The New News: Journalism We Want and Need

Economic pressures on one hand and continuing democratization of news on the other have already changed the news picture in Chicago, as elsewhere in the U.S. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times are in bankruptcy, and local broadcast news programs also face economic pressures. Meanwhile, it seems every week brings a new local news entrepreneur from Gapers Block to Beachwood Reporter to Chi-Town Daily News to Windy Citizen to The Printed Blog.In response to these changes, the Knight Foundation is actively supporting a national effort to explore innovations in how information, especially at the local community level, is collected and disseminated to ensure that people find the information they need to make informed decisions about their community's future. The Chicago Community Trust is fortunate to have been selected as a partner working with the Knight Foundation in this effort through the Knight Community Information Challenge. For 94 years, the Trust has united donors to create charitable resources that respond to the changing needs of our community -- meeting basic needs, enriching lives and encouraging innovative ways to improve our neighborhoods and communities.Understanding how online information and communications are meeting, or not, the needs of the community is crucial to the Trust's project supported by the Knight Foundation. To this end, the Trust commissioned the Community Media Workshop to produce The New News: Journalism We Want and Need. We believe this report is a first of its kind resource offering an inventory and assessment of local news coverage for the region by utilizing the interactive power of the internet. Essays in this report also provide insightful perspectives on the opportunities and challenges

Milk Production from Cows Grazing Perennial Ryegrass Pastures Infected with Wild or AR1 Endophyte in New Zealand

Most perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) cultivars in New Zealand are available with either the natural wild endophyte (Neotyphodium lolii); the AR1 novel endophyte (no lolitrem B or ergovaline production); or endophyte-free. Although wild endophyte protects ryegrass against insect attack, improving pasture persistence, it can also cause ryegrass staggers and reduced animal performance. Endophyte AR1 does not cause ryegrass staggers but still protects against insect pests such as Argentine stem weevil (Listronotus bonariensis). A 3-year farmlet experiment was carried out to evaluate the effects of AR1 and wild endophyte-infected ryegrass on pasture performance, milk production and cow health

Growth, Yield, and Efficiency of Potassium Fertilizer Use in Burley Tobacco Production

For many crops, band placement of fertilizer offers agronomic, economic, and environmental advantages over commonly used preplant broadcast applications. Drill banding most of the nitrogen (N) fertilizer 12 inches to both sides of the row for tobacco shortly after transplanting greatly aIleviates manganese toxicity and other nutrient imbalances, improves early growth and yield, and offers increased efficiency of N use. Nitrogen fertilizers applied after transplanting are less likely to be leached during excess rainfall events that commonly occur in April and early May in Kentucky

Standardized or simple effect size: what should be reported?

It is regarded as best practice for psychologists to report effect size when disseminating quantitative research findings. Reporting of effect size in the psychological literature is patchy – though this may be changing – and when reported it is far from clear that appropriate effect size statistics are employed. This paper considers the practice of reporting point estimates of standardized effect size and explores factors such as reliability, range restriction and differences in design that distort standardized effect size unless suitable corrections are employed. For most purposes simple (unstandardized) effect size is more robust and versatile than standardized effect size. Guidelines for deciding what effect size metric to use and how to report it are outlined. Foremost among these are: i) a preference for simple effect size over standardized effect size, and ii) the use of confidence intervals to indicate a plausible range of values the effect might take. Deciding on the appropriate effect size statistic to report always requires careful thought and should be influenced by the goals of the researcher, the context of the research and the potential needs of readers

Distributed Memory, GPU Accelerated Fock Construction for Hybrid, Gaussian Basis Density Functional Theory

With the growing reliance of modern supercomputers on accelerator-based architectures such a GPUs, the development and optimization of electronic structure methods to exploit these massively parallel resources has become a recent priority. While significant strides have been made in the development of GPU accelerated, distributed memory algorithms for many-body (e.g. coupled-cluster) and spectral single-body (e.g. planewave, real-space and finite-element density functional theory [DFT]), the vast majority of GPU-accelerated Gaussian atomic orbital methods have focused on shared memory systems with only a handful of examples pursuing massive parallelism on distributed memory GPU architectures. In the present work, we present a set of distributed memory algorithms for the evaluation of the Coulomb and exact-exchange matrices for hybrid Kohn-Sham DFT with Gaussian basis sets via direct density-fitted (DF-J-Engine) and seminumerical (sn-K) methods, respectively. The absolute performance and strong scalability of the developed methods are demonstrated on systems ranging from a few hundred to over one thousand atoms using up to 128 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on the Perlmutter supercomputer.Comment: 45 pages, 9 figure

