Digital Commons Network^™

Policies To Eliminate Racial Disparities In Education: A Literature Review, Ann Curry-Stevens, Analucia Lopezrevoredo, Dana Peters

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

In response to an increasing need to understand the reach of the literature and the research undertaken on initiatives to eliminate racial disparities, a literature review was initiated in 2012 for the Eliminating Racial Disparities Collaborative within the All Hands Raised initiative to improve academic outcomes for students in Multnomah County. This was an expansive undertaking – and at the end, we have drawn upon about 160 different articles, some of which were meta-analyses of an array of publications in a particular field.

The first section in this report is a summary document that details each policy-based recommendation in this …

The African Immigrant And Refugee Community In Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile, Ann Curry-Stevens, Coalition Of Communities Of Color

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since 1975, African immigrants, refugees and secondary migrants have been relocating to Multnomah County and now represent the fourth largest immigrant community after Latino, Asian, and Slavic immigrants. The African community here is incredibly diverse in its make-up, with over 28 different African countries and numerous ethnic groups represented. Estimates from 2003 suggest that African immigrants make up 2% of the foreign-born population in the Portland Metro (tri-county) area. Nearly half (45%) of the tri-county area’s African foreign-born population is from eastern Africa, including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Other countries of origin include Sudan, Sierra …

Yet Another Crisis Of The Book, Bennett Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book bindings and binding decor can reveal deep parts of our attitudes toward books and toward culture. Changes in attitudes toward the codex book during the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are part of continual change in book culture. The re-binding of early printed books is exemplary evidence of these changes. The new bindings express both a rejection of pre-Enlightenment culture and an attempt to stabilize traditional cultural values. This also suggests how we might view events customarily considered to be "revolutions".

From Exhaustion To Exhilaration: Assessing Librarian Job Satisfaction With Virtual Reference, Arthur Hendricks, Sherry Buchanan

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Purpose – Librarians respond to staffing L-net, Oregon's statewide reference chat service, in different ways. The aim of this paper is to create a survey to look for ways to improve the statewide service and improve the experience of chat librarians (as well as patrons).
Design/methodology/approach – The authors surveyed L-net librarians to learn their thoughts and satisfaction with answering L-net chat questions. They collected anonymous survey data via PSU's web survey software (Qualtrics). The survey instrument was a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questions. The survey consisted of 29 questions.
Findings – While the literature has many articles regarding …

Tutor-Facilitated Adult Digital Literacy Learning: Insights From A Case Study, Kimberly D. Pendell, Elizabeth Withers, Jill Castek, Stephen Reder

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

While the digital divide has decreased, those who are still unable to access and use information and communication technologies are left further behind. An effective digital literacy program helps underserved populations gain needed skills and alleviate the demand placed on public library staff. This case study presents findings on a digital literacy learning model that utilizes a self-paced online platform and in-person volunteer tutors. The researchers found that the learner/tutor relationship is an essential part of the learning process, and that tutors develop a variety of strategies for helping learners. The researchers also identify aspects of effective program implementation.

The Research Process And The Library: First-Generation College Seniors Vs. Freshmen, Elizabeth F. Pickard, Firouzeh Logan

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

In a follow-up study to the ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) Project, librarians at UIC compared the responses of first-generation college freshmen from the original study to those of seniors. The study’s aim was to determine whether student information literacy increases as a result of undergraduate education and to further explore the student research process with respect to the particular factors that inform and effect change in it. The findings showed that information literacy increased among these students, and they developed a more complex approach to the research process and the library.

Sinq Retention And Belonging: An Exploration Of Retention And Belonging Factors Of Portland State University Sophomore Inquiry Students, Cristina Restad, Christa Zinke

University Studies Assessment Research

Research on sophomore success.conducted by graduate students. Examines factors related to SINQ student retention and sense of belonging at PSU.

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Aesthetic Engagement In The City, Nathalie Blanc

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

What Is 'Everyday' In Everyday Aesthetics?, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The theme of everyday aesthetics has recently been addressed by numerous authors. However, the question of what is actually the nature of the everyday, as contrasted with the non-everyday and how this nature affects the aesthetics of the everyday has not been sufficiently elaborated. The purpose of this essay is to clarify the everydayness of the everyday and combine the general notion of everydayness with the key points of everyday aesthetics

The Propaganda Power Of Protest Songs: The Case Of Madison's Solidarity Sing-Along, Sheryl Tuttle Ross

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The aim of this paper is to examine the propaganda power of Madison’s Solidarity Sing-Along. To do so, I will modify the Epistemic Merit Model of propaganda so that it can account for a broader spectrum of propaganda. I will show how this is consistent with other accounts of musical pragmatics and the potential political function of songs and music. This will provide the ground for a robust interpretation of the political meanings of the Solidarity Sing-Along. I will assume the Madison protests and the Solidarity Sing-Along can be considered a paradigm case of peaceful protest as it has been …

The Failed Promise Of Language Rights: A Critique Of The International Language Rights Regime, Moria Paz

Faculty Scholarship

Major international legal instruments commit international law to protect language rights absolutely, irrespective of counter-pressures toward linguistic uniformity. This unconditional commitment to language rights is echoed in the writings of prominent human rights scholars, who argue that language is a constitutive element of cultural identity. This article contrasts the ideals of language rights with the actual record of their enforcement. It presents a detailed analysis of the 133 cases that have come before the European Court of Human Rights, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights dealing with language issues as they arise in (i) …

Professor Edward Cooper: The Quintessential Reporter, Mary Kay Kane

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Can The Blind Lead The Blind? Rethinking Equal Protection Jurisprudence Through An Empirical Examination Of Blind People's Understanding Of Race, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Eco-Terrorism Or Eco-Tage: An Argument For The Proper Frame, David Thomas Sumner, Lisa M. Weidman

Faculty Publications

What does the term “terrorism” mean? Is it accurate to lump illegal acts that destroy property but carefully avoid harming people into the same category as acts clearly intended to kill? Is this a difference of kind or just of degree? While we (the authors) don't generally endorse the destruction of property as a method of generating social change, we believe that the destruction of property is fundamentally different from the intentional killing of people; therefore, to label acts of obstruction, trespassing, vandalism, sabotage, or arson as “terrorism” is inaccurate and has the potential to damage one's understanding of real …

Here, We Are Walking On A Clothesline: Statelessness And Human (In)Security Among Burmese Women Political Exiles Living In Thailand, Elizabeth Hooker

Dissertations and Theses

An estimated twelve million people worldwide are stateless, or living without the legal bond of citizenship or nationality with any state, and consequently face barriers to employment, property ownership, education, health care, customary legal rights, and national and international protection. More than one-quarter of the world's stateless people live in Thailand. This feminist ethnography explores the impact of statelessness on the everyday lives of Burmese women political exiles living in Thailand through the paradigm of human security and its six indicators: food, economic, personal, political, health, and community security. The research reveals that exclusion from national and international legal protections …

Jane Austen, The Prose Shakespeare, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

This essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration, rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as a “prose Shakespeare” by nineteenth-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’ dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading.

Linguistic Minorities And The Right To Languages (Minorías Lingüísticas Y Derecho A Las Lenguas), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Resumen: Esta contribución se centra en la noción de minorías lingüísticas y en el derecho a las lenguas desde una perspectiva sociopolítica y cultural. Se ofrece una definición de lo que se considera “minoría lingüística” con ejemplos representativos de lenguas bajo esta consideración así como datos que ratifican la existencia, vitalidad y extinción de éstas según el contexto moderno de la globalización. Además se incluyen situaciones de multilingüismo y diglosia y cómo el estado ha respondido constitucionalmente a las necesidades de estas comunidades, incluyendo programas educativos, legislaciones internas y derecho de lenguas. Para ello se han escogido una selección de …

Peaceful Warrior-Demons In Japan: From Empress Kōmyō’S Red Repentant Asura To Miyazawa Kenji’S Melancholic Blue Asura, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Strife, and the violence begotten from it, has long been a concern of Buddhism. Anger, ignorance, and greed, namely the three great evils, must be understood and overcome in order to advance towards enlightenment. Buddhism, as a syncretic religion, incorporated other religious figures from the Asian continent into it as a part of the process of appealing to new converts. The Asura embodies all three of these vices and yet in the process of being adopted into Buddhism, he was able to change from a violent demon into a peaceful guardian of the Buddha.

