THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Business leaders, senior management professionals and policymakers will share their views on current economic and development topics at TRIMA 2022, an annual management convention hosted by the Trivandrum Management Association (TMA). The event will take place at ‘O by Tamara’ on Friday.
Governor Arif Mohammad Khan will inaugurate the two-day event which will include four technical sessions. The thematic sessions will feature experts, who will share their experiences and offer ideas that can be adopted for the sustainable development of the state, with a particular focus on the capital. Presentations and panel discussions will also take place under the theme “Vision Trivandrum 2025”.
Minister of Transport Antony Raju, Minister of Food and Civil Supplies GR Anil and Minister of General Education V Sivankutty will share their views during the closing session of the meeting. CK Ranganathan, President, All India Management Association (AIMA), will be the guest of honour.
ISRO President S Somanath will receive the 2022 Management Leadership Award instituted by TMA for his contributions to the Indian space program at the inaugural event. The keynote address of the opening session will be delivered by S Unnikrishnan Nair, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center. This will be followed by the first technical session on “Sustainable Development”, where KR Jyothilal, Principal Secretary for Transport, will deliver the keynote address.
Other panelists include Dr. Anil Balakrishnan, Head of CSR, Adani Vizhinjam Port Pvt Ltd, Vineeta Hariharan, Head of Externally Supported Missions, Ministry of MSMEs, New Delhi; and Ranjith Ramakrishnan, Vice President and Regional Head, AG&P Pratham. G Vijayaraghavan, former member of Kerala State Planning Board, will be the moderator.
Employees of government and private institutions, students and the public can register as delegates to the event.
To register, contact: +91 7907933518 / 9447714672 or email: [email protected].
]]>A tree called Alerce Milenario, located in Alerce Costero National Park in Chile, may be the oldest living organism in the world. Research by Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean environmental scientist working in Paris, estimates that the conifer is over 5,000 years old.
Barichivich holds a master’s degree in climate change and a doctorate. in Environmental Science from the world renowned Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is also a winner of the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program, created by the French government to find creative solutions to climate change.
Some of the dendrochronologist’s work is available through Google Scholar.
For this particular test, it used a special drill to test the age of the Alerce Milenario. The drill removes narrow wood elements without damaging the tree.
His method showed about 2,400 growth rings. Barichivich and his team deduced that the tree had an 80% chance of being around 5,484 years old.
Belonging to the same botanical family as giant sequoias and redwoods, Alerces Milenario is a type of conifer. That puts it in the same rough category as Methuselah, the eastern California bristlecone pine widely considered the oldest tree in the world, with 4,853 growth rings.
In 1993, Antonio Lara from the Austral University of Chile found an old strain of alerce in southern Chile with 3,622 tree rings, similar to Alerce Milenario.
Several scholars are intrigued by Barichvich’s findings.
Harald Bugmann, a fellow dendrochronologist at ETH Zürich, said the method used to determine the age of the tree was “a very clever approach”.
Others are more reserved.
“The prospect is certainly exciting,” said Nathan Stephenson, scientist emeritus at the US Geological Survey. “[But] as a scientist, you want the peer-reviewed publication, with all the dirty, dirty details.
This lack of detail made others doubt it.
Barichivich’s informal results do not include a full count of growth rings, which some consider essential for accurately aging any tree.
Ed Cook, founding director of the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University, expressed his opinion forcefully.
“The ONLY way to truly determine the age of a tree is to count the rings dendrochronologically. This requires ALL rings to be present or accounted for,” he concluded.
Barichivich is not afraid of skepticism. “Alerce is the second longest living species, so you would expect to see old trees,” he said. “My method is verified by studying [the full growth rings of] other trees.
Ramzi Touchan, of the University of Arizona’s Tree Ring Research Laboratory, said making assumptions about tree rings without counting them leaves room for error. As a young tree, it may have had less competition and grown faster than later years, he argued, so inferences about a tree’s inner rings may be inaccurate.
Still, Barichivitch said, “The alert is where it should be on the exponential growth curve. It grows slower than bristlecone pine, the oldest known tree, indicating it should live longer.
Barichivitch will soon publish a full report on his findings.
]]>A CSU student has died in a plane crash in Nepal, leaving a hole in the hearts of those who knew her.