The woods around the ivory tower: A systematic review examining the value and relevance of school forests in the United States

Throughout the United States, many institutions of higher education own forested tracts, often called school forests, which they use for teaching, research, and demonstration purposes. These school forests provide a range of benefits to the communities in which they are located. However, because administration is often decoupled from research and teaching, those benefits might not always be evident to the individuals who make decisions about the management and use of school forests, which may undervalue their services and put these areas at risk for sale, development, or over-harvesting to generate revenue. To understand what messages are being conveyed about the value and relevance of school forests, we conducted a systematic literature review and qualitatively coded the resulting literature content using an ecosystem services framework. While school forests provide many important benefits to academic and local communities, we found that most of the existing literature omits discussions about cultural ecosystem services that people may receive from school forests. We discuss the implications of this omission and make recommendations for addressing it

Physical Properties of Complex C Halo Clouds

Observations from the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array HI (GALFA-HI) Survey of the tail of Complex C are presented and the halo clouds associated with this complex cataloged. The properties of the Complex C clouds are compared to clouds cataloged at the tail of the Magellanic Stream to provide insight into the origin and destruction mechanism of Complex C. Magellanic Stream and Complex C clouds show similarities in their mass distributions (slope = -0.7 and -0.6, respectively) and have a common linewidth of 20 - 30 km/s (indicative of a warm component), which may indicate a common origin and/or physical process breaking down the clouds. The clouds cataloged at the tail of Complex C extend over a mass range of 10^1.1 to 10^4.8 solar masses, sizes of 10^1.2 to 10^2.6 pc, and have a median volume density of 0.065 cm^(-3) and median pressure of (P/k) = 580 K cm^{-3}. We do not see a prominent two-phase structure in Complex C, possibly due to its low metallicity and inefficient cooling compared to other halo clouds. From assuming the Complex C clouds are in pressure equilibrium with a hot halo medium, we find a median halo density of 5.8 x 10^(-4) cm^(-3), which given a constant distance of 10 kpc, is at a z-height of ~3 kpc. Using the same argument for the Stream results in a median halo density of 8.4 x 10^(-5) x (60kpc/d) cm^(-3). These densities are consistent with previous observational constraints and cosmological simulations. We also assess the derived cloud and halo properties with three dimensional grid simulations of halo HI clouds and find the temperature is generally consistent within a factor of 1.5 and the volume densities, pressures and halo densities are consistent within a factor of 3.Comment: Accepted for publication in AJ. 54 pages, including 6 tables and 16 figure

Physiotherapy for adults with joint hypermobility syndrome: A pilot randomised controlled trial

Background: Joint Hypermobility Syndrome (JHS) is a heritable disorder associated with laxity and pain in multiple joints. Physiotherapy is the mainstay of treatment but there is little research investigating its effectiveness. The aim of this study was therefore to conduct a pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) to determine the feasibility of conducting a future definitive RCT. Methods: A comprehensive physiotherapy intervention was developed in conjunction with patients and healthcare professionals. It was then piloted and refined on the basis of patient and physiotherapist feedback. A parallel two-arm pilot RCT in two UK secondary care NHS Trusts compared 'Advice' against 'Advice & Physiotherapy'. Inclusion criteria were: >16 years, a diagnosis of JHS, and no other musculoskeletal conditions causing pain. The Advice intervention was a one-off session, supplemented by advice booklets from the Hypermobility Syndromes Association and Arthritis Research UK. All patients could ask questions specific to their circumstances and received tailored advice. Participants were then randomly allocated to 'Advice' (no further advice or physiotherapy) or 'Advice & Physiotherapy' (an additional six 30 minute sessions over 4 months). The Physiotherapy intervention was supported by a patient handbook and delivered on a one-to-one patient-therapist basis. It aimed to increase patients’ physical activity through developing knowledge, understanding and skills to better manage their condition. The primary outcome related to the feasibility of conducting a future definitive RCT. Qualitative interviews with patients and physiotherapists therefore formed a major component of data collection. Secondary outcomes included clinical measures (physical function, pain, global status, self-reported joint count, quality of life, exercise self-efficacy and adverse events); resource use (to estimate cost-effectiveness); and an estimate of the value of information from a future RCT. Outcomes were recorded at baseline, 4 months (at the end of physiotherapy) and 7 months (3 months following physiotherapy). Results: A total of n=29 participants were recruited to the pilot RCT. Recruitment was challenging, primarily due to a perceived lack of equipoise between Advice and Physiotherapy. The qualitative evaluation provided very clear guidance to inform a future RCT, including enhancement of the Advice intervention. Some patients reported that the Advice intervention was useful and the Physiotherapy intervention was evaluated very positively. The rate of return of questionnaires was low within the Advice group but reasonable in the Physiotherapy group. The Physiotherapy intervention showed evidence of promise in terms of primary and secondary clinical outcomes. The Advice arm experienced more adverse events. The value of information estimate indicated the potential for high value from a future RCT. Conclusion: A future definitive RCT of physiotherapy for JHS seems feasible, although the Advice intervention should be made more robust to address perceived equipoise and subsequent attrition

