Agricultural Information Needs and Food Access in the Stann Creek District of Belize

The purpose of this study was to describe agricultural information sources available to farmers and to describe food access and availability for the people of Dangriga, Stann Creek, Belize. This study used descriptive survey research methods with convenience sampling of the general public (n=22) and of farmers (n = 38) in the summer of 2017. Farmers use a variety of agricultural information sources with the extension service cited most often, followed by friends and fellow farmers. Weather, lack of information, pests, and inadequate access to capital were of primary concern for farmers. Face-to-face meetings were used most often by extension officers for disseminating agricultural information. Smallholder farmers and the general public have very similar levels of food access and availability. No significant difference was foundbetween the smallholder farmers and the general public on food insecurity with both groups reporting mild to severe food insecurity. Recommendations focused on practical operational strategies for the local Department of Agriculture, as well as the Belize Ministry of Agriculture to eradicate hungerand increase overall food access and availability throughout Belize

Prediction of average annual surface temperature for both flexible and rigid pavements

The surface temperature of pavements is a critical attribute during pavement design. Surface temperature must be measured at locations of interest based on time-consuming field tests. The key idea of this study is to develop a temperature profile model to predict the surface temperature of flexible and rigid pavements based on weather parameters. Determination of surface temperature with traditional techniques and sensors are replaced by a newly developed method. The method includes the development of a regression model to predict the average annual surface temperature based on weather parameters such as ambient air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and precipitation. Detailed information about temperature and other parameters are extracted from the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) online database. The study was conducted on 61 pavement sections in the state of Alabama for a 10-year period. The developed model would predict the average annual surface temperature based on the known weather parameters. The predicted surface temperature model for asphalt pavements was very reliable and can be utilized while designing a pavement. The study was also conducted on seven rigid pavement sections in Alabama to predict their surface temperature, in which a successful model was developed. The outcome of this study would help the transportation agencies by saving time and effort invested in expensive field tests to measure the surface temperature of pavements

Going Virtual: Delivering Nanotechnology Safety Education on the Web

The emergence of nanotechnology has created new challenges for the 21st century. Future development of Engineered Nano Materials (ENMs) will soon impact society in ways never imagined before. Most importantly, those who develop and work with ENMs must understand the importance of worker safety. Educators must use creative and innovative ways to educate Generation ‘Y’ to develop a competent nano workforce. We posit that the use of virtual environments in education may be the conduit between Generation ‘Y’s technology connectedness and the teaching of nanotechnology safety education effectively, and cite an example of teaching nanotechnology safety education in a virtual world. In addition, this method of instruction may have implications for engaging higher education students in the STEM area of nanotechnology

Electrostatic Charge Polarity Effect on Respiratory Deposition in the Glass Bead Tracheobronchial Airways Model

The effects of unipolar and bipolar electrostatic charges on the deposition efficiency of therapeutic aerosols in the physical model of human tracheobronchial (TB) airways have been investigated. Respirable size aerosol particles were generated by a commonly prescribed and commercially available nebulizer and charged by a corona charger and then their size and charge distributions were characterized by an Electronic Single Particle Aerodynamic Relaxation Time analyzer to study the drug aerosol particles\u27 deposition pattern. The experiments were performed with a glass bead tracheobronchial model (GBTBM) (physical model) which was designed and developed based upon widely used and adopted dichotomous lung morphometric data presented in the Ewald R. Weibel model. The model was validated with the respiratory deposition data predicted by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) approved Andersen Cascade Impactor (ACI). Unipolarly and bipolarly charged particles were characterized for two configurations: a) without TB model in place and b) with TB model in place. Findings showed that the deposition of unipolarly charged particles was about 3 times of the bipolarly charged particles. It was also found that bioengineered therapeutic aerosols with good combinations of aerodynamic size and electrostatic charge are good candidates for the administration of respiratory medicinal drugs

Use of Airborne LiDAR to Delineate Canopy Degradation and Encroachment along the Guatemala-Belize Border

Tropical rainforest clearing and degradation significantly reduces carbon sequestration and increases the rate of biodiversity loss. There has been a concerted international effort to develop remote sensing techniques to monitor broad-scale patterns of forest canopy disturbance. In addition to loss of natural resources, recent deforestation in Mesoamerica threatens historic cultural resources that for centuries lay hidden below the protective canopy. Here, we compare satellite-derived measures of canopy disturbance that occurred over a three decade period since 1980 to those derived from a 2009 airborne LiDAR campaign over the Caracol Archaeological Reserve in western Belize. Scaling up fine-resolution canopy height measures to the 30 m resolution of Landsat Thematic Mapper, we found LiDAR revealed a \u3e58% increase in the extent of canopy disturbance where there was an overlap of the remotely sensed data sources. For the entire archaeological reserve, with the addition of LiDAR, there was a 2.5% increase of degraded canopy than estimated with Landsat alone, indicating that 11.3% of the reserve has been subjected to illegal selective logging and deforestation. Incursions into the reserve from the Guatemala border, represented by LiDAR-detected canopy disturbance, extended 1 km deeper (to 3.5 km) into Belize than were derived with Landsat. Thus, while LiDAR enables a synoptic, never-seen-before, below-canopy view of the Maya city of Caracol, it also reveals the degree of canopy disturbance and potential looting of areas yet to be documented by archaeologists on the ground

