Environmental Justice in Indian Country: Using Equity Assessments to Evaluate Impacts to Trust Resources, Watersheds and Eco-cultural Landscapes

Native American cultures, genetics, nutrition, and ways of life co-evolved with their natural systems through thousands of years. This process has resulted in seamless eco-cultural systems of humans, plants, animals, rivers, landforms, and air sheds. These eco-cultural systems have also provided its peoples with unique and valid environmental management science that has sustained the peoples and their resources for thousands of years. This resource-based perspective could form the basis of environmental justice risk assessment methodology in Indian Country. Cumulative impacts to tribal cultures are a combination of pre-existing stressors (existing conditions or co-risk factors) and any other contamination or new activity that affects environmental quality. Characterizing risks or impacts in Indian Country entails telling the cumulative story about risks to trust resources and a cultural way of life. Equity assessments could also be performed in a way that describes these systems-level cumulative risks/impacts. This requires improvements in metrics based on an understanding of the unbreakable ties between people, their cultures, and their resources. Specific recommendations are presented for performing equity assessments in Indian Country and for developing a Risk Ethics discipline

Integrating Mathematical Thinking Into Family Engagement Programs

The brief explains how exposing young children to early math concepts supports their development of reasoning and problem solving skills and later success in and out of school. It describes the unique ways each of five family engagement programs funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation developed, tested, and integrated early math learning into their usual activities. The brief lays out seven practical tips that emerged from the grantees' experiences that can guide practitioners and other stakeholders who are interested in integrating early math into their own family engagement programs, and sheds light on issues that programs may want to keep in mind while doing so.

The Search for Values: Young Adults and the Literary Experience

published or submitted for publicatio

Hearing the Community: Evolution of a Nutrition and Physical Activity Program for African American Women to Improve Weight

Listening to the needs of the community is an important step toward reducing health disparities. Researchers may need to adjust their methods to maximize participation and benefit to the community. This report describes how the project team adjusted its approach to a weight loss intervention to support a community of African American women seeking to improve their health

Building Teacher Capacity to Support English Language Learners in Schools Receiving School Improvement Grants

The Study of School Turnaround examines the improvement process in a purposive sample of 35 case study schools receiving federal funds through the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program over a three-year period (2010 -- 11 to 2012 -- 13 school years). This brief focuses on 11 of these SIG schools with high proportions of English Language Learner (ELL) students (a median of 45 percent ELLs), describing their efforts to improve teachers' capacity for serving ELLs through staffing strategies and professional development (PD). Key findings that emerged from the ELL case study data collected during the 2011 -- 12 and 2012 -- 13 school years include:Few schools reported leveraging staffing strategies to improve teacher capacity for serving ELLs. Administrators in 3 of the 11 schools reported considering ELL expertise and experience when hiring classroom teachers, while respondents in 2 of the 11 schools reported that teachers' ELL expertise and experience purposefully factored into assignment of teachers to specific classrooms.Most teacher survey respondents (54 to 100 percent) in all 11 schools reported participating in ELL-related PD during the 2011 -- 12 school year. On average, teachers reported that ELL-related PD accounted for less than 20 percent of their total PD hours.Teacher survey respondents in schools that reported a greater PD focus on ELL-related topics, such as instructional strategies for advancing English proficiency or instructional strategies to use for ELLs within content classes, also generally appeared more likely to report that PD improved their effectiveness as teachers of ELLs

Historical knowledge in a knowledge economy – what types of knowledge matter?

This article examines the potential of history as a subject to contribute to a ‘knowledge economy’. Global trends in curricula reforms have often emphasised generic competences and development of students’ critical thinking to benefit the future economic position of citizens and nations. However, viewing knowledge in these terms presents a reductive view, particularly given that there is no clear definition of the nature of the knowledge which could or should be universally deployed in the pursuit of a ‘knowledge economy’. This paper presents an argument that a focus on ‘powerful’ disciplinary knowledge and ‘valuable’ frameworks of knowledge, in areas such as history education rather than generic competences and skills, would better serve a knowledge economy. Drawing on two empirical studies from England and New Zealand, which present different policy contexts, the paper explores the extent to which the potential of history education is being realised to develop such powerful and valuable knowledge. The data reveal similar patterns in both contexts; despite the history teachers in both countries sharing a disciplinary understanding of the subject this is not comprehensively reflected in the curricula they construct, and there are few attempts to create coherent frameworks of knowledge. This suggests that the opportunities for history education to support the development of a knowledge economy have not been fully realised and exploited

MSFC Robotic Lunar Lander Testbed and Current Status of the International Lunar Network (ILN) Anchor Nodes Mission

The lunar lander robotic exploration testbed at Marshall Spaceflight Center provides a test environment for robotic lander test articles, components and algorithms to reduce the risk on the airless body designs during lunar landing. Also included is a chart comparing the two different types of Anchor nodes for the International Lunar Network (ILN): Solar/Battery and the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope generator (ARSG.

3rd Annual Conference of the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH), Developing methods in agriculture and health research, London, 13–14 June 2013

Non-PRIFPRI3; ISI; CRP4; B Promoting healthy food systemsPHND; A4NHCGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH

Theoretical Analysis of the "Double-q" Magnetic Structure of CeAl2

A model involving competing short-range isotropic Heisenberg interactions is developed to explain the "double-q" magnetic structure of CeAl$_2$. For suitably chosen interactions, terms in the Landau expansion quadratic in the order parameters explain the condensation of incommensurate order at wavevectors in the star of (1/2 $-\delta$, 1/2 $+\delta$, 1/2)$(2\pi/a)$, where $a$ is the cubic lattice constant. We show that the fourth order terms in the Landau expansion lead to the formation of the so-called "double-q" magnetic structure in which long-range order develops simultaneously at two symmetry-related wavevectors, in striking agreement with the magnetic structure determinations. Based on the value of the ordering temperature and of the Curie-Weiss $\Theta$ of the susceptibility, we estimate that the nearest neighbor interaction $K_0$ is ferromagnetic, with $K_0/k=-11\pm 1$K and the next-nearest neighbor interaction $J$ is antiferromagnetic with $J/k=6 \pm 1$K. We also briefly comment on the analogous phenomenon seen in the similar system TmS.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure