Northern Arizona University

Indigenous Peoples have an inherent responsibility and right to “exercising” sovereignty—the practice of sport and physical activity in performance of our cultural, political, and spiritual citizenship. By exercising this inherent right and responsibility, sport has the power for communities to reenvision their futures. Sport and physical activity are highly regarded and practiced in multiple contexts within Indigenous communities. Utilizing Indigenous ways of knowing, practices of resurgence, Indigenous activism, and Indigenous responses to political and cultural injustices, we apply the five protective factors of “exercising” sovereignty, including community, relationality, strength, abundance, and resilience to analyze Indigenous sport research in North America.

Prescribing is a significant activity undertaken by physicians, physician associates/assistants (PAs), and nurse practitioners (NPs). We analyzed prescribing data to understand better the growing presence of PAs and NPs in older adults. A trend in frequently prescribed medications was compared with other physicians. All prescriptions in Medicare Part D were grouped into broad categories of drugs and linked to each type of provider. The analysis spanned 9 years (2013–2021). The results revealed that all five providers similarly prescribed the top three main drug classes (antacids, antihypertensives, and statins). In addition, there was a decline in the number of unique prescribers and prescriptions for all three types of physicians (family medicine, internal medicine, and general practice physicians). Concurrently, the number and share of prescriptions for NPs and PAs increased yearly. The findings are consistent with data that PAs and NPs are backfilling physician shortages in treating older adults.

As geoscience and water related enrollment and degrees continue to decline, new methods are needed to recruit and engage students in these interesting and challenging interdisciplinary fields. An existing water-themed distinguished lecture tour was reinvented and reinvigorated to include a workshop to (1) promote interdisciplinary collaboration and (2) increase student engagement in earth sciences. The Geological Society of America has dedicated foundation support for a domestic and international lecture tour to promote the scientific discipline of hydrogeology. In addition to the lecture tour with a standard presentation and meetings with faculty, staff, and students, a half-day, interactive field demonstration of the inventory and assessment techniques for springs ecosystems was conducted at a spring near the lecture site. Local faculty hosts were encouraged to engage students in the planning and implementation of the demonstration workshop. The students were provided additional training to enter the interdisciplinary ecosystem data into a cloud-sourced database and to be actively engaged in producing a publication related to the springs ecosystems inventories and assessments. Of the participants of the demonstration workshops, students at eight of the host institutions became co-authors of the resulting manuscript. With the significant investment of time, resources, and logistics to implement a lecture tour, an additional interactive, hands-on, demonstration workshop is a cost-effective way to increase student engagement and provide interdisciplinary collaboration.

Spinal cord epidural stimulation can promote the recovery of motor function in individuals with severe spinal cord injury (SCI) by enabling the spinal circuitry to interpret sensory information and generate related neuromuscular responses. This approach enables the spinal cord to generate lower limb extension patterns during weight bearing, allowing individuals with SCI to achieve upright standing. We have shown that the human spinal cord can generate some standing postural responses during self-initiated body weight shifting. In this study, we investigated the ability of individuals with motor complete SCI receiving epidural stimulation to generate standing reactive postural responses after external perturbations were applied at the trunk. A cable-driven robotic device was used to provide constant assistance for pelvic control and to deliver precise trunk perturbations while participants used their hands to grasp onto handlebars for self-balance support (hands-on) as well as without support (free-hands). Five individuals with motor complete SCI receiving lumbosacral spinal cord epidural stimulation parameters specific for standing (Stand-scES) participated in this study. Trunk perturbations (average magnitude: 17 ± 3% bodyweight) were delivered randomly in the four cardinal directions. Participants attempted to control each perturbation such that upright standing was maintained and no additional external assistance was needed. Lower limb postural responses were generally more frequent, larger in magnitude, and appropriately modulated during the free-hands condition. This was associated with trunk displacement and lower limb loading modulation that were larger during free-hands. Further, we observed discernible lower limb muscle synergies that were similar between the two perturbed standing conditions. These findings suggest that the human spinal circuitry involved in postural control retains the ability to generate meaningful lower limb postural responses after SCI when its excitability is properly modulated. Moreover, lower limb postural responses appear enhanced by a standing environment without upper limb stabilization that promotes afferent inputs associated with a larger modulation of ground reaction forces and trunk kinematic. These findings should be considered when developing future experimental frameworks aimed at studying upright postural control and activity-based recovery training protocols aimed at promoting neural plasticity and sensory-motor recovery.

A joint statement from two federal agencies in the United States calls for coordination and collaboration between programs serving families of infants and toddlers who are at risk or developmentally delayed or disabled U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Policy guidance: Joint statement on collaboration and coordination of the MIECHV and IDEA Part C programs. (2017). Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. ED/HHS Joint Guidance Document: Collaboration and Coordination of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part C Programs. Young Native American children living on tribal lands in this country are currently eligible for two federal programs associated with these agencies which overlap in mission and implementation. This paper outlines potential strategies for creating a more seamless system of services for tribal families involving more centralized intake processes and procedures, cross training of staff to work across programs, and adopting more unifying approaches to program implementation. A streamlined system of services will result in interventions that better support family and child outcomes while reducing duplication of services, consolidating the limited number of qualified professionals available to provide services, and increasing convenience and cultural attunement of services to Native American families currently participating in both programs.

Study reproducibility is essential to corroborate, build on, and learn from the results of scientific research but is notoriously challenging in bioinformatics, which often involves large data sets and complex analytic workflows involving many different tools. Additionally, many biologists are not trained in how to effectively record their bioinformatics analysis steps to ensure reproducibility, so critical information is often missing. Software tools used in bioinformatics can automate provenance tracking of the results they generate, removing most barriers to bioinformatics reproducibility. Here we present an implementation of that idea, Provenance Replay, a tool for generating new executable code from results generated with the QIIME 2 bioinformatics platform, and discuss considerations for bioinformatics developers who wish to implement similar functionality in their software.

Quantitative assessment of greenhouse gas emissions is an essential step to plan, track, and verify emission reductions. Multiple approaches have been taken to quantify U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (FFCO2), the primary driver of global climate change. A 2020 study analyzing atmospheric 14CO2 observations (a key check on bottom-up estimates) and multiple inventories found significant differences in the U.S. total FFCO2 emissions. The specific reasons for the differences were left for future work. Here, we take up this task and explore the differences between two widely used U.S. FFCO2 inventories, the Vulcan FFCO2 emissions data product and the EPA GHG inventory, developed using mostly independent data sources. Where possible, we isolate definitions and data sources to quantify/understand discrepancies. We find that the initial 2011 emissions difference (104 MtC/yr; RD = 10.7%) can be reduced by aligning the two estimates to account for differing definitions of emission categories or system boundaries. Out of the remaining 90.6 MtC/yr gap (RD = 6.2%), we find that differences can be largely explained by data completeness, emission factors, and fuel heating values. The remaining difference, 45.4 MtC/yr (3.2%), is difficult to isolate due to limited EPA documentation and disaggregation of emissions by sector/fuel categories. Furthermore, the final net difference obscures countervailing gross differences (~40 MtC/yr) within individual sectors. Nevertheless, this comparison suggests the potential for a national estimation approach that can simultaneously satisfy reporting at the national/global scale and the local scale, maintaining internal consistency throughout and offering detailed decision support to a much wider array of stakeholders.

Climate change is contributing to declines of insects through rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and an increasing frequency of extreme events. The impacts of both gradual and sudden shifts in weather patterns are realized directly on insect physiology and indirectly through impacts on other trophic levels. Here, we investigated direct effects of seasonal weather on butterfly occurrences and indirect effects mediated by plant productivity using a temporally intensive butterfly monitoring dataset, in combination with high‐resolution climate data and a remotely sensed indicator of plant primary productivity. Specifically, we used Bayesian hierarchical path analysis to quantify relationships between weather and weather‐driven plant productivity on the occurrence of 94 butterfly species from three localities distributed across an elevational gradient. We found that snow pack exerted a strong direct positive effect on butterfly occurrence and that low snow pack was the primary driver of reductions during drought. Additionally, we found that plant primary productivity had a consistently negative effect on butterfly occurrence. These results highlight mechanisms of weather‐driven declines in insect populations and the nuances of climate change effects involving snow melt, which have implications for ecological theories linking topographic complexity to ecological resilience in montane systems.