Rojina Shrestha, along with her mother, father and younger sister, were among 22 people killed in her home country of Nepal on May 29, according to media reports.
The flight left the resort town of Pokhara, 200 km west of Kathmandu, according to media reports. The plane was on a scheduled 20-minute flight to the mountain town of Jomsom when it crashed near the town in an “area of deep gorges and mountains”, according to an Associated Press report on the ‘accident.
According to a preliminary investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, or CAAN, bad weather was the cause of the Tara Air Twin Otter turboprop crash.
Callie Slaughter was a co-teacher and a member of Strestha’s cohort, both pursuing their doctorates in cell and molecular biology at Colorado State University.
Slaughter said the trip to Nepal was the first time Strestha, 23, and her 20-year-old sister Rabina, who also studied in the United States, had been with their parents in Nepal in years.
“She was a very dear friend to me and a beautiful light in this world,” Slaughter wrote in an email. “She was a teacher, a student, a scientist and a wonderful friend. I will miss her very much.”
Slaughter said Stestha’s favorite TV show was ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and she was going to be teaching her friend to drive this summer because she had just gotten her license.
“She was trying to make a difference in this life,” Slaughter said. “I am in pain right now.”
Carol Wilusz, a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology and director of the Cellular and Molecular Biology program at CSU, wrote in an email to students in the program that Strestha transferred to CSU from Purdue in August. She was at the Snow Lab in Chemical and Biological Engineering and was working on her Ph.D. research project on the biology of synthetic proteins.
Wilusz wrote that part of the reason for the transfer was that Strestha was getting closer to his partner, Prasiddha (Sid) Shakya, who is studying for a doctorate in economics at CSU.
“Rojina was a valued and loved member of our freshman cohort and we will miss her terribly,” Wilusz wrote in the email, which was shared with the Coloradoan. “As we come to terms with this devastating loss, we will find ways to celebrate, remember and honor Rojina’s short life.”
Resources are available to provide support to all faculty, staff and students, Wilusz wrote.
Strestha is survived by Shakya and an older brother.
Living without gravity: CSU alumnus talks about life on the International Space Station
Journalist Miles Blumhardt seeks stories that impact your life. Whether it’s news, outdoors, sports – you name it, it wants to report it. Do you have a story idea? Reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter @MilesBlumhardt. Support his work and that of other Colorado journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
]]>Recently marrying Tom Williams brought Madison Williams to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he is assigned to the United States Air Force.
“We tried to live a long distance from each other for a while before moving to Grand Forks,” she says.
She described Grand Forks as about as facing the Adirondack Mountains as you can get.
” It is flat. There are no trees or trails. Pretty much the only outdoor activities the locals do there are hunting and fishing,” she added. “I fish, but I am not a hunter. I just wanted a way to stay connected outdoors, so I decided to take a kayak.
Photo submitted by Tom Conroy
Williams said she thought about taking a long kayak trip on the Red River and noticed it spilled into Lake Winnipeg.
“I started talking to people in Grand Forks about things to know in a hunter safety course and I heard about a woman who went from Minneapolis to the Arctic a few years ago, and that I should look into it”, Madison said. “I heard that Natalie Warren made the trip in 2011. She and I have been talking ever since, and here I am.”
She started the journey on May 7. At Le Sueur she had to stop for a few weeks because of flooding, but said she was lucky enough to meet a friendly family, the Straubs, at the boat dock, and spent two weeks with them before continuing. his trip.
“They were great, with a group of children and a farm”, said Williams.
“There have been a lot of insects, mainly gnats, over the past three days,” she explained.
She typically paddles 10 to 15 miles per day upriver and often against the wind on the Minnesota River.
Williams has a bilge pump handy in his kayak in case the boat starts to flood. His other supplies include an ultralight backpack, tent, and sleeping bag.
His expedition is sponsored by Big Agnes, a lightweight camping company.
In addition, she performs river water quality testing for the state of North Dakota.
Williams has also connected with local groups to hold public conservation events in communities such as Fargo and Grand Forks and other towns along the rivers she sits on. She plans to talk about cleaning up rivers, planting trees and other acts of conservation.
When it arrives in Brown’s Valley, Minnesota, it will go from upstream to downstream.
