Achieving Educational Equity in Minnesota\u27s K-12 Public School Districts

This study seeks to determine whether there are relationships between: first, public funding investment and educational equity; second, access to opportunities for students of color and disadvantaged backgrounds and educational equity; third, the interaction effect between access to opportunities for students of color and disadvantaged backgrounds and public funding investment on educational equity; fourth, teacher workforce diversity and educational equity; and fifth, the interaction effect between teacher workforce diversity and public funding investment on educational equity. The Minnesota Achievement and Integration Program is the source of public funding for this study, and the program was established in the 2013-2014 school year to accelerate racial integration and improve educational equity for students in Minnesota K-12 public school districts. A decade after the implementation of the A&I Program, despite the state’s public funding investment to create educational opportunities and increase academic achievements for students of color and disadvantaged backgrounds, concrete disparities continue to exist. The purpose of this study is to better understand existing efforts and their direct impact on educational equity. The study determines the effectiveness of public funding investment in achieving educational equity in Minnesota’s K-12 public school districts through the A&I Program and seeks to identify specific efforts that positively impact educational equity such as access to opportunities for students of color and disadvantaged backgrounds and diversifying the teacher workforce

Bringing the Question of Chinese IPR Enforcement to the WTO Under TRIPS: An Effective Strategy or a Meaningless and Overused Tactic by the U.S.?

China has had a long history of high levels of piracy and counterfeiting. Leaders of China’s Food and Drug Administration have confessed that their pharmaceutical market is immersed in fake and deadly drugs.\ud In addition, DVD’s and VCD’s containing pirated versions of Chinese and foreign films or television series are easily found in China’s major cities. Since China is the world’s fastest growing economy and the contributor of the largest trade deficit to the United States (U.S.) (U.S. $268 billion in 2008), it is no surprise that the issue of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) counterfeiting and piracy are of national interest to the U.S..\u

Stress rapidly suppresses in vivo LH pulses and increases activation of RFRP-3 neurons in male mice

Restraint stress is a psychosocial stressor that suppresses reproductive status, including LH pulsatile secretion, but the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying this inhibition remains unclear. Reproductive neural populations upstream of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons, such as kisspeptin, neurokinin B and RFRP-3 (GnIH) neurons, are possible targets for psychosocial stress to inhibit LH pulses, but this has not been well examined, especially in mice in which prior technical limitations prevented assessment of in vivo LH pulse secretion dynamics. Here, we examined whether one-time acute restraint stress alters in vivo LH pulsatility and reproductive neural populations in male mice, and what the time-course is for such alterations. We found that endogenous LH pulses in castrated male mice are robustly and rapidly suppressed by one-time, acute restraint stress, with suppression observed as quickly as 12–18 min. This rapid LH suppression parallels with increased in vivo corticosterone levels within 15 min of restraint stress. Although Kiss1, Tac2 and Rfrp gene expression in the hypothalamus did not significantly change after 90 or 180 min restraint stress, arcuate Kiss1 neural activation was significantly decreased after 180 min. Interestingly, hypothalamic Rfrp neuronal activation was strongly increased at early times after restraint stress initiation, but was attenuated to levels lower than controls by 180 min of restraint stress. Thus, the male neuroendocrine reproductive axis is quite sensitive to short-term stress exposure, with significantly decreased pulsatile LH secretion and increased hypothalamic Rfrp neuronal activation occurring rapidly, within minutes, and decreased Kiss1 neuronal activation also occurring after longer stress durations

Improving utility of brain tumor confocal laser endomicroscopy: objective value assessment and diagnostic frame detection with convolutional neural networks

Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE), although capable of obtaining images at cellular resolution during surgery of brain tumors in real time, creates as many non-diagnostic as diagnostic images. Non-useful images are often distorted due to relative motion between probe and brain or blood artifacts. Many images, however, simply lack diagnostic features immediately informative to the physician. Examining all the hundreds or thousands of images from a single case to discriminate diagnostic images from nondiagnostic ones can be tedious. Providing a real-time diagnostic value assessment of images (fast enough to be used during the surgical acquisition process and accurate enough for the pathologist to rely on) to automatically detect diagnostic frames would streamline the analysis of images and filter useful images for the pathologist/surgeon. We sought to automatically classify images as diagnostic or non-diagnostic. AlexNet, a deep-learning architecture, was used in a 4-fold cross validation manner. Our dataset includes 16,795 images (8572 nondiagnostic and 8223 diagnostic) from 74 CLE-aided brain tumor surgery patients. The ground truth for all the images is provided by the pathologist. Average model accuracy on test data was 91% overall (90.79 % accuracy, 90.94 % sensitivity and 90.87 % specificity). To evaluate the model reliability we also performed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis yielding 0.958 average for the area under ROC curve (AUC). These results demonstrate that a deeply trained AlexNet network can achieve a model that reliably and quickly recognizes diagnostic CLE images.Comment: SPIE Medical Imaging: Computer-Aided Diagnosis 201

Engineering Students’ Views on the Effectiveness of Peer Tutors in Scholars Assisting Scholars Program

In engineering education, retaining engineering students in the first two years of college is a critical issue when the attrition rate has been persistently high. Peer tutoring and supplemental instruction are widely used methods to help first year students and sophomores succeed in challenging courses in universities. Research has shown that peer tutoring improves academic outcomes such as achieving higher GPAs, higher retention rates, and improving student connectedness. In an earlier study we examined whether and to what degree a peer tutoring and supplemental instruction program called Scholars Assisting Scholars, SAS, implemented in a college of engineering facilitated student academic performance in a specific Calculus course. In this follow-up study, we focused on the impact of the peer tutoring and supplemental instruction program on students who utilized the peer tutoring program across a wide range of core courses