The Asura devas battled Indra in …

Stab Wound Of The Heart With Unusual Sequelae, Peter I Praeger, Jonathan Praeger, Ahmed M Abdel-Razek, Elie M Elmann

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

A 31-year-old woman was admitted to the emergency department with a stab wound to the heart. She was initially stable but rapidly developed hypotension. While the operating room and staff were in preparation, she underwent pericardiocentesis. She was then rushed to the operating room by the general surgical trauma team, who performed a bilateral anterior thoracotomy to control the bleeding. In the recovery room, the patient was still hypotensive, so cardiothoracic surgery was consulted.

An echocardiogram revealed severe hypokinesis of both ventricles. The cardiothoracic surgeons returned her to the operating room and discovered that the anterior pericardium had been completely …

Endovascular Treatment Of Acute Type B Dissection Complicating Aortic Coarctation, Seyed Ebrahim Kassaian, Kyomars Abbasi, Mehdi Mousavi, Mohammad Sahebjam

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

Surgical treatment poses a high risk to patients with concomitant aortic coarctation and dissection, and an interventional approach could be an alternative. We describe the case of a 52-year-old man with a long history of untreated hypertension and aortic coarctation who emergently presented at our institution with an acute Stanford type B dissection. The patient's elevated serum creatinine level, perfusion deficit in the right lower limb, and hypertension did not respond to medical therapy, and he did not consent to surgery. By endovascular means, we used a self-expandable stent-graft to cover the entry point of the dissection; then, we deployed …

Cardiovascular Disease In Late Survivors Of Tetralogy Of Fallot: A Tertiary Care Center Experience, Elisa Bradley, Jeff Parker, Eric Novak, Philip Ludbrook, Joseph Billadello, Ari Cedars

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

Patients with tetralogy of Fallot can survive to late adulthood; however, there are few data on cardiovascular outcomes in this population. We conducted a single-center retrospective analysis of cardiovascular outcomes and risk factors in 208 patients with tetralogy of Fallot to better evaluate the burden of cardiovascular disease in this group. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the prevalence of relevant cardiovascular risk factors and outcomes, including a composite analysis of cardiovascular disease. Rates and mean values from the American Heart Association 2011 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Update were used as population estimates for comparison.

In tetralogy of Fallot …

Early Hemodynamic And Biochemical Changes In Overloaded Swine Ventricleearly Hemodynamic And Biochemical Changes In Overloaded Swine Ventricle, Sandro Gelsomino, Fabiana Lucà, Chiara Nediani, Sandra Zecchi Orlandini, Daniele Bani, Antonio S Rubino, Attilio Renzulli, Roberto Lorusso, Andrea Consolo, Antonino Lo Cascio, Jos Maessen, Gian Franco Gensini

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

The present study was undertaken to investigate, in an animal model, the relationship between sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase (SERCA2a) activity, phospholamban phosphorylation, acylphosphatase activity, and hemodynamic changes that occur in the early phase of pressure overload. In 54 study-group pigs, weighing 40±5 kg each, an aortic stenosis was created with a band of umbilical tape tied around the aorta; 18 sham-operated pigs formed our control group. Eight animals (6 study and 2 control) were randomly assigned to each experimental time (0.5, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 72, 96, and 168 hr). All indices of left ventricular function declined significantly, with a …

Perventricular Device Closure Of Residual Muscular Ventricular Septal Defects After Repair Of Complex Congenital Heart Defects In Pediatric Patients, Da Zhu, Kaiyu Tao, Qi An, Shuhua Luo, Changping Gan, Ke Lin

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

Residual muscular ventricular septal defects are surgical challenges, especially after the repair of complex congenital heart defects. We investigated perventricular device closure as a salvage technique in pediatric patients who had postoperative residual muscular ventricular septal defects.

