Topographic Map Acquisition In U.S. Academic Libraries

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Designing Scholarships To Improve College Success: Final Report On the Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration

Performance-based scholarships have two main goals: to give students more money for college and to provide incentives for academic progress. They are designed to reduce the financial burden on low-income students and help them progress academically by offering financial aid contingent upon meeting pre-specified academic benchmarks. The scholarships are intended to cover a modest amount of students' educational costs during the semesters they are offered -- generally between 15 and 25 percent of students' unmet financial need, the difference between students' calculated financial need to attend college and the financial aid they are awarded. The money is paid directly to students, on top of their existing federal and state need-based financial aid, and the students themselves decide how best to use the funds. MDRC launched the Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration in 2008 to evaluate the effectiveness of these scholarships for as broad a range of low-income students as possible, in a variety of settings, and with varying incentive structures. As such, the evaluation includes more than 12,000 students in institutions across six states to test different performance-based scholarship designs. These results show that even relatively moderate investments in low-income students' education can have modest but long-lasting impacts on their academic outcomes. These findings may be especially relevant to states, institutions, and private scholarship providers seeking purposeful and efficient ways to give low-income students additional financial aid that can also help them succeed academically

The carbon life cycle assessment of the production of shelterbelt species in Saskatchewan

Non-Peer ReviewedShelterbelt tree and shrub adoption has been a major landscape management practice on agricultural land in Saskatchewan throughout the 1900s. Shelterbelt trees were distributed to landowners, free of charge, from 1901 to 2002 by the Canadian government's prairie shelterbelt centre, which was located in Indian Head, Saskatchewan. Though the shelterbelt centre at Indian Head closed in 2013, many other shelterbelt centres and forestry nurseries still exist to serve this purpose. Saskpower's Shand Greenhouse, operated out of Estevan, Saskatchewan, provides approximately 500,000 seedlings a year, both free of charge for those eligible and for purchase. Shelterbelt tree and shrubs are important for carbon sequestration and storage efforts within Saskatchewan and Canada, however it is important to note the carbon produced in the production of these seedlings. Using data collected from Shand Greenhouse and an LCA software program (SimaPro), the overall carbon produced by this stage of the shelterbelt life cycle can be determined. With this information, the net carbon balance of shelterbelt production and use will be better understood. This may serve as beneficial information regarding future decision-making for individual landowners and governmental policies regarding the production as well as the removal/retention of shelterbelt trees

Small Molecule Inhibition of Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 (GSK-3) Specifically Inhibits the Transcription of Inhibitory Co-Receptor LAG-3 for Enhanced Anti-Tumor Immunity

Immune checkpoint blockade using antibodies against negative co-receptors such as cytolytic T cell antigen-4 (CTLA-4) and programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) has seen much success treating cancer. However, most patients are still not cured, underscoring the need for improved treatments and the possible development of small molecule inhibitors (SMIs) for improved immunotherapy. We previously showed that glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)- 3a/b is a central regulator of PD-1 expression, where GSK-3 inhibition down-regulates PD-1 and enhances CD8+ cytolytic T cell (CTL) function, reducing viral infections and tumor growth. Here, we demonstrate that GSK-3 also negatively regulates Lymphocyte Activation Gene-3 (LAG-3) expression on CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. GSK-3 SMIs are more effective than LAG-3 blockade alone in suppressing B16 melanoma growth, while their combination resulted in enhanced tumor clearance. This was linked to increased expression of the transcription factor, Tbet, which bound the LAG-3 promoter, inhibiting its transcription, and to increased granzyme B and interferong1 expression. Overall, we describe a small molecule approach to inhibit LAG-3, resulting in enhanced anti-tumor immunity

New Model for Electron-Impact Ionization Cross Sections of Molecules

A theoretical model for electron-impact ionization cross sections, which has been developed primarily for atoms and atomic ions, is applied to neutral molecules. The new model combines the binary-encounter theory and the Bethe theory for electron-impact ionization, and uses minimal theoretical data for the ground state of the target molecule, which are readily available from public-domain molecular structure codes such as GAMESS. The theory is called the binary encounter Bethe (BEB) model, and does not, in principle, involve any adjustable parameters. Applications to 19 molecules, including H2, NO, CH2, C6H6, and SF6, are presented, demonstrating that the BEB model provides total ionization cross sections by electron impact from threshold to several keV with an average accuracy of 15% or better at the cross section peak, except for SiF3. The BEB model can be applied to stable molecules as well as to transient radicals

