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The Impact of Cocaine on Inflammatory Markers in SIM-A9 Microglial Cells
No full textSubstance use disorders are conditions in which an individual continues to use a drug or other substance despite adverse consequences to their health and well-being. It has been hypothesized that inflammation within the central nervous system plays a critical role in the development of substance use disorders. The resident macrophages in the brain, also known as microglia, release markers of inflammation in response to injury or infection. A better understanding of the inflammatory response mediated by microglia in response to drugs of misuse can validate this hypothesis and help guide drug development. In the current studies, the microglia cell line SIM-A9 was treated with the negative control of phosphate buffered saline, cocaine at different concentrations, or the positive control lipopolysaccharide. After incubation with these treatments for 24 hours, RNA extraction was performed and followed by cDNA synthesis. The cDNA was then used for qPCR analysis to determine the change in expression of the inflammatory markers IL-1β and TNF-α. There were significant between-group differences for both IL-1β (P\u3c0.0001) and TNF-α (P =0.0395). In post-hoc analyses, there were significant increases in IL-1β with the higher dose of cocaine compared to phosphate buffered saline but increases in TNF-α with cocaine compared to other groups were non-significant. Overall, these preliminary data indicate that certain inflammatory markers, principally IL-1β, are elevated on the SIM-A9 microglia cell line in response to cocaine. Future studies are needed to determine if similar responses exist in vivo
Investigating Undergraduate Conditioned Place Preference Utilizing Virtual Alcohol Stimuli
No full textAlcohol use remains a major concern among college students, with binge drinking linked to serious physical and mental health problems. But how much does the environment influence these addictive behaviors? The relationship between environmental cues and alcohol related behaviors is a critical area of study, particularly understanding reward and motivation mechanisms. Binge drinking, common among college students, is associated with a range of negative outcomes such as physical harm, legal issues, poorer overall health, sleep problems, depression, anxiety, and severe thoughts of suicide. In our study, college undergraduates were exposed to two VR rooms: one with alcohol-related stimuli and one neutral. Participants with a history of alcohol use spent significantly more time in the alcohol-paired room, indicating the development of a conditioned place preference (CPP). In contrast, participants without alcohol experience showed no clear preference. This study is the second to demonstrate that virtual alcohol cues can establish CPP, suggesting that virtual environments can influence behavior, particularly in individuals with prior alcohol exposure. These findings have implications for understanding the role of environmental context in addiction and could inform strategies for prevention and intervention
Parenting Under Siege: Reckoning with Coercive Control
No full textCoercive control is a pervasive form of domestic violence in which one partner engages in a prolonged and multifaceted campaign of abuse in order to gain and maintain dominance over the other partner. While some coercively controlling partners employ physical violence to ensure compliance with their demands, others use exclusively non-violent tactics. In co-parenting relationships, coercive control not only inflicts severe harm on the targeted parent but also affects children as co-victims of both direct and indirect abuse. As a result, co-victim children suffer significant emotional, developmental, and social harm, and adverse health outcomes, even in the absence of physical abuse. Yet legal frameworks addressing domestic violence typically focus on discrete acts of physical violence, adhering to what scholars term the “violent incident model.”
Recognizing this gap, several states have introduced legislation that would expand state law domestic violence definitions to include coercive control, both in criminal and family law contexts. This Article critiques these trending legislative reforms, arguing that such expansions are unlikely to meaningfully benefit survivors and may instead be weaponized by abusive partners, resulting in criminal prosecution, loss of custody of children, and other negative consequences for survivors of coercive control who are unjustly swept up in broad statutory language. Systemic flaws in both the criminal and family law systems make women of color and other marginalized victims particularly vulnerable to this risk of being falsely classified as perpetrators of coercive control.
This Article recommends against these broad definitional changes, instead proposing a more nuanced approach combining training initiatives with legislative reforms that expand key legal protections to victims of coercive control. The Article concludes by noting that more comprehensive solutions will remain out of reach without a fundamental shift in societal values which challenges the deeply patriarchal social norms of abuse and victimhood that entrap and endanger coercive control victims and their children
Big Banks: Go Small!
No full textDespite the promise of the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws, racial gaps in wealth, homeownership, and mortgage lending persist today. Our nation’s biggest banks deny mortgage loan applications to Black and Brown consumers at a rate higher than the rest of the industry, often claiming that lending to historically marginalized consumers is too risky. Instead, these lending institutions focus on providing highly profitable financial services to wealthy consumers.