The degree to which gender symmetry exists in intimate partner violence depends largely on the type of violent relationship in question. While men are more likely than women to commit acts of relationship violence in the context of coercive control, situational violence may involve a perpetrator of any gender. This chapter will discuss how the absence of representation of different types of intimate partner violence in American culture and media has effaced the issue of gender symmetry. Drawing on recent high-profile cases, including the 2022 defamation lawsuit by actor Johnny Depp against ex-wife Amber Heard, this chapter concludes that differentiating between types of intimate partner violence in culture and media could offer a more nuanced and productive conversation about the role of gender in intimate partner violence.

A combination of forest thinning followed by prescribed burning is widely applied in the western United States to increase ecosystem resistance and resilience to disturbances. Understory plant community responses may be driven by both management treatments and climatic factors. Thus, responses to treatments during a 20‐year megadrought have implications for the role of management in fostering adaptive capacity to climate change. We used a network of five sites (600 plots) spanning an environmental gradient in ponderosa pine ( Pinus ponderosa ) forests of the American Southwest, an ecosystem that is broadly distributed and actively managed throughout the western United States. We used repeated long‐term monitoring data to quantify plant community responses to treatment 1–5‐, 6–10‐ and >10‐year post‐implementation. Specifically, we focussed on the effects of treatment and abiotic conditions on native and non‐native plant cover and species richness and the proportion of native species with northern (cool‐mesic) biogeographic affinities. Overall, thinning and prescribed burning nearly doubled native cover and increased native species richness by about 50% relative to untreated controls. These effects persisted for over a decade after treatment, even under the influence of significant and persistent drought. Cover and richness were also greater on intermediate to wet sites. Finally, native species with northern biogeographic affinities were reduced for up to 5 years after treatment relative to those with southern (warm‐xeric) affinities, and in dry years, indicating that both management and interannual climate variability may foster shifts to plant communities that are more resilient to a warming climate. Synthesis and applications . In ponderosa pine forests of the American Southwest, tree thinning followed by prescribed burning will generally promote restoration goals of increasing resilience to climate change by enhancing the diversity and abundance of native understory plant species, even during a persistent 20‐year megadrought.

In the aftermath of a high-intensity wildfire in La Michilia Biosphere Reserve, Mexico, an initial study suggested a shift from an oak-pine forest to a grass-savanna ecosystem. We conducted repeated measurements on sixty permanent plots 1, 5, 10, and 20 years after the original wildfire at paired burned and unburned study sites to capture spatial and temporal dynamics in forest composition and structure. We found that the burned site regained most pre-wildfire characteristics two decades after the wildfire. The ongoing regeneration in the burned site suggests that despite the remaining differences, the site is approaching a complete recovery, with forest characteristics analogous to the unburned site. Our findings indicate that the combination of seeders' wildfire resistance and resprouters' post-wildfire sprouting strategies in mixed-species forests provide high resilience to high-intensity wildfire. Moreover, protecting La Michilía as a biosphere reserve and heightened public awareness of the natural environment likely played an indispensable role in facilitating the recovery of the post-wildfire ecosystem.