Wayfinding: How Ecological Perspectives of Navigating Dynamic Environments Can Enrich Our Understanding of the Learner and the Learning Process in Sport

Wayfinding is the process of embarking upon a purposeful, intentional, and self-regulated journey that takes an individual from an intended region in one landscape to another. This process is facilitated through an individual’s capacity to utilise temporally structured, functional actions embedded within a particular environmental niche. Thus, individuals learn of their performance landscapes by experiencing them through interactions, detecting and exploiting its many features to ‘find their way’. In this opinion piece, we argue that these ecological and anthropological conceptualisations of human navigation can, metaphorically, deepen our understanding of the learner and the learning process in sport, viewed through the lens of ecological dynamics. Specifically, we consider sports practitioners as (learning) landscape designers, and learners as wayfinders; individuals who learn to skilfully self-regulate through uncharted fields (composed of emergent problems) within performance landscapes through a deeply embodied and embedded perception-action coupling. We contend that, through this re-configuration of the learner and the learning process in sport, practitioners may better enact learning designs that afford learners exploratory freedoms, learning to perceive and utilise available opportunities for action to skilfully navigate through emergent performance-related problems. We conclude the paper by offering two practical examples in which practitioners have designed practice landscapes that situate learners as wayfinders and the learning process in sport as wayfinding

Social control in online communities of consumption: a framework for community management

Online communities of consumption (OCCs) represent highly diverse groups of consumers whose interests are not always aligned. Social control in OCCs aims to effectively manage problems arising from this heterogeneity. Extant literature on social control in OCCs is fragmented as some studies focus on the principles of social control, while others focus on the implementation. Moreover, the domain is undertheorized. This article integrates the disparate literature on social control in OCCs providing a first unified conceptualization of the topic. The authors conceptualize social control as a system, or configuration, of moderation practices. Moderation practices are executed during interactions operating under different governance structures (market, hierarchy, and clan) and serving different purposes (interaction initiation, maintenance, and termination). From this conceptualization, important areas of future research emerge and research questions are developed. The framework also serves as a community management tool for OCC managers, enabling the diagnosis of social control problems and the elaboration of strategies and tactics to address them

New Model for Electron-Impact Ionization Cross Sections of Molecules

A theoretical model for electron-impact ionization cross sections, which has been developed primarily for atoms and atomic ions, is applied to neutral molecules. The new model combines the binary-encounter theory and the Bethe theory for electron-impact ionization, and uses minimal theoretical data for the ground state of the target molecule, which are readily available from public-domain molecular structure codes such as GAMESS. The theory is called the binary encounter Bethe (BEB) model, and does not, in principle, involve any adjustable parameters. Applications to 19 molecules, including H2, NO, CH2, C6H6, and SF6, are presented, demonstrating that the BEB model provides total ionization cross sections by electron impact from threshold to several keV with an average accuracy of 15% or better at the cross section peak, except for SiF3. The BEB model can be applied to stable molecules as well as to transient radicals

‘Knowing as we go’: a Hunter-Gatherer Behavioural Model to Guide Innovation in Sport Science

Where do novel and innovative ideas in sport science come from? How do researchers and practitioners collectively explore the dynamic landscape of inquiry, problem, solution and application? How do they learn to skilfully navigate from current place and practice toward the next idea located beyond their current vantage point? These questions are not just of philosophical value but are important for understanding how to provide high-quality support for athletes and sport participants at all levels of expertise and performance. Grounded in concepts from social anthropology, and theoretically positioned within an ecological dynamics framework, this opinion piece introduces a hunter-gatherer model of human behaviour based on wayfinding, situating it as a conceptual guide for implementing innovations in sport science. Here, we contend that the embedded knowledge of a landscape that guides a successful hunting and gathering party is germane to the pragmatic abduction needed to promote innovation in sport performance, leading to the inquisition of new questions and ways of resolving performance-preparation challenges. More specifically, exemplified through its transdisciplinarity, we propose that to hunt ‘new ideas’ and gather translatable knowledge, sport science researchers and practitioners need to wayfind through uncharted regions located in new performance landscapes. It is through this process of navigation where individuals will deepen, enrich and grow current knowledge, ‘taking home’ new ideas as they find their way