Understanding the Unique Needs of Adolescent Refugee Students

Using the Essential Attributes of developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable guidelines established by This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents, this article will provide a frame of reference for readers to assist their understanding of the kaleidoscope of issues that face our refugee adolescent population (AMLE/NMSA, 2010). For each of the four