Monroe Community College

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The booming optics manufacturing industry is suffering from a severe shortage of skilled technicians. The registered Optics Manufacturing Technician apprenticeship is a structured "earn and learn" solution that combines on-the-job learning with related technical instruction.

Whether it's telecommunications, medical imaging or cancer research, the vital technologies of today are reliant on the science of light: optics and photonics; and yet there's a serious shortage of experts with the appropriate skills to work in these areas. Consequently, there is a push to find passionate students of STEM, and to encourage them to take up careers in optics and photonics. But doing so is not just about filling a void. Optics technicians can make a real difference. They are at the forefront of innovation and design in many areas such as medicine, national security, manufacturing and renewable energy.

Reformed experimental activities (REActivities) are an innovative approach to the delivery of the traditional material in an undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory. A description of the design and implementation of REActivities at both a four- and two-year institution is discussed. The results obtained using a reformed teaching observational protocol are described and correlated to the transferability of REActivities between different instructors and their transportability between different institutions.

The consequences of initial variability in reproductive effort on later pollination and fruit development have frequently been investigated with flower removal experiments. Often, plants produce many fewer fruits than flowers, so flower removal might not be expected to alter subsequent growth or development patterns all that much. Yet, many studies have demonstrated such changes even for species with low average fruit set, which begs for an explanation. Many (at least seven, by our count) such explanations have been reported in the literature, but experimental support for most is limited. In summer 2014, we conducted a field experiment on a lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) farm in Maine. In this experiment, we coupled flower removal with three other treatments, each designed to assess the validity of one of three often-cited hypotheses invoked to explain why growth and development changes occur following flower removal: 1) “Short-term nutrient shortages;” 2) “spatiotemporal limitations;” and 3) “the compound interest effect.” The three respective treatments—foliar nitrogen fertilization, positionally biased flower removal, and defoliation—were designed to either intensify or weaken the apparent effects of flower removal if the corresponding hypothesis had merit. As in a 2013 preliminary experiment, flower removal elicited several statistically significant growth and development changes in blueberry, including increases in final leaf area, ripe fruit weight, fruit ripening rate, and relative fruit production. The additional treatments also elicited several significant plant responses, though not always with concomitant flower removal effects as well. For example, fertilization generally increased fruit cluster mass by harvest, but flower removal itself had no such effect on cluster mass. Most observed interactive effects between flower removal and the additional treatments either ran counter to expectations, were limited in scope, or couldn't be unambiguously interpreted. For at least a few observed changes, none of the additional treatments significantly altered the effects of flower removal. We conclude that current hypotheses for the mechanistic basis for changes induced by flower removal are inadequate, at least for blueberry, a species with frequently low fruit set even when managed commercially. However, strong intellectual and economic imperatives exist to encourage further investigation into this open question.Plants grown in horticulture or occurring as adventives outside their native range can provide insight into species’ fundamental niche requirements that might not be evident from the native range, or realized niche, alone. Such occurrences can also identify conditions that support individual survival, but do not currently sustain positive population growth (i.e., a species’ ‘tolerance niche’). Further, in the context of rapid climate change, horticultural and adventive occurrences beyond current range edges might circumvent natural dispersal limitations and facilitate species range shifts. To explore these concepts in the field, we investigated the history and structure of five newly discovered populations of naturalized Magnolia tripetala near horticultural sites in western Massachusetts, USA. This tree species is native to the southeastern US, but has been grown horticulturally in the Northeast since the 1800s. However, naturalized populations had not been well documented in the region previously, raising the possibility that the species’ escape has been triggered by recent climate change. With tree coring and life stage surveys, we asked whether the naturalized populations exhibited synchronous patterns of establishment and expansion, suggestive of climatic release and a shift from tolerance niche to fundamental niche conditions in the region. Across the five sites, we documented 660 individuals, with populations ranging in size from 46 to 396 individuals, including seedlings, saplings, and reproduct

In this article, we show how the Eigenfactor score, originally designed for ranking scholarly journals, can be adapted to rank the scholarly output of authors, institutions, and countries based on author‐level citation data. Using the methods described in this article, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for 84,808 disambiguated authors of 240,804 papers in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—a preprint and postprint archive devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. As an additive metric, the Eigenfactor scores are readily computed for collectives such as departments or institutions as well. We show that a collective's Eigenfactor score can be computed either by summing the Eigenfactor scores of its members or by working directly with a collective‐level cross‐citation matrix. We provide Eigenfactor rankings for institutions and countries in the SSRN repository. With a network‐wide comparison of Eigenfactor scores and download tallies, we demonstrate that Eigenfactor scores provide information that is both different from and complementary to that provided by download counts. We see author‐level ranking as one filter for navigating the scholarly literature, and note that such rankings generate incentives for more open scholarship, because authors are rewarded for making their work available to the community as early as possible and before formal publication.

A simple two-step synthetic route leads to 2,4,6-tris(trifluoromethyl)aniline. It proceeds through deprotonation and iodination of 1,3,5-tris(trifluoromethyl)benzene, followed by copper-catalyzed amination.