High-Velocity Clouds in the Nearby Spiral Galaxy M 83

We present deep HI 21-cm and optical observations of the face-on spiral galaxy M 83 obtained as part of a project to search for high-velocity clouds (HVCs) in nearby galaxies. Anomalous-velocity neutral gas is detected toward M 83, with 5.6x10^7 Msolar of HI contained in a disk rotating 40-50 km/s more slowly in projection than the bulk of the gas. We interpret this as a vertically extended thick disk of neutral material, containing 5.5% of the total HI within the central 8 kpc. Using an automated source detection algorithm to search for small-scale HI emission features, we find eight distinct, anomalous-velocity HI clouds with masses ranging from 7x10^5 to 1.5x10^7 Msolar and velocities differing by up to 200 km/s compared to the HI disk. Large on-disk structures are coincident with the optical spiral arms, while unresolved off-disk clouds contain no diffuse optical emission down to a limit of 27 r' mag per square arcsec. The diversity of the thick HI disk and larger clouds suggests the influence of multiple formation mechanisms, with a galactic fountain responsible for the slowly-rotating disk and on-disk discrete clouds, and tidal effects responsible for off-disk cloud production. The mass and kinetic energy of the HI clouds are consistent with the mass exchange rate predicted by the galactic fountain model. If the HVC population in M 83 is similar to that in our own Galaxy, then the Galactic HVCs must be distributed within a radius of less than 25 kpc.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ. Some figures have been altered to reduce their siz

Quantitative expression and localization of GABAB receptor protein subunits in hippocampi from patients with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy

This study investigates GABAB protein expression and mRNA levels in three types of specimens. Two types of specimens from patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), secondary to hippocampal sclerosis, sclerotic hippocampal samples (TLE-HS), and tissue from the structurally preserved non-spiking ipsilateral superior temporal gyrus (TLE-STG) removed from the same patient during epilepsy surgery; and third specimen is hippocampal tissue from individuals with no history of epilepsy (post-mortem controls, PMC). mRNA expression of GABAB subunits was quantified in TLE-HS, TLE-STG and PMC specimens by qRT-PCR. Qualitative and quantitative Western blot (WB) and immunohistochemistry techniques were employed to quantify and localize GABAB proteins subunits. qRT-PCR data demonstrated an overall decrease of both GABAB1 isoforms in TLE-HS compared to TLE-STG. These results were mirrored by the WB findings. GABAB2 mRNA and protein were significantly reduced in TLE-HS samples compared to TLE-STG; however they appeared to be upregulated in TLE-HS compared to the PMC samples. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) showed that GABAB proteins were widely distributed in PMC and TLE-HS hippocampal sections with regional differences in the intensity of the signal. The higher expression of mature GABAB protein in TLE-HS than PMC is in agreement with previous studies. However, these findings could be due to post-mortem changes in PMC specimens. The TLE-STG samples examined here represent a better 'control' tissue compared to TLE-HS samples characterized by lower than expected GABAB expression. This interpretation provides a better explanation for previous functional studies suggesting reduced inhibition in TLE-HS tissue due to attenuated GABAB currents. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Ltd.