A Study of the Relationship between Nonverbal Kindergarten Ability and Third-grade Reading Achievement

Increased scrutiny of educational proficiency targets has intensified the urgency for educators to identify measurements that indicate students’ likelihood of eventual achievement in reading. This regression analysis explored the relationship between nonverbal ability in kindergarten as measured by the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT) and eventual third-grade achievement in reading and writing as measured by the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). Naglieri and Ronning (2000) found a range of correlational r values from .49 to .56 when comparing NNAT results to results from the Stanford Achievement Test 9 (SAT-9) in reading when tested concurrently at various grade levels. The present research examined data from two cohorts of students (n = 794, 795) and produced correlational r values of .50 and .44 with a four-year span between assessment administrations. These r values are similar to those found in other research comparing ability with reading achievement in the early childhood years. Furthermore, this study examined the results of multiple regression analysis between seven student demographic subgroup categories and identified the NNAT’s ability to predict MAP achievement for each group

Conceptualizing and Analyzing Metal-Organic Frameworks and the Role of the Ionic Liquid

The synthesis of Metal-Organic Frameworks, or MOFs, can be easily changed or manipulated simply by changing the solvent medium. The research focused primarily on the role ionic liquids (ILs) had in MOF synthesis. ILs can be defined as salts that are liquid at room temperature. IL ligands were found one of three ways in the final structure; either acting as the anion, cation, or neither and just acting as a medium for a reaction. This research primarily revolved around Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). The purpose of CSD was a way to look more closely at these crystalline structures from previous research papers and create certain figures that are different from the ones used in the originals to formulate a better understanding of the role of the IL in the MOFs. Keywords to the research, searched in databases such as Scifinder Scholar, and Google Scholar to try and find research papers with a suitable structure that could be found via CSD. The suitable structures found in the research papers were searched in CSD, so they could be transferred to its associated software Mercury. By using Mercury, new structures were created to convey and highlight the role of the IL and differences in connections from structure to structure. One structure in particular was synthesized by Ribbeck et al. They were able to crystalize the 3D Frameworks of lanthanide ions with pentaflouroethyltricyanoborate with the ionic liquid ethyl-methyl-imidazolium or emim. In this specific case, the ionic liquid emim plays the role of the anion in the 3D crystalline structure; linking together the metal in an unique way. Another of the papers analyzed discussed the ionothermal synthesis of compounds [emim][Mn(btc)] and [pmim][Mn(btc)] with the latter having different structures dependent upon the IL. In the case of these compounds, the IL not only acted as a medium, but the IL’s anion was part of the final structure and contributed to the structural differences between compounds. Throughout the research in the final product, the IL could act as an anion, a cation, or not appear in the final product at all. However, no matter how the ionic liquid played into the final structure, every structure varied by bridging ligand, types of connections from ligand to metal (such as monodentate or bidentate, etc.), the metal coordination number, the metal geometry, the ligand plane, and the net of the centroids. After gathering the data together, this information was used to create structures and find similarities between each of the papers and the MOFs within them

Cyber Insurance Effects on Cyber Hygiene: Does the Homeostatic Effect Apply?

A theoretical framework and research strategy is proposed to gain insight into perceptions and decisions as to how SMBs make decisions regarding cybersecurity hygiene measures, which could lead to betterinformed decisions regarding insurance as part of an ISA program, as well as have a bearing on policy structures and pricing for such insurance. This is because the definition of “cybersecurity hygiene habits”(CHH) as a task appears to vary within the industry and makes the practice hard to measure and evaluate. Research suggests that there may be a poorly understood connection between CHHs undertaken by organizations and their perceptions and/or adoption of cybersecurity insurance as well, thus leading to gaps or holes within business security perimeters. Homeostatic Risk Theory (HRT) has been observed in other venues in which the use of risk mitigation measures (including insurance) leads to more risky behavior; this may have a bearing on why so many organizations, particularly Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are very slow to adopt Information Security Assurance (ISA) measures at all or do so minimally. This paper presents a theoretical framework and proposed research, which will provide greater clarity on these issues while highlighting areas where further research is required

Scater: pre-processing, quality control, normalization and visualization of single-cell RNA-seq data in R.