Some of his other plans include cleaning boats to prevent the spread of invasive species and picking up litter along rivers.
She sourced much of her clothing and equipment from second-hand sources.
Williams suffers from celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder in which ingesting gluten leads to damage to the small intestine. It is estimated that one in 100 people have the disease, but only 30% of them are correctly diagnosed.
She has an immune response if she eats anything with wheat, barley, or rye, so she needs to eat completely gluten-free foods. Most of her food is sent by her husband to post offices along her route. Sometimes she buys food.
“I often eat rice and ramen (noodles)”, she added. “I tried pasta and mac and cheese, but it didn’t work well on my stovetop. It freezes because it’s so starchy.
She also eats mashed potatoes, Jerky, fruit cups, oats for breakfast, lots of snack foods and other things.
Williams is currently unemployed.
“No one would give me time off for the trip” she says.
Williams worked as an overnight mail handler for a time at the Grand Forks Post Office. She has worked for 10 years in retail, including management.
“I’m still trying to figure out my career. I studied civil engineering for three and a half years and learned that I didn’t want to do this,” she added.
For more information, visit expeditionalpine.com and follow Williams on Facebook and Instagram.
(Fritz Busch can be emailed to [email protected].)
The prospect of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) has gone from science fiction to reality in less than a lifetime. Today, the role of CGMs in diabetes management is more pronounced than ever, but questions remain regarding the characteristics that make patients more likely to adopt and adhere to the use of CGMs.
At the 82nd Scientific Session of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), discussions and symposia put the use of CGM under the microscope to better understand and optimize its use, particularly in primary care settings. A pair of posters presented at the conference by Lindsay Mayberry, PhD, associate professor of medicine and bioinformatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, examined contemporary trends in CGM use in adults with type 2 diabetes. in primary care or endocrinology clinics within their healthcare system and further explore which patient characteristics were associated with an increased likelihood of primary care use.
Study results demonstrated that CGM use increased rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an average of 110.2 patients per month receiving newly prescribed CGM in 2021. The results of this study suggest an older age youth, insulin use and higher A1c, but not gender, race or ethnicity, which contradicts the findings of many previous studies. When assessing the correlates associated with the use of CGM in primary care, study results indicated that use was more common in younger patients (55 [IQR, 47-62] against 60 [IQR, 53-68]; p= 0.031), had a higher baseline A1c (9.1% [IQR, 8.1-10.4] against 8.3% [IQR, 7.5-9.5]; P= 0.048), used insulin (69% versus 36%, P= 0.002) and had higher baseline diabetes distress (45 [IQR, 25-55] against 30 [IQR, 15-50]; P=.09). As in the first study, there was no association between gender, duration of diabetes, race, ethnicity, and health literacy with increased use.
To learn more about the results of these studies and how they can inform efforts to optimize CGM adoption, Endocrinology Network sat down with Mayberry at ADA 2022 and that conversation can be found below.
Endocrinology Network: Can you describe the responsibility for these studies and what were your most important findings?
Mayberry: I’m a behavioral scientist. So I design and test interventions to help people make lifestyle changes for chronic conditions like diabetes. One of the areas I work most in is type 2 diabetes. What we’ve seen with our most recent intervention trial is that people are using CGM in numbers never seen before. I got really interested in how we should react to that, because it’s behavioral, isn’t it?
It is a health behavior to use a CGM effectively. So that becomes how do we understand what is going on here. One of the things I did to figure out what was to look at the impact of CGM use in people with type 2 diabetes in our healthcare system.
So we use data from electronic health records and we use a pre-validated algorithm to identify all people with type 2 diabetes who have been seen in primary care or endocrinology clinics. We said, “Okay, this is our patient population or our cohort, let’s look back to see if they’ve ever used a CGM? If yes, when did this happen?
What was really interesting was that we saw that an increase in CGM use started to appear for these patients in the spring of 2018. Then, just as it rapidly increased to the point that in 2021, the average rate of new CGM users was 110 patients per month. That’s a lot of people with type 2 diabetes who use CGM.
We are therefore interested in what characterizes the people who use it compared to those who do not use it. Using data from electronic health records, we examined demographic characteristics, insurance status, HbA1c, HbA1c when prescribed, and race/ethnicity.
