Aspire Public Schools: Building the Organizational Capacity for Healthy Growth

Two years into an aggressive expansion plan, Aspire Public Schools was on track in terms of school openings but behind on its goals to add a layer of management. The schools were performing well, but the nonprofit's leaders were stretched paper thin and concerned about the organization's ability to perform in the face of more growth. Determined to build an organization that could support their expansion plans, the Aspire team took swift action. Their initiatives included:Articulating criteria for "healthy growth" that they would use to assess expansion opportunities, thereby incorporating organizational sustainability into any future decisions about growth;Addressing a profound anxiety about hiring "outsiders" and delegating responsibilities to an increasingly larger team;Defining the boundaries of accountability for each of the organization's leadership positions;Clarifying decision-making authority at a broad level, and making explicit the roles and responsibilities associated with specific and potentially contentious decisions

Analyzing the proving activity of a group of three students

We present an analysis and outline an evaluation of the proving activity of a group of three university level students when solving a geometrical problem whose solution required the formulation of a conjecture and its justification within a specific theoretical system. To carry out the analysis, we used the model presented by Boero, Douek, Morselli and Pedemonte (2010) that centers on the arguments and rational behavior. Our analysis indicates that the student‘s proving activity is close to the one we used as a reference

Live-in domestic workers : overworked, underpaid and overlooked

Live-in domestics are the housekeepers, nannies and home health care workers that live with the families they work for five to seven nights a week. Like other domestics, the live-in domestics interviewed for this report suffered restriction of movement, isolation, inadequate nutrition, physical violence, wage theft and excessive overtime, all in Texas. Moreover, live-ins are more reluctant than other domestics to exercise their rights because they may automatically find themselves homeless. Nobody knows exactly how many live-in domestic workers are in the U.S. because of the secluded nature of their work, but experts and advocates agree that many live-in domestic workers are victims of human trafficking. There are more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in Texas, nearly 234,000 of those were adult victims of labor trafficking, according to reports. The same reports found that traffickers exploit approximately $600 million per year from victims of labor trafficking in Texas only. Since 2012, domestic work has represented the largest sector of all labor trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Texas is the second state with the most cases of human trafficking reported to the Hotline, second only to California. Like other states, these reported cases are growing every year. Reports also show that 85 percent of domestic worker trafficking survivors said having pay withheld or being paid well below minimum wage; 81 percent have lived in abusive living conditions; and 80 percent have been tricked with false or otherwise deceptive contracts. Through the lives of four present and former live-in domestic workers, these numbers come to life and live-in domestic workers stay in the shadows no more.Journalis

The Balfour Declaration: Between History and Narrative.

100 years have passed since the Balfour declaration, and this significant historical document is still under much scrutiny and at the same time highly relevant. Each side – the Jews and the Palestinians – makes a structured political use of it, in order to justify its arguments, and to criticizes what does not fit his narrative; and this mainly to deepen his justifications and nationalist ideology

The Canadian Role in Operation “Charnwood,” 8 July 1944: A Case Study in Tank/Infantry Doctrine and Practice

On the morning of 8 July 1944, soldiers of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade (9 CIB) left their startlines near the Norman village of Vieux Cairon heading for Buron and Gruchy; two villages nearly 2,000 yards across open ground to the south. Their advance was part of Operation “Charnwood,” British I Corps’ final assault on Caen. By the end of the day most objectives were secured, and on 9 July Caen north of the Orne River and Canal was captured. General Dempsey, General Officer Commanding (GOC) British 2nd Army expressed his satisfaction, saying that the operations of 8 and 9 July were “well and cleanly carried out.” Troops of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division (3 CID) and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade (2 CAB) shared in the victory no less than the British divisions that took part. “Charnwood” stands apart from other Canadian operations in Normandy because it was the only operation of its type undertaken by 3 CID and 2 CAB as complete formations. After “Charnwood” II Canadian Corps became operational, and the scale, tempo and expectations of operations altered considerably. The capture of Caen, therefore, affords insights into tactical doctrine that are obscured by later large-scale operations with more ambitious objectives. In particular, in this operation the Canadian armour and infantry defeated the Germans by employing tanks as direct-fire closesupport weapons. In fact, such intimate support had not been a part of Canadian tank/infantry doctrine since the introduction of the Sherman tank in 1943. Instead, since the fall of 1943 armoured units were told specifically to work to the enemy’s flanks and support by fire, not by participating in the close infantry battle. The fighting on 8 July indicates that in this instance at least, Canadian troops won in spite of the prevailing doctrine and not because of it

Double marking revisited

In 2002, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published the report of an independent panel of experts into maintaining standards at Advanced Level (A-Level). One of its recommendations was for: ‘limited experimental double marking of scripts in subjects such as English to determine whether the strategy would signi-ficantly reduce errors of measurement’ (p. 24). This recommendation provided the impetus for this paper which reviews the all but forgotten literature on double marking and considers its relevance now

Cooperative Epistemic Multi-Agent Planning for Implicit Coordination

Epistemic planning can be used for decision making in multi-agent situations with distributed knowledge and capabilities. Recently, Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) has been shown to provide a very natural and expressive framework for epistemic planning. We extend the DEL-based epistemic planning framework to include perspective shifts, allowing us to define new notions of sequential and conditional planning with implicit coordination. With these, it is possible to solve planning tasks with joint goals in a decentralized manner without the agents having to negotiate about and commit to a joint policy at plan time. First we define the central planning notions and sketch the implementation of a planning system built on those notions. Afterwards we provide some case studies in order to evaluate the planner empirically and to show that the concept is useful for multi-agent systems in practice.Comment: In Proceedings M4M9 2017, arXiv:1703.0173

Carnage Interrupted: An Analysis of Fifteen Terrorist Plots against Public Surface Transportation, Research Report 11-20

This report examines 13 terrorist plots against public surface transportation that were uncovered and foiled by authorities between 1997 and 2010 and two failed attempts to carry out attacks. Certainly, this is not the total universe of foiled or failed terrorist plots in these years, but they were selected on the basis of what is known about them and the accessibility of information. The report focuses on terrorist plots in the West. Seven of the 15 plots took place in the United States, and four occurred in the United Kingdom. These two countries figure prominently as targets of terrorism, and in addition, American and British officials have dealt with terrorist plots through publicized arrests and trials, which provide additional information. Although motive was not a criterion in the selection of the plots, all but one involve individuals or groups inspired by al Qaeda’s ideology of violent global jihad against the West. The exception is the 1997 Flatbush plot, in which two terrorists, both of whom had connections with Hamas, angered by events in Palestine, simply wanted to kill as many Jews as possible to express their opposition to U.S. support for Israel. Other sources suggest that the Flatbush plotters wanted to force the release of jailed Islamist terrorists in the United States, including Ramzi Yousef, who participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman, who was convicted for his involvement in a plot to carry out additional bombings in New York