primarily from related donors with a variable quality of histocompatibility match. IgG was the predominant immunoglobulin class fixed in 13 biopsies, and IgM in six. The pattern of immunoglobulin deposition was linear, connoting anti-GBM antibody in four of the 19; it was granular and discontinuous, connoting antigen–antibodycomplex deposits, in 13. An immune process may affect glomeruli of renal allografts by mechanisms comparable to those that cause glomerulonephritis in native kidneys. The transplant glomerulonephritis may represent a persistence of the same disease that originally destroyed the host kidneys or the consequence of a new humoral antibody response to allograft antigens. © 1970, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved

Numerical optimization of integrating cavities for diffraction-limited millimeter-wave bolometer arrays

Far-infrared to millimeter-wave bolometers designed to make astronomical observations are typically encased in integrating cavities at the termination of feedhorns or Winston cones. This photometer combination maximizes absorption of radiation, enables the absorber area to be minimized, and controls the directivity of absorption, thereby reducing susceptibility to stray light. In the next decade, arrays of hundreds of silicon nitride micromesh bolometers with planar architectures will be used in ground-based, suborbital, and orbital platforms for astronomy. The optimization of integrating cavity designs is required for achieving the highest possible sensitivity for these arrays. We report numerical simulations of the electromagnetic fields in integrating cavities with an infinite plane-parallel geometry formed by a solid reflecting backshort and the back surface of a feedhorn array block. Performance of this architecture for the bolometer array camera (Bolocam) for cosmology at a frequency of 214 GHz is investigated. We explore the sensitivity of absorption efficiency to absorber impedance and backshort location and the magnitude of leakage from cavities. The simulations are compared with experimental data from a room-temperature scale model and with the performance of Bolocam at a temperature of 300 mK. The main results of the simulations for Bolocam-type cavities are that (1) monochromatic absorptions as high as 95% are achievable with <1% cross talk between neighboring cavities, (2) the optimum absorber impedances are 400 Ω/sq, but with a broad maximum from ~150 to ~700 Ω/sq, and (3) maximum absorption is achieved with absorber diameters ≥1.5λ. Good general agreement between the simulations and the experiments was found

The top-down crystallisation of Mercury's core

The regime governing the growth of Mercury's core is unknown, but the dynamics of core growth are vital to understanding the origin and properties of the planet's weak magnetic field. Here, we use advanced first-principles methods, which include a magnetic entropy contribution, to investigate the magnetic and thermo-elastic properties of liquid Fe-S-Si and of pure liquid iron at the conditions of Mercury's core. Our results support a ‘top-down’ evolution of the core, whereby solid iron-rich material crystallises at shallow depths and sinks. This process would likely result in a compositionally driven dynamo within a stably stratified uppermost liquid layer, providing an explanation for the observed properties of the weak magnetic field of Mercury