Lowering higher education Côté, James E; Allahar, Anton L
Lowering higher education,
c2011, 20160415, 2011, 2015, 2011-01-15, 2016-04-15
eBook
"What happens to the liberal arts and science education when universities attempt to sell it as a form of job training? In Lowering Higher Education, a follow-up to their provocative 2007 book Ivory ...Tower Blues, James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar explore the subverted 'idea of the university' and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. Côté and Allahar connect the corporatization of universities to a range of contentious issues within higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences instruction."
"Lowering Higher Education points to a fundamental disconnect between policymakers, who may rarely set foot in contemporary classrooms, and the teachers who must implement their educational policies - which the authors argue are poorly informed - on a daily basis. Côté and Allahar expose stakeholder misconceptions surrounding the current culture of academic disengagement and supposed power of new technologies to motivate students. While outlining what makes the status quo dysfunctional, Lowering Higher Education also offers recommendations that have the potential to reinvigorate liberal education."--pub. desc.
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are induced through a variety of endogenous and exogenous sources. Overwhelming of antioxidant and DNA repair mechanisms in the cell by ROS may result in oxidative ...stress and oxidative damage to the cell. This resulting oxidative stress can damage critical cellular macromolecules and/or modulate gene expression pathways. Cancer induction by chemical and physical agents involves a multi-step process. This process includes multiple molecular and cellular events to transform a normal cell to a malignant neoplastic cell. Oxidative damage resulting from ROS generation can participate in all stages of the cancer process. An association of ROS generation and human cancer induction has been shown. It appears that oxidative stress may both cause as well as modify the cancer process. Recently association between polymorphisms in oxidative DNA repair genes and antioxidant genes (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and human cancer susceptibility has been shown.
The monochromatic illumination system is constructed to carry out in situ measurements of the response function of the mosaicked CCD imager used in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The system is ...outlined and the results of the measurements, mostly during the first six years of the SDSS, are described. We present the reference response functions for the five color passbands derived from these measurements, and discuss column-to-column variations and variations in time, and also their effects on photometry. We also discuss the effect arising from various, slightly different response functions of the associated detector systems that were used to give SDSS photometry. We show that the calibration procedures of SDSS remove these variations reasonably well with the resulting final errors from variant response functions being unlikely to be larger than 0.01 mag for g, r, i, and z bands over the entire duration of the survey. The considerable aging effect is uncovered in the u band, the response function showing a 30% decrease in the throughput in the short wavelength side during the survey years, which potentially causes a systematic error in photometry. The aging effect is consistent with variation of the instrumental sensitivity in the u band, which is calibrated out. The expected color variation is consistent with measured color variation in the catalog of repeated photometry. The color variation is Delta *D(u -- g) ~ 0.01 for most stars, and at most Delta *D(u -- g) ~ 0.02 mag for those with extreme colors. We verified in the final catalog that no systematic variations in excess of 0.01 mag are detected in the photometry which can be ascribed to aging and/or seasonal effects except for the secular u -- g color variation for stars with extreme colors.
Ivory tower blues Côté, James E; Allahar, Anton L
Ivory tower blues,
c2007, 20071231, 2007, 2007-12-31, 2007-05-26, 20070101
eBook
Ivory Tower Bluesis an in-depth look at the crisis facing Canadian and American universities, the factors that are precipitating the situation, and the long-term impact this crisis will have on the ...quality of higher education.
Neuroscience tells us that the products of the mind-thought, emotions, artistic creation-are the result of the interactions of the biological brain with our senses and the physical world: in short, ...that thinking and learning are the products of a biological process. This realization, that learning actually alters the brain by changing the number and strength of synapses, offers a powerful foundation for rethinking teaching practice and one's philosophy of teaching. James Zull invites teachers in higher education or any other setting to accompany him in his exploration of what scientists can tell us about the brain and to discover how this knowledge can influence the practice of teaching. He describes the brain in clear non-technical language and an engaging conversational tone, highlighting its functions and parts and how they interact, and always relating them to the real world of the classroom and his own evolution as a teacher. "The Art of Changing the Brain" is grounded in the practicalities and challenges of creating effective opportunities for deep and lasting learning, and of dealing with students as unique learners.
Polarized Campbell, James E
2018, 2016., 20180327, 2016, 2018-03-27
eBook
Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and ...historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened. Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society. Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one. James E. Campbell is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His books include The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote and The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections.