\u3cem\u3eBoring\u3c/em\u3e Lessons: Defining the Limits of a Teacher\u27s First Amendment Right to Speak Through the Curriculum

Margaret Boring\u27s classes were anything but boring. She taught Advanced Acting at Owen High School in rural Buncombe County, North Carolina, and her classes\u27 performances regularly won regional and state awards. In the fall of 1991, Ms. Boring chose a controversial play, Independence by Lee Blessing, for her students to perform. Independence powerfully depicts the dynamics within a dysfunctional, single-parent family - a divorced mother and three daughters; one a lesbian, another pregnant with an illegitimate child. Prior to the first performance at the school, Ms. Boring informed the principal of the play\u27s title but not its content. After the presentation of the play, she was transferred to a middle school. Viewing her transfer as a demotion, she filed suit, claiming that the First Amendment protected her decision to teach controversial material. A federal trial court dismissed her complaint for failure to state a claim. On appeal, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit reversed the trial court, finding that Ms. Boring\u27s choice of the play was speech protected by the First Amendment. Later, a sharply divided Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, split 7-6 to reverse the panel decision, finding that curricular speech garners no First Amendment protection

Tumour Suppressor Genes—One Hit Can Be Enough

A paper published in 1998 showed that loss of only one copy of the p53 tumor suppressor gene is sometimes enough to initiate carcinogenesi

An Analysis of Robot-Assisted Social-Communication Instruction for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Social and communication deficits are a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and impact an individual\u27s ability to be a full participant in their school environment and community. The increase in number of students with ASD in schools combined with the use of ineffective interventions have created a critical need for quality social-communication instruction in schools for this population. Technology-based interventions, like robots, have the potential to greatly impact students with disabilities, including students with ASD who tend to show increased interest and engagement in technology-based tasks and materials. While research on the use of robots with these learners is limited, these technologies have been successfully used to teach basic social-communication skills. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a social-communication intervention for young children with ASD that is rooted in evidence-based practices and utilizes a surrogate interactive robot as the primary interventionist. This study utilized a multiple baseline design across behaviors to determine the impact of the robot-assisted intervention on the manding, tacting, and intraverbal skills of four, 3-year old students with ASD. The researchers found that this intervention was effective in increasing the rate of all three the target behaviors

Adrift : petites histoires/ little stories for children and lovers and renegades of the American Revolution

Adrift: petites histoires/little stories for children and lovers and renegades of the american revolution -- a five-act play with a dramaturgical excursus-- explores the relation between text and counter-text, and the intersection of identity, history, myth, and spatial perception in performance. The dramaturgical excursus maps the wor(l)ds of play which shape the playtext, serving as an intertext and counter-text to Adrift , and engaging the discourses (spatial, historical, bodily, and linguistic) which orbit and construct it. In Adrift , six actors play multiple parts, attempting to make sense of themselves and each other as they traverse a desert landscape in search of adventure, drama, utopia, and home. Disparate scenes and characters perform in a shared theatrical space: a sandbox serves . as playground, desert, utopia, and hieroglyph to each character who wanders into it. Adrift introduces outcasts, runaways, and actors-- in alternating states of exodus, exile, and odyssey--converging upon the metonymic and mythic American cities of Paris, El Dorado, and Washington, D.C. The play employs fragmentary collage structure, while subverting the genre of historical re-enactment. Adrift shifts back and forth in narrative time, space, and memory as identities and scenes shift, and as stories clash, intersect, or correspond to one another. Lacunae and aporiae haunt the wanderers' versions of their past, present, and future selves and histories; to fill in the gaps, characters suture personal narrative to myth in the reconstruction of the sel

Identification of novel amplification gene targets in mouse and human breast cancer at a syntenic cluster mapping to mouse identification of novel amplification gene targets in mouse and human breast cancer at a syntenic cluster mapping to mouse ch8a1 and human ch13q34

