Diversity in education: changing faces

As America becomes more and more diverse, public schools are forced to adapt to the changing faces in education. The purpose of this study was to promote culturally responsive teaching and analyze programs that impact non-Asian minority students in a suburban school district. The intern used observations, surveys, and interviews to study programs at the Charles W. Lewis Middle School in Blackwood, New Jersey. The research began by examining the school\u27s culture and then went on to form committees and groups to promote diversity throughout the building. During this research, the intern determined that non-Asian minority students were disproportionately represented in special education, regular education, and gifted programs. White students were also afforded more opportunities for academic success than minority students. Through culturally responsive teaching, special programs were established to boost self-esteem, promote diversity, and increase academic performance among minority students

Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.

Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well

Introductory considerations on crop diversity

Modern society faces decreased biodiversity in nature caused by increased uniformity in agriculture, and health related problems with nutrition caused by industrialisation in food production. Conversion to organic farming increases biodiversity, because of diversification in crops and decreased intensity in control of weed and pests, and increase biochemical diversity within food products because of decreased nitrogen application in field. The author argues that the positive effects of in organic farming can be further improved by improved genetic diversity within the crop. Inter-cropping and variety mixtures are already used by some farmers, but diversity within the crop can be further improved by development of composite cross populations, composition of new stabilized populations, and reintroduction of historic varieties and populations

Exploiting Tradeoff Between Transmission Diversity and Content Diversity in Multi-Cell Edge Caching

Caching in multi-cell networks faces a well-known dilemma, i.e., to cache same contents among multiple edge nodes (ENs) to enable transmission cooperation/diversity for higher transmission efficiency, or to cache different contents to enable content diversity for higher cache hit rate. In this work, we introduce a partition-based caching to exploit the tradeoff between transmission diversity and content diversity in a multi-cell edge caching networks with single user only. The performance is characterized by the system average outage probability, which can be viewed as the sum of the cache hit outage probability and cache miss probability. We show that (i) In the low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) region, the ENs are encouraged to cache more fractions of the most popular files so as to better exploit the transmission diversity for the most popular content; (ii) In the high SNR region, the ENs are encouraged to cache more files with less fractions of each so as to better exploit the content diversity.Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kansas City, MO, USA, May 201

Differences in faces do make a difference: Diversity perceptions and preferences in faces

Throughout previous research focusing on individuals' diversity perception, it remains somewhat unclear which attributes (i.e., objective diversity) are reflected in perceptions of diversity. This manuscript investigates whether individuals consider objective differences in ambiguous facial information (which are not related to gender or race) when making diversity judgments and decisions. Throughout seven studies, facial information of group members was manipulated to appear more similar or different in regards to personality and information unrelated to Big 5 dimensions, while race, gender, and age were kept constant. Study 1a provides support that objective differences in facial information related to perceived personality traits is validly reflected in perceptions of diversity. Study 1b shows that results regarding the Big 5 can be replicated in an ensemble-coding setup. Studies 2a and 2b replicate this result, additionally showing that objective differences in facial information unrelated to the Big 5 are reflected in perceptions of diversity, too. Focusing on perceived extraversion, Study 3 reveals that individuals select faces differing (similar) in extraversion information in order to assemble a diverse (homogeneous) team. Study 4 investigates diversity choices in an ambiguous setting, showing that individuals who more strongly believe in the value of diversity are more likely to assemble a team that is objectively diverse regarding facial information. Study 5 indicates that the association between diversity in facial information and choices deteriorates if other attributes such as gender are varied too. The impact of the results for research is highlighted and discussed

Research note: Complying with frustration, the experience of equality and diversity practitioners

The Equality and Diversity (E&D) role in Higher Education (HE) in the UK ensures that universities are compliant with equalities legislation and that they fulfil their duty to promote equality as these relate to employees and the institution as a whole. Hunter and Swan (2007) call for more research to explore how equality and diversity practitioners handle these complex and contradictory (E&D) duties (Healy et al, 2010). We also argue that, as the UK university context itself faces severe financial challenges, understanding the experiences of HE E&D practitioners/managers becomes more urgent. The purpose of the research is to explain the experience of equality practitioners in the HE context, an under-explored area of equality practice. Meyerson and Scully’s concept (1995) of the ‘tempered radical’ has been used to give us greater insight into how the challenges of this role are played out in the HE context

The Role of Gut Microbiota Diversity in Infant Attentional Processing of Emotional Faces at the Age of Eight Months

The Role of Gut Microbiota Diversity in Infant Attentional Processing of Emotional Faces at the Age of Eight Months In recent years a lot of interest has been put in linking neuroscience and microbiology together as we start to understand the importance of the bacteria to our brain health and concept of gut-brain axis have been launched. Gut microbiota can influence neurodevelopment in several mechanisms including immunological, endocrine, neural and metabolic pathways. Germ-free rodent studies show that microbiota is necessary for normal stress responsivity, fear-related behavior, anxiety-like behaviors, sociability and cognition in sex specific manner. Recent human studies demonstrate that gut microbiota diversity is associated with temperament, cognitive performance and differences in amygdala-thalamus connectivity, which is central in processing emotional information. In addition, human probiotic intervention studies have suggested that probiotics intake reduce negative mood and might help in preventing depression. Infant is selecting information from sensory input by orienting attention. Already newborns’ attention is biased towards faces. Another attention bias emerging during second half of first year is the heightened bias towards faces expressing fear, called fear bias. Attention bias for fear can be seen for example in a slower or less probable disengagement of attention from fearful or angry faces as compared to happy or neutral faces. Deviations in early emotion processing from facial expressions may influence the trajectories of socio-emotional development. The data for this master thesis was a sub-sample (n=126) from FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Aim was to investigate the associations between early gut microbiota alpha diversity/richness and infant attention to emotional faces. The possible sex differences in these associations were also investigated. The gut microbiota diversity was assessed at 2.5 months of age and analyzed with 16s rRNA sequencing. Attention to emotional faces was assessed with eye tracking using age-appropriate face-distractor paradigm microbiota at the age of eight months. In this master thesis no associations between gut microbiota diversity and attention to emotional faces was found. Probability of disengagement was lowest for fearful faces. The only significant correlation was found between fear bias and gut microbiota richness in boys but not in girls, but there was not statistically significant interaction between the sex and gut microbiota in a linear regression model controlling for mode of delivery and breastfeeding. This data encourages for further human studies to illustrate the potential underlying neural structures of emotional attention and gut microbiota in sex-specific manner. Keywords: microbiota, gut-brain-axis, brain development, face processing, threat processing, attention mechanism, emotional attentio