A Policy Mystery: The Passage of the 2004 School Calendar Changes Bill

The purpose of this research is to describe and explain how the major players representing the education associations in the North Carolina education political system create and employ power and influence in order to lobby and negotiate for their needs and values for state policy initiatives. This study's focus on the politics of the school calendar made it necessary to collect data from the major players representing the education associations in the North Carolina education political system. There are four key state-level education interest groups or associations in North Carolina. They are the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), the North Carolina Association of School Administrators (NCASA), the North Carolina School Boards Association (NCSBA), and the Professional Educators of North Carolina (PENC). In addition, the Public School Forum of North Carolina (PSFNC) is a sister organization to the four key state-level education associations in North Carolina. Further, another major player in the North Carolina education political system is the Education Committee's chief legislative staff members. The conceptual framework devised for the study is adapted from both Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System of Human Development and Marshall and Gerstl-Pepin's Politics from Margin to Center. Each circle in the conceptual framework has a lens that any researcher can use to observe and then understand any political system. The circles in the conceptual framework are arranged in order of concreteness. As one moves outward through each circle, the behaviors become more internalized and less measurable or observable. The political system is located in the center circle of the framework because the political system is the logical and obvious location to begin a study of political power and influence. The first circle exemplifies Mazzoni's Arena Model. The researcher found that an arena shift occurred because Representative Culpepper placed the school calendar bill into the Commerce Legislative Subsystem as opposed to the Education Legislative Subsystem. The second circle exemplifies Marshall, Mitchell, and Wirt's the hierarchies of power and circles of influence models. The third circle exemplifies Marshall et al.'s assumptive worlds model. The hierarchies of power, circles of influence and assumptive worlds models formed the bedrock of this study. Many of the interview questions spring from these models. These models also help to explain data describing actions that occurs in the different circles as well. The fourth circle is best explained through Elazar's political culture and Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky's cultural theory. The researcher did discover evidence that North Carolina is a traditionalistic-hierarchical state. The fifth circle is best explained through the competing-values perspective. The researcher employed the competing-values perspective to flesh out details and to help refocus the assumptive worlds model when behaviors or beliefs appeared to contradict. Beyond the five circles are ideologies. The researcher found two major discoveries concerning ideology. The first major discovery is that the ideology lens reveals North Carolina's persistent belief in the myth that education issues and education legislation are non-partisan. The second major discovery concerning ideology is that a political party in the majority can lock out the other party as well as certain education interests from participation in the legislative process. Finally, beyond the hegemonic policy square is situated politics from beyond the margins. The researcher discovered that a better classification system that denotes the political abilities of a marginal group is needed to structure a group's ability to maneuver beneficial legislation through the political and legislative arenas. Further, the conceptual framework provided a way to see how marginal groups must learn to organize, find their voice, make their issues more global, secure more money, communicate their issues more effectively to the media, free themselves from the myth of one champion and finally find voices from every region of the state to support their issues

Identification of Listeria monocytogenes Determinants Required for Biofilm Formation

Listeria monocytogenes is a Gram-positive, food-borne pathogen of humans and animals. L. monocytogenes is considered to be a potential public health risk by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as this bacterium can easily contaminate ready-to-eat (RTE) foods and cause an invasive, life-threatening disease (listeriosis). Bacteria can adhere and grow on multiple surfaces and persist within biofilms in food processing plants, providing resistance to sanitizers and other antimicrobial agents. While whole genome sequencing has led to the identification of biofilm synthesis gene clusters in many bacterial species, bioinformatics has not identified the biofilm synthesis genes within the L. monocytogenes genome. To identify genes necessary for L. monocytogenes biofilm formation, we performed a transposon mutagenesis library screen using a recently constructed Himar1 mariner transposon. Approximately 10,000 transposon mutants within L. monocytogenes strain 10403S were screened for biofilm formation in 96-well polyvinyl chloride (PVC) microtiter plates with 70 Himar1 insertion mutants identified that produced significantly less biofilms. DNA sequencing of the transposon insertion sites within the isolated mutants revealed transposon insertions within 38 distinct genetic loci. The identification of mutants bearing insertions within several flagellar motility genes previously known to be required for the initial stages of biofilm formation validated the ability of the mutagenesis screen to identify L. monocytogenes biofilm-defective mutants. Two newly identified genetic loci, dltABCD and phoPR, were selected for deletion analysis and both ΔdltABCD and ΔphoPR bacterial strains displayed biofilm formation defects in the PVC microtiter plate assay, confirming these loci contribute to biofilm formation by L. monocytogenes

UNLV College of Education Multicultural & Diversity Newsletter

A newsletter discussing a variety of topics dealing with multicultural topics and diversity in education

UNLV College of Education Multicultural & Diversity Newsletter

Each morning I wound my way up the steep hill along the deeply rutted dirt path, exchanging daily maaa\u27s with five bleating sheep and shouting out, ¡Hola! in response to the children who gleefully identified me as ¡Gringa! Women and children, colorful bowls of cooked maize balanced atop their heads, sauntered to and from Maria Elena\u27s where their maize would be ground; at home the dough would be shaped and flattened into tortillas, the mainstay of every meal in the small Guatemalan village of San Juan

