Focus on Flattery.

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Strategies to Support Adult Learners and Some College, No Degree Students “To and Through” a Postsecondary Credential

With generous support from Grantmakers for Education’s Learning, Evaluation & Data Impact Group and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, I partnered with Ascendium and program officers in their Streamline Key Learner Transitions focus area to examine the current status, scope, and impact of existing retention and completion strategies to support adult learners and some college, no degree students. This project had four primary goals: (1) to assemble an inventory of existing programs; (2) to develop a typology of these programs across important contextual domains; (3) to compile a brief literature review of existing research on strategies to support adult learners and some college, no degree students; and (4) to identify actionable opportunities for research, philanthropy, and policy or practice. This executive summary focuses on the first two goals and additionally presents and describes a third deliverable: a map of programs included in the inventory and typology. The Adult Learner and Some College, No Degree Student Program Inventory is a representative list of 83 individual programs and 15 common strategies that states, regions, and institutions have adopted to serve adult learners and some college, no degree students across a variety of levels, contexts, and strategies. The Typology takes these programs and scatters them across important program domains—location, audience, strategy, and solution—allowing one to quickly view clusters of practices and to begin answering “what works.” A map then captures the state, regional, and institutional programs to view their geographic reach and to identify areas of relatively high or low support for adult learners and some college, no degree students

Cosmetic Hints.

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The Implications of Distance and Envy in Organizations: An Exploration of Leader-Member Exchange and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Tennessee Honors Program at Trace: Tennessee Research an

Construction and assessment of a computer graphics-based model for wheelchair propulsion

Upper limb overuse injuries are common in manual wheelchair using persons with spinal cord injury (SCI), especially those with tetraplegia. Biomechanical analyses involving kinetics, kinematics, and muscle mechanics provide an opportunity to identify modifiable risk factors associated with wheelchair propulsion and upper limb overuse injuries that may be used toward developing prevention and treatment interventions. However, these analyses are limited because they cannot estimate muscle forces in vivo. Patient-specific computer graphics-based models have enhanced biomechanical analyses by determining in vivo estimates of shoulder muscle and joint contact forces. Current models do not include deep shoulder muscles. Also, patient-specific models have not been generated for persons with tetraplegia, so the shoulder muscle contribution to propulsion in this population remains unknown. The goals of this project were to: (i) construct a dynamic, patient-specific model of the upper limb and trunk and (ii) use the model to determine the individual contributions of the shoulder complex muscles to wheelchair propulsion. OpenSim software was used to construct the model. The model has deep shoulder muscles not included in previous models: upper and middle trapezius, rhomboids major and serratus anterior. As a proof of concept, kinematic and kinetic data collected from a study participant with tetraplegia were incorporated with the model to generate dynamic simulations of wheelchair propulsion. These simulations included: inverse kinematics, inverse dynamics, and static optimization. Muscle contribution to propulsion was achieved by static optimization simulations. Muscles were further distinguished by their contribution to both the push and recovery phases of wheelchair propulsion. Results of the static optimization simulations determined that the serratus anterior was the greatest contributor to the push phase and the middle deltoid was the greatest contributor to the recovery phase. Cross correlation analyses revealed that 80% of the investigated muscles had moderate to strong relationships with the experimental electromyogram (EMG). Results from mean absolute error calculations revealed that, overall, the muscle activations determined by the model were within reasonable ranges of the experimental EMG. This was the first wheelchair propulsion study to compare estimated muscle forces with experimental fine-wire EMG collected from the participant investigated

