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Uncovering the Impact of COVID-19 on K-12 Public School Enrollment
No full textM.P.P.As the 2020-2021 academic year began following the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in the United States welcomed fewer students than they had in a decade. The relatively massive loss of student body can have aftershocks for years to come such as a drop in graduation rates, learning loss, and financial instability for local education agencies, requiring both specific policies to find and reenroll these students and to prepare for future pandemics and lessen their impact. Failure to develop targeted policies will have short and long-term impacts for the students as well as pose a risk during future pandemics. Previous literature on the Ebola outbreak and the Spanish flu fails to provide adequate guidance on addressing the challenge we face, increasing the urgency of examining potential variables correlating with greater drops in enrollment following the COVID-19 pandemic. Current research uses only initial data from the National Center for Education Statistics regarding SY2021, but does find that local education agencies’ method of instruction had a statistically significant impact on enrollment rates. This paper updates the current literature, finding that the median age of the state population and the amount of positive COVID-19 cases in the state all had significant relationships with student enrollment rates. Unlike previous research, method of instruction did not appear to have a statistically significant impact on a state level on immediate enrollment rates during the pandemic. However, initial analysis of the SY2122 school year indicates that method of instruction during the pandemic may have lagging impacts on enrollment rates
The Phonetics and Phonology of Alaskan Russian: The Disappearing Dialect of a Forgotten People
No full textPh.D.This work is the first comprehensive documentation of the phonetics and phonology of Alaskan Russian, a dialect which grew from Russian involvement in Alaska beginning in the 18th century and was sufficiently moribund by the turn of the 21st. The history of this Russian dialect is a fascinating mix of language contact and bilingualism across typologically diverse languages, with continued interaction with Eskimo-Aleut and Athabascan languages since the start of Russian settlement and an English language influx on the back of rapid Americanization in the early 20th century. This dialect offers interesting insights into language contact transfer effects, amidst an array of social contexts, as well as obsolescence. Due to its unique history, Alaskan Russian presents an alternate development path for certain Russian sound tendencies. From a phonological perspective, this dialect has nearly neutralized Russian’s secondarily articulated palatalization contrast, a likely result of English contact and language death. Alaskan Russian mostly retains standard Russian’s regressive voicing assimilation and word-final devoicing phenomena, but there are unexpected instances of word-initial devoicing, regressive devoicing across phonological word boundaries, and intervocalic and medial devoicing possibly resulting from contact with Alaska Native languages. This influence is typologically notable as an example of a phonological reversal driven by a substratum language. However, the most unique sound feature of Alaskan Russian is invariably its /w/ phoneme; this is the first Russian dialect observed to exhibit a primary phonological alternation between the voiced labiovelar approximant [w] and voiceless labiodental fricative [f]. While this phoneme diachronically has been vulnerable to change, the specific shift from [v] to [w] in Alaskan Russian is almost certainly the result of contact with Aleut and Alutiiq. The Alaskan Russian manifestation of this phoneme is much simpler to model than its Standard Russian counterpart and highlights avenues for future study within Russian sonorant voicing
Investigating the Enhancement Capabilities of Individual 1-Dimensional Zinc Oxide Nanorods and their Heterojunction Variations Using Confocal Raman Spectroscopy
No full textPh.D.Zinc oxide nanorods have been researched to be applied as a chemical and biological sensor due to their unique chemical and physical properties. These unique properties originate from its high shape anisotropy and waveguiding abilities. These properties have been shown to enhance fluorescence signals from surface coupled fluorophores. This enhancement was shown to be the most intense at the NRs ends. Presently, all analysis using ZnO NRs to enhance Raman signals have been conducted using bulk material of ZnO. In this dissertation, confocal Raman spectroscopy and z-depth mapping was utilized to understand how 1-dimensional ZnO NRs can enhance Raman signals of model polymer analytes. Additionally, the ability of individual ZnO NRs to effectively couple and guide fluorescence emission when uniaxial mechanical strain was applied along the long axis of the NR was examined. The presence of uniaxial mechanical strain on the ZnO NR was confirmed utilizing confocal Raman spectroscopy. Finally, I studied the ability of combining an individual ZnO NR with an individual silver NR to create a semiconductor-metal heterojunction to see if these individual heterojunctions could further enhance Raman scattering emission. I ascertained the degree of enhancement on Raman scattering intensity from individual spatially resolved ZnO NR/ Ag NR heterojunction substrates. These studies will prove to be valuable in the development of highly sensitive single ZnO NR containing Raman probes
#531 The Greatness of Lincoln.
No full textParticipants include: Mr. David C. Mearns, Head, Manuscript Division, the Library of Congress, Author of the Lincoln Papers Rev. Joseph T. Durkin, S.J., Professor of Constitutional History, Georgetown Universit
Heeren-Moon on Ezrachi & Stucke, How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation
No full textReview: Ezrachi, A., Stucke, M.E. (2022). How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back. HarperCollins. 288 pages. $29.99. ISBN: 978006303088
TLISI 2023: Care as Praxis and Method in Digital Research and the Classroom
No full text"In her keynote talk, Catherine Knight Steele will discuss how interdisciplinary scholars and instructors increasingly use digital tools and texts for their work. As we consider the impact of artificial intelligence, big data, and social media on our students and in our research, this talk focuses on how we might restructure our courses and design new research projects for the digital age. Taken from her work constructing Digital Humanities programming and her research on Digital Black Feminism, Steele argues for bringing a Black Feminist praxis of care to the classroom and our method.
Catherine Knight Steele, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. There she directs the Black Communication and Technology lab and the graduate program in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Steele studies race and media, specifically focusing on Black discourse, technology, and social media. Her research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (forthcoming April 2023, Routledge) and Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), which examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S and was the 2022 winner of the Association of Internet Research Nancy Baym Book Award and Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association.
The Effects of Non-Academic Factors on Early Literacy Acquisition: Evidence from Post 'Literacy-Based Promotion Act' Mississippi
No full textM.P.P.Literacy is fundamental to modern socioeconomic and political life. Despite informing such a critical skill, U.S. reading curriculum has shifted significantly within the past two decades. While there has been ample dialogue surrounding Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act (2013) and stunning National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results since 2019, the potential disparities between urbanicities or groups of students has gained considerably less attention. This study aims to fill a gap in the literature surrounding early childhood literacy acquisition by evaluating the relationship between proficiency rates and school-level characteristics. The empirical analysis utilizes multinomial logit regression methods to assess the effects of various non-academic characteristics, such as proportion of students eligible for free lunch and demographic makeup, on the likelihood that individual schools in Mississippi (N = 369) are able to boost their proficiency rates after the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) is signed into law. Results suggest that schools with higher proportions of students eligible for free lunch are significantly less likely to make progress under the policy