Understanding School and Community Contexts: Leading for success along the Texas-Mexico border

Enacting social justice leadership requires that school leaders understand social, political, and historic contexts of the communities and schools where they lead. This paper examines the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metropolitan area and highlights some of these issues within this particular community along the Texas-Mexico border. This description of the area provides understanding of the uniqueness of borderlands contexts and allows us to better understand the social justice work of one local school district in leading for success in this context

Science for some: examining representations of relevancy and multiculturalism in Texas biology standards and textbooks

Curriculum standards play an important role in the development of instructional materials considering they are used as a framework by publishing companies to outline textbooks. Therefore, it is imperative that standards and instructional materials integrate relevant interdisciplinary content that fosters the development of scientific literacy, health literacy, environmental literacy, and multicultural awareness. This qualitative research critically examines the Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills (TEKS) biology standards and three commonly adopted biology textbooks to determine the degree of relevancy and inclusion of multicultural content using James A. Banks’ Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content. The researchers found that the inclusion of concepts of relevancy and multiculturalism are absent or minimal from the standards and textbooks and conclude that curricular transformation is needed to prioritize and support relevancy and multicultural teaching and learning in biology classrooms. Opportunities to enrich biology standards and textbooks that fall within the transformative approach and social action approach of Banks’ Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content to promote relevancy and multiculturalism are presented

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg(2) to measure BAO to redshifts z < 0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Ly alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g < 22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15 < z < 3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Ly alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance d(A) to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z = 0.3 and z = 0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Ly alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D-A(z) and H-1(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z similar to 2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS

Rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3, and TREM2 implicate microglial-mediated innate immunity in Alzheimer's disease

We identified rare coding variants associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in a 3-stage case-control study of 85,133 subjects. In stage 1, 34,174 samples were genotyped using a whole-exome microarray. In stage 2, we tested associated variants (P<1×10-4) in 35,962 independent samples using de novo genotyping and imputed genotypes. In stage 3, an additional 14,997 samples were used to test the most significant stage 2 associations (P<5×10-8) using imputed genotypes. We observed 3 novel genome-wide significant (GWS) AD associated non-synonymous variants; a protective variant in PLCG2 (rs72824905/p.P522R, P=5.38×10-10, OR=0.68, MAFcases=0.0059, MAFcontrols=0.0093), a risk variant in ABI3 (rs616338/p.S209F, P=4.56×10-10, OR=1.43, MAFcases=0.011, MAFcontrols=0.008), and a novel GWS variant in TREM2 (rs143332484/p.R62H, P=1.55×10-14, OR=1.67, MAFcases=0.0143, MAFcontrols=0.0089), a known AD susceptibility gene. These protein-coding changes are in genes highly expressed in microglia and highlight an immune-related protein-protein interaction network enriched for previously identified AD risk genes. These genetic findings provide additional evidence that the microglia-mediated innate immune response contributes directly to AD development

Geometric and dosimetric evaluation of atlas based auto-segmentation of cardiac structures in breast cancer patients

Auto-segmentation represents an efficient tool to segment organs on CT imaging. Primarily used in clinical setting, auto-segmentation plays an increasing role in research, particularly when analyzing thousands of images in the "big data" era. In this study we evaluate the accuracy of cardiac dosimetric endpoints derived from atlas based auto-segmentation compared to gold standard manual segmentation. Heart and cardiac substructures were manually delineated on 54 breast cancer patients. Twenty-seven patients were used to build the auto-segmentation atlas, the other 27 to validate performance. We evaluated accuracy of the auto-segmented contours with standard geometric indices and assessed dosimetric endpoints. Auto-segmented contours overlapped geometrically with manual contours of the heart and chambers with Dice-similarity coefficients of 0.93 ± 0.02 (mean ± standard deviation) and 0.79 ± 0.07 respectively. Similarly, there was a strong link between dosimetric parameters derived from auto-segmented and manual contours (R  = 0.955-1.000). On the other hand, the left anterior descending artery had little geometric overlap (Dice-similarity coefficient 0.09 ± 0.07), though acceptable representation of dosimetric parameters (R  = 0.646-0.992). The atlas based auto-segmentation approach delineates heart structures with sufficient accuracy for research purposes. Our results indicate that quality of auto-segmented contours cannot be determined by geometric values only

known as Love Your Data in 2016 - 2017

All pages from the Love Data Week event website are archived here in PDF. Love Data Week was established in 2016 as Love Your Data week. Originally created in the USA, it quickly grew to an international event in which a wide range of institutions, organizations, scholars, students, and other data lovers could celebrate their data. Coordinated by Heather Coates, the planning committee developed themes, wrote, curated content, developed activities, all to celebrate data in all its forms, promote good research data management strategies, ask hard questions about the role of data in our lives, and share data success and horror stories. Though the website is defunct, the event lives on, driven by the community