Grading What We Value: A Conversation for Creative Writing

This essay considers how we might grade creative writing in a way that is better aligned with our values as writers and teachers. The authors, in the form of an active dialogue, reflect on their efforts to develop an alternative grading method, and discuss their experiences putting that method into practice at two different City University of New York (CUNY) colleges. They detail the considerations that informed their “rubric” and its four central values: professionalism, community, exploration, and revision. They also discuss their strategies for putting those values into practice, through collective brainstorming with students, and the development of individualized contracts. Finally, the authors reflect on the successes, challenges, and surprising outcomes of their grading approach, as well as some important pedagogical interventions that were enabled through this “rubric.” In addition to these reflections, this essay also includes samples of the assessment materials they developed for these classes. By sharing these materials and stories, the authors aim to open their conversations about grading creative writing to a wider community of creative writing studies scholars

The Gen Z Zombie: YA Takes On the Undead

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom, or for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into strange new places including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z zombie.” In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle William Bishop mentions YA zombie texts including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies but groups them with other contemporary zombie story types, including the zombie comedy. He suggests that this kind of zombie offers a seductive escape from the pressures of modern life, but my survey of YA texts (including Warm Bodies, Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead, and Darren Shan’s Zom-B), suggests that the Gen Z zombie is more than empathetic—it is reflective of the target audience’s experience. These books are not part of the zombie renaissance, but a reaction to it. Many of these newer narratives are set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, where the triggering catastrophe is a part of history. The young protagonists (some of them zombies) find themselves facing a world of anxiety, distrust, and fear created by the generations that came before. The sort of character who would be a hero in a post-9/11 zombie story has their morality called into question in these YA texts. After all, the undead cannot help their physical state and the adults have become soulless and horrific by choice. Since monstrosity is displaced from the zombie and placed on older generations, adulthood becomes the new sickness that the young protagonists struggle to avoid

Democracy Derived? New Trajectories in Pluripotent Stem Cell Research

How has the development of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) modified the trajectory of stem cell research? Here, coauthorship networks of stem cell research articles and analysis of cell lines used in stem cell research indicate that hiPSCs are not replacing human embryonic stem cells, but instead, the two cell types are complementary, interdependent research tools. Thus, we conclude that a ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research could have unexpected negative ramifications on the nascent field of hiPSCs

The openVA Toolkit for Verbal Autopsies

Verbal autopsy (VA) is a survey-based tool widely used to infer cause of death (COD) in regions without complete-coverage civil registration and vital statistics systems. In such settings, many deaths happen outside of medical facilities and are not officially documented by a medical professional. VA surveys, consisting of signs and symptoms reported by a person close to the decedent, are used to infer the cause of death for an individual, and to estimate and monitor the cause of death distribution in the population. Several classification algorithms have been developed and widely used to assign cause of death using VA data. However, The incompatibility between different idiosyncratic model implementations and required data structure makes it difficult to systematically apply and compare different methods. The openVA package provides the first standardized framework for analyzing VA data that is compatible with all openly available methods and data structure. It provides an open-sourced, R implementation of several most widely used VA methods. It supports different data input and output formats, and customizable information about the associations between causes and symptoms. The paper discusses the relevant algorithms, their implementations in R packages under the openVA suite, and demonstrates the pipeline of model fitting, summary, comparison, and visualization in the R environment

Energy Storage Optimization for Grid Reliability

Large scale renewable energy integration is being planned for multiple power grids around the world. To achieve secure and stable grid operations, additional resources/reserves are needed to mitigate the inherent intermittency of renewable energy sources (RES). In this paper, we present formulations to understand the effect of fast storage reserves in improving grid reliability under different cost functions. Our formulations and solution schemes not only aim to minimize imbalance but also maintain state-of-charge (SoC) of storage. In particular, we show that accounting for system response due to inertia and local governor response enables a more realistic quantification of storage requirements for damping net load fluctuations. The storage requirement is significantly lower than values determined when such traditional response are not accounted for. We demonstrate the performance of our designed policies through studies using real data from the Elia TSO in Belgium and BPA agency in the USA. The numerical results enable us to benchmark the marginal effect on reliability due to increasing storage size under different system responses and associated cost functions

The zebrafish xenograft platform-A novel tool for modeling KSHV-associated diseases

Kaposi\u27s sarcoma associated-herpesvirus (KSHV, also known as human herpesvirus-8) is a gammaherpesvirus that establishes life-long infection in human B lymphocytes. KSHV infection is typically asymptomatic, but immunosuppression can predispose KSHV-infected individuals to primary effusion lymphoma (PEL); a malignancy driven by aberrant proliferation of latently infected B lymphocytes, and supported by pro-inflammatory cytokines and angiogenic factors produced by cells that succumb to lytic viral replication. Here, we report the development of the firs

Probabilistic Quantification of Hurricane Resilience of Communities through a Distributed Simulation Platform

Resilience is an essential requirement in mitigating the effects of natural hazards such as hurricanes. This paper presents a framework to probabilistically quantify the damage of residential communities subject to hurricane hazards which is an essential step in quantifying community resilience. An engineering-based vulnerability model is developed for typical residential buildings. In particular, damage due to the two mechanisms of net pressure and wind-borne debris impact on the envelope components is considered. By integrating full hurricane wind field models into the framework, damage can be estimated for any given hurricane category and storm track. A distributed simulation platform, using Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM) libraries, is proposed for modeling the debris-induced interdependencies between the damages sustained by the buildings defining the community.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grants ACI-1638186 and CMMI-1562388. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors

Differential effects of Akkermansia-enriched fecal microbiota transplant on energy balance in female mice on high-fat diet

Estrogens protect against weight gain and metabolic disruption in women and female rodents. Aberrations in the gut microbiota composition are linked to obesity and metabolic disorders. Furthermore, estrogen-mediated protection against diet-induced metabolic disruption is associated with modifications in gut microbiota. In this study, we tested if estradiol (E2)-mediated protection against obesity and metabolic disorders in female mice is dependent on gut microbiota. Specifically, we tested if fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) from E2-treated lean female mice, supplemented with or without Akkermansia muciniphila, prevented high fat diet (HFD)-induced body weight gain, fat mass gain, and hyperglycemia in female recipients. FMT from, and cohousing with, E2-treated lean donors was not sufficient to transfer the metabolic benefits to the E2-deficient female recipients. Moreover, FMT from lean donors supplemented with A. muciniphila exacerbated HFD-induced hyperglycemia in E2-deficient recipients, suggesting its detrimental effect on the metabolic health of E2-deficient female rodents fed a HFD. Given that A. muciniphila attenuates HFD-induced metabolic insults in males, the present findings suggest a sex difference in the impact of this microbe on metabolic health.Peer reviewe