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ABSTRACTThe Engineering Education Research (EER) Peer Review Training (PERT) project aimed to develop EER scholars’ peer review skills through mentored experiences reviewing journal manuscripts. Concurrently, the project explored how EER scholars develop capabilities for evaluating and conducting EER scholarship through peer reviewing. PERT used a mentoring structure in which two researchers with little reviewing experience were paired with an experienced mentor to complete three manuscript reviews collaboratively. Using a variety of techniques including think aloud protocols, structured peer reviews, and exit surveys, the PERT research team addressed the following research questions: (1) To what extent are the ways in which reviewers evaluate manuscripts influenced by reviewers’ varied levels of expertise? and (2) To what extent does participation in a mentored peer reviewer programme influence reviewers’ EER manuscript evaluations? Data were collected from three cohorts of the mentored review programme over 18 months. Findings indicate that experience influenced reviewers’ evaluation of EER manuscripts at the start of the programme, and that participation can improve reviewers’ understanding of EER disciplinary conventions and their connection to the EER community. Deeper understanding of the epistemological basis for manuscript reviews may reveal ways to strengthen professional preparation in engineering education as well as other disciplines.

Across many countries, the use of dating applications and websites (DAWs) has become increasingly popular over recent years; however, research examining the relationship between DAWs use and experience of dating violence and/or other harms is limited. This study aims to explore the use, motivations, and experiences of harm associated with using DAWs and meeting people in person via DAWs. An online convenience sample pilot survey was completed by adults (n= 217) aged 18+ years, living in the UK or the Republic of Ireland, who had used a DAW in the past two years. Differences were found in usage, motivations, and experiences of using DAWs in age and gender. Nearly half, 46.5% of respondents reported having been a victim of at least one harm as a result of meeting someone in person via DAWs in their lifetime; 33.2% reported experiencing sexual violence, 27.2% verbal abuse, 8.3% sexual activity in exchange for goods and 6.5% physical assault. Further to this, 41.9% of respondents reported being “Catfished” in the past two years (i.e., the other person looking different in person compared to their DAWs profile). In multivariate analysis, experiencing at least one harm was significantly associated with female gender (Adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 4.0; p< .001), being aged 40+ years (AOR 3.1; p< .01; reference category, 18–29 years) and being “Catfished” (AOR 3.3; p< .001). In multivariate analysis, sexual violence was significantly associated with being female (AOR 6.9; p< .001), being aged 40+ years (AOR 2.9; p= .013; reference category, 18–29 years) and being “Catfished” (AOR 2.9; p= .001). The study reinforces the importance of understanding the use of DAWs, exposure to harms on and offline, and risks associated with “Catfishing.”

The Martinsburg Initiative (TMI) is a community-based model developed in Martinsburg, West Virginia, that implements a comprehensive approach to adverse childhood experiences and substance use prevention and mitigation by leveraging partnerships in public health and health care, public safety, and education. TMI receives coordinated federal funding and technical assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials to integrate evidence-based and promising strategies. It advances such strategies by translating them for implementation within the community, evaluating the reach and potential impact of the model, and by engaging key stakeholders. Preliminary results describing program reach and short-term outcomes collected for a subset of the interventions during implementation are presented. The model uses touchpoints across multiple community sectors in the city of Martinsburg to break the cycle of trauma and substance use across the life span.

Aim: Sexual violence is global public health, human rights and gender equality issue. Sexual violence bystander programmes for nightlife workers are emerging across a few countries and further examination of such programmes is required. This exploratory study evaluates the potential effectiveness of the Good Night Out Campaign, a sexual violence bystander programme for nightlife workers. Subject and methods: Two hundred and seven trainees attending the 1.5 hour training programme across two cities in England were recruited opportunistically, immediately prior to training delivery. Sexual violence myth acceptance and readiness and confidence to intervene in sexual violence were measured at baseline and post-intervention. Analyses used paired-sample tests to examine differences in the three measurements pre to post-training and effect sizes were quantified using Cohen’s d. Results: Compared to pre-training, post-training participants were significantly (p&lt; 0.001) less likely to agree with sexual violence myths, and more likely to be confident and ready to intervene in sexual violence or incidents of vulnerability. Effect sizes were small–medium. Conclusions: The study adds to emergent evidence suggesting that sexual violence bystander programmes may be promising in decreasing sexual violence myths and barriers to bystander intervention, and increasing willingness to intervene amongst nightlife workers. Findings can support the emergence of sexual violence prevention activities implemented in nightlife spaces. Further programme implementation and evaluation using experimental designs is needed to explore outcomes in greater depth, considering the complexity of the nightlife environment.

This article examines the right to water from an environmental perspective. In particular, it focuses on the various forms of legal recognition provided to the right and how these interact with the realities of water stress and shortage. It places particular emphasis on the international construction of the right and its domestic application. The article also examines how existing legal mechanisms, such as the ecosystem approach and concept of sustainability, may assist in balancing these supply and demand considerations. Finally, it looks to ways the right to water may be realized within the constraints of environmental capacity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors offer a comparative analysis on the access of water in Australia and South Africa. They analyze the legal regimes regulating water services provision in Australia and South Africa. They examine the effectiveness of the strategies employed by both South African and Australia to provide access of water to their people. They provide brief overview of the environmental and socio-economic conditions in each country that are relevant to the issue of water service

The aim of this work was to establish measurement conditions under which endogenous skin fluorescence ("auto-fluorescence") is relatively invariant, so that changes in exogenous agents can be accurately determined. Fluorescence emission was measured on the volar forearm of 36 subjects, chosen to be equally representative of all 6 Fitzpatrick skin types. All subjects were exposed to approximately 40 minutes of optical excitation at 450 and 500 nm with 4 irradiances between 0.3 and 9 mW/cm2. Both non-optically-induced (e.g. tissue settling and fluctuation) and optically-induced variations were observed in the measured fluorescence and mechanisms explaining these effects are proposed. The optically-induced auto-fluorescence decay was independent of skin type when excited at 450 nm, but significantly dependent on skin type when excited at 500 nm. Further, the extent of decay over time was linearly related to irradiance at 500 nm, but at 450 nm was non-linear, with the extent of decay rolling off between 2 and 9 mW/cm2. In order to maintain the auto-fluorescence signal within 95% of its original value over a 30 minute period, the excitation at 450 nm would need to be limited to 1.5 mW/cm2, while excitation at 500 nm should be limited to 5 mW/cm2.

The article describes the cooperative breeding behavior in captive southern ground hornbills at the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City, Utah. The hornbills were housed as a family group during the breeding season in 2009. Considered as the second largest hornbill, southern ground hornbills can be found in Kenya, Burundi, Nambia, Botswana and South Africa. One significant factor in the development of chicks is group interaction.

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as STATEMENT, Question, BACKCHANNEL, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.

XTcf-3 is an HMG box transcription factor that mediates Xenopus dorsal-ventral axis formation. As a Wnt pathway effector, XTcf-3 interacts with β-catenin and activates the expression of the dorsal organizing gene siamois, while in the absence of β-catenin, XTcf-3 functions as a transcriptional repressor. We show that XTcf-3 contains amino- and carboxy-terminal repressor domains and have identified a Xenopus member of the C-terminal Binding Protein family of transcriptional co-repressors (XCtBP) as the C-terminal co-repressor. We show that two XCtBP binding sites near the XTcf-3 carboxy-terminus are required for the interaction of XTcf-3 and XCtBP and for the transcriptional repression mediated by the XTcf-3 carboxy-terminal domain. By fusing the GAL4 activation domain to XCtBP we have generated an antimorphic protein, XCtBP/G4A, that activates siamois transcription through an interaction with endogenous XTcf-3. Ectopic expression of XCtBP/G4A demonstrates that XCtBP functions in the regulation of head and notochord development. Our data support a role for XCtBP as a co-repressor throughout Xenopus development and indicate that XCtBP/G4A will be a useful tool in determining how XCtBP functions in various developmental processes.

A dermal ulcer wound-healing model was established in rabbit ear to examine the effects of recombinant human transforming growth factor-β1 (rhTGF-β1) in wound healing. Histomorphometric examination of the wounds indicate a biphasic healing response 7 days after a single application of rhTGF-β1 at the time of wounding. Statistically significant healing occurred at 5-100 ng but not at higher doses of 500 or 1000 ng rhTGF-β1/wound. Enhanced collagen synthesis as determined by [3H]proline incorporation occurred at 15 and 25 ng and was significantly depressed at 500 ng rhTGF-β1/wound. Multiple doses of 100 ng rhTGF-β1 applied to the wound at the time of wounding and for 3 days after wounding provided results comparable to the single application of growth factor. Delaying treatment 24 hr after wounding did not enhance wound healing compared with vehicle. Our findings suggest that rhTGF-β1 can be a valuable growth factor to improve the healing of ulcer wounds.

A dermal ulcer wound-healing model was established in rabbit ear to examine the effects of recombinant human transforming growth factor-β1 (rhTGF-β 1) in wound healing. Histo-morphometric examination of the wounds indicate a biphasic healing response 7 days after a single application of rhTGF-β l at the time of wounding. Statistically significant healing occurred at 5-100 ng but not at higher doses of 500 or 1000 ng rhTGF-β l/wound. Enhanced collagen synthesis as determined by [3H] proline incorporation occurred at 15 and 25 ng and was significantly depressed at 500 ng rhTGF-β1wound. Multiple doses of 100 ng rhTGF-/3l applied to the wound at the time of wounding and for 3 days after wounding provided results comparable to the single application of growth factor. Delaying treatment 24 hr after wounding did not enhance wound healing compared with vehicle. Our findings suggest that rhTGF-β l can be a valuable growth factor to improve the healing of ulcer wounds.

Tgf‐β1Increases Cell Proliferation And Collagen Synthesis In Osteoblast‐Like Cells And Bone Organ Cultures. However, The Effects Of Tgf‐β1On Bone Resorption Remain Contradictory. Therefore, The Exact Role That This Growth Factor Plays In The Process Of Bone Remodeling Is Still Not Clear. We Studied The Effects Of Recombinant Human Tgf‐β1(Rhtgf‐β1) On Bone Formation And Resorption In A Mineralizing Bone Organ Culture System. Parietal Bones From 20‐Day‐Old Fetal Rat Calvariae Were Cultured Up To 7 Days In Serum‐Free BgjBMedium. They Responded To A 1 Day Pulse Or Continuous Treatment Of Rhtgf‐β1With Dose‐Dependent Increases In Dry Weight, [3H]thymidine ([3H]TdR) incorporation, and collagen synthesis. In contrast, rhTGF‐β, reduced the calcium content of the bones. This is not due to increased bone resorption but rather to failure of calcium deposition. The following responses occurred at 1 nM rhTGF‐β1. Dry weight was increased 25–50% after 6 days in culture. DNA synthesis was increased to a maximum at day 1, reaching twofold of the control level. Adding hydroxyurea at day 0 reduced [3H]TdR incorporation in rhTGF‐β, treated bones to 20% of the control and indomethacin abrogated the increase in [3H]TdR stimulated by rhTGF‐β1to the control level. Both treatments completely blocked the increase in dry weight induced by rhTGF‐β1at day 6. rhTGF‐β1stimulated collagen synthesis to reach its maximum at day 2, with a twofold increase in [3H]proline incorporation. Basal alkaline phosphatase activity fell continuously in culture, reaching 35% of day 0 level at day 6. Enzyme activity was not altered by rhTGF‐β1. Morphologic observations by light and electron microscopy confirmed these findings. In summary, rhTGF‐β1altered bone remodeling by increasing organic components and decreasing calcification in a mineralizing bone organ culture system.

The biologic effects of recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein‐2b (BMP‐2b = BMP‐4) were studied and compared with transforming growth factor‐β1(TGF‐β1) in fetal rat osteoblast‐like (ROB) cells. Similar to the effects of TGF‐β1, BMP‐2b stimulated DNA and collagen synthesis as well as protein accumulation. Unlike TGF‐β1, which inhibited alkaline phosphatase activity, BMP‐2b enhanced enzyme activity eight‐to ninefold over the control level. The present study demonstrates direct actions of BMP‐2b on bone‐associated cells to stimulate osteogenic phenotypes in vitro and provides a cellular mechanism for the induction of bone formation by BMP‐2b in vivo.

The article discusses the teaching of civic responsibility within history courses. Particular focus is given to the author's experience of designing and teaching a college course on the history of social responses to poverty in which students were expected to consider such themes as the interconnectedness of human beings, selflessness, tolerance for difference, and collaboration. The course included both a standard seminar format and a web site conceived, written, and designed by the students.

The poem "a theory of orbital resonance" by Rebecca Bates is presented. First Line: the fox body and another and the snow thicket, two foxes circling as bodies, Last Line: in disorder, blazing foxes and the bodies rigid, a fire chaos.

This work investigates the use of prosodic features in modeling disfluencies (filled pauses, repeated words, and self‐repairs) in spontaneous speech. The main goal is to automatically detect and correct disfluencies, so that a ‘‘fluent’’ version of a disfluent utterance can be used as input for speech understanding and other applications. A second goal is to develop explicit acoustic and language models for disfluencies to improve speech recognition performance for spontaneous speech. The prosodic features examined include duration, fundamental frequency, amplitude, and features correlated with voice quality. Decision trees serve as the acoustic models that relate these prosodic features to disfluency events. To integrate the disfluency model into speech recognition, decision tree probabilities are combined with standard acoustic model scores and probabilities from a ‘‘Clean‐up’’ language model to rescore N‐best hypotheses. The Cleanup language model represents disfluencies as hidden events, and predicts words following a disfluency from the corresponding fluent word sequence. A linguistically hand‐annotated version of the Switchboard corpus is used for model training and evaluation. [Work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. IRI‐9314967 and No. IRI‐8905249.]