“The feeling of fear was not from my student, but from myself”: A pre-service teacher’s shift from traditional to problem-posing second language pedagogy in a Mexican youth prison

This era of globalization, capitalism, and economic progress has given rise to mass incarceration, as a considerable number of youths in developing and developed countries live behind bars in detention facilities without appropriate educational support. Educators in these facilities deposit knowledge, through traditional pedagogical approaches, under systemic oppression and surveillance deemed necessary for safety and security. This study investigated implementations of Freire’s (2000) problem-posing pedagogy using a participatory action research (PAR) approach through the lens of critical theory. Two of the co-authors helped develop a Freirean language teaching program in an urban youth prison in Mexico, centering student teachers’ critical self-awareness by providing them with opportunities to reflect on their identity, life experiences, and reality while teaching in prison. Through critical, autoethnographic self-reflections of a bilingual teacher candidate on her teaching practices, this study provides insights into how the teacher was impacted by the problem-posing pedagogy and how it was reflected in her transformation to a critical, loving teacher and student progress. This research embraces a humanistic approach to teaching incarcerated youth in Mexico through care and courage by supporting them as students, as well as by empowering their voices and thoughts. Building a learning community, where students and teachers create respectful human connections through dialogue and discussions on language, culture, and lived experiences, is portrayed in this research as essential

A contemporary approach to the problem of determining physical parameters according to the results of measurements

The shortcomings of the classical approach are set forth, and the newer methods resulting from these shortcomings are explained. The problem was approached with the assumption that the probabilities of error were known, as well as without knowledge of the distribution of the probabilities of error. The advantages of the newer approach are discussed

Quality factors and coding standards - a comparison between open source forges

Enforcing adherence to standards in software development in order to produce high quality software artefacts has long been recognised as best practice in traditional software engineering. In a distributed heterogeneous development environment such those found within the Open Source paradigm, coding standards are informally shared and adhered to by communities of loosely coupled developers. Following these standards could potentially lead to higher quality software. This paper reports on the empirical analysis of two major forges where OSS projects are hosted. The first one, the KDE forge, provides a set of guidelines and coding standards in the form of a coding style that developers may conform to when producing the code source artefacts. The second studied forge, SourceForge, imposes no formal coding standards on developers. A sample of projects from these two forges has been analysed to detect whether the SourceForge sample, where no coding standards are reinforced, has a lower quality than the sample from KDE. Results from this analysis form a complex picture; visually, all the selected metrics show a clear divide between the two forges, but from the statistical standpoint, clear distinctions cannot be drawn amongst these quality related measures in the two forge samples

Food, hunger and ethics

Management of hunger has to look into issues of availability, accessibility and adequacy. Posing it from an ethical perspective the paper argues out in favour of right to food. But, for this to happen, the state has to come up with an appropriate and effective bill on food and nutrition security, address the issue of inadequate provisioning of storage space by state agencies leading to rotting of foodgrains - a criminal waste when people are dying of hunger, and rely on a bottom-up approach involving the community that complements the top-down administrative structure to identify poor and reduce both exclusion and inclusion errors in targeting.Bottom-up, cash transfers, exclusion and inclusion errors, foodgrains, Mahatma Gandhi, nutrition adequacy, poverty, Rawls, right to food, targeting, top-down, unique identification

On testing frame-dragging with LAGEOS and a recently announced geodetic satellite

Recently, Ciufolini and coworkers announced the forthcoming launch of a new cannonball geodetic satellite in 2019. It should be injected in an essentially circular path with the same semimajor axis $a$ of LAGEOS, in orbit since 1976, and an inclination $I$ of its orbital plane supplementary with respect to that of its existing cousin. According to their proponents, the sum of the satellites' precessions of the longitudes of the ascending nodes $\Omega$ should allow one to test the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect to a $\simeq 0.2\%$ accuracy level, with a contribution of the mismodeling in the even zonal harmonics $J_\ell,~\ell=2,4,6,\ldots$ of the geopotential to the total error budget as little as $0.1\%$. Actually, such an ambitious goal seems to be hardly attainable because of the direct and indirect impact of, at least, the first even zonal $J_2$. On the one hand, the lingering scatter of the estimated values of such a key geophysical parameter from different recent GRACE/GOCE-based global gravity field solutions is representative of an uncertainty which may directly impact the summed Lense-Thirring node precessions at a $\simeq 70-80\%$ in the worst scenarios, and to a $\simeq 3-10\%$ level in other, more favorable cases. On the other hand, the phenomenologically measured secular decay $\dot a$ of the semimajor axis of LAGEOS (and, presumably, of the other satellite as well), currently known at a $\sigma_{\dot a}\simeq 0.03~\textrm{m~yr}^{-1}$ level after more than 30 yr, will couple with the sum of the $J_2$-induced node precessions yielding an overall bias as large as $\simeq 20-40\%$ after $5-10$ yr. A further systematic error of the order of $\simeq 2-14\%$ may arise from an analogous interplay of the secular decay of the inclination $\dot I$ with the oblateness-driven node precessions.Comment: LaTex2e, 27 pages, 3 tables, 7 figures. Accepted for publicatio

Mismanagement: Labor\u27s Rightful Cause

[Excerpt] Mismanagement is so widespread and its effects upon job security, wages and standards are so damaging to labor that unions must expand the traditional boundaries of their authority and begin to experiment with ways to challenge management prerogatives. While some people may argue that such a direction will lead to enterprise unionism, those arguments have many of the same weaknesses as those against worker ownership and power-sharing. The alternative in our current situation is to passively allow managers to continue to destroy jobs and communities. Those who hope to rebuild our economy based upon more humane principles will need a constituency which includes union members who have, at the local level, really dug in and challenged mismanagement, posing alternatives to save jobs. The discussion below covers the most common and damaging forms of mismanagement; the rest of this issue of Labor Research Review shows what unions can and have done to challenge bad management. It does nor cover subjects which many of us consider mismanagement of the overall economy, such as socially destructive deregulation, laissez-faire trade policies, or the massive diversion of precious financial and technical resources to the military. While not ignoring such national economic issues, the training for empowerment for more grass-roots control of the economy has to begin with local campaigns where local unions and their allies have immediate organizing handles