MOTIVATION: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is increasingly used to study gene expression at the level of individual cells. However, preparing raw sequence data for further analysis is not a straightforward process. Biases, artifacts and other sources of unwanted variation are present in the data, requiring substantial time and effort to be spent on pre-processing, quality control (QC) and normalization. RESULTS: We have developed the R/Bioconductor package scater to facilitate rigorous pre-processing, quality control, normalization and visualization of scRNA-seq data. The package provides a convenient, flexible workflow to process raw sequencing reads into a high-quality expression dataset ready for downstream analysis. scater provides a rich suite of plotting tools for single-cell data and a flexible data structure that is compatible with existing tools and can be used as infrastructure for future software development. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The open-source code, along with installation instructions, vignettes and case studies, is available through Bioconductor at http://bioconductor.org/packages/scater . CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Strategic Asia 2002 Final Report

The Strategic Asia Program made considerable progress over the course of 2002--the program's first year with support from the Department of Energy--and completed all its tasks on schedule and within budget. Following a planning meeting in Washington in February 2002, a team of leading specialists wrote a series of original assessments regarding the impact of September 11 on the strategic environment in Asia, examining how perceptions and strategies of countries in the region changed following the terrorist attacks. The final products, Strategic Asia 2002-03: Asian Aftershocks and its accompanying executive summary, were published in September 2002. The program's research findings (some of which are summarized) were presented to policymakers in Washington and elsewhere throughout the year, and almost 2,000 copies of the book had been distributed by mid-2003

Synthesis, structure and stereodynamics of atropisomeric N-chloroamides

Atropisomeric N-chloroamides were efficiently accessed by electrophilic halogenation of ortho-substituted secondary anilides. The stereodynamics of atropisomerism in these novel scaffolds was interrogated by detailed experimental and computational studies, revealing that racemization is correlated with amide isomerization. The stereoelectronic nature of the amide was shown to significantly influence racemization rates, with potentially important implications for other C–N atropisomeric scaffolds

In Search of Cellular Immunophenotypes in the Blood of Children with Autism

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social behavior, communication difficulties and the occurrence of repetitive or stereotyped behaviors. There has been substantial evidence for dysregulation of the immune system in autism.We evaluated differences in the number and phenotype of circulating blood cells in young children with autism (n = 70) compared with age-matched controls (n = 35). Children with a confirmed diagnosis of autism (4-6 years of age) were further subdivided into low (IQ<68, n = 35) or high functioning (IQ ≥ 68, n = 35) groups. Age- and gender-matched typically developing children constituted the control group. Six hundred and forty four primary and secondary variables, including cell counts and the abundance of cell surface antigens, were assessed using microvolume laser scanning cytometry.There were multiple differences in immune cell populations between the autism and control groups. The absolute number of B cells per volume of blood was over 20% higher for children with autism and the absolute number of NK cells was about 40% higher. Neither of these variables showed significant difference between the low and high functioning autism groups. While the absolute number of T cells was not different across groups, a number of cellular activation markers, including HLA-DR and CD26 on T cells, and CD38 on B cells, were significantly higher in the autism group compared to controls.These results support previous findings that immune dysfunction may occur in some children with autism. Further evaluation of the nature of the dysfunction and how it may play a role in the etiology of autism or in facets of autism neuropathology and/or behavior are needed

Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org/) collected, disseminated, and synthesized tens of millions of specific predictions from more than 90 different academic, industry, and independent research groups. A multimodel ensemble forecast that combined predictions from dozens of groups every week provided the most consistently accurate probabilistic forecasts of incident deaths due to COVID-19 at the state and national level from April 2020 through October 2021. The performance of 27 individual models that submitted complete forecasts of COVID-19 deaths consistently throughout this year showed high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Two-thirds of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than a naïve baseline model. Forecast accuracy degraded as models made predictions further into the future, with probabilistic error at a 20-wk horizon three to five times larger than when predicting at a 1-wk horizon. This project underscores the role that collaboration and active coordination between governmental public-health agencies, academic modeling teams, and industry partners can play in developing modern modeling capabilities to support local, state, and federal response to outbreaks