Return on Involvement: The True ROI

In recent years, there has been a much larger emphasis placed upon the importance of student involvement to achieve success, especially at the collegiate level. Research has shown that involvement not only helps students to practice better time management skills, but also allows them to connect with and learn from other students who share similar interests and passions. At the college level, students who become involved often feel connected to the school and as if they can actually make a difference. I am hoping to explore this topic through my Senior Honors Project to further understand the effects that student involvement has on a student’s college experience. I chose to select this topic after becoming involved at the University of Rhode Island throughout my four-year college journey. I can certainly explain the effects that student involvement has had on my college experience as a marketing major in the College of Business Administration; however, this project allowed me to further understand how student involvement affects other URI students studying business that are different than myself

Climate Change Impacts on Groundwater in MAPC Communities

Groundwater is important for human health and the environment but has often been overlooked in the development of climate change adaptation strategies. This is because groundwater is rarely visible, and because changes in groundwater levels are not as dramatic as extreme flooding events, coastal storms, and storm surge. The importance of groundwater for drinking water, natural resources, and streamflow is well documented. Groundwater levels are also important considerations in the design of pavements, underground infrastructure, foundations, on-site wastewater treatment systems, and in the remediation of hazardous waste disposal areas. Groundwater is especially important in the wet northeast, where groundwater levels tend to be shallow and impactful. It is typically assumed that on average groundwater levels are not changing. This is no longer true with climate change. Groundwater is the world’s largest distributed source of fresh water and is important for both ecosystems and human consumption. Groundwater levels are affected directly by recharge (water infiltrating the ground surface and moving into the groundwater system) and water losses through groundwater discharge to surface water bodies and groundwater withdrawals from aquifers. Many factors influence the amount of groundwater recharge that occurs. These include precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, land cover and land use, soil moisture, and topography. Climate change is affecting the global water cycle by increasing rates of ocean evaporation, terrestrial evapotranspiration, and precipitation. Precipitation, temperatures, and sea levels are all projected to increase in the northeast due to climate change. These factors can result in long-term and seasonal changes in groundwater levels potentially impacting drinking water supplies, water quality, the useful life of pavements and underground infrastructure, and flooding

The Unusual Linear Plasmid Generating Systems of Prokaryotes

Linear DNA is vulnerable to exonuclease degradation and suffers from genetic loss due to the end replication problem. Eukaryotes overcome these problems by locating repetitive telomere sequences at the end of each chromosome. In humans and other vertebrates this noncoding terminal sequence is repeated between hundreds and thousands of times, ensuring important genetic information is protected. In most prokaryotes, the end-replication problem is solved by utilizing circular DNA molecules as chromosomes. However, some phage and bacteria do store genetic information in linear constructs, and the ends of these structures form either invertrons or hairpin telomeres. Hairpin telomere formation is catalyzed by a protelomerase, a unique protein that modifies DNA by a two-step transesterification reaction, proceeding via a covalent protein bound intermediate. The specifics of this mechanism are largely unknown and conflicting data suggests variations occur between different systems. These proteins, and the DNA constructs they produce, have valuable applications in the biotechnology industry. They are also an essential component of some human pathogens, an increased understanding of how they operate is therefore of fundamental importance. Although this review will focus on phage encoded protelomerase, protelomerases found from Agrobacterium and Borellia will be discussed in terms of mechanism of action

Robust Quantum Metrology

In optical interferometry path-entangled states such as NOON states have shown to give quantum-enhanced precision measurements, but these states are notoriously fragile to particle losses, which typically collapse the quantum state and destroy the phase information. A class of inherently robust states that show the potential for great improvements over the alternatives are the entangled coherent states (ECSs). We show that these states allow substantial improvements over unentangled `classical' states and highly-entangled NOON states for a wide range of loss values. We then describe a measurement scheme that can be used to measure these states with a precision close to the theoretical bound given by the quantum Fisher information. We then look at the quantum mechanisms that lead to precise measurements. In optical interferometry multi-mode entanglement is often assumed to be the driving force behind quantum enhanced measurements. Recent work has shown this assumption to be false, and here we show that when photon losses occur multi-mode entanglement is actually detrimental to obtaining quantum enhanced measurements. We specifically apply this idea to a superposition of coherent states, demonstrating that these states show a robustness to loss that allows them to significantly outperform their competitors in realistic systems. A practically viable measurement scheme is then presented that allows measurements close to the theoretical bound, even with loss. In this thesis we also consider superpositions of spin coherent states and their application to quantum metrology. Compared to optical states, spin systems have a distinctly different process of decoherence known as non-Markovian dephasing, which has shown to give greatly improved robustness to loss. We see that spin cat states give an enhanced scaling over the shot noise limit, even with dephasing, whilst being realisable with current technology

Developing tomorrow's leaders today : leadership development programs at selected North Carolina community colleges