Basically what we found was that the people who used CGM were younger and they were more likely to use insulin, but there was a pretty good proportion of them who didn’t didn’t use insulin at all, which was rather surprising. And we found no differences by race, ethnicity, or insurance status. And that was exciting because there may not be an unequal distribution, at least within our system, of this technology, by race or by insurance status.
Endocrinology Network: Is it encouraging to see that race, insurance type and gender didn’t really impact the adoption rate or are you worried that it doesn’t reflect experiences outside of your healthcare system? ?
Mayberry: I think both of those things are true. I think it’s really great that in our medical center we don’t see any disparities, I think that’s great. Our medical center is certainly not representative of what we would see in community health centers. So to assume that because we don’t see disparities means there aren’t any, that would be wrong.
I’m sure there are disparities, but maybe it happens depending on where people seek care and insurance probably plays a role, but, at least in our health care system, that was not the case, but maybe there weren’t as many people who were underinsured in our health care system as there might be elsewhere. I know that insurance plays a role and the adoption of CGM. So I don’t want to act like it’s not a factor, but it was to encourage that maybe it’s not as big a factor as we might have assumed.
]]>Gasoline. Races. Lease. Insurance.
It has become more expensive to live in Florida – much more expensive.
Overall, prices for all kinds of things are up nearly 9% from a year ago. Paychecks do not follow price increases.
The inflation is here, and it’s squeezing Floridians, especially the elderly – a huge population in this state. This particularly hurts low-income Floridians and retirees who depend on Social Security checks. And that will likely play a role in the election later this year.
In April, prices rose 8.8% in the Southeastern United States, a slight improvement from the regional inflation rate of 9.1% in March. This includes gasoline and food.
“I think, unfortunately, (inflation) is going to be there for probably another 6 to 12 months,” said University of Central Florida Institute for Economic Forecasting director Sean Snaith. “What’s happening in Florida is no different than what we see across the country. You know, maybe with the exception of the housing market.”
Home prices jumped 20.6% in March from a year earlier, according to the US National S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index. But the price jumps were even bigger in Florida – up 32% in Miami, up 34% in Tampa. And Florida is also home to some of the highest annual rent increases.
This spring, more than a third of Florida households reported having difficulty paying their usual expenses. That was slightly higher than a year earlier according to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
The Federal Reserve began raising its target short-term interest rate earlier this spring to fight inflation, and Snaith fears the central bank will have to keep raising borrowing costs to drive the rate of hike down. prices.
“I think the Fed, in its actions to try to get inflation down and back towards its target level of 2%, is likely to push the economy into a recession over the next 12 months,” he said. he declared.
Rapidly rising prices are hitting low-income and fixed-income Floridians faster and longer. Fueled by higher inflation, the annual increase in the cost of living for Social Security at the end of last year was 5.9% – the highest annual increase since 1982. The advocacy group Senior Citizen League think the increase at the end of this year could be 8.6%.
The average Social Security recipient receives a monthly check for $1,657. Such a boost, which the Senior Citizen League expects, would add $142 to that amount.
Florida has long been a retirement paradise with its warm climate and zero income tax. Still, former director of FSU’s Claude Pepper Center, Larry Polivka, said there are significant differences between these new Florida retirees and more experienced Floridians.
“The ‘native’ population is significantly poorer with fewer assets and savings than the people who settle here,” he said. “One of the reasons associated with this is the fact that it is disproportionately single and minority women (who already live in Florida) compared to people moving into the state.”
This week, President Biden met with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday at the White House to talk about higher prices. Biden reiterated his respect for central bank independence and his efforts to bring down inflation.
Governor Ron DeSantis has frequently criticized the president’s handling of the economy. “You see interest rates going up. You’re probably going to continue to see that. It’s going to put downward pressure on the growth of the economy. And you could very well end up seeing this country plunged into a recession,” , he said on May 20. “I hope it doesn’t happen.
In February, the economy was cited as the most important issue by Florida voters, with GOP voters mentioning it slightly more often than Democrats. A more recent Florida Chamber of Commerce poll from March found inflation and gas prices to be the third most important issue after the economy and education.