Tunable itinerant spin dynamics with polar molecules

Strongly interacting spins underlie many intriguing phenomena and applications ranging from quantum magnetism and spin transport to precision quantum sensing and quantum information processing. An interacting spin system with high controllability is desired in order to understand these complex phenomena. Here, we demonstrate tunable itinerant spin dynamics enabled by dipolar interactions using a gas of potassium-rubidium molecules confined to two-dimensional planes, where the spin-1/2 is encoded in the molecular rotational levels. The dipolar interaction gives rise to a shift of the rotational transition frequency and a collision-limited Ramsey contrast decay that emerges from the coupled spin and motion. Both the Ising and spin exchange interactions are precisely tuned by varying the strength and orientation of an electric field, as well as the internal molecular state. This full tunability enables both static and dynamical control of the spin Hamiltonian, allowing reversal of the coherent spin dynamics. Our work establishes an interacting spin platform that allows for exploration of many-body spin dynamics and spin-motion physics utilizing the strong, tunable dipolar interaction.Comment: 22 pages, including 4 + 2 figure

Deploying Fourier Coefficients to Unravel Soybean Canopy Diversity

Soybean canopy outline is an important trait used to understand light interception ability, canopy closure rates, row spacing response, which in turn affects crop growth and yield, and directly impacts weed species germination and emergence. In this manuscript, we utilize a methodology that constructs geometric measures of the soybean canopy outline from digital images of canopies, allowing visualization of the genetic diversity as well as a rigorous quantification of shape parameters. Our choice of data analysis approach is partially dictated by the need to efficiently store and analyze large datasets, especially in the context of planned high-throughput phenotyping experiments to capture time evolution of canopy outline which will produce very large datasets. Using the Elliptical Fourier Transformation (EFT) and Fourier Descriptors (EFD), canopy outlines of 446 soybean plant introduction (PI) lines from 25 different countries exhibiting a wide variety of maturity, seed weight, and stem termination were investigated in a field experiment planted as a randomized complete block design with up to four replications. Canopy outlines were extracted from digital images, and subsequently chain coded, and expanded into a shape spectrum by obtaining the Fourier coefficients/descriptors. These coefficients successfully reconstruct the canopy outline, and were used to measure traditional morphometric traits. Highest phenotypic diversity was observed for roundness, while solidity showed the lowest diversity across all countries. Some PI lines had extraordinary shape diversity in solidity. For interpretation and visualization of the complexity in shape, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed on the EFD. PI lines were grouped in terms of origins, maturity index, seed weight, and stem termination index. No significant pattern or similarity was observed among the groups; although interestingly when genetic marker data was used for the PCA, patterns similar to canopy outline traits was observed for origins, and maturity indexes. These results indicate the usefulness of EFT method for reconstruction and study of canopy morphometric traits, and provides opportunities for data reduction of large images for ease in future use

Do Community Females Display a Propensity towards Sexual Aggression? An Empirical Assessment of Prevalence and Psychological Predictors

Objective: Despite growing interest in female sexual offending, academic understanding of community females who display a propensity towards sexual aggression (PSA) is lacking. Method: Across three vignette studies, we recruited three independent samples of community females (Noverall = 555) to assess the prevalence of female PSA towards males. We also examined whether established risk factors associated with male PSA are valid predictors of female PSA. These included ambivalent sexist attitudes, inappropriate sexual interests, non-sexual aggression, impulsivity, male rape myth acceptance, and sexual preoccupation. Results: Across studies, findings showed that between 26.9% and 44.0% of participants did not emphatically reject an interest in adult male-directed PSA. Key predictors of participants’ non-zero endorsement included an interest in violent sexual activities, rape myth acceptance, and sexual preoccupation. Conclusions: Though lower than their male counterparts (see Bohner, G., Reinhard, M. A., Rutz, S., Sturm, S., Kerschbaum, B., & Effler, D. (1998). Rape myths as neutralizing cognitions: Evidence for a causal impact of anti-victim attitudes on men’s self-reported likelihood of raping. European Journal of Social Psychology, 28(2), 257–268), some community females self-report an interest in perpetrating male-directed sexual aggression. We discuss the implications of our findings on harm prevention efforts with females, alongside avenues for future research

Geochemistry and mineralogy of the phonolite lava lake, Erebus volcano, Antarctica: 1972–2004 and comparison with older lavas

Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 177 (2008): 589-605, doi:10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2007.11.025.Mount Erebus, Antarctica, is a large (3794 m) alkaline open-conduit stratovolcano that hosts a vigorously convecting and persistently degassing lake of anorthoclase phonolite magma. The composition of the lake was investigated by analyzing glass and mineral compositions in lava bombs erupted between 1972 and 2004. Matrix glass, titanomagnetite, olivine, clinopyroxene, and fluor-apatite compositions are invariant and show that the magmatic temperature (~1000°C) and oxygen fugacity (ΔlogFMQ = -0.9) have been stable. Large temperature variations at the lake surface (ca. 400 - 500°C) are not reflected in mineral compositions. Anorthoclase phenocrysts up to 10 cm in length feature a restricted compositional range (An10.3-22.9Ab62.8-68.1Or11.4-27.2) with complex textural and compositional zoning. Anorthoclase textures and compositions indicate crystallization occurs at low degrees of effective undercooling. We propose shallow water exsolution causes crystallization to occur and shallow convection repeats this process multiple times, yielding extremely large anorthoclase crystals. Minor variations in eruptive activity from 1972 to 2004 are decoupled from magma compositions. The variations probably relate to changes in conduit geometry within the volcano and/or variable input of CO2-rich volatiles into the upper-level magma chamber from deeper in the system. Eleven bulk samples of phonolite lava from the summit plateau that range in age from 0 ± 4 ka to 17 ± 8 ka were analyzed for major and trace elements. Small compositional variations are controlled by anorthoclase content. The lavas are indistinguishable from modern bulk lava bomb compositions and demonstrate that Erebus volcano has been erupting lava and tephra from the summit region with the same bulk composition for ~17 ka.The work at Erebus volcano and the continued operation of the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory is supported by grants (OPP-0229305, ANT-0538414) from the Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation