Descent into Peargatory

Poetry Contest, Honorable Mentio

Sex determination

Multicellular animals are a diverse lot, with widely varied body plans and lifestyles. One feature they share, however, is a nearly universal reliance on sexual reproduction for species propagation. Humans have long been fascinated by human sex differences and formal theories on how human sex is determined date at least to Aristotle (in De Generatione Animalium, ca. 335 BCE). However, it is only in the past couple of decades that the genetic and molecular programs responsible for generating the two sexes have been understood in any detail. Sex, it turns out, can be established by many very different and fast-evolving mechanisms, but often these involve a conserved class of transcriptional regulators, the DM domain proteins

Emily in Plato\u27s Cave

Poetry Contest, First Plac

Innovation Lab For Museums: Case Studies in Innovation and Adaptive Capacity

This case study on Latino New South follows the journey and partnerships of three cultural institutions -- the Levine Museum of the New South (Charlotte, NC), the Atlanta History Center (Atlanta, GA), and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (Birmingham, AL). These three organizations entered the Innovation Lab for Museums with the intention of making their programs and institutions more resonant with, and responsive to, the fast-growing Latino communities in their respective cities

The Role of Data in Organizing an Access to Justice Movement

reminds us that civil justice reform has to start with compelling human stories. She’s right. Building a movement requires drawing in the care and effort of those who previously had not seen the problem. A story of a mother and her family unjustly evicted from their home, of an older gentleman whose life savings are unjustly taken, or of a father fighting for visitation rights unjustly denied: each of these personal stories is an outrage and will often generate anger in the listener. Stories lead those who do not live the injustices of our civil justice system every day to ask: How can this be? Broad outrage, the “how can it be?” question, and the demand for answers and action, are the fuel of any social justice movement. But in a social justice movement, personal stories rarely allow us to see the complete picture. To change the system, we as advocates also need the wider communities in which we live to see that the personal stories are representative of thousands more that are the product of the same and related systemic failures. Individual acts of compassion for those whose stories we hear will not help the thousands whose stories we never hear. The “complete picture” of the lack of access to civil justice is that the problem is systemic and that fixing it will require big changes and concerted action

Touch Typing Tutor for visually impaired children and young people

Touch Typing Tutor is a software programme which was designed to assist teaching touch typing skills to visually impaired children. It was first designed and written in the 1990s by Graeme Douglas and Alan Gamble and then updated in 2000 and is now available as freeware. The programme was specially designed to meet the needs of visually impaired people (in particular children and young people). For example, it provides the means to set up different colours, dimensions and fonts for the exercise text displayed, and has speech capability. These features make it possible for Touch Typing Tutor to be operated independently by the learner. This program is easy to use, with a full set of touch typing exercises supplied. Additional exercises can easily be created using any text editor which is capable of writing plain ASCII files (e.g. the Windows 'Notepad'), and organised into lessons. This means that you are able to use Touch Typing Tutor to teach according to the scheme of your choice - no particular approach is built into the program itself - even replacing the entire suite of lessons with your own if you wish. The software has been used extensively in the UK as well as other parts of the world (particularly Africa)

Comparison of Harvested and Nonharvested Painted Turtle Populations

Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) are commercially harvested in large numbers in Minnesota for sale to biological supply companies and the pet trade. We investigated the possible effects of this harvest by comparing size, demography, and catch rates of painted turtles in 12 harvested and 10 nonharvested painted turtle populations in 2001 and 2002. We correlated turtle catch rates to harvest status, and harvested lakes had a lower catch-per-unit-effort than nonharvested lakes. Harvest had minimal effect on the size of turtles captured, and we found no significant differences in the count of male:female:juvenile turtles among lakes of different harvest status. We suggest that painted turtle populations likely have been impacted by harvester activities, but it was unclear whether the current harvest is sustainable. Further work is needed to determine whether there are any long-term effects on painted turtle populations