Global proteome changes in the rat diaphragm induced by endurance exercise training

Mechanical ventilation (MV) is a life-saving intervention for many critically ill patients. Unfor- tunately, prolonged MV results in the rapid development of diaphragmatic atrophy and weakness. Importantly, endurance exercise training results in a diaphragmatic phenotype that is protected against ventilator-induced diaphragmatic atrophy and weakness. The mechanisms responsible for this exercise-induced protection against ventilator-induced dia- phragmatic atrophy remain unknown. Therefore, to investigate exercise-induced changes in diaphragm muscle proteins, we compared the diaphragmatic proteome from sedentary and exercise-trained rats. Specifically, using label-free liquid chromatography-mass spectrome- try, we performed a proteomics analysis of both soluble proteins and mitochondrial proteins isolated from diaphragm muscle. The total number of diaphragm proteins profiled in the sol- uble protein fraction and mitochondrial protein fraction were 813 and 732, respectively. Endurance exercise training significantly (P<0.05, FDR <10%) altered the abundance of 70 proteins in the soluble diaphragm proteome and 25 proteins of the mitochondrial proteome. In particular, key cytoprotective proteins that increased in relative abundance following exer- cise training included mitochondrial fission process 1 (Mtfp1; MTP18), 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase (3MPST), microsomal glutathione S-transferase 3 (Mgst3; GST-III), and heat shock protein 70 kDa protein 1A/1B (HSP70). While these proteins are known to be cytoprotective in several cell types, the cyto-protective roles of these proteins have yet to be fully elucidated in diaphragm muscle fibers. Based upon these important findings, future experiments can now determine which of these diaphragmatic proteins are sufficient and/or required to promote exercise-induced protection against inactivity-induced muscle atrophy

Knowledge Extraction from Survey Data Using Neural Networks

AbstractSurveys are an important tool for researchers. It is increasingly important to develop powerful means for analyzing such data and to extract knowledge that could help in decision-making. Survey attributes are typically discrete data measured on a Likert scale. The process of classification becomes complex if the number of survey attributes is large. Another major issue in Likert-Scale data is the uniqueness of tuples. A large number of unique tuples may result in a large number of patterns. The main focus of this paper is to propose an efficient knowledge extraction method that can extract knowledge in terms of rules. The proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, the network is trained and pruned. In the second phase, the decision tree is applied to extract rules from the trained network. Extracted rules are optimized to obtain a comprehensive and concise set of rules. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to two sets of Likert scale survey data, and results show that the proposed method produces rule sets that are comparable with other knowledge extraction techniques in terms of the number of rules and accuracy

Learning Global Citizenship: Students and Teachers in Belize and the U.S. Take Action Together

We are a group of educators who have taken our passion for literacy and commitment to active citizenship to a global level. As part of a small, teacher-led non-profit organization called the Belize Education Project, we have made a long-term commitment to improve literacy and education in the Cayo District of Belize, Central America. For each of the past five years, we have travelled to Belize for a week in October to work with children and provide professional development for up to 40 teachers at three primary schools in the Cayo District. We also bring Belizean educators to the United States for professional development in our schools. Over the years we have developed close friendships with our colleagues in Belize. We treasure watching the children, who captured our hearts during the first visit, grow up and become readers. Shari (a fourth grade teacher and co-author of this article) put it best when she said, Half of my heart now lives in Belize. It is wonderful to visit that half of my heart every October

Revising the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) and testing for factorial invariance

In this study, we revised the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), a self-report instrument designed to assess students’ awareness of reading strategies when reading school-related materials. We collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (MARSI-R). We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the MARSI instrument, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. We then tested MARSI-R for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, thus allowing for their comparison on levels of metacognitive processing skills. We found evidence of the external validity aspect of MARSI-R data through correlations of such data with a measure of the students’ perceived reading ability. Given that this journal is oriented to second language learning and teaching, our article also includes comments on the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), which was based on the original MARSI and was designed to assess adolescents’ and adults’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of ESL reading strategies. We provide a copy of the MARSI-R instrument and discuss the implications of the study’s findings in light of new and emerging insights relative to assessing students’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies

Characterization of the Nuclear Pore Complex in Red Alga, Cyanidioschyzon merolae

Cyanidioschyzon merolae (C. merolae) is a primitive, unicellular species of red alga that is considered to be one of the simplest self-sustaining eukaryotes. The highly elementary nature of C. merolae makes it an excellent model organism for studying evolution as well as cell function and organelle communication. In our study, we hypothesize that C. merolae contains the minimal assembly of proteins to make up their Nuclear Pore Complexes (NPCs), and hence are the first ancestral NPCs. NPCs are essential for basic nuclear transport in the cell. They are embedded in the double membrane of the nucleus, the nuclear envelope (NE), which separates nuclear DNA from cytoplasmic organelles. The NE acts as a selective protective barrier, and active transport of molecules between the nucleus and the cytoplasm is facilitated mainly by nuclear NPCs in higher and lower eukaryotic cells. When not functioning properly or fully, NPCs are known to be involved in several types of human disease, including cancer, accelerated aging and Huntington’s Disease (HD)