Serial analysis of gene expression from aggressive mammary tumors derived from transplantable p53 null mouse mammary outgrowth lines revealed significant up-regulation of Tfdp1 (transcription factor Dp1), Lamp1 (lysosomal membrane glycoprotein 1) and Gas6 (growth arrest specific 6) transcripts. All of these genes belong to the same linkage cluster, mapping to mouse chromosome band 8A1. BAC-array comparative genomic hybridization and fluorescence in situ hybridization analyses revealed genomic amplification at mouse region ch8A1.1. The minimal region of amplification contained genes Cul4a, Lamp1, Tfdp1, and Gas6, highly overexpressed in the p53 null mammary outgrowth lines at preneoplastic stages, and in all its derived tumors. The same amplification was also observed in spontaneous p53 null mammary tumors. Interestingly, this region is homologous to human chromosome 13q34, and some of the same genes were previously observed amplified in human carcinomas. Thus, we further investigated the occurrence and frequency of gene amplification affecting genes mapping to ch13q34 in human breast cancer. TFDP1 showed the highest frequency of amplification affecting 31% of 74 breast carcinomas analyzed. Statistically significant positive correlation was observed for the amplification of CUL4A, LAMP1, TFDP1, and GAS6 genes (P < 0.001). Meta-analysis of publicly available gene expression data sets showed a strong association between the high expression of TFDP1 and decreased overall survival (P = 0.00004), relapse-free survival (P = 0.0119), and metastasis-free interval (P = 0.0064). In conclusion, our findings suggest that CUL4A, LAMP1, TFDP1, and GAS6 are targets for overexpression and amplification in breast cancers. Therefore, overexpression of these genes and, in particular, TFDP1 might be of relevance in the development and/or progression in a significant subset of human breastFil: Abba, Martín Carlos. University of Texas; Estados Unidos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Fabris, Victoria Teresa. University of Texas; Estados Unidos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Fundación de Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Hu, Yuhui. University of Texas; Estados UnidosFil: Kittrell, Frances S.. Baylor College of Medicine; Estados Unidos. University of Texas; Estados UnidosFil: Cai, Wei Wen. University of Texas; Estados Unidos. Baylor College of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Donehower, Lawrence A.. University of Texas; Estados UnidosFil: Sahin, Aysegui. University of Texas; Estados UnidosFil: Medina, Daniel. University of Texas; Estados Unidos. Baylor College of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Aldaz, Claudio Marcelo. University of Texas; Estados Unido

Toward a Dramaturgy of Feminist Spatial Curiosity: Urban Performance Creation in Montreal

My doctoral research in urban performance engages both creative and academic research modalities to explore the performative interactions between performance and its city of situation, putting into practice a spectrum of historical and contemporary techniques for engaging critically and creatively with urban places. Curiocité is an urban theatre and performance dramaturgy oriented toward apprehending and representing—through curious modalities, narratives, and media—the histories, ambiguities, and differential material and social effects of ongoing capitalist processes on urban neighbourhoods. Abattoir de l’est, the first performance event issuing from Curiocité, is a parable situated in Montreal’s deindustrializing and gentrifying east-end district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. In the context(s) of this performance research, curiosity delineates an attitude of desire toward the local and the proximate, describing a complex, careful, and eccentric set of experiential and archival techniques (walking, collecting, and assemblage) for apprehending ever-changing urban places, and drawing from a repertoire of curiosity-related aesthetic forms and techniques, among them the curiosity cabinet, popular motion picture media, object theatre, and epic theatrical techniques of defamiliarization toward “as is” narratives and “common sense” discourses of place. A narrative exegesis to my performance research in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Toward a Dramaturgy of Feminist Spatial Curiosity: Urban Performance Creation in Montreal responds to and through the following questions: How can curiosity toward place inform urban performance research? What methods and media support a curious approach to performance creation? Tracing the processes of composition for Abattoir de l’est, from scripting through to the siting of the performance event in the urban field, the exegesis asks after the artist’s own siting in these ongoing capitalist processes, demonstrating curiosity as an epistemic stance and set of methods for urban performance creation that would hold onto the ambivalence of the city, while seeking also to embody curiosity in the text through reflective and reflexive returns to the archives and places of performance research. The exegesis includes the full script of Abattoir de l’est, with performances documented through multiple photographs

An adaptive approach to managing gull predation at seabird restoration sites in Maine /

In recent years, gull control has become closely tied to seabird restoration in the Gulf of Maine. Herring (Larus argentatus ) and Great Black-backed (L. marinus) gulls are the principal targets of control, yet anecdotal reports suggest that gull predation remains an important source of egg and chick mortality at many managed seabird colonies. The main objective of this study was to examine the impact of gull predation on the reproductive success of several waterbird species nesting at restoration sites in Maine. Particular emphasis was placed on understanding gull foraging behavior, identifying foraging constraints, and applying this knowledge to management of gulls and small seabirds.Productivity of Common (Sterna hirundo), Arctic ( S. paradisaea), and Roseate (S. dougallii) terns was monitored and daily predation watches were conducted at Eastern Egg Rock, Maine from 2003-2005. In 2004 and 2005 only, attempts were made to shoot gulls preying on terns. Shooting failed to eliminate predation, and tern predation risk was influenced by nest location, but not year. Common and Arctic terns experienced heavy predation in all years, but Roseate Tern nests were seldom depredated, presumably because Roseates selected nest-sites with more cover. Great Black-backed Gull predation was influenced by visibility, tidal state, and year, while Herring Gull predation depended only on the stage of the tern breeding cycle. There was little evidence that gulls preyed selectively on unfit chicks. The limitations of shooting are discussed and non-lethal alternatives suggested.Common Eider (Somateria mollissima dresseri) nest (hatching) success, habitat use, and duckling survival were studied at Stratton Island, Maine in 2004-2005. Eiders nested in a variety of habitats offering vegetative cover and enjoyed high nest success. Duckling survival was negligible however, because of opportunistic, group attacks by Great Black-backed Gulls. Glossy Ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) also appeared to suffer heavy gull predation, with adults occasionally attacked in flight. In 2006, gull displacement walks, gull nest/egg destruction, and occasional shooting were used on a trial basis and may enhance future eider production