Against all odds: Success stories of Latino students who survived the educational pipeline

The purpose of this interview study was to explore the experiences of Latino students, from their perspectives, as they journeyed through the educational pipeline, particularly the part focusing on the transfer experience from a 2-year college to a 4-year institution. This was accomplished by conducting in-depth interviews with 17 self-identified Latino men and women. All of the participants had attended Florida International University for at least 1 semester and had transferred from Miami Dade College. The participants varied in age, generational status, and cultural identity.^ The participants were asked to reflect on the external and internal influences that lead them to the 4-year institution. Tinto's (1993) model of student departure theory provided the theoretical framework for data collection and analysis. Based on the coding of the interviews, numerous themes emerged, including the role of the family, the impact of early education, the experiences of being Latino in Miami, the decisions to choose a college, the experience at the 2-year institution, the experience with the transfer process, and the obstacles and strategies the participants used for overcoming obstacles. These themes were furthered developed to determine which influences were most important for a successful journey through the educational pipeline. ^ The study found that viewing the pipeline via the students' perspectives juxtaposed with Tinto's (1993) model of student departure gave greater insight into the experiences of a population of students who have been underrepresented in higher education. The findings of this case study indicate that the transfer process for Latinos attending a Hispanic Serving Institution such as Florida International University, situated in a majority-minority city, is complex, with participants having to rely on peers and significant others for pertinent information and support. Several factors, including the importance of positive support networks and increased confidence nurtured by the 2-year institution, influenced the students' transfer to a 4-year institution. For professionals in the field, the findings of this study may lead to a broader understanding of the experiences of Latino students in the pipeline and, more importantly, assist college administrators and faculty in successfully guiding a population through a 4-year institution who first came via a 2-year institution. ^

A "Transforming the School-to-Prison Pipeline" Initiative: Mentoring Model Pilot Project Symposium

Abstract: This informative and interactive teaching symposium posits the Positive Peer Leadership Mentoring Program (PPLM) as an evidence-based wrap-around service for youth and families in Miami-Dade who are involved in the school-to-prison pipeline. Presenters first provide information to initiate the dialogic process of discerning and interpreting the school-to-prison pipeline, impacted by costs of incarceration for Black youth and families and the move toward effective mental health services in the juvenile justice system. Then, participants experience an interactive pedagogical mentoring format set forth in PPLM as the first step toward transforming the school-to-prison pipeline in their own classroom or other educational setting.

Mapping Transnational Crime in El Salvador: New Trends and Lessons from Colombia

Since El Salvador’s civil war formally ended in 1992 the small Central American nation has undergone profound social changes and significant reforms. However, few changes have been as important or as devastating as the nation’s emergence as a central hub in the transnational criminal “pipeline” or series of recombinant, overlapping chains of routes and actors that illicit organizations use to traffic in drugs, money weapons, human being, endangered animals and other products. The erasing of the once-clear ideological lines that drove the civil war and the ability of erstwhile enemies to join forces in criminal enterprises in the post-war period is an enduring and dangerous characteristic of El Salvador’s transnational criminal evolution. Trained, elite cadres from both sides, with few legitimate job opportunities, found their skills were marketable in the growing criminal structures. The groups moved from kidnapping and extortion to providing protection services to transnational criminal organizations to becoming integral parts of the organizations themselves. The demand for specialized military and transportation services in El Salvador have exploded as the Mexican DTOs consolidate their hold on the cocaine market and their relationships with the transportista networks, which is still in flux. The value of their services has risen dramatically also because of the fact that multiple Mexican DTOs, at war with each other in Mexico and seeking to physically control the geographic space of the lucrative pipeline routes in from Guatemala to Panama, are eager to increase their military capabilities and intelligence gathering capacities. The emergence of multiple non-state armed groups, often with significant ties to the formal political structure (state) through webs of judicial, legislative and administrative corruption, has some striking parallels to Colombia in the 1980s, where multiple types of violence ultimately challenged the sovereignty of state and left a lasting legacy of embedded corruption within the nation’s political structure. Organized crime in El Salvador is now transnational in nature and more integrated into stronger, more versatile global networks such as the Mexican DTOs. It is a hybrid of both local crime – with gangs vying for control off specific geographic space so they can extract payment for the safe passage of illicit products – and transnational groups that need to use that space to successfully move their products. These symbiotic relationships are both complex and generally transient in nature but growing more consolidated and dangerous.

Evaluating the Appropriateness of Project Delivery Systems for Different Trenchless Methods

Trenchless methods have been considered to be a viable solution for pipeline projects in urban areas. Their applicability in pipeline projects is expected to increase with the rapid advancements in technology and emerging concerns regarding social costs related to trenching methods. Selecting appropriate project delivery system (PDS) is a key to the success of trenchless projects. To ensure success of the project, the selected project delivery should be tailored to trenchless project specific characteristics and owner needs, since the effectiveness of project delivery systems differs based on different project characteristics and owners requirements. Since different trenchless methods have specific characteristics such rate of installation, lengths of installation, and accuracy, the same project delivery systems may not be equally effective for different methods. The intent of this paper is to evaluate the appropriateness of different PDS for different trenchless methods. PDS are examined through a structured decision-making process called Fuzzy Delivery System Selection Model (FDSSM). The process of incorporating the impacts of: (a) the characteristics of trenchless projects and (b) owners’ needs in the FDSSM is performed by collecting data using questionnaires deployed to professionals involved in the trenchless industry in order to determine the importance of delivery systems selection attributes for different trenchless methods, and then analyzing this data. The sensitivity of PDS rankings with respect to trenchless methods is considered in order to evaluate whether similar project delivery systems are equally effective in different trenchless methods. The effectiveness of PDS with respect to attributes is defined as follows: a project delivery system is most effective with respect to an attribute (e.g., ability to control growth in costs ) if there is no project delivery system that is more effective than that PDS. The results of this study may assist trenchless project owners to select the appropriate PDS for the trenchless method selected.

Identification of Conserved Splicing Motifs in Mutually Exclusive Exons of 15 Insect Species

Background: During alternative splicing, the inclusion of an exon in the final mRNA molecule is determined by nuclear proteins that bind cis-regulatory sequences in a target pre-mRNA molecule. A recent study suggested that the regulatory codes of individual RNA-binding proteins may be nearly immutable between very diverse species such as mammals and insects. The model system Drosophila melanogaster therefore presents an excellent opportunity for the study of alternative splicing due to the availability of quality EST annotations in FlyBase. Methods: In this paper, we describe an in silico analysis pipeline to extract putative exonic splicing regulatory sequences from a multiple alignment of 15 species of insects. Our method, ESTs-to-ESRs (E2E), uses graph analysis of EST splicing graphs to identify mutually exclusive (ME) exons and combines phylogenetic measures, a sliding window approach along the multiple alignment and the Welch’s t statistic to extract conserved ESR motifs. Results: The most frequent 100% conserved word of length 5 bp in different insect exons was “ATGGA”. We identified 799 statistically significant “spike” hexamers, 218 motifs with either a left or right FDR corrected spike magnitude p-value < 0.05 and 83 with both left and right uncorrected p < 0.01. 11 genes were identified with highly significant motifs in one ME exon but not in the other, suggesting regulation of ME exon splicing through these highly conserved hexamers. The majority of these genes have been shown to have regulated spatiotemporal expression. 10 elements were found to match three mammalian splicing regulator databases. A putative ESR motif, GATGCAG, was identified in the ME-13b but not in the ME-13a of Drosophila N-Cadherin, a gene that has been shown to have a distinct spatiotemporal expression pattern of spliced isoforms in a recent study. Conclusions: Analysis of phylogenetic relationships and variability of sequence conservation as implemented in the E2E spikes method may lead to improved identification of ESRs. We found that approximately half of the putative ESRs in common between insects and mammals have a high statistical support (p < 0.01). Several Drosophila genes with spatiotemporal expression patterns were identified to contain putative ESRs located in one exon of the ME exon pairs but not in the other.

