PERCEPTIONS OF PREPAREDNESS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT’S BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN NURSING PROGRAM

Background: In the US, the BIPOC community receives less than ideal healthcare as a result of the systemic racism deeply ingrained in the country. They are often under diagnosed, under screened, and experience higher mortality and healthcare complication rates than their white counterparts. Purpose: The purpose of this cross-sectional quantitative study is to determine if there are differences in how undergraduate students and in the University of Vermont’s undergraduate nursing program perceive how the program is doing in adequately teaching the AACN’s social justice essentials. Methods: The method of this study was a survey through UVM’s RedCap platform. The survey had a demographics section, AACN essentials section, and a continuing education section that were estimated to take under 15 minutes to complete. The Likert scale of 1-5 was utilized and the survey was distributed to fourth year UVM BSN students and UVM BSN faculty. Results: The survey had 58 respondents, 9 of which were faculty and 49 of which were fourth year students. Of significance, faculty had more confidence in student’s ability to self report bias and advocate for social justice than the students themselves did upon entry to professional practice. Conclusion: UVM BSN seniors need more education on just what advocating for social justice and communicating one’s own bias entails. Additionally, they need more accessible DEI education beyond minimum licensure. The gaps in confidence between students and faculty should be further examined to streamline the program and the education it is facilitating

Alternative Strategies for Identifying High-Performing Charter Schools in Texas

The Obama administration\u27s recurring policy emphasis on high-performing charter schools begs the obvious question: how do you identify a high-performing charter school? That is a crucially important policy question because any evaluation strategy that incorrectly identifies charter school performance could have negative effects on the economically and/or academically disadvantaged students who frequently attend charter schools. If low-performing schools are mislabeled and allowed to persist or encouraged to expand, then students may be harmed directly. If high-performing schools are driven from the market by misinformation, then students will lose access to programs and services that can make a difference in their lives. Most of the scholarly analysis to date has focused on comparing the performance of students in charter schools to that of similar students in traditional public schools (TPS). By design, that research measures charter school performance only in relative terms. Charter schools that outperform similarly situated, but low performing, TPSs have positive effects, even if the charter schools are mediocre in an absolute sense. This analysis describes strategies for identifying high-performing charter schools by comparing charter schools with one another. We begin by describing salient characteristics of Texas charter schools. We follow that discussion with a look at how other researchers across the country have compared charter school effectiveness with TPS effectiveness. We then present several metrics that can be used to identify high-performing charter schools. Those metrics are not mutually exclusive—one could easily justify using multiple measures to evaluate school effectiveness—but they are also not equally informative. If the goal is to measure the contributions that schools are making to student knowledge and skills, then a value-added approach like the ones highlighted in this report is clearly superior to a levels-based approach like that taken under the current accountability system

Phenomenological High Precision Neutron-Proton Delta-Shell Potential

We provide a successful fit for proton-neutron scattering below pion production threshold up to LAB energies of 350 MeV. We use seven high-quality fits based on potentials with different forms as a measure of the systematic uncertainty. We represent the interaction as a sum of delta-shells in configuration space below the 3fm and a charge dependent one pion exchange potential above 3fm together with magnetic and vacuum polarization effects. Special attention is paid to estimate the errors of the phenomenological interaction.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Comments and one figure with differential observables adde

Understanding U.S. Coins to Spend and Save (1st grade)

This unit was designed for first grade to teach the value and relationships of U.S. coins. Students will be using their knowledge about coins to count money and make decisions about spending and saving

The jet of Markarian 501 from millions of Schwarzschild radii down to a few hundreds

Aims: The TeV BL Lac object Markarian 501 is a complex, core dominated radio source, with a one sided, twisting jet on parsec scales. In the present work, we attempt to extend our understanding of the source physics to regions of the radio jet which have not been accessed before. Methods: We present new observations of Mrk 501 at 1.4 and 86 GHz. The 1.4 GHz data were obtained using the Very Large Array (VLA) and High Sensitivity Array (HSA) in November 2004, in full polarization, with a final r.m.s. noise of 25 microJy/beam in the HSA total intensity image; the 86 GHz observations were performed in October 2005 with the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), providing an angular resolution as good as 110 x 40 microarcseconds. Results: The sensitivity and resolution provided by the HSA make it possible to detect the jet up to ~700 milliarcseconds (corresponding to a projected linear size of ~500 pc) from its base, while the superior resolution of the 86 GHz GMVA observations probes the innermost regions of the jet down to ~200 Schwarzschild radii. The brightness temperature at the jet base is in excess of 6e10 K. We find evidence of limb brightening on physical scales from <1 pc to ~40 pc. Polarization images and fits to the trend of jet width and brightness vs. distance from the core reveal a magnetic field parallel to the jet axis.Comment: 10 pages, accepted by A&

Computational modelling of COVID-19: A study of compliance and superspreaders

Background: The success of social distancing implementations of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) depends heavily on population compliance. Mathematical modelling has been used extensively to assess the rate of viral transmission from behavioural responses. Previous epidemics of SARS-Cov-2 have been characterised by superspreaders, a small number of individuals who transmit a disease to a large group of individuals, who contribute to the stochasticity (or randomness) of transmission compared to other pathogens such as Influenza. This growing evidence proves an urgent matter to understand transmission routes in order to target and combat outbreaks. / Objective: To investigate the role of superspreaders in the rate of viral transmission with various levels of compliance. / Method: A SEIRS inspired social network model is adapted and calibrated to observe the infected links of a general population with and without superspreaders on four compliance levels. Local and global connection parameters are adjusted to simulate close contact networks and travel restrictions respectively and each performance assessed. The mean and standard deviation of infections with superspreaders and non-superspreaders were calculated for each compliance level. / Results: Increased levels of compliance of superspreaders proves a significant reduction in infections. Assuming long-lasting immunity, superspreaders could potentially slow down the spread due to their high connectivity. / Discussion: The main advantage of applying the network model is to capture the heterogeneity and locality of social networks, including the role of superspreaders in epidemic dynamics. The main challenge is the immediate attention on social settings with targeted interventions to tackle superspreaders in future empirical work. / Conclusion: Superspreaders play a central role in slowing down infection spread following compliance guidelines. It is crucial to adjust social distancing measures to prevent future outbreaks accompanied by population-wide testing and effective tracing

Sodhana Environmental - Final Design Report

A fully designed cost-effective, sustainable, toilet for the developing world

Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

VLEngagement: A Dataset of Scientific Video Lectures for Evaluating Population-based Engagement

With the emergence of e-learning and personalised education, the production and distribution of digital educational resources have boomed. Video lectures have now become one of the primary modalities to impart knowledge to masses in the current digital age. The rapid creation of video lecture content challenges the currently established human-centred moderation and quality assurance pipeline, demanding for more efficient, scalable and automatic solutions for managing learning resources. Although a few datasets related to engagement with educational videos exist, there is still an important need for data and research aimed at understanding learner engagement with scientific video lectures. This paper introduces VLEngagement, a novel dataset that consists of content-based and video-specific features extracted from publicly available scientific video lectures and several metrics related to user engagement. We introduce several novel tasks related to predicting and understanding context-agnostic engagement in video lectures, providing preliminary baselines. This is the largest and most diverse publicly available dataset to our knowledge that deals with such tasks. The extraction of Wikipedia topic-based features also allows associating more sophisticated Wikipedia based features to the dataset to improve the performance in these tasks. The dataset, helper tools and example code snippets are available publicly at https://github.com/sahanbull/context-agnostic-engagemen