Investigation of mTOR-independent regulation of macroautophagy

Investigation of mTOR-independent regulation of macroautophagy Richard Ian Odle Macroautophagy is a critical catabolic response to cellular stress, enabling lysosomal mediated breakdown of cytosolic cargo. The nutrient-responsive mTORC1 kinase complex has been described as a master regulator of cellular metabolism. Indeed, mTORC1 inhibits autophagy via repressive phosphorylation of the key autophagy regulators ATG13, ULK1, ATG14 and TFEB. Consequently, mTORC1 has become a candidate therapeutic target in neurodegeneration and cancer; however, its essential role in other cellular programs has prompted the investigation of mTORC1-independent regulation of autophagy. This thesis explores the role of CMGC kinase family members ERK1/2 and CCNB1-CDK1 in the regulation of autophagy. The ERK1/2 signalling cascade is activated in a high proportion of cancers. ERK2 has been proposed as a regulatory kinase of TFEB; however, we found little evidence to suggest that ERK1/2 was a direct kinase responsible for TFEB phosphorylation, including at the putative site S142. Furthermore, whilst we observed that hyperactivation of the ERK1/2 pathway did lead to increases in total TFEB protein levels in HEK293, this appeared to be a cell line specific finding. We therefore concluded ERK1/2 was not likely to be a critical regulator of TFEB. It has been proposed that autophagy must be repressed during mitosis, otherwise nuclear envelope breakdown will expose the genome to the cytosolic autophagy machinery. Here we show that autophagy initiation, as measured by markers of the omegasome, is indeed repressed throughout mitosis. Furthermore, autophagy regulators undergo mitotic hyperphosphorylation, including at known repressive sites, in a manner dependent on CDK1 but not mTORC1. Indeed, we find mTORC1 is likely inactive as a result of CDK1-dependent hyperphosphorylation of RAPTOR. Thus, we conclude that mTORC1 is substituted by CDK1, as the master repressor of autophagy during mitosis. These results suggest that autophagy regulation is uncoupled from nutrient status during nuclear envelope breakdown as a mechanism to prevent genomic instability, a hallmark of cancer.Funded by a Medical Research Council PhD studentship, the Frank Edward Elmore Fund, and the James Baird Fun

Development of a toolbox for the kinematic evaluation of hands-up video games

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) often have limited upper extremity (UE) control, Virtual reality (VR) is a current technology being evaluated as a form of UE therapy for children with CP, The systems currently available have been developed with games that cannot be graded to match the skill level of children with severely impaired UE control. A novel video game platform, Hands-Up , has been developed at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The platform features software that allows for the customization of games and encourages users to make purposeful UE movements. To quantify changes and improvement in movement due to increased game play, a MATLAB-based toolbox of functions was developed. The functions include measures of peak velocity, percentage time to peak velocity, number of movement units, and straightness ratio. Data collected during reaching tasks were analyzed to validate the toolbox. The toolbox of functions provides different ways to interpret user intent

Basic Basketball

This book is written with the intention that it may be of some help to a group of men who are dealing with our most valuable possession...our youth. It is by no means written with the idea that it represents an exhaustive book of reference. It is therefore just the compilation of a few ideas that have been formulated in the author\u27s mind for the past several years as a player and a coach. This book is dedicated to a group of young men who meet every Monday night to thank God for the opportunities that they have in athletics to grow physically, mentally, and spiritually.https://pillars.taylor.edu/ayres-collection-books/1020/thumbnail.jp

Privilege through Prayer: Examining Bible-Based Prison Rehabilitation Programs under the Establishment Clause

In early June of 2006, an Iowa federal judge found a publicly-funded prison ministry to be in violation of the Establishment Clause and ordered it stopped. The program in question, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, conceived and maintained by Prison Fellowship Ministries, utilized an overtly Christian model to rehabilitate inmates through spiritual and moral regeneration. In the eyes of the court, the failure of the state of Iowa to provide a reasonable secular alternative had the primary effect of advancing religion and fostered excessive governmental entanglement under a traditional Lemon analysis. Equally important in the court’s decision was the lack of conclusive evidence demonstrating a positive effect upon recidivism rates of InnerChange inmates compared with the rates of inmates within the general Iowa prison population. This comment addresses the seemingly endless problem of inmate recidivism in light of both studies evaluating the effectiveness of the InnerChange program, as well as more general solutions proposed under the Faith-Based Initiative. The fallout from Americans United for a Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, 432 F.Supp.2d 862, could not only impact future decisions of prison administrators but potentially limit the application of the Bush Administration’s controversial Faith-Based Initiative