Academic Research Journals in Medical Sociology,Medical Anthropology,and Contemporary Social Medicine: A Focus on Public and Global Health

A bibliography of 31 academic journals in medical sociology, medical anthropology, and contemporary social medicine with a focus on public and global health is provided. Along with basic identifying information, the bibliometric measures of Eigenfactor, Article Influence Score, SCImago Journal Rank, and H-index have been specified for each journal when available. Brief annotations along with both Library of Congress and medical subject headings are supplied. Though some limitations are acknowledged, this bibliography serves as a valuable tool for locating and selecting a wide range of periodical scholarship devoted to the social and cultural features of health and medicine.     

‘Doing research was inspiring’: building a research community with teachers

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study related to K–12 teachers’ understandings of what research is, and what enables or inhibits teacher use of research in the classroom towards informing their instructional practices. In a collaboration exemplifying school board and university partnerships, we examined the nature of associations between teachers and education research(ers). Our findings indicated that teachers felt both connected and disconnected to research practices in education. Participants suggested ways to establish and sustain better links and collaborations among the communities of teaching and research. This paper emphasizes the importance of universities, schools and teachers working together to conduct meaningful research and apply current knowledge in the field of education.     

Nativity Shifts,Broken Dreams,and the New Latino South's Post-First Generation

For game three of the 2013 NBA finals, 11-year-old Sebastian de la Cruz, a musical prodigy born and raised in the great state of Texas, opened the June game with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner—a la mariachi. As the applause faded for the El Charro de Oro's [The Golden Mariachi's] performance, an outburst of racialized twittering hit the cloud. Although we watched the series of events that surrounded Sebastian de la Cruz's performances from thousands of miles away and despite the geographic distance between San Antonio and our communities, we recognized the hit-and-run commentary as all too familiar. In Georgia and the Carolinas, increasingly corrosive rhetoric surrounds Latino immigration—creating great obstacles to academic achievement including the navigation of a postcolonial nativist American landscape of K-12 education that continues to fail minoritized youth. Or, as Flores and Loss (2010) surmised, “Immigration policies and practices have been, and continue to be, riddled with contradictions. Close to the center of this sometimes bloody and always controversial issue is a fundamental, indeed enduring, question: Who is an American and what sorts of education should all Americans enjoy?” (p. 403). With these questions in mind, we argue that given an ongoing Latino nativity shift marked by 2010 Census analyses, the continued framing of post-first generation Latinos as perpetual foreigners whose academic achievement depends simply on the remediation of their English language proficiency is symptomatic a “national myopia” (P. R. Portes &; Salas, 2014). We conclude with the overarching proposition that educational policy paradigms for Latino achievement in and beyond the shifting demographics of the U.S. South need to be grounded in additive models of cultural identity development that advance inter-culturally distributed cognitions, attitudes, and affective-behavioral patterns that result in achieving broader, richer identities across a variety of social contexts.     

Can Middle School Students with Serious Reading Difficulties Help Each Other and Learn Anything?

This investigation was intended to examine the effects of teaching middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. All students were reading significantly below grade level and many students exhibited behavior problems in addition to their primary disability area. Students were randomly assigned to a tutoring or traditional reading instruction condition. Within the tutoring condition, students were matched into tutoring dyads, trained in the tutoring procedures, and taught specific reading comprehension strategies. Reciprocal tutoring was employed, such that students assumed roles of both tutor and tutee during daily reading periods. Performance on reading comprehension tests following tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Observational, survey, and interview data revealed that students enjoyed tutoring more than their traditional instruction, appeared to see the value and benefits of the tutoring, and wanted to include tutoring as part of their other classes, such as science and social studies. Findings are discussed with respect to the strengths and challenges associated with the use of tutoring to provide strategic instruction to students with special learning needs.     

Reinforcer Preferences of Secondary Students with Disabilities

WHILE TEACHERS are often the ones who select the objects, events and activities that serve as potential reinforcers in their contingency management systems, research indicates that teachers are not always accurate in their selection of reinforcers that are motivating to their students. This study examined the reinforcement preferences of 110 secondary students with disabilities. Respondents rated 90 potential reinforcers using a three‐point Likert scale. Results indicated that while student preferences represent a range of reinforcers within existing reinforcement hierarchies, the sample group tended to prefer less intrusive higher level reinforcers. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Russian Digital Collections in North America: A Survey

This article discusses an inventory of Russian digital collections that was gathered from publically available material on the Web in 2011. It touches on the opportunities and difficulties that come with the increase of digital material on the Web and how librarians can attempt to bring smaller collections to the attention of scholars and researchers.     

Simplified prototyping of perfusable polystyrene microfluidics

Cell culture in microfluidic systems has primarily been conducted in devices comprised of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) or other elastomers. As polystyrene (PS) is the most characterized and commonly used substrate material for cell culture, microfluidic cell culture would ideally be conducted in PS-based microsystems that also enable tight control of perfusion and hydrodynamic conditions, which are especially important for culture of vascular cell types. Here, we report a simple method to prototype perfusable PS microfluidics for endothelial cell culture under flow that can be fabricated using standard lithography and wet laboratory equipment to enable stable perfusion at shear stresses up to 300 dyn/cm² and pumping pressures up to 26 kPa for at least 100 h. This technique can also be extended to fabricate perfusable hybrid PS-PDMS microfluidics of which one application is for increased efficiency of viral transduction in non-adherent suspension cells by leveraging the high surface area to volume ratio of microfluidics and adhesion molecules that are optimized for PS substrates. These biologically compatible microfluidic devices can be made more accessible to biological-based laboratories through the outsourcing of lithography to various available microfluidic foundries.     

Microfluidic impedance cytometry of tumour cells in blood

The dielectric properties of tumour cells are known to differ from normal blood cells, and this difference can be exploited for label-free separation of cells. Conventional measurement techniques are slow and cannot identify rare circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in a realistic timeframe. We use high throughput single cell microfluidic impedance cytometry to measure the dielectric properties of the MCF7 tumour cell line (representative of CTCs), both as pure populations and mixed with whole blood. The data show that the MCF7 cells have a large membrane capacitance and size, enabling clear discrimination from all other leukocytes. Impedance analysis is used to follow changes in cell viability when cells are kept in suspension, a process which can be understood from modelling time-dependent changes in the dielectric properties (predominantly membrane conductivity) of the cells. Impedance cytometry is used to enumerate low numbers of MCF7 cells spiked into whole blood. Chemical lysis is commonly used to remove the abundant erythrocytes, and it is shown that this process does not alter the MCF7 cell count or change their dielectric properties. Combining impedance cytometry with magnetic bead based antibody enrichment enables MCF7 cells to be detected down to 100 MCF7 cells in 1 ml whole blood, a log 3.5 enrichment and a mean recovery of 92%. Microfluidic impedance cytometry could be easily integrated within complex cell separation systems for identification and enumeration of specific cell types, providing a fast in-line single cell characterisation method.