The characteristics of a leadership development challenge for America's community colleges have been well-documented in the literature. A worldwide population aging trend, college leader retirements, and an ineffective system for new leader development have led to predictions of a shortfall in well-trained leaders at all levels of community colleges. These colleges are essential to workforce and economic development in over 1,500 communities and sound leadership of them is essential to the achievement of this mission. The purpose of this study was to add to the greater body of knowledge by describing the planning, developing, delivering, and strengthening elements of three community college-based faculty and staff leadership development programs. Additionally, the study assessed the individual and institutional outcomes of the selected campus-based programs and the relationship of structural, methodological, and topical elements to those results. An extensive review of the literature described the significance of the need to understand the development, delivery, and outcomes of grow-your-own community college leadership development programs. A concurrent mixed-methods approach incorporating interviews, documents, surveys, and program evaluations was used to gather information about the sponsoring institutions and their programs, participants, staff, and sponsors. Emerging themes and patterns of findings were used to address the following research questions within each of the study sites as well as across the three programs: 1. What programmatic elements were included in the planning, developing, delivering, and strengthening phases of each LDI program? 2. What perceived leadership development outcomes did study participants attribute to their participation in the LDI program 3. What perceived organizational outcomes did study participants attribute to the LDI program? 4. How did the LDI programmatic elements relate to perceived leadership development and organizational outcomes The research was organized to examine leadership development programs in the context of a literature-based hybrid analytical framework. The framework was developed to broaden and deepen the understanding of these programs and provide guidance for improved program planning, implementation, and evaluation. The study revealed that many of the elements outlined in the literature were incorporated in the programs examined. Unique and culturally-relevant programmatic innovations led to profound individual leadership development outcomes across each of the programs. Programs displayed institutional nuances while achieving a core group of fundamentally similar institutional outcomes. Programmatic best practices for planning, developing, delivering, and strengthening community college leadership development were also identified and described

Comparative analysis of quantitative trait loci for body weight, growth rate and growth curve parameters from 3 to 72 weeks of age in female chickens of a broiler-layer cross

Background: Comparisons of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for growth and parameters of growth curves assist in understanding the genetics and ultimately the physiology of growth. Records of body weight at 3, 6, 12, 24, 48 and 72 weeks of age and growth rate between successive age intervals of about 500 F female chickens of the Roslin broiler-layer cross were available for analysis. These data were analysed to detect and compare QTL for body weight, growth rate and parameters of the Gompertz growth function.Results: Over 50 QTL were identified for body weight at specific ages and most were also detected in the nearest preceding and/or subsequent growth stage. The sum of the significant and suggestive additive effects for bodyweight at specific ages accounted for 23-43% of the phenotypic variation. A single QTL for body weight on chromosome 4 at 48 weeks of age had the largest additive effect (550.4 ± 68.0 g, 11.5% of the phenotypic variation) and a QTL at a similar position accounted 14.5% of the phenotypic variation at 12 weeks of age. Age specific QTL for growth rate were detected suggesting that there are specific genes that affect developmental processes during the different stages of growth. Relatively few QTL influencing Gompertz growth curve parameters were detected and overlapped with loci affecting growth rate. Dominance effects were generally not significant but from 12 weeks of age they exceeded the additive effect in a few cases. No evidence for epistatic QTL pairs was found.Conclusions: The results confirm the location for body weight and body weight gain during growth that were identified in previous studies and were consistent with QTL for the parameters of the Gompertz growth function. Chromosome 4 explained a relatively large proportion of the observed growth variation across the different ages, and also harboured most of the detected QTL for Gompertz parameters, confirming its importance in controlling growth. Very few QTL were detected for body weight or gain at 48 and 72 weeks of age, probably reflecting the effect of differences in reproduction and random environmental effects

Proposed robust entanglement-based magnetic field sensor beyond the standard quantum limit

Recently, there have been significant developments in entanglement-based quantum metrology. However, entanglement is fragile against experimental imperfections, and quantum sensing to beat the standard quantum limit in scaling has not yet been achieved in realistic systems. Here, we show that it is possible to overcome such restrictions so that one can sense a magnetic field with an accuracy beyond the standard quantum limit even under the effect of decoherence, by using a realistic entangled state that can be easily created even with current technology. Our scheme could pave the way for the realizations of practical entanglement-based magnetic field sensors

Multiparameter estimation in networked quantum sensors

We introduce a general model for a network of quantum sensors, and we use this model to consider the following question: When can entanglement between the sensors, and/or global measurements, enhance the precision with which the network can measure a set of unknown parameters? We rigorously answer this question by presenting precise theorems proving that for a broad class of problems there is, at most, a very limited intrinsic advantage to using entangled states or global measurements. Moreover, for many estimation problems separable states and local measurements are optimal, and can achieve the ultimate quantum limit on the estimation uncertainty. This immediately implies that there are broad conditions under which simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters cannot outperform individual, independent estimations. Our results apply to any situation in which spatially localized sensors are unitarily encoded with independent parameters, such as when estimating multiple linear or nonlinear optical phase shifts in quantum imaging, or when mapping out the spatial profile of an unknown magnetic field. We conclude by showing that entangling the sensors can enhance the estimation precision when the parameters of interest are global properties of the entire network