The North Dakota Experience: Achieving High-Performance Health Care Through Rural Innovation and Cooperation

Explores how North Dakota has met the healthcare challenges of rural communities with support for primary care and the idea of a medical home, organization of care through coordination and cooperation networks, and the innovative use of technology

Gateways to the Principalship: State Power to Improve the Quality of School Leaders

Examines weaknesses in state policies with respect to principal preparation program approval and licensure requirements and highlights leading states and lagging states in efforts to raise preparation and certification standards. Makes recommendations

Good Helping Relationships in Child Welfare: Co-authored Stories of Success (SUMMARY REPORT)

This project involved multiple, in-depth interviews with six worker-client dyads from child welfare. The dyads were selected on the basis of workers and clients agreeing that they had worked through some degree of negative interpersonal process toward the achievement of a good working relationship. For each dyad, two individual interviews with the worker and the client were followed by a joint interview. These interviews produced stories that described from workers\u27 and clients\u27 perspectives how the relationship developed over time, how difficulties were dealt with, and what impact the relationship had on the participants. Although these stories were written by the researchers, they were co-authored by workers and clients in the sense that the participants reviewed drafts of their stories, made suggestions for revisions, and agreed that the final product fairly represented their experience. Across story analyses yielded common themes with regard to worker and client contributions to the development of a good relationship, the qualities of a good relationship, and central issues and turning points in relationship development and client change. The results paint a picture of a good working relationship that is deeply human, integrates personal and professional elements, and takes time and effort to develop. Findings also provide insights about how the challenges of developing good relationships in child welfare, and in any helping endeavour, can be dealt with productively

Negatively Correlated Search

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been shown to be powerful tools for complex optimization problems, which are ubiquitous in both communication and big data analytics. This paper presents a new EA, namely Negatively Correlated Search (NCS), which maintains multiple individual search processes in parallel and models the search behaviors of individual search processes as probability distributions. NCS explicitly promotes negatively correlated search behaviors by encouraging differences among the probability distributions (search behaviors). By this means, individual search processes share information and cooperate with each other to search diverse regions of a search space, which makes NCS a promising method for non-convex optimization. The cooperation scheme of NCS could also be regarded as a novel diversity preservation scheme that, different from other existing schemes, directly promotes diversity at the level of search behaviors rather than merely trying to maintain diversity among candidate solutions. Empirical studies showed that NCS is competitive to well-established search methods in the sense that NCS achieved the best overall performance on 20 multimodal (non-convex) continuous optimization problems. The advantages of NCS over state-of-the-art approaches are also demonstrated with a case study on the synthesis of unequally spaced linear antenna arrays

Professional Skills Acquisition and Human Capital Development: Implications for Higher Education Institutions

This study delved into University of Port Harcourt (UPH) and Rivers State University of Science and Technology (RSUST) lecturers’ approaches to professional development. Lecturers in the faculties of education in the universities constituted the target population from which a random sample of 120 respondents was selected. Data were collected using a questionnaire and analyzed using percentages, means and standard deviations. The findings were that new entrants into the teaching profession were not exposed to comprehensive induction programmes; the strategies used for professional development were limited; and new entrants into teaching were disposed towards mentoring. It was also found that new entrants into the teaching profession would prefer to be mentored in all the domains of knowledge management. Grounded on these findings, the study suggests ways of improving the acquisition of professional skills among lecturers in the universities.Keywords: Career mentoring; Induction; Professional developmen

ICOT 2018 Proceedings of The 18th International Conference on Thinking

In May 2018, join practitioners and researchers from around the world for the International Conference on Thinking in Miami. This transdisciplinary conference brings together leading world researchers and practitioners who will offer research, insights and experiences that provoke, challenge and foster collegial exchange and educational development around the topic of thinking and its application to solving global problems and creating a better world. ‘Thinking’ is understood broadly to include the use of one’s mind for cognitive processes such as thinking, learning, creativity, reflecting, reasoning, analyzing and deciding while also acknowledging cultural, psychological, historical, and disciplinary diversity and richness. Now more than ever it is imperative to innovate and deal with a deep and wide range of global problems IMMEDIATELY, as the consequences of not doing so are, frankly, dire. Set to marshal and develop the thinking and application of hearts and minds to better serve our fellow global citizens and planet. The conference is emphatically transdisciplinary in trend, drawing from such fields as education, neuroscience, health sciences, the arts, sports, government, business, anthropology, history, cross-cultural studies, architecture, engineering, economics, geography, technology and other areas. Issues like globalization, climate change, demographic changes, mass migration, immigration, technology, the global economy and ethical dilemmas lead us inquire and find solutions from multiple perspectives. With the theme: Cultivating Mindsets for Global Citizens” we aim to create awareness about global issues and the big questions that the next generations will inherit from us. Together we will explore strategies for deeply engaging citizens as young as toddlers up to seniors in understanding world issues from different points of view. We will consider the interdependency of different disciplines in an effort to collaboratively find solutions to global problems in a digital era

The form and function of coordinated vocal signalling in a cooperatively breeding Neotropical songbird, the Rufous-naped Wren ( Campylorhynchus rufinucha)

Coordinated vocal signals produced by birds, such as duets and choruses, present a compelling opportunity to investigate the adaptive significance of cooperation and conflict-based behaviours. I studied the form and function of coordinated vocal signals in cooperatively breeding Neotropical Rufous-naped Wrens (Campylorhynchus rufinucha). I examined variation in daily and seasonal vocal output and found that solo and duet songs peak at dawn and decrease thereafter, and that solo song rate, but not duet or chorus song rate, varied across breeding stages. Both sexes have song repertoires, and song sharing decreases with distance between territorial groups. To examine the function of coordinated vocalizations, I played back solos, duets, and choruses to territorial birds to represent varying degrees of threat. Groups responded strongly and similarly to all playback treatments. This study suggests that song may be an important indicator of group identity and that coordinated vocalizations function in cooperative territory defence