Culture

A team of education, economics and public policy scholars has built a new tool that can quickly assess how a particular school finance reform proposal might impact individual California school districts.

The tool can be used to assess any formula that consolidates so-called "categorical" or restricted, special-purpose state and federal funds. It will be discussed at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday, April 14.

While cities have shown considerable racial disparities in cancer survival, those racial disparities virtually disappear among smaller populations, such as neighborhoods within that city. The finding comes from a new analysis published in the May 15, 2009 issue of CANCER. The study examined breast and prostate cancer survival rates at different geographic levels, and the results suggest that there are significant societal factors at the root of cancer-related racial disparities.

Kansas gravel roads have varying speed limits, but a study by Kansas State University researchers shows that instead of abiding by those limits, people are more likely to use their own judgment to gauge how fast they should drive on the roads.

K-State researchers Sunanda Dissanayake, associate professor of civil engineering, and Litao Liu, graduate student in civil engineering, have studied the actual speeds on Kansas gravel roads and the various factors involved.

All African Pygmies, inhabiting a large territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique population who lived around 20,000 years ago, according to an international study led by researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The research, published April 10 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, concludes that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and farmers separated ~60,000 years ago.

French and Chinese blue glass, Dutch layered glass, Baltic amber: roughly 70,000 beads manufactured all over the world have been excavated at one of the Spanish empire's remotest outposts, the Santa Catalina de Guale Mission. The beads were found as part of an extensive, ongoing research project led by a team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History on St. Catherines Island off the coast of Georgia.

Public middle-grades schools placed under private management in 2002 as part of a state-run overhaul of the Philadelphia School District did not keep pace with the rest of the city's public schools, according to a study published in the American Journal of Education.

The study, which tracked schools through 2006, found that test scores had improved in the privatized schools, but scores in the rest of the city's public schools improved at a much faster rate, leaving the privatized schools in the dust.

Session: Advances in science, engineering, public policy and hazard mitigation as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.Location: DeAnza Ballroom 1, Thursday, April 9, 2009, 1:30 p.m.

The Loma Prieta earthquake transformed the earthquake sciences and engineering and remains a major focus of study, some twenty years later. The 17 October 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake severely shook the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions and initiated major changes in earthquake science and engineering, disaster response and public policy well beyond California.