From February 2009 through June 2011, 14 pediatric patients at our hospital had residual muscular ventricular septal defects after undergoing surgical repair of complex congenital heart defects. Ten patients met our criteria for perventricular device closure of the residual defects: significant left-to-right shunting (Qp/Qs >1.5) or substantial hemodynamic instability (a defect ≥2 mm in size). The patients' mean age was 20.4 ± 13.5 …

Preventing Sudden Cardiac Death In Athletes: In Search Of Evidence-Based, Cost-Effective Screening, Paolo Angelini, Mladen I Vidovich, Christine E Lawless, Macarthur A Elayda, J Alberto Lopez, Dwayne Wolf, James T Willerson

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

Sudden cardiac death in athletes is a recurrent phenomenon at sporting events and during training. Recent studies have associated sudden cardiac death with such cardiovascular conditions as coronary artery anomalies, cardiomyopathies, and electrocardiographic abnormalities, most of which are screenable with modern imaging techniques. We recently inaugurated the Center for Coronary Artery Anomalies at the Texas Heart Institute, which is dedicated to preventing sudden cardiac death in the young and investigating coronary artery anomalies. There, we are conducting 2 cross-sectional studies intended to firmly establish and quantify, in a large group of individuals from a general population, risk factors for sudden …

Components Of The Complete Blood Count As Risk Predictors For Coronary Heart Disease: In-Depth Review And Update, Mohammad Madjid, Omid Fatemi

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease, and several inflammatory biomarkers, such as C-reactive protein, have been used to predict the risk of coronary heart disease. High white blood cell count is a strong and independent predictor of coronary risk in patients of both sexes, with and without coronary heart disease. A high number of white blood cells and their subtypes (for example, neutrophils, monocytes, lymphocytes, and eosinophils) are associated with the presence of coronary heart disease, peripheral arterial disease, and stroke. The coronary heart disease risk ratios associated with a high white blood cell count are comparable to those of other …

Meaningful Sustainability Learning: An Action Research Study Of Sustainability Pedagogy In Two University Courses, Heather Burns

Educational Leadership and Policy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Educators are increasingly aware of the importance of sustainability and the need to educate for sustainable change within higher education. This article addresses the growing need to focus on how teaching and learning can be re-oriented towards sustainability, and more specifically how educators can effectively address increasingly well-known sociocultural and ecological problems in ways that transform learners and empower them to make change based on a sense of civic responsibility and sustainability. This research study draws on the Burns Model of Sustainability Pedagogy, which integrates ecological design, systemic and interdisciplinary learning, multiple perspectives, an active and engaged learning process, and …

An Assessment Of Integrated Weed Management Strategies For Purple Threeawn-Dominated Rangelands, Nickolas Alois Dufek

Range Science

Purple threeawn (Aristida purpurea Nutt.) is a native bunch grass that is avoided by grazers. It is capable of dominating old cropland and overgrazed pastures, limiting livestock carrying capacity, and degrading wildlife habitat. Traditional management tools have had little impact on threeawn dominance in semiarid regions of the west. Our objectives were to: 1) assess fire and nitrogen treatment effects on threeawn forage quality at various phenological stages to test their potential as pretreatments in a grazing strategy and 2) examine a threeawn-dominated plant community’s response to prescribed fire, nitrogen addition, and clipping. Fire improved threeawn forage quality with greater …

Preparation In Practice: Simultaneous Preparation Of Educational Leaders And Future Teachers For Social Justice In Professional Development Schools, Amy Daggett Petti, Sabrina Flamoe

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

In times of crisis there are opportunities for innovation. Teacher preparation, leadership preparation, and education in general are facing a time of crisis. Teacher and principal preparation and performance are no longer just the fodder of educational journals and elite academics. When mainstream publications such as Newsweek run a cover image of a chalkboard with repeated lines of text, "We Must Fire Bad Teachers" as the solution to "saving American Education" (2010), we know the public perception of teacher preparation, teacher professionalism, and leadership in schools is in a crisis.

This chapter examines a case study of a school committed …

Matching International Enthusiasm With Diversity Commitment, Michael J. Smith, Akiko Ota

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article discusses the need for diversity and commitment from U.S. universities to increase enthusiasm for foreign student recruitment. It notes that cooperative societies have been formed by universities to attain efficiency and cost control. It mentions that partnership between schools and private sector recruiting firms have risen.