Enhancing Persistence on Mastery Tasks Among Young Preschool Children by Implementing the “I Can” Mastery Motivation Classroom Program

Task persistence plays important role in school readiness and helps to enhance young children’s cognitive development and academic skills; thus, designing and implementing programs to enhance it is vital. The objective of the present research was to assess the effectiveness of the “I Can” mastery motivation classroom program in enhancing young children’s persistence on mastery tasks. Altogether, forty-four (n = 44) children between the ages of two to three years selected from three kindergartens in Malaysia participated in the research, which was conducted by using a randomized pretest and posttest experimental-control group design. Persistence on three mastery tasks and mastery pleasure were assessed by using the Individualized Assessment of Mastery Motivation manual. The experimental group (n = 25) was exposed to the “I Can” mastery motivation classroom program, while the control group (n = 19) attended regular classroom lessons. There was a significant gain score difference between the experimental and control groups on task persistence for puzzles but not for shape sorters, cause and effect toys, and mastery pleasure. Thus, the program was effective in enhancing persistence on some mastery tasks. The content and findings of the intervention should help policy makers understand this important aspect of early childhood education

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200

Performance Persistence of Dutch Pension Funds

This paper studies the investment performance of pension funds with a focus on their ability in implementing their intended investment strategy. We use a sample of Dutch industry-wide pension funds, which are obliged by law to report their investment performance according to the so-called z-score. The z-score is a risk-adjusted performance measure with benchmark settings predefined by Dutch law. We find that pension funds as a group cannot beat their self-selected benchmarks consistently. Applying a cross-sectional portfolio approach we find evidence that the largest pension funds outperform the smallest funds

Unobservable Persistant Productivity and Long Term Contracts

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker’s productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects over time. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme that attracts only high productivity workers: consumption –regardless of time period– is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories, and the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption satisfies the martingale property derived in Rogerson (1985). However, in the case of i.i.d. output and square root utility we show that, contrary to the features of the optimal contract for a repeated moral hazard problem, the level and the variance of consumption are negatively correlated, due to the influence of early luck into future compensation. Moreover, in this example long-term inequality is lower under persistent private informatio

Improving the Deductive System DES with Persistence by Using SQL DBMS's

This work presents how persistent predicates have been included in the in-memory deductive system DES by relying on external SQL database management systems. We introduce how persistence is supported from a user-point of view and the possible applications the system opens up, as the deductive expressive power is projected to relational databases. Also, we describe how it is possible to intermix computations of the deductive engine and the external database, explaining its implementation and some optimizations. Finally, a performance analysis is undertaken, comparing the system with current relational database systems.Comment: In Proceedings PROLE 2014, arXiv:1501.0169

Educational policy, policy appropriation and Grameen Bank higher education financial aid policy process

The paper talks about higher educational polices and their process of policy appropriations, policy as practices, policy as symbolic, policy as rituals, policy as myths, policy backward- mapping and policy-forward mapping, multi-stage policy implementation process, street-bureaucrats planners, and policy reform process. It critically looks at pros-and-corns of different educational policy theories and their applications in education, and the higher education student financial aid different policies, strategies and products and their impact on the college students. The paper also narrates the higher educational policies and methods of need-based, merit-based, means-test-based grants allocation and loan disbursement and their impact on student academic achievements. Moreover, it discusses the policy process model that has both agendas and multiple streams that consider looking at policy designing problems, solutions of the problems and their usefulness to SES students. Additionally, the paper narrates the Grameen Bank higher education student loan policy making process, although there is no higher education student financial aid services are not exist in Bangladesh. Literature reviews, conversations with higher education students, contextual analysis, and the author personal working experience incorporate here. The study finds for policy improvement, policy analysis is vital because policy analysis can explores usefulness of the policy for public well being and for effectiveness of the policy appropriation.Center for Social Economy Learning and Workplace, University of Toronto. -- York Center for Asia Research, York University. -- Indiana University Bloomington

What am I? Virtual Machines and the Mind/Body Problem

When your word processor or email program is running on your computer, this creates a "virtual machine” that manipulates windows, files, text, etc. What is this virtual machine, and what are the virtual objects it manipulates? Many standard arguments in the philosophy of mind have exact analogues for virtual machines and virtual objects, but we do not want to draw the wild metaphysical conclusions that have sometimes tempted philosophers in the philosophy of mind. A computer file is not made of epiphenomenal ectoplasm. I argue instead that virtual objects are "supervenient objects". The stereotypical example of supervenient objects is the statue and the lump of clay. To this end I propose a theory of supervenient objects. Then I turn to persons and mental states. I argue that my mental states are virtual states of a cognitive virtual machine implemented on my body, and a person is a supervenient object supervening on his cognitive virtual machine