Youth Design the Future of Transportation for Their Community

The complexity of a globalized world, accelerating technological advances, and rapid change challenge educational systems. Around the world the call is to develop 21st century skills with a focus on career readiness, ability for lifelong learning, and collaboration skills. The development of the foundational elements of civic engagement (civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions) of children and youth is also a dominant concern for educators and policymakers. Unfortunately, not all youth have the same opportunities to develop civic self-efficacy. However, the civic empowerment engagement gap can be closed by providing underserved students with interactive and authentic civic experiences. We strove to create such an authentic civic experience and piloted the Fresno State Transportation Challenge (FSTI) at an elementary school in the Washington Unified School district, Fresno County, California. The research question for this innovation grant was: Can we leverage the expertise and resources of the Fresno State Transportation Institute to bring high quality educational experience to underserved students and help them improve their communities

Gravitational Microlensing by Globular Clusters

Stars in globular clusters can act either as sources for MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) located along the line of sight or as lenses for more distant background stars. Although the expected rate of microlensing events is small, such observations can lead to very useful results. In particular, one could get information on the shape of the galactic halo along different lines of sight, allowing to better constrain its total dark matter content. Moreover, on can also infer the total dark matter content of globular clusters, which is presently not well known. To this latter purpose, we analyse the microlensing events towards the galactic bulge, which lie close to the three globular clusters NGC 6522, NGC 6528 and NGC 6540. We find evidence that some microlensing events are indeed due to MACHOs located in the globular clusters, suggesting, therefore, that these clusters contain a significant amount of dark matter.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures included. Accepted for publication in A &

The Fresno State Transportation Challenge

The Fresno State Transportation Challenge uses an action civics approach to support K-12 students in developing transportation-related projects that have a positive impact on the community. In 2020 the goal was to expand, refine, and create structures to sustain the implementation of the Transportation Challenge across subsequent years. As a result of the COVID pandemic, the process and goals of the project were adapted. The project was extended into April 2021 and was entirely conducted through remote participation. The focus was on two high schools. The expansion into the high school age bracket was successful and the experience with these two projects will allow for easier expansion in additional high schools in the future. One high school focused on the topic of active mobility, specifically biking, and addressed the challenge of how to get more students to bike to school. The other high school combined the transportation challenge with an economic vitalization project. The students were asked to also develop a modern transportation concept. Both projects exposed high school students to the topic of transportation and expanded awareness of transportation careers. Students also developed important competencies in the domains of problem solving, collaboration, communication, and leadership

In Situ Monitoring of Heterogeneously Catalyzed Reactions under Supercritical Conditions

A novel high-pressure batch system suitable for in situ monitoring of heterogeneously catalyzed reactions under supercritical conditions is described. The apparatus allows exploration of changes in phase behavior and composition by on-line video imaging as well as on-line sampling and analysis by gas-chromatography using a computer-based approach

The Central Valley Transportation Challenge

The Central Valley Transportation Challenge provides underserved minority students, who are primarily from rural areas, with high quality transportation-related educational experiences so that they learn about transportation-related topics and opportunities in transportation careers. The CVTC is a project-based learning program that brings university faculty and students to K–12 classrooms in rural areas. The project operated with three main objectives: (1) support K–12 teachers’ understanding and implementation of the CVTC programs; (2) connect K–12 students with university faculty and students, and transportation professionals through the CVTC program; and (3) develop an online hub with transportation-related lesson plans and sequences. The results of this study are reported as five case studies and a description of the online hub. The case studies illustrate how different pedagogical approaches and uses of technology were implemented and how the project connections between the schools, community members and professionals from transportation-related fields were developed. In addition, to support the sustainability of transportation-related learning across subsequent years, the research team created an online transportation resource repository. This hub was populated with lessons and units developed by pedagogical and content experts. The lessons cover the grades K–12 and range from brief lessons to very engaging and holistic two-week-long lesson sequences. The CVTC has proven to be a highly flexible and adaptive model due to the use of technology and the teachers’ experience and pedagogical expertise. The timing of the program during the COVID-19 pandemic also provided the students that were learning from home with an engaging learning experience and some relief for teachers who were already dealing with a lot of adjustments. In that sense, the program reached traditionally underserved students, but did so in a critical time where these students faced even more obstacles