Background To investigate the antibiotic resistance of Helicobacter pylori ( H. pylori ) strains to clarithromycin, metronidazole, amoxicillin, levofloxacin, furazolidone, and tetracycline in Chinese children. Materials and Methods This multicenter, retrospective study was conducted from January 2016 through May 2023. Gastric mucosa biopsies were obtained from pediatric participants who underwent upper gastrointestinal endoscopy at 96 hospitals in northern, southwestern, and southeastern China. The susceptibility of H. pylori to six commonly used antibiotics was determined by agar dilution method. Results Among the 3074 H. pylori isolates, 36.7% were resistant to clarithromycin, 77.3% to metronidazole, 16.6% to levofloxacin, and 0.3% to amoxicillin. No strains were detected to be resistant to furazolidone or tetracycline. During the 8‐year study period, resistance to clarithromycin and metronidazole showed a significant upward trend, while the resistance pattern of the other antibiotics demonstrated a slight but nonsignificant fluctuation. Significant regional differences were found in the distribution of clarithromycin resistance among the northern (66.0%), southwestern (48.2%), and southeastern (34.6%) regions. The metronidazole resistance rate was significantly lower in the southeastern coastal region (76.3%) than in the other two regions (88.2% in the north and 87.7% in the southwest). Multi‐drug resistance for two or more antibiotics was detected in 36.3% of the H. pylori strains, and the predominant multi‐resistance pattern was the dual resistance to clarithromycin and metronidazole. Conclusions The prevalence of H. pylori resistance to clarithromycin and metronidazole is rather high in Chinese children and has been increasing over time. A relatively high resistance rate to levofloxacin was also noticed in children, while almost all strains were susceptible to amoxicillin, furazolidone, and tetracycline. It will be of great clinical significance to continuously monitor the antibiotic‐resistance patterns of H. pylori in the pediatric population.

Diurnal surface temperature data collected from the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer have been used to characterize dust redistribution on Mars following a regional dust storm in January 2022. A comparative temporal analysis is conducted pre‐ and post‐dust storm to estimate net changes in surface dust thickness at Syrtis Major, Isidis Planitia, Tyrrhena Terra, Hesperian Planum, and Elysium Planitia. By leveraging data from a numerical thermal model, we relate differences in observed surface temperature to changes in the thickness of the surface dust layer. We describe the methodology for estimating net changes in surface dust thickness, including a description of the thermophysical model employed, provide a sensitivity analysis with respect to local time and surface properties, and discuss the implications of our findings. Surface temperature differences suggest both dust deposition and removal, with some regions experiencing a net removal as high as 340 μm, while other regions experienced net deposition reaching up to 120 μm. Visible‐wavelength imagery from the Emirates Exploration Imager, which is more sensitive to changes in surface dust distribution, is incorporated in our analysis to provide additional context. When the area of each region of interest is accounted for, we find that the dust storm had the potential to remove and/or deposit more than 1.51 × 10⁹ and 1.20 × 10⁹ kg, respectively, suggesting that dust reservoirs are capable of transporting vast quantities of dust over short timescales.

For average tourists to the American Southwest, there is often a disconnected view of indigenous people. Their perceptions might include that people who once lived here have left and no longer have ties to the land and resources. Few tour guides are Indigenous. Non-indigenous tour guides are ill-prepared to speak about the land’s rich human heritage, even while visiting ancestral places of living cultures. There is recognition and attribution that tribal affiliations exist. Yet, for non-tribal tourists these are simply stories meant for entertainment that have boundaries and meanings often inconsistent with living cultures. Incorporating and sharing Indigenous voices is one way to expand tourist awareness of cultural heritage. This chapter explores how Indigenous perspectives at the Grand Canyon National Park were developed and shared with non-Indigenous tourists. This case can be used as an example of a respectful and culturally sustaining approach to heritage tourism.

With the continuous advancement of technology and productivity in China, most companies are gradually expanding. However, due to the emergence of New Crown Pneumonia in 2019, the profitability of most enterprises is affected by the New Crown Pneumonia epidemic. Therefore, enterprises are facing greater challenges, and the only way to survive in such an environment is to continuously improve the profitability of enterprises based on legal and reasonable compliance in order to adapt to the progress and development of the times. Facing the new economic environment and policies, enterprises need to analyze the complex economic environment they are currently facing from multiple perspectives. The main object of this paper is to analyze the corporate profitability of Ningxia Baofeng Energy and the impact of various indicators on profitability, identify key indicators that have a significant impact on corporate profitability, and find ways to improve corporate profitability through discussion and analysis. The main methods used in this paper are literature analysis and empirical research, and the analysis of corporate profitability is further developed and discussed by analyzing the content of the literature and studying the specific situation of Ningxia Baofeng Energy. This paper came to the following conclusions about the study of corporate profitability: companies should reduce operating costs through cost control and focus on increasing sales margins to ensure sustainable profitability.