Towards the prediction of mutations in genomic sequences

Bio-systems are inherently complex information processing systems. Furthermore, physiological complexities of biological systems limit the formation of a hypothesis in terms of behavior and the ability to test hypothesis. More importantly the identification and classification of mutation in patients are centric topics in today's cancer research. Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies can provide genome-wide coverage at a single nucleotide resolution and at reasonable speed and cost. The unprecedented molecular characterization provided by NGS offers the potential for an individualized approach to treatment. These advances in cancer genomics have enabled scientists to interrogate cancer-specific genomic variants and compare them with the normal variants in the same patient. Analysis of this data provides a catalog of somatic variants, present in tumor genome but not in the normal tissue DNA. In this dissertation, we present a new computational framework to the problem of predicting the number of mutations on a chromosome for a certain patient, which is a fundamental problem in clinical and research fields. We begin this dissertation with the development of a framework system that is capable of utilizing published data from a longitudinal study of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), who's DNA from both normal as well as malignant tissues was subjected to NGS analysis at various points in time. By processing the sequencing data at the time of cancer diagnosis using the components of our framework, we tested it by predicting the genomic regions to be mutated at the time of relapse and, later, by comparing our results with the actual regions that showed mutations (discovered at relapse time). We demonstrate that this coupling of the algorithm pipeline can drastically improve the predictive abilities of searching a reliable molecular signature. Arguably, the most important result of our research is its superior performance to other methods like Radial Basis Function Network, Sequential Minimal Optimization, and Gaussian Process. In the final part of this dissertation, we present a detailed significance, stability and statistical analysis of our model. A performance comparison of the results are presented. This work clearly lays a good foundation for future research for other types of cancer.^

Screening for AmpR-Specific Inhibitors to Combat P. aeruginosa Infections

Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a Gram-negative bacterium, an opportunistic pathogen that infects individuals suffering from reduced immunity or damaged tissue. The treatment of these infections has become a major problem due to its increasing antibiotic resistance. Many multi-drug resistant isolates of P. aeruginosa can thwart most antibiotic classes including ?- lactams, fluoroquinolones, and aminoglycosides. Its ability to combat ?-lactams is in part due to expression of AmpC, a major chromosomally encoded ?-lactamase. The expression of ampC is positively regulated by AmpR. Besides antibiotic resistance, AmpR is an important regulator of various factors that are required for establishing acute and chronic infections. Loss of ampR makes P. aeruginosa susceptible to ?-lactams and less virulent than the wild type. We hypothesize that AmpR is a potential therapeutic target. In the absence of new drugs in the pipeline, the aim of this study is to find an AmpR-specific inhibitor to assist and improve the use of currently available ?- lactam treatment. A small-molecule library from Torrey Pines Institute will be used in this study. Two reporter systems, lux and lacZ, fused to a PampC promotor will be used to assess AmpR activity. Positive hits will be those that inhibit 50% PampC activity in the presence of sub inhibitory concentration of imipenem, a ?- lactam. The top positive hits will be screened for their ability to cause human cell-cytotoxicity. The non-cytotoxic hits will be assessed for their ability to affect P. aeruginosa virulence and antibiotic resistance using various in vitro assays. Determination of potential AmpR inhibitors will prove to be useful in fighting off infections and may save countless patients suffering from these infections.

The Development of a Hybrid Optimization Algorithm for the Evaluation and Optimization of the Asynchronous Pulse Unit

The effectiveness of an optimization algorithm can be reduced to its ability to navigate an objective function’s topology. Hybrid optimization algorithms combine various optimization algorithms using a single meta-heuristic so that the hybrid algorithm is more robust, computationally efficient, and/or accurate than the individual algorithms it is made of. This thesis proposes a novel meta-heuristic that uses search vectors to select the constituent algorithm that is appropriate for a given objective function. The hybrid is shown to perform competitively against several existing hybrid and non-hybrid optimization algorithms over a set of three hundred test cases. This thesis also proposes a general framework for evaluating the effectiveness of hybrid optimization algorithms. Finally, this thesis presents an improved Method of Characteristics Code with novel boundary conditions, which better characterizes pipelines than previous codes. This code is coupled with the hybrid optimization algorithm in order to optimize the operation of real-world piston pumps.