Clemson University

About: Clemson University is a education organization based out in Clemson, South Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Control theory. The organization has 20556 authors who have published 42518 publications receiving 1170779 citations. The organization is also known as: Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina.

Law and policy on the concept of bullying at school

Abstract: The nationwide effort to reduce bullying in U.S. schools can be regarded as part of larger civil and human rights movements that have provided children with many of the rights afforded to adult citizens, including protection from harm in the workplace. Many bullied children find that their schools are hostile environments, but civil rights protections against harassment apply only to children who fall into protected classes, such as racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, and victims of gender harassment or religious discrimination. This article identifies the conceptual challenges that bullying poses for legal and policy efforts, reviews judicial and legislative efforts to reduce bullying, and makes some recommendations for school policy. Recognition that all children have a right to public education would be one avenue for broadening protection against bullying to all children.

The Use of Discontinuities and Functional Groups to Assess Relative Resilience in Complex Systems

Abstract: It is evident when the resilience of a system has been exceeded and the system qualitatively changed. However, it is not clear how to measure resilience in a system prior to the demonstration that the capacity for resilient response has been exceeded. We argue that self-organizing human and natural systems are structured by a relatively small set of processes operating across scales in time and space. These structuring processes should generate a discontinuous distribution of structures and frequencies, where discontinuities mark the transition from one scale to another. Resilience is not driven by the identity of elements of a system, but rather by the functions those elements provide, and their distribution within and across scales. A self-organizing system that is resilient should maintain patterns of function within and across scales despite the turnover of specific elements (for example, species, cities). However, the loss of functions, or a decrease in functional representation at certain scales will decrease system resilience. It follows that some distributions of function should be more resilient than others. We propose that the determination of discontinuities, and the quantification of function both within and across scales, produce relative measures of resilience in ecological and other systems. We describe a set of methods to assess the relative resilience of a system based upon the determination of discontinuities and the quantification of the distribution of functions in relation to those discontinuities.

Beyond the Roots of Young Seedlings: The Influence of Age and Order on Fine Root Physiology

Abstract: The increasingly widespread use of minirhizotrons, below-ground video cameras, and root image analysis software has generated information on fine root (<1 mm in diameter) dynamics in many species and ecosystems (Johnson and others 2001; Eissenstat and Yanai 2002). These techniques have also revealed the daunting complexity of the fine root system. Within the fine root system of a single fieldgrown plant are roots of numerous branching orders, lengths, diameters, ages, colors, and degrees of mycorrhizal colonization (Afek and others 1990; Pregitzer and others 1997; Wells and Eissenstat 2001; Anderson and others 2002; Mihail and others 2002; Waisel and Eshel 2002). Fine roots continually emerge, age, and die throughout the favorable growing season at rates that differ among subsets of the root population and change in response to seasonal and environmental factors (Hendrick and Pregitzer 1993; Pregitzer and others 1993; Reid and others 1993; Forbes and others 1997; Ruess and others 1998; Majdi and others 2001; Wells and Eissenstat 2001; Wells and others 2002a). The demographic characteristics of the fine root population are constantly shifting, and the consequences of these shifts for whole-plant physiology and growth are very poorly understood. The heterogeneity of the fine root system should not be surprising. Above ground, individual leaves exhibit well-characterized differences in anatomy and physiology with age and position in the crown (Esau 1965; Nobel 1975; Coleman 1986). An appreciation of these differences is implicit in most aboveground sampling strategies and is incorporated into models of whole-canopy function. Until recently, however, physiological differences among individual roots less than 1 mm in diameter were not frequently acknowledged. Most water and nutrient uptake models use total fine root length as a model parameter and assume constant rates of uptake along this length (Chen and Barbar 1990; Smethurst and Commerford 1993; Teo and others 1995; but Gao and others 1998). However, a number of studies indicate that roots of different ages and positions are anatomically and physiologically dissimilar (Atkinson and Wilson 1979; Palta and Nobel 1988; Lopez and Nobel 1991; McKenzie and Peterson 1995; Pregitzer and others 1997; Bouma and others 2001; Kosola and others 2002). At present, the majority of our information on fine root physiology derives from studies of the young, white seminal roots of crop seedlings grown in solution culture (Clarkson 1985; McCully 1999). Such studies have been extremely valuable in elucidating the details of root anatomy, development, Received: 2 January 2003; accepted: 31 January 2003; Online publication: 22 April 2003 *Corresponding author; e-mail: cewells@clemson.edu J Plant Growth Regul (2003) 21:324–334 DOI: 10.1007/s00344-003-0011-1

Effect of Chitosan on the Biological Properties of Sweet Basil (Ocimum basilicum L.)

Abstract: The effect of the treatment of chitosan at various concentrations (0.01%, 0.05%, 0.1%, 0.5%, and 1%) upon sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) before seeding and transplanting was investigated in aspects of the amount of phenolic and terpenic compounds, antioxidant activity, and growth of the basil, as well as the phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) activity. The total amount of the phenolic and terpenic compounds increased after the chitosan treatment. Especially, the amounts of rosmarinic acid (RA) and eugenol increased 2.5 times and 2 times, respectively, by 0.1% and 0.5% chitosan treatment. Due to the significant induction of phenolic compounds, especially RA, the corresponding antioxidant activity assayed by the DPPH* (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) free radical scavenging test increased at least 3.5-fold. Also, the activity of PAL, a key regulatory enzyme for the phenylpropanoid pathway, increased 32 times by 0.5% chitosan solution. Moreover, after the elicitor chitosan treatment, the growth in terms of the weight and height of the sweet basil significantly increased about 17% and 12%, respectively. Our study demonstrates that an elicitor such as chitosan can effectively induce phytochemicals in plants, which might be another alternative and effective means instead of genetic modification.