The Fresno State Transportation Challenge

The goal of the “Fresno State Transportation Challenge” was outreach to schools and community engagement, to provide K-8 students opportunities to learn about transportation and transportation-related careers, and to practice 21st century skills by solving a transportation-related issue in their community. Through the pedagogical frameworks of action civics and eduScrum (a method to facilitate self-managed teamwork with a visual board), teachers and students worked on solving issues in their community. They learned design thinking to identify issues and develop solutions while using eduScrum to manage their work. University students from transportation engineering visited the schools regularly to support the K-8 students in their work on a transportation-related project. The study tested two different formats: summer school and during the regular academic school year. The research question was: What is the impact of the “Fresno State Transportation Challenge” on K-8 students, K-8 teachers, university students, and community members? The research methods involved observations, open interviews, and a final survey of participants. Key findings reveal the Transportation Challenge is suited to teach elementary and middle school students about transportation and transportation-related careers, and to encourage them to apply this knowledge in addressing a transportation-related issue in their community. The involvement of university students had a positive influence on the younger students’ learning in regard to motivation, role modeling, and broadening the perspective of transportation-related careers. The pedagogical approaches of action civics and eduScrum facilitated the development of career skills, such as collaboration, communication, creativity, teamwork, critical thinking, and persistence to overcome challenges. Implications for practice include that leveraging university resources, such as the Fresno State Transportation Institute, can be an effective way to engage K-8 students and teachers in transportation-related authentic learning experience, increase their awareness of transportation-related careers and topics, and develop their career skills

Home-based versus clinic-based care for patients starting antiretroviral therapy with low CD4⁺ cell counts: findings from a cluster-randomized trial.

OBJECTIVES: African health services have shortages of clinical staff. We showed previously, in a cluster-randomized trial, that a home-based strategy using trained lay-workers is as effective as a clinic-based strategy. It is not known whether home-based care is suitable for patients with advanced HIV disease. METHODS: The trial was conducted in Jinja, Uganda. One thousand, four hundred and fifty-three adults initiating ART between February 2005 and January 2009 were randomized to receive either home-based care or routine clinic-based care, and followed up for about 3 years. Trained lay workers, supervised by clinical staff based in a clinic, delivered the home-based care. In this sub-analysis, we compared survival between the two strategies for those who presented with CD4⁺ cell count less than 50 cells/μl and those who presented with higher CD4⁺ cell counts. We used Kaplan-Meier methods and Poisson regression. RESULTS: Four hundred and forty four of 1453 (31%) participants had baseline CD4⁺ cell count less than 50 cells/μl. Overall, 110 (25%) deaths occurred among participants with baseline CD4⁺ cell count less than 50  cells/μl and 87 (9%) in those with higher CD4⁺ cell count. Among participants with CD4 cell count less than 50  cells/μl, mortality rates were similar for the home and facility-based arms; adjusted mortality rate ratio 0.80 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.53-1.18] compared with 1.22 (95% CI 0.78-1.89) for those who presented with higher CD4⁺ cell count. CONCLUSION: HIV home-based care, with lay workers playing a major role in the delivery of care including providing monthly adherence support, leads to similar survival rates as clinic-based care even among patients who present with very low CD4⁺ cell count. This emphasises the critical role of adherence to antiretroviral therapy

Quantitative Characterization of Event Streams in Analysis of Hard Real-Time Applications

Many real-time embedded systems process event streams that are composed of a finite number of different event types. Each different event type on the stream would typically impose a different workload to the system, and thus the knowledge of possible correlations and dependencies between the different event types could be exploited to get tighter analytic performance bounds of the complete system. We propose an abstract stream model to characterize such an event stream. The model captures the needed information of all possible traces of a class of event streams. Hence, it can be used to obtain hard bounded worst-case and best-case analysis results of a system. We show how the proposed abstract stream model can be obtained from a concrete stream specification, and how it can be used for performance analysis. The applicability of our approach and its advantages over traditional worst-case performance analysis are shown in a case study of a multimedia applicatio

Explaining differences in reading motivation between immigrant and native students: The role of parental involvement

Immigrant students usually report high levels of academic interest and motivation compared to their native peers. Given the important role that parents play in fostering their children’s academic motivation, this article focuses on aspects of parental involvement and analyzes possible mediator effects on the students’ reading motivation and achievement using structural equation modeling. The analyses were conducted with data from N = 891 Swiss fourth-graders and their families. Immigrant students received less emotional support from their parents, although the latter had significantly higher expectations for their child’s reading achievement. Furthermore, the three aspects of parental involvement investigated had a significant impact on the development of reading motivation. In mediation analyses, just one of the 12 effects tested appeared to be a mediation effect. Further research is needed to explain differences in motivation between immigrant and native students