Impact of Vegetative Treatment Systems on Multiple Measures of Antibiotic Resistance in Agricultural Wastewater

Wastewater is an important vector of antibiotic resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes (ARB/G). While there is broad agreement that ARB/G from agricultural (ag) wastewaters can be transported through the environment and may contribute to untreatable infectious disease in humans and animals, there remain large knowledge gaps surrounding applied details on the types and amounts of ARB/G associated with different agricultural wastewater treatment options and different ag production systems. This study evaluates a vegetative treatment system (VTS) built to treat the wastewater from a beef cattle feedlot. Samples were collected for three years, and plated on multiple media types to enumerate tetracycline and cefotaxime-resistant bacteria. Enterobacteriaceae isolates (n = 822) were characterized for carriage of tetracycline resistance genes, and E. coli isolates (n = 673) were phenotyped to determine multi-drug resistance (MDR) profiles. Tetracycline resistance in feedlot runoff wastewater was 2-to-3 orders of magnitude higher compared to rainfall runoff from the VTS fields, indicating efficacy of the VTA for reducing ARB over time following wastewater application. Clear differences in MDR profiles were observed based on the specific media on which a sample was plated. This result highlights the importance of method, especially in the context of isolate-based surveillance and monitoring of ARB in agricultural wastewaters

Impact of Argument Type and Concerns in Argumentation with a Chatbot

Conversational agents, also known as chatbots, are versatile tools that have the potential of being used in dialogical argumentation. They could possibly be deployed in tasks such as persuasion for behaviour change (e.g. persuading people to eat more fruit, to take regular exercise, etc.) However, to achieve this, there is a need to develop methods for acquiring appropriate arguments and counterargument that reflect both sides of the discussion. For instance, to persuade someone to do regular exercise, the chatbot needs to know counterarguments that the user might have for not doing exercise. To address this need, we present methods for acquiring arguments and counterarguments, and importantly, meta-level information that can be useful for deciding when arguments can be used during an argumentation dialogue. We evaluate these methods in studies with participants and show how harnessing these methods in a chatbot can make it more persuasive

On the Functional Determination of Lexical Categories

Nous présentons d’abord des données de l’anglais et du st’át’imcets (famille salish) qui nous amènent à conclure que les racines doivent être spécifiées pour la valeur de leur catégorie lexicale, et ceci indépendamment du contexte syntaxique où elles se trouvent. Puis nous examinons la variation paramétrique entre les systèmes catégoriels de l’anglais et du st’át’imcets. En anglais, il y a une corrélation entre la catégorie fonctionnelle D (déterminant) et la présence de N, alors qu'en st’át’imcets il y a une corrélation entre D et le statut argumental d’une expression. Nous proposons que la différence principale se situe dans la nature même des noms. Dans les langues salish, tous les noms sont comptables et donc dénotent des ensembles d’individus précis. Par contre, en anglais, tous les noms sont non comptables et sont individualisés à l’aide de la catégorie fonctionnelle Num (nombre).First, we provide evidence from both English and St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish) that roots must be inherently specified for lexical category, independently of any syntactic environment they might appear in. Then, we address the parametric difference between the English and the Salish systems: in English, the functional category Determiner seems to correlate with the presence of a noun, while in Salish, D strictly correlates with argumenthood and has no correlation with nounhood. We claim that the core difference lies in the nature of nouns. In Salish, all nouns are count nouns which denote sets of atomic individuals. In English, all nouns are mass until made otherwise by an 'individuating' Num head (ɑ)

Climate Policy Constraints: Yet Another Negative Reverberation of Russia's War in Ukraine?

Prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian government was taking modest but meaningful steps to develop its domestic climate policy, prompted in part by incentives and pressures from the international market. Since then, however, Russia's war in Ukraine has heightened obstacles to addressing climate change: it has reinforced the importance of fossil fuel exports, further stifled climate activism at home, and increased impediments to international cooperation. The war’s longer-term impact on decarbonization remains uncertain

Astronomical Data Reduction and Analysis for the Next Decade

The astronomical community has become very sophisticated in setting requirements and figures of merit for the technical capabilities of new observatories. Sensitivity, field of view, spatial and energy resolution, observing efficiency and the lifetime of the facility are all set out to address scientific problems as efficiently as possible. The ultimate goal of these facilities, however, is not simply to gather data, but to create knowledge. It is thus important to consider the process of converting data to knowledge and ask whether there are ways to improve this for the coming generation. Software for data reduction and analysis provides a key link in this chain. Modest investments in this area can have a very large impact on astronomy as a whole, if they are made wisely. Conversely, it is possible to waste significant amounts of money on software efforts that never fulfill their promise. We need to learn from the successes and failures of the past to try to maximize our productivity in astronomy as a whole. That means working more closely together across agencies, projects, institutions and disciplines to share in building and maintaining this essential infrastructure

Do Accountability Policies Push Teachers Out?

The impact of accountability on U.S. schools, for good or ill, is a subject of debate and research. The authors recently studied an aspect of accountability that had previously received little attention. They asked, do accountability reforms affect public schools\u27 ability to retain their teachers? By analyzing data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Followup Survey, they found strong (but unsurprising) evidence that accountability made teacher retention more difficult in low-performing schools; schools whose students scored low on high-stakes assessments had higher teacher turnover than those that scored higher; and schools that received sanctions because of their low performance had even higher turnover. The most helpful finding of the analysis was that even in schools subject to sanctions, higher teacher turnover was not inevitable. Schools that had better working conditions—and especially those that gave teachers greater classroom autonomy–were able to mitigate the negative effects of accountability sanctions. The authors conclude that holding teachers accountable for results must be paired with giving them control over the instruction that produces these results

Negotiating \u27Professional Agency\u27: Social Work and Decision-Making within the Ontario Child Welfare System

This article explores how social work as a discipline has helped to negotiate professional agency in decision-making within the restructured child protection system. The narratives of child protection workers affirm that a restrictive climate does exist in child protection agencies and that it indeed shapes the way they make their decisions. This study uses institutional ethnography as the methodology for exploring the decision-making practices of child protection workers. Three forms of data collection were used: experience as data, documentation reviews and in-depth interviews

Retaining Teachers: How Preparation Matters

A new study shows that teachers who receive less pedagogical training are more likely to leave teaching -- and that\u27s bad news for mathematics and science education

What Are the Effects of Teacher Education and Preparation on Beginning Teacher Attrition?

This study addresses the question: Do the kinds and amounts of pre-service education and preparation that beginning teachers receive before they start teaching have any impact on whether they leave teaching? Authors Richard Ingersoll, Lisa Merrill, and Henry May examine a wide range of measures of teachers’ subject-matter education and pedagogical preparation. They compare different fields of teaching, with a particular focus on mathematics and science, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the 2004-05 Teacher Follow-up Survey. The analyses show that beginning teachers widely varied in the pre-service education and preparation they received. In general, mathematics teachers and, especially, science teachers tended to have more subject-matter content education and more graduate-level education, and to have less pedagogical and methodological preparation than other teachers. The analyses also show that, after controlling for the background characteristics of teachers and their schools, some aspects of the education and preparation that beginning teachers received were significantly associated with their attrition, while others were not. Specifically, the type of college, degree, entry route or certificate mattered little. What did matter was the substance and content of new teachers’ pedagogical preparation. Those with more training in teaching methods and pedagogy—especially practice teaching, observation of other classroom teaching and feedback on their own teaching—were far less likely to leave teaching after their first year on the job