The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is the community college district serving Los Angeles, California, and some of its neighboring cities and certain unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Its headquarters are in Downtown Los Angeles. Over the past seventy-seven years LACCD has served as educator to more than three million students. In addition to typical college aged students, the LACCD also serves adults of all ages: over half of all LACCD students are older than 25 years of age, and more than a quarter are 35 or older. LACCD educates almost three times as many Latino students and nearly four times as many African-American students as all of the University of California campuses combined. Eighty percent of LACCD students are from underserved populations. The Los Angeles Community College District is the largest community college district in the United States and is one of the largest in the world. The nine colleges within the district offer educational opportunities to students in Los Angeles. It serves students located in the Alhambra, Beverly Hills, Burbank, Culver City, Garvey, Las Virgenes, Los Angeles, Montebello, Palos Verdes and San Gabriel school districts. The district covers the Los Angeles city limits, San Fernando, Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Hidden Hills, Burbank, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Rosemead (southern portion), Montebello, Commerce, Vernon, Huntington Park, Bell, Cudahy, Bell Gardens, South Gate, Gardena, Carson, Lomita, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills, Rancho Palos Verdes, and numerous unincorporated communities, including East Los Angeles, Florence-Firestone, Athens, and Walnut Park. The LACCD consists of nine colleges and covers an area of more than 882 square miles (2,280 km2)..
ABSTRACT Teaching practicum programs provide pathways for potential future faculty, such as graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at four‐year universities, to participate in immersive mentorship and professional development experiences at nearby institutions in preparation for a competitive academic job market. These regional initiatives train the next generation of undergraduate instructors and also address an urgent need to hire and retain a diverse, highly trained faculty. This study focuses on a portfolio of mentored teaching practicum programs embedded within the California Community College system in the southern California region, specifically Los Angeles and Orange counties. Using interviews and questionnaires with program leadership and survey data from past participants, this study examines key program features, the benefits and challenges of program implementation, and the impact on program alumni. Findings indicate that these programs share common goals and strategies that lead to participants’ increased interest in and preparation for careers at community colleges.
The Blue Nile Basin is one of the five main sedimentary Basins in Ethiopia which has a contemporaneous origin with the petroliferous Ogaden Basin. Since the Blue Nile Basin has good petroleum prospect, reconstructing its paleodepositional environment is key to unravel the nature of the reservoir rocks in the Basin. Fieldwork and microscopic examination were carried out in the carbonates of the Antalo limestone Formation exposed throughout the Blue Nile Basin, to determine paleoenvironments and understand depositional history. Based on microfacies and sedimentological analysis, sixteen (16) microfacies types related to shallow marine homoclinal carbonate ramp are identified. The facies associations were assigned to specific ramp environments through integrated analysis of sedimentological, paleontological content, and textural characteristics observed in thin sections. The facies analysis revealed the recognition of three inner ramp facies associations of tidal flat, inner lagoonal and outer lagoonal which characterize the lower part of the formation. The middle section transitions to a mid-ramp setting with high-energy shoal and shallow marine facies. The upper part indicates a shift to deep open marine environments (outer ramp and deep Basin). However, the very top layer indicates a return to inner to middle ramp environments, with the shoal and lagoon facies depicting a return to shallower environments. The distribution of facies associations indicates that an overall deepening upward sequence, characteristics of carbonate ramp. The vertical variations in the facies suggests sea-level fluctuations within the basin. Regionally, the depositional model aligns with other Ethiopian sedimentary basins, such as Mekele Basin, which show comparable carbonate ramp model. It also similar with ramp models of Tethyan carbonate systems offering insights into hydrocarbon exploration. It also enhances global comparisons with other marine carbonate sequences.
Post-treatment Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1) rebound is dictated by the stochastic reactivation of latent reservoirs influenced by immune fluctuations and Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) decay. In this paper, we study the effects of time, immune variability, and ART pharmacokinetics on HIV reactivation following treatment interruption. In this work, we model latency reversal as a Poisson-driven stochastic process shaped by circadian rhythms, transient inflammation, and immune bursts. We incorporate gamma-distributed waiting times in order to capture heterogeneity in activation dynamics and confirm the reduced early post-ART reactivation. Building on earlier stochastic models of reactivation, we present a rigorous framework that captures a range of activation dynamics-including constant, sinusoidal, stochastic, and exponentially decaying rates-reflecting both immune-driven variability and pharmacokinetic influences on latency reversal. We further investigate block-and-lock strategies, showing that combining ART with latency-promoting agents pharmacologically stabilizes the reservoir and delays reactivation, particularly when drug decay is slow. In addition, we study a deterministic model describing the dynamics of viruses, latent cells, and infected cells, including the role of the immune response and the effect of shock-and-kill strategies. Our results reveal that synchronizing latency-reversing agents with immune activation cycles enhances viral clearance and delays rebound. This framework refines post-treatment control predictions and generalizes to persistent infections, such as Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) and Cytomegalovirus (CMV), where immune fluctuations and drug decay shape stochastic viral reactivation.
Knowledge bases traditionally require manual optimization to ensure reasonable performance when answering queries. We build on previous neurosymbolic approaches by improving the training of an embedding model for logical statements that maximizes similarity between unifying atoms and minimizes similarity of non-unifying atoms. In particular, we evaluate different approaches to training this model.
