Uncovering Trilingual Development and Multilingual Literacy Practices in the United States: A Review

Uncovering trilingual development and multilingual literacy practices in the United States: A Review Trilingual literacy practices in the United States have not been widely researched. When evaluating the benefits of trilingualism, most of the ongoing conversation has largely concentrated on theories of subtractive and additive bilingualism, which have been recently identified as inadequate to explain the complexity of literacy development in children who are born in a trilingual home. It is hypothesized that there is a staggering gap in how much is known about learning strategies and multilingual literacy instruction for trilingual children in the United States. Using the framework of language rights in the context of inclusive education, the proposed research aims to conduct an integrative literature review to report the existence of empirical studies devoted to understanding trilingual development and multilingual education. This review encompasses literacy practices from newborn children to adolescence and it is limited to education exclusively in the United States of America. Analysis and synthesis of primary sources will include empirical and experimental studies while theoretical literature will be excluded. Several databases will be accessed such as PubMed, Web of Science, and PsychINFO. Keyword generation will include multilingual, trilingual, child development, education, literacy, and United States. Considering that “families still live in a multilingual world of vanishing languages as many languages are dying while many others are being marginalized” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al., 2009), the goal of this research is to uncover the challenges that different groups with rich linguistic backgrounds experience as their multi-lingual repertoires are adversely limited by a persistent tradition of monolingual ideology in which the North American education system has been built despite its historical influx of cultural-diverse people

Substance Use Disorders, Cognitive Dysfunction, and Neurodivergence in Emerging Adulthood

Substance Use Disorders, Cognitive Dysfunction, and Neurodivergence in Emerging Adulthood Posada, D., Herbert, J., Weingast, L., Holliday, E. Cognitive functioning in college students with substance use disorders (SUD) has been widely researched, however, discussions have largely concentrated on executive functions (EF) such as working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. Literature on the relationship between cognitive dysfunction and SUD has largely underreported the influence of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (ADD/ADHD) and other neurodivergent characteristics. The current review explores the state of the literature on the relationship between neurodivergence, cognitive dysfunction, and SUD in emerging adulthood. More specifically, it speculates whether college students who are 18-25 years old with ADD/ADHD are at a higher risk of developing and maintaining an SUD. The field’s understanding of emerging adults is evolving due to technological advances in research and the increasing awareness of neurodiversity. The current review will focus on the age bracket of emerging adults due to the critical neurological development that occurs during this developmental window. Methodology includes systematically searching several databases to ensure that the widest scope of relevant literature on these topics is reviewed including PubMed, Google Scholar, and Psych INFO. Keywords include terms selected to capture the specificity and depth of the areas of interest. It is hypothesized that there are critical gaps in the understanding of cognitive dysfunction and SUD in college students with ADD/ADHD. However, there may be preliminary literature that suggests there is a relationship between these phenomena. The current review aims to inform future practice and research through presenting the state of the literature on emerging adulthood, neurodivergence, and SUD. Key Words: Cognitive Dysfunction, College Students, Emerging Adulthood, Substance Use Disorders, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, ADD, ADHD, Executive Functio

Micotoxinas en materias primas para alimentación animal en Colombia

Para hablar de alimentación animal se debe hablar inicialmente de materias primas (MP) y su calidad y el papel que juegan en esta industria tan creciente, por lo tanto los factores que afecten la calidad de estas materias primas y su uso son muy importantes como lo son sus características físico-químicas y microbiológicas, como también algunos contaminantes dentro de estos se encuentran las micotoxinas. Actualmente en Colombia esta surgiendo una necesidad creciente en la calidad de las materias primas que se utilizan para la alimentación animal ya que el origen de ellas es muy variado (MP nacionales e importadas) y es necesario un referente en cuanto a dichos contaminantes, es por esto que el objetivo de este estudio es Recopilar información sobre las “Micotoxinas en materias primas para alimentación animal en Colombia”, lo cual se realizó por medio de medio de la búsqueda de bases de datos actualizadas como Mendeley, Scielo, Google escolar, Scopus, Redalyc, Wolrd wide Sciene, Science direct, donde se encuentren artículos usando los conectores lógicos como (and, or, not,) y con las palabras claves citadas a continuación

