Paving the Way for Success in High School and Beyond: The Importance of Preparing Middle School Students for the Transition to Ninth Grade

P/PV's GroundWork series summarizes available evidence on a variety of social policy topics, providing a firm foundation for future work.This second brief in the series presents an overview of issues surrounding the ninth grade transition: why it is so important; why many middle school students find it so difficult; traits related to a successful transition; and what schools can do to ease difficulties in the transition. Research indicates that students unprepared to handle the transition are more likely to disengage from school, which in turn may lead to dropping out -- and a host of related problems, thus perpetuating a cycle of poverty for disadvantaged, low-income youth

Margaret Chase Smith\u27s 1972 Election: The Fall of an Institutional Giant

Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and was well-known by her constituents in Maine as a principled, integrous public servant. In 1972, after 24 years in the Senate, Margaret Chase Smith lost her first ever election to democratic challenger, William Hathaway. An examination of the primary source documents available at the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine, as well as local and national newspaper coverage, finds three main reasons that Smith suffered defeat: Smith was unwilling to let go of her traditional way of campaigning, she was berated by a press that she had antagonized throughout her career, and the state of national politics caused a coalition of out-of-state forces to rise up against her

The case of equality in the Livingstone-Wagner Theorem

Let G be a permutation group acting on a set Ω of size n∈ℕ and let 1≤k<(n−1)/2. Livingstone and Wagner proved that the number of orbits of G on k-subsets of Ω is less than or equal to the number of orbits on (k+1)-subsets. We investigate the cases when equality occurs

Administering the Clean Water Act: Do Regulators Have Bigger Fish to Fry When it Comes to Addressing the Practice of Chumming on the Chesapeake Bay?

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the country\u27s most productive estuaries. However, for decades the health of the Bay has been declining due in large part to nutrification. Excessive nutrients encourage algal blooms, which lower dissolved oxygen and increase turbidity in the Bay\u27s waters. More than 40% of the Bay\u27s main stern is now dead largely as a result of this problem. The practice of chumming, the discarding of baitfish, usually menhaden, over the sides of fishing boats to attract game fish like striped bass, is contributing to the Bay\u27s nutrification problem because the decomposing chum raises the waters biological oxygen demand which lowers dissolved oxygen and increases water turbidity causing bay grasses to die and setting in motion destructive positive feedback loops. Chum may also be a source of disease in game fish, and the demand for chum is contributing to the decline of menhaden, an important food and filter fish, on the Atlantic Coast. Despite these problems, the practice of chumming is not regulated by either the federal government or the state of Maryland. This article explores whether citizens can compel regulation by either jurisdiction and concludes that such initiatives would likely fail because of the absence of a duty to regulate. The article examines why regulators decline to regulate and finds that the most likely reasons are an over dependence on economic approaches to environmental regulation, which drives regulators to choose the largest targets of opportunity, and a failure to understand how small disturbances in complex systems like estuaries can set off a cascade of potentially catastrophic and irreversible consequences--here, the loss of the Bay\u27s biodiversity. The article concludes by suggesting that the Precautionary Principle offers a much better approach to identifying regulatory targets in estuarine systems where much is scientifically uncertain; and exhorts citizens to spend time educating regulators of these facts rather than in fruitless and time-consuming litigation

The Crescent Student Newspaper, October 8, 1935

Student newspaper of Pacific College (later George Fox University). 6 pages, black and white.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/1954/thumbnail.jp

CONFIGR: A Vision-Based Model for Long-Range Figure Completion

CONFIGR (CONtour FIgure GRound) is a computational model based on principles of biological vision that completes sparse and noisy image figures. Within an integrated vision/recognition system, CONFIGR posits an initial recognition stage which identifies figure pixels from spatially local input information. The resulting, and typically incomplete, figure is fed back to the “early vision” stage for long-range completion via filling-in. The reconstructed image is then re-presented to the recognition system for global functions such as object recognition. In the CONFIGR algorithm, the smallest independent image unit is the visible pixel, whose size defines a computational spatial scale. Once pixel size is fixed, the entire algorithm is fully determined, with no additional parameter choices. Multi-scale simulations illustrate the vision/recognition system. Open-source CONFIGR code is available online, but all examples can be derived analytically, and the design principles applied at each step are transparent. The model balances filling-in as figure against complementary filling-in as ground, which blocks spurious figure completions. Lobe computations occur on a subpixel spatial scale. Originally designed to fill-in missing contours in an incomplete image such as a dashed line, the same CONFIGR system connects and segments sparse dots, and unifies occluded objects from pieces locally identified as figure in the initial recognition stage. The model self-scales its completion distances, filling-in across gaps of any length, where unimpeded, while limiting connections among dense image-figure pixel groups that already have intrinsic form. Long-range image completion promises to play an important role in adaptive processors that reconstruct images from highly compressed video and still camera images.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0423); National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NMA 201-01-1-0216); National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N000014-01-1-0624