Banking institutions, especially our nation’s biggest banks, have both a moral and economic obligation to serve all members of the public who need and desire financial services. It is time for big banks to “go small” in order to close the racial lending gap
Editorial: A Vision for Research in Music Education? New Answers to a Perpetual Question
No full textA Descriptive Analysis of Elementary Music Teachers\u27 Planning Time
No full textThe purpose of this descriptive study was to examine elementary music teachers’ planning times. The existing literature on planning time is scarce and the literature on elementary music teachers’ planning time is nearly non-existent. The following research questions guided the study: (a) How many minutes of planning time do elementary music teachers have? (b) What type(s) of planning do elementary music teachers participate in? (c) What do elementary music teachers do during their planning time? The researcher modified an existing survey (Hixson et al., 2013), which underwent two piloting phases to establish content validity and statistical reliability. The participants (N = 246) were randomly selected from across the United States via the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) survey research assistance program. The survey items relating to planning time were based on the participants’ teaching rotations. All but one participant reported having individual planning time and most (85.8%, n = 211) participants did not participate in common planning time or in a Professional Learning Community for music teachers (54.1%, n = 133). Elementary music teachers planned lessons (n = 240, 97.6%), called students’ parents (n = 132, 53.7%), graded student work (n = 131, 73.6%), attended meetings (n = 131, 53.3%), cleaned their rooms between classes (n =18, 20.1%), repaired instruments (n = 6, 6.8%), and composed and arranged music (n = 3.4%) during their planning times. The results of this study will lay the foundation for future studies regarding elementary music teachers’ planning time and impact future education policy regarding planning time
“It’s like Mental Marginalization”: Stories of Four Music Students at a Hispanic Serving Institution.
No full textResearchers have explored the ways in which P-12 teachers and students negotiate Latino/a/x/e cultural and musical identities in the classrooms (Abril, 2009; Lechuga & Schmidt, 2018; Palkki, 2015). While some have connected culturally responsive teaching to the needs of the growing number of Latino/a/x and Hispanic students in P-12 settings (Abril & Kelly-McHale, 2015), currently, no studies within music education address the experiences of music students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), as well as the music making practices, curriculum, and faculty experiences at HSI. This case study examined how a music department at an HSI served the needs of its racially minoritized student population. Research questions guiding this study included: In what ways do racially minoritized students make meaning of the intersections between their racial, cultural, and student identities; and, what barriers or success have these students experienced in their musical studies in relation to their identities? Themes emerged from the data included: devaluing of “whoness” (Davis, 2021), community centered values, and access to preparation for higher education
How Attention Related Brainwaves Vary with Performance on Speech-In-Noise Tasks
No full textPrior studies have found alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (15-30 Hz) oscillations measured with EEG both increase in power when people are performing speech-in-noise tasks. In theory, variation in speech-in-noise performance could reflect the ability to segregate and neurally encode background versus foreground sounds. Here, we aim to examine how alpha and beta oscillations play a role in ignoring background sounds versus attending to foreground speech sounds. We had thirty-four healthy young adults perform a speech-in-noise task while we recorded brain signals using 64-channel EEG. Subjects were instructed to ignore the randomly varied background “noise” sounds that onset at the beginning of each trial and attend to foreground digits. After listening to each digit sequence, subjects reported the digits heard. We analyzed the EEG data using custom MATLAB scripts developed by our lab, finding that speech-in-noise performance is easier when the background sound has high stationarity in acoustic features over time. Our results indicate a high involvement of alpha and beta oscillations in attending to foreground sounds amidst background noise, with the alpha oscillations increasing prior to foreground sound onset during background sound onset in order to suppress brain processing of the distracting background sound in preparation for focusing on the attended foreground digits. Interestingly, the increase of beta power prior to onset of the attended digit sequence supports the theory that beta oscillations engage to generate a working memory encoding of the ignored background sounds. Additionally, the more dynamically variable speech “Babble” background sound induced more beta oscillations, in theory reflecting more working memory processes and detection of temporal amplitude modulations over time for the speech “Babble” sounds as compared to the other sounds, such as “White Noise”. Given that the behavioral performance for correctly reporting the digit sequence was also lower for “Babble” background sounds, the higher beta power for “Babble” may index distractibility as well as a working memory representation of the “Babble” sound
Comparative Data Science Education Policy and Management: United States and Europe
No full textThis study examines what “good” curricula and administration for undergraduate data science are by surveying and interviewing U.S. and European data science educators and administrators. Many U.S. and European higher education institutions have embraced data science education with a kind of inertial sensibility, i.e., it is inevitable that data science education needs to be offered to students. Information and data affect so many areas of knowledge that higher education administrators feel they must assure students are “ready” for the world they are inheriting. Academic capitalism and isomorphism theories help elucidate social and market forces influencing higher education decision-making. Topics to which I contribute using a comparative perspective include knowledge management across higher education institutions; data science education practice; transdisciplinarity; and the designing and implementation of public policies at the federal and local levels