Infinitely long branches and an informal test of common ancestry

Background: The evidence for universal common ancestry (UCA) is vast and persuasive. A phylogenetic test has been proposed for quantifying its odds against independently originated sequences based on the comparison between one versus several trees. This test was successfully applied to a well-supported homologous sequence alignment, which was however criticized on the basis of simulations showing that alignments without any phylogenetic structure could mislead its conclusions.Results: Here we present a simplified version of this same counterexample, which can be interpreted as a tree with arbitrarily long branches, and where the UCA test fails again. We also present another case whereby any sufficiently similar alignment will favour UCA irrespective of the true independent origins for the sequences. Finally, we present a class of frequentist tests that perform better than the purportedly formal UCA test.Conclusion: Despite claims to the contrary, we show that the counterexamples successfully detected a drawback of the original UCA test, of relying on sequence similarity. In light of our own simulations, we therefore conclude that the UCA test as originally proposed should not be trusted unless convergence has already been ruled out a priori.Reviewers: This article was reviewed by Professor Eugene Koonin, Dr. Yuri I. Wolf and Professor William Martin

Evidence for survival of Pleistocene climatic changes in Northern refugia by the land snail Trochoidea geyeri (Soós 1926) (Helicellinae, Stylommatophora)

BACKGROUND: The study of organisms with restricted dispersal abilities and presence in the fossil record is particularly adequate to understand the impact of climate changes on the distribution and genetic structure of species. Trochoidea geyeri (Soós 1926) is a land snail restricted to a patchy, insular distribution in Germany and France. Fossil evidence suggests that current populations of T. geyeri are relicts of a much more widespread distribution during more favourable climatic periods in the Pleistocene. RESULTS: Phylogeographic analysis of the mitochondrial 16S rDNA and nuclear ITS-1 sequence variation was used to infer the history of the remnant populations of T. geyeri. Nested clade analysis for both loci suggested that the origin of the species is in the Provence from where it expanded its range first to Southwest France and subsequently from there to Germany. Estimated divergence times predating the last glacial maximum between 25–17 ka implied that the colonization of the northern part of the current species range occurred during the Pleistocene. CONCLUSION: We conclude that T. geyeri could quite successfully persist in cryptic refugia during major climatic changes in the past, despite of a restricted capacity of individuals to actively avoid unfavourable conditions

Simulation of genome-wide evolution under heterogeneous substitution models and complex multispecies coalescent histories

Genomic evolution can be highly heterogeneous. Here, we introduce a new framework to simulate genome-wide sequence evolution under a variety of substitution models that may change along the genome and the phylogeny, following complex multispecies coalescent histories that can include recombination, demographics, longitudinal sampling, population subdivision/species history, and migration. A key aspect of our simulation strategy is that the heterogeneity of the whole evolutionary process can be parameterized according to statistical prior distributions specified by the user. We used this framework to carry out a study of the impact of variable codon frequencies across genomic regions on the estimation of the genome-wide nonsynonymous/synonymous ratio. We found that both variable codon frequencies across genes and rate variation among sites and regions can lead to severe underestimation of the global dN/dS values. The program SGWE—Simulation of Genome-Wide Evolution—is freely available from http://code.google.com/p/sgwe-project/, including extensive documentation and detailed examples.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. JCI-2011-1045

GenDecoder: genetic code prediction for metazoan mitochondria

Although the majority of the organisms use the same genetic code to translate DNA, several variants have been described in a wide range of organisms, both in nuclear and organellar systems, many of them corresponding to metazoan mitochondria. These variants are usually found by comparative sequence analyses, either conducted manually or with the computer. Basically, when a particular codon in a query-species is linked to positions for which a specific amino acid is consistently found in other species, then that particular codon is expected to translate as that specific amino acid. Importantly, and despite the simplicity of this approach, there are no available tools to help predicting the genetic code of an organism. We present here GenDecoder, a web server for the characterization and prediction of mitochondrial genetic codes in animals. The analysis of automatic predictions for 681 metazoans aimed us to study some properties of the comparative method, in particular, the relationship among sequence conservation, taxonomic sampling and reliability of assignments. Overall, the method is highly precise (99%), although highly divergent organisms such as platyhelminths are more problematic. The GenDecoder web server is freely available from