A Guide to Service Learning

The purpose of this guide is to facilitate successful and meaningful service learning activities for middle school students at River Bluff Middle School. Middle school students involved in service learning activities are positively impacted and provide a service to the community

Fighting Online Click-Fraud Using Bluff Ads

Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and even individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses. In this note we wish to raise the awareness of the networking research community on potential research areas within this emerging field. As an example strategy, we present Bluff ads; a class of ads that join forces in order to increase the effort level for click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads are either targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. They act as a litmus test for the legitimacy of the individual clicking on the ads. Together with standard threshold-based methods, fake ads help to decrease click-fraud levels.Comment: Draf

No-Regret Learning in Extensive-Form Games with Imperfect Recall

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) is an efficient no-regret learning algorithm for decision problems modeled as extensive games. CFR's regret bounds depend on the requirement of perfect recall: players always remember information that was revealed to them and the order in which it was revealed. In games without perfect recall, however, CFR's guarantees do not apply. In this paper, we present the first regret bound for CFR when applied to a general class of games with imperfect recall. In addition, we show that CFR applied to any abstraction belonging to our general class results in a regret bound not just for the abstract game, but for the full game as well. We verify our theory and show how imperfect recall can be used to trade a small increase in regret for a significant reduction in memory in three domains: die-roll poker, phantom tic-tac-toe, and Bluff.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, expanded version of article to appear in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Conference on Machine Learnin

Using Public Schools as Community-Development Tools: Strategies for Community-Based Developers

This paper explores the use of public schools as tools for community and economic development. As major place-based infrastructure and an integral part of the community fabric, public schools can have a profound impact on the social, economic and physical character of a neighborhood. Addressing public schools, therefore, is a good point of entry for community-based developers to place their work in a comprehensive community-development context. The paper examines ways in which community-based developers can learn from, as well as contribute to, current community-based efforts, particularly in disinvested urban areas, to reinforce the link between public schools and neighborhoods. Furthermore, the paper considers the policy implications of including public schools in comprehensive development strategies, and argues that reinforcing the link between public schools and neighborhoods is not only good education policy, but also good community-development policy and practice

Mentorship from the student perspective

Midwifery Basics: Mentorship 3 When undertaking a programme of pre-registration midwifery education, student midwives are working towards responsible and accountable practice at the point of registration. In order to facilitate this, mentors are required to support learning in a range of clinical settings and contribute to the development of the students ability to practice as a safe and competent midwife (Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2008, 2011). Experiences of mentorship can influence how a student midwife's confidence and competence develops and may shape how they will subsequently practice once qualified (Hughes and Fraser, 2011; Licqurish and Seibold, 2008). Consequently, supportive and positive mentorship is essential to enhance student learning experiences in practice and to promote their personal and professional developmen