Infant feeding requires successful interactions between infant physiology and the maternal (or bottle) nipple. Within artificial nipples, there is variation in both nipple stiffness and flow rates, as well as variation in infant physiology as they grow and mature. However, we have little understanding into how infants interact with variable nipple properties to generate suction and successfully feed. We designed nipples with two different stiffnesses and hole sizes and measured infant feeding performance through ontogeny using a pig model. We evaluated their response to nipple properties using high-speed X-Ray videofluoroscopy. Nipple properties substantially impacted sucking physiology and performance. Hole size had the most profound impact on the number of sucks infants took per swallow. Pressure generation generally increased with age, especially in nipples where milk acquisition was more difficult. However, most strikingly, in nipples with lower flow rates the relationship between suction generation and milk acquisition was disrupted. In order to design effective interventions for infants with feeding difficulties, we must consider how variation in nipple properties impacts infant physiology in a targeted manner. While reducing flow rate may reduce the frequency an infant aspirates, it may impair systems involved in sensorimotor integration.

This work investigates the effects of pre-employment training on employment outcomes for previously incarcerated individuals using two theories developed in the discipline of economics: human capital theory and signaling theory. Human capital theory suggests that preemployment training increases wages and the likelihood of employment by building relevant skills that would improve productivity. Signaling theory asserts that the completion of pre-employment training acts as a signal of participant ability, as ability is known to the applicant but unknown to employers. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, results support hypotheses related to signaling theory for individuals without a history of incarceration, but show no meaningful relationship between pre-employment training and employment outcomes for previously incarcerated individuals. Findings contribute to both economic and criminal justice theory and can be used to inform employment interventions for those with or without a history of incarceration.

Interactions between plants and herbivores are central in most ecosystems, but their strength is highly variable. The amount of variability within a system is thought to influence most aspects of plant-herbivore biology, from ecological stability to plant defense evolution. Our understanding of what influences variability, however, is limited by sparse data. We collected standardized surveys of herbivory for 503 plant species at 790 sites across 116° of latitude. With these data, we show that within-population variability in herbivory increases with latitude, decreases with plant size, and is phylogenetically structured. Differences in the magnitude of variability are thus central to how plant-herbivore biology varies across macroscale gradients. We argue that increased focus on interaction variability will advance understanding of patterns of life on Earth.

Software teams increasingly adopt different tools and communication channels to aid the software collaborative development model and coordinate tasks. Among such resources, software development forums have become widely used by developers. Such environments enable developers to get and share technical information quickly. In line with this trend, GitHub announced GitHub Discussions—a native forum to facilitate collaborative discussions between users and members of communities hosted on the platform. Since GitHub Discussions is a software development forum, it faces challenges similar to those faced by systems used for asynchronous communication, including the problems caused by related posts (duplicated and near-duplicated posts). These related posts can add noise to the platform and compromise project knowledge sharing. Hence, this article addresses the problem of detecting related posts on GitHub Discussions. To achieve this, we propose an approach based on a Sentence-BERT pre-trained general-purpose model: the RD-Detector . We evaluated RD-Detector using data from three communities hosted in GitHub. Our dataset comprises 16,048 discussion posts. Three maintainers and three Software Engineering (SE) researchers manually evaluated the RD-Detector results, achieving 77–100% of precision and 66% of recall. In addition, maintainers pointed out practical applications of the approach, such as providing knowledge to support merging the discussion posts and converting the posts to comments on other related posts. Maintainers can benefit from RD-Detector to address the labor-intensive task of manually detecting related posts.