“The economy always plays a big role in midterm elections and presidential elections. And no doubt this fall, it will do the same. That usually means bad news for the party in power in the White House.” said Mike Binder, head of the public opinion research lab at UNF in Jacksonville.
Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi expects Florida Republicans to pull off “a trick.” Amandi described it as the GOP focusing on inflation toward Pres. Biden and the Democrats.
“Republicans have totally controlled the state of Florida for over 20 years,” he said. “I think Democrats can shine a light on who is responsible here in Florida for discussing this as a Republican issue that they haven’t resolved to the satisfaction of voters.”
The Florida Roundup invited three Florida Republican strategists to join the program. They refused.
Copyright 2022 WLRN 91.3 FM. For more, visit WLRN 91.3 FM.
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Bonke Sonjani (he/him)
Bonke Sonjani is currently pursuing a Masters in Heritage Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also a trainee archivist at the GALA Queer Archives where he is interested in homosexual student protests in South Africa.
Dr Irma McClaurin recently presented a guest lecture with the Center for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in which she spoke about her renowned black feminist archive established for the preservation and dissemination of history and heritage black women. The Black Feminist Archive is one of a kind – it is the first archive in the world that acts as a catalyst for the collection, protection and dissemination of the voices of Black African/American women who have been inherently excluded from official histories. Dr. McClaurin originally developed the archive as a record of her own life and her experiences at the various institutions for which she worked. By acknowledging the power relations embedded in the cis-gender and male-dominated field of study – anthropology in which she earned a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, McClaurin acts as a vector of both resistance and radical re-imagining. Black feminist archives provide a training ground for black archivists to counter the heteropatriarchal profession of archivist.
McClaurin says she believes everyone is an archive filled with rich family, professional and social history. According to her, “Our stories are a necessary (and sometimes secret) ingredient in a recipe for impactful social change in America” (McClaurin 2021). As such, she encouraged all conference attendees to begin documenting their emails, letters, notes and lived experiences, saying these serve as an archive of thoughts, methodologies and events. McClaurin’s take on the Black Feminist Archive is inspiring. She does not approach the project from the “institutionalized” practice of archiving which has a discursive history of eradicating queer, black and female bodies from accepted narratives of history. Additionally, through what I would call a “bottom-up” methodology, McClaurin helps Black women celebrate and preserve their experiences and stories that reflect “lifetimes” of activism, resistance, creativity, and production. intellectual. Through such methodologies, their life and their various contributions (artistic, social, political, scientific, etc.) are recognized as having played a major role in the development of a more complete American History (McClaurin 2021).
McClaurin’s artistic practices, both as an activist bio-cultural anthropologist and as an archivist, inspire me as a young scholar. As a former recipient of the Andrew W Mellon Prize from the History Department of the Humanities Research Center at the University of the Western Cape, and as an aspiring curator, archivist and heritage practitioner, McClaurin’s work has provided a model for my artistic practices. As a former history scholar at a historically black university that does not have an art school, McClaurin inspired my positioning within my artistic research interests.
What sets McClaurin apart from other scholars and artists is his aura – during the conference, one couldn’t help but feel so empowered and inspired to start the projects they had been putting off. It was the same case for me too, I had a hard time situating myself in my research interests. I consulted with my lecturers and various other people who could inform my curatorial practices on “how” to organize and initiate the projects I designed. The meaning of McClaurin’s assertion about black feminist archives has therefore inspired me beyond these various engagements I have had with other scholars and artists. I have learned that following institutionalized canons of “how to” only reiterates the gendered and heteropatriarchal terrains of artistic practices. And so countering these canons as McClaurin did would provide what Alberta Whittle calls “a conservation conservation strategy” in which she argues that “biting the hand that feeds you” (referring to official institutions) is necessary. to the destruction and harmful patterns of contemporary arts (Whittle 2019).
This notion of “bite the hand, the hand feeds you” as posed by Whittle involves engaging with communities and ordinary citizens in order to infiltrate and counter cis-gender white spaces in contemporary arts. McClaurin has used this strategy of curating black feminist archives in practice by preserving material from black women like Miss Archie Henderson Jones, who turns 97 this year. According to McClaurin, Miss Archie is an anthropologist whose work remains unpublished in academic journals and websites such as Google Scholar, Academia and JSTOR due to her provocative approach to anthropology that viewed black people as unworthy of research. By engaging with her material, the Black Feminist Archive aims to highlight her material on black people while giving it agency and recognition at the same time. As a feminist scholar interested in reclaiming the ostracized narratives of queer people from student protests such as the Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall movements, I was inspired by the Black Feminist Archive to “bite the hand” by demonstrating agency for the queer student. community by writing an arts-based research project that illustrates the contribution of queer people to movements.
Reference list
Whittle, A. 2019. Biting the Hand That Feeds You: A Temperamental Conservation Strategy, Critical Arts, 33; 6, 110-123
McClaurin, I. 2021. Black Women: Seen and Heard. Foundation of the Black Feminist Archives at UMass. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
]]>In an effort to address a years-long teacher shortage made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, Newark Public Schools will raise starting salaries by $8,000 this fall, or about 15%, the district and local union announced. .
Raising the starting salary to $62,000 a year for entry-level teachers in the state’s largest school district is among several salary changes intended to attract new teachers and retain veterans.
The union and the district renegotiated salary increases under an existing contract that expires at the end of the 2023-24 school year. Without the raises, the starting salary in September would have been $55,469, down from $54,000 in September 2021, according to the union.
Officials said additional changes include raising the salaries of teachers already in the district to the new starting minimum if they earn less. All teachers, regardless of their current salary, will receive an additional $500 increase for each of the remaining two years of the contract, on top of the 3.5% annual increases originally provided for in the three-year contract.
Newark Public Schools Superintendent Roger León released a statement Thursday calling the agreement “historic.”
“As teacher shortages across the country have been exacerbated by the global pandemic, we at Newark are leveraging several strategies to attract and retain great teachers,” León said. “These new salaries will attract new talent and at the same time promote retention by increasing the salaries of experienced teachers.”
Newark Teachers Union president John Abeigon said Friday there were about 500 teaching vacancies in the district. That compares to the 2,951 positions currently filled, union officials said. They educate a total of just over 35,000 regular public school students.
Newark has another 20,000 students enrolled in charter schools, although their teachers are not paid by the district and are not eligible for increases announced this week.
Abeigon said the ongoing teacher shortage has resulted in larger class sizes and a heavier workload for teachers, both of which are detrimental to student education.
He was confident that the salary increases would help fill the staffing gap, especially with several nearby universities like Montclair State University and Kean University in the Union producing education graduates looking for jobs. a job in the fall.
Abeigon cautioned against comparing salaries too closely between districts, noting that New Jersey’s starting salary and teacher salary ranges are based on the local cost of living and other factors.
That said, the renegotiated salary increases appear to significantly boost Newark’s competitiveness, with the new starting salary more than $6,000 higher than the state’s average minimum wage of $55,469 for teachers with bachelor’s degrees in 2021-22, according to New Jersey School Boards. Association.
Abeigon said the $4 million costs of the starting salary hike and other increases would come from federal American Recovery Act funds earmarked explicitly for pandemic-related teacher recruitment and retention.
The pandemic has worsened the shortage of teachers in Newark and other districts, with dramatic changes in the job, including the demand for new skills required for distance learning and health concerns with the return of classes in person while the coronavirus and its variants remained in circulation.
But, Abeigon said, the virus has underscored the importance of public schools as a key part of the economy that allows parents to physically commute to work or attend to work while working from home. .
For Newark, where understaffing had been an issue long before the coronavirus demanded educational and societal changes, Abeigon said a silver lining from the pandemic could finally fill a persistent compensation-related staffing gap that the negotiations had failed to resolve.
“We’ve had these discussions for several years now,” he said. “The COVID pandemic has just brought it to the fore.”
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Steve Strunsky can be reached at [email protected]
]]>By GRANT GUGGISBERG
K State News Service
MANHATTAN — The Kansas State University Concrete Canoe Team will compete in the 35th Annual American Society of Civil Engineers Concrete Canoe Competition Finals after a second-place finish at the Regional Student Symposium of Central America in May.
The competition, which will feature 19 qualifiers from 10 regions, takes place Friday through Sunday at the Louisiana Tech University campus in Ruston, Louisiana.
The competition challenges teams to create a functional concrete canoe. The process includes designing a shell, performing structural analysis, and finally designing a concrete mix that satisfies the strength requirements found in the structural analysis. Teams are judged on their final product, design document, oral presentation, and race results. Races include men’s and women’s sprints and endurance races.
Canoes are also built around a theme, with K-State choosing Triton’s Trireme as the theme for 2022.
“As a team, we are honored to represent K-State in the competition,” said Maddie Akers, senior civil engineering and geology officer. “To see our hard work pay off has been a tremendous reward.”
Civil engineering senior Hunter Meier said the team bonded as they prepared for the regional competition on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
“Our team had grown closer in the weeks and months leading up to the competition in Ames,” he said. “Qualifying for the national competition in Ruston will further strengthen that bond and we look forward to competing again next year.”
Christopher Jones, a Wallis-Lage Family Cornerstone teacher-researcher and associate professor in K-State’s Department of Civil Engineering, is the team’s academic advisor.
K-State ASCE Concrete Canoe team members include the following students:
Civil Engineering Junior Hunter Prochaska, Beloit; Aidan Torrez, second-year civil engineering student, Bucyre.
Of Greater Kansas City: Luke Vohs, senior in civil engineering, Lenexa; Isabelle McCann, senior in civil engineering, Assignment; Quinn Underwood, Senior Civil Engineer, land park; and Amelia Mullin, senior in architectural engineering, Shawnee.
Hunter Meier, Senior Civil Engineer, lincoln; Dalton Willbrant, graduated May 2022 in civil engineering, manhattan; Lindsay Schupp, freshman in general engineering, oskaloosa; Cody Meyer, Civil Engineering Junior, sabetha; Nathan Streeter, second-year civil engineering student, Saline; Abbi Clark, Civil Engineering Junior, Wamego; and Kisan Patel, Senior Civil Engineer, Wichita.
From out of state: Ben Garnmeister, Civil Engineering Junior, Arlington Heights, Illinois; Kayleigh Bednar, second-year industrial engineering student, Kansas City, Missouri; Ciara Hogsett, graduated May 2022 in civil engineering, Willow Springs, Mo.;andMaddie Akers, Senior Civil Engineer, Omaha, Nebraska.
]]>Dr. Denise Schares, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa, will take charge of schools at Fort Dodge beginning July 1.
In late April, current superintendent Derrick Joel tendered his resignation from the school board. Joel – who started with the district on July 1, 2021 – will leave to become assistant superintendent of the Norris School District outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Schares was selected by the Board of Education after being interviewed by the Board on Wednesday evening.
“We have been extremely impressed with the strength of our candidate pool in terms of a wealth of experience and passion for education,” said school board chair Stu Cochrane. “We believed Dr. Schares embodied the passion for education we were looking for, and she had outstanding academic credentials that we believe provided excellent leadership to move our district forward.”
Schares has over 40 years of experience in public education. She began as a professional home economics and health teacher in several eastern Iowa school districts throughout the 1980s.
In 1994, she was Director of Educational Services for Union and Hudson Schools in La Porte City and Hudson. Schares served as Director of Professional Development and Associate Superintendent of Waterloo Community School District from 2006 to 2010. In 2010, she became superintendent of Clear Creek Amana Community School District in Oxford.
Since 2013, Schares has been Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at UNI. Also at UNI, she is director of the Institute for Educational Leadership, coordinator of the superintendence program and a member of the graduate faculty.
Schares earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Professional Home Economics Education from Iowa State University in 1978. She later earned her Masters in Educational Psychology and her Ph.D. in Home Economics Curriculum and Instruction. UNI in 1986 and 1994.
“I am thrilled to join the Fort Dodge team and look forward to getting to know the community, staff and students,” Shares said.
Schares will be hired on a one-year contract as acting superintendent, Cochrane said. In the winter, the board will consider hiring a permanent superintendent for the district, although he said if Schares is the right fit, the board could consider extending his contract beyond the interim year.
Three other external candidates were auditioned on Wednesday by the Board of Education.
Those candidates were Bob Olson, former superintendent of the Clarion-Goldfield-Dows Community School District; Jon Thompson, former superintendent at Aplington-Parkersburg and current superintendent at Minnesota; and Corey Lunn, former superintendent of the Johnson Community School District.