The Dark (or the Light) Side of The Moon? Michigan\u27s Elimination of the Local Property Tax

For some, Senate Bill 1 was a bold and courageous move that held hope not only of breaking the twenty year legislative impasse on school finance reform, but also of providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform public education

A cross cultural examination of the relative age effect in professional rugby union

In the interest of fairness, many sports impose age grades within youth sport, with the intention that children will be competing with others of a similar physical and cognitive development. The relative age effect (RAE) refers to the finding that individuals born relatively soon after the cut-off date tend to be over-represented at the higher levels of certain sports. The current study examined whether RAEs were present in 3726 professional rugby players registered for the 2014 season in the top eight ranked countries in the world. The results indicated that an RAE existed in both top tier and second tier competitions in the South African cohort, only in the second tier competition in the Australian and French cohorts, and only in the top tier competition in the New Zealand and English cohorts. No RAE was found within the Irish, Welsh or Scottish cohorts. These results suggest that the presence of an RAE is influenced by both nationality and playing level. The existence of an RAE in senior professional rugby suggests an underpinning problem at the youth level in selected countries

Education Reform and the Limits of Policy: Lessons from Michigan

By examining a major set of education policy reforms undertaken in Michigan and across the country over the past 20-plus years, Addonizio and Kearney are able to reveal the varying success of innovations such as finance reform, state assessment of student performance, school accountability measures, charter schools, and schools of choice.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1234/thumbnail.jp

Teacher Quality and Sorting across Traditional Public and Charter Schools in the Detroit Metropolitan Region

In the quest to raise student achievement in low-performing urban schools, researchers often point to the central importance of recruitment and retention of a high quality teacher workforce

Successful Transfer of a Motor Learning Strategy to a Novel Sport

This study investigated whether secondary school students who were taught a motor learning strategy could transfer their knowledge of the strategy to learning a novel task. Twenty adolescents were randomly allocated to a strategy or control group. The strategy group was taught Singer’s five-step learning strategy, while the control group received information on the evolution and biomechanics of the basketball free throw. Both groups received three 1-hour practice sessions on a modified basketball shooting task. After 1 month, participants were introduced to the transfer task, golf putting. Performance accuracy was recorded for all tasks, and participants completed questionnaires regarding strategy use during practice. Participants taught the five-step learning strategy successfully recalled and applied it after a 1-month interval, and they demonstrated superior performance on both acquisition and transfer tasks, relative to the control group. Physical education teachers and coaches should consider using this learning strategy to enhance the learning of closed motor skills

A manipulative test of competing theories for metabolic scaling

The reasons why metabolic rate (B) scales allometrically with body mass (M) remain hotly debated. The field is dominated by correlational analyses of the relationship between B and M; these struggle to disentangle competing explanations because both B and M are confounded with ontogeny, life history, and ecology. Here, we overcome these problems by using an experimental approach to test among competing metabolic theories. We examined the scaling of B in size-manipulated and intact colonies of a bryozoan and show that B scales with M. To explain this, we apply a general model based on the dynamic energy budget theory for metabolic organization that predicts B on the basis of energy allocation to assimilation, maintenance, growth, and maturation. Uniquely, this model predicts the absolute value of B, emphasizes that there is no single scaling exponent of B, and demonstrates that a single model can explain the variation in B seen in nature

Plant cysteine oxidase oxygen-sensing function is conserved in early land plants and algae

All aerobic organisms require O2 for survival. When their O2 is limited (hypoxia), a response is required to reduce demand and/or improve supply. A hypoxic response mechanism has been identified in flowering plants: stability of proteins with N-terminal cysteine residues is regulated in an O2-dependent manner by the Cys/Arg branch of the N-degron pathway. Oxidation of these cysteine residues is catalysed by plant cysteine oxidases (PCOs) which destabilises proteins in normoxia; PCO inactivity in hypoxia results in protein stabilisation. Biochemically, the PCOs are sensitive to O2 availability and can therefore act as plant O2 sensors and regulation of the stability of proteins such as Group VII ethylene response factors (ERF-VIIs) can initiate adaptive responses to hypoxia. It is not known whether oxygen-sensing mechanisms exist in other phyla from the plant kingdom. Known PCO targets are only conserved in flowering plants, however PCO-like sequences are conserved in all planta. We sought to determine whether PCO-like enzymes from the liverwort, Marchantia polymorpha (MpPCO) and the freshwater algae, Klebsormidium nitens (KnPCO) have a similar function to PCO enzymes from Arabidopsis thaliana . We report that MpPCO and KnPCO show O2-sensitive N-terminal cysteine dioxygenase activity towards known AtPCO ERF-VII substrates as well as a putative endogenous substrate, MpERF-like, which was identified by homology to the Arabidopsis ERF-VIIs transcription factors. This work confirms functional and O2-dependent PCOs from Bryophyta and Charophyta, indicating the potential for PCO-mediated O2-sensing pathways in these organisms and suggesting PCO O2-sensing function could be important throughout the plant kingdom