From A Service-Learning to A Social-Change Model

Tutor education courses that prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants often include service learning; a typical servicelearning tutor education course involves sending students to tutor in local schools, usually in underserved neighborhoods. Existing writing center scholarship on service learning tends to overlook the limitations of this model. This article advances a radically different approach for tutor education where the course acts as an incubator for social change on campus. Informed by the principles advanced by the critical service learning movement, the course described here invites students to design and implement campus-based community building projects. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that a course focused on community building, rather than tutoring theory and strategies, can effectively prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants while imparting a heightened awareness of social inequities and a deep investment in the campus community.University Writing Cente

Corrections, clarifications, and additions to the 1996 checklist of the Alticinae of Central America : including Mexico (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

In our checklist of the Alticinae of Central America and Mexico (Furth and Savini, 1996), there were some species whose status or generic combination needs clarification. In preparing the 1996 checklist the authors referred to some unpublished notes of Jan Bechyne in order to understand his system of alticine names and to clarify to which genera he considered various species to belong

Molecular Detectability in Exoplanetary Emission Spectra

Of the many recently discovered worlds orbiting distant stars, very little is yet known of their chemical composition. With the arrival of new transit spectroscopy and direct imaging facilities, the question of molecular detectability as a function of signal-to-noise (SNR), spectral resolving power and type of planets has become critical. In this paper, we study the detectability of key molecules in the atmospheres of a range of planet types, and report on the minimum detectable abundances at fixed spectral resolving power and SNR. The planet types considered - hot Jupiters, hot super-Earths, warm Neptunes, temperate Jupiters and temperate super-Earths - cover most of the exoplanets characterisable today or in the near future. We focus on key atmospheric molecules, such as CH4, CO, CO2, NH3, H2O, C2H2, C2H6, HCN, H2S and PH3. We use two methods to assess the detectability of these molecules: a simple measurement of the deviation of the signal from the continuum, and an estimate of the level of confidence of a detection through the use of the likelihood ratio test over the whole spectrum (from 1 to 16$\mu m$). We find that for most planetary cases, SNR=5 at resolution R=300 ($\lambda < 5\mu m$) and R=30 ($\lambda > 5\mu m$) is enough to detect the very strongest spectral features for the most abundant molecules, whereas an SNR comprised between 10 and 20 can reveal most molecules with abundances 10^-6 or lower, often at multiple wavelengths. We test the robustness of our results by exploring sensitivity to parameters such as vertical thermal profile, mean molecular weight of the atmosphere and relative water abundances. We find that our main conclusions remain valid except for the most extreme cases. Our analysis shows that the detectability of key molecules in the atmospheres of a variety of exoplanet cases is within realistic reach, even with low SNR and spectral resolving power.Comment: ICARUS Accepte

Optimizing surveillance for livestock disease spreading through animal movements

The spatial propagation of many livestock infectious diseases critically depends on the animal movements among premises; so the knowledge of movement data may help us to detect, manage and control an outbreak. The identification of robust spreading features of the system is however hampered by the temporal dimension characterizing population interactions through movements. Traditional centrality measures do not provide relevant information as results strongly fluctuate in time and outbreak properties heavily depend on geotemporal initial conditions. By focusing on the case study of cattle displacements in Italy, we aim at characterizing livestock epidemics in terms of robust features useful for planning and control, to deal with temporal fluctuations, sensitivity to initial conditions and missing information during an outbreak. Through spatial disease simulations, we detect spreading paths that are stable across different initial conditions, allowing the clustering of the seeds and reducing the epidemic variability. Paths also allow us to identify premises, called sentinels, having a large probability of being infected and providing critical information on the outbreak origin, as encoded in the clusters. This novel procedure provides a general framework that can be applied to specific diseases, for aiding risk assessment analysis and informing the design of optimal surveillance systems.Comment: Supplementary Information at https://sites.google.com/site/paolobajardi/Home/archive/optimizing_surveillance_ESM_l.pdf?attredirects=

Una finestra su: Amsterdam

Amsterdam è in una fase di delicata transizione. L’articolo propone e affronta una lettura critica di quattro temi chiave: la diversificazione della struttura demografica e socio-economica, la liberalizzazione della politica abitativa, l’approccio organico dello sviluppo urbano e la governance metropolitana. Oggi la città di Amsterdam è più etnicamente e socialmente frammentata che mai. La geografia sociale mostra una crescente diversificazione tra centro e periferia che sottolinea importanti asimmetrie economiche e culturali. Stanno avvenendo anche cambiamenti nella tradizione degli interventi su larga scala e della pianificazione pubblica: in tempi di austerità, gli interventi urbani sono infatti prevalentemente su piccola scala ed orientati a stimolare imprenditorialità in determinate aree urbane e spesso legate a sperimentazioni ed ‘economie creative’. Infine alla base di questi trends si configura un nuovo panorama politico composto da partiti liberali e progressisti, che sfidano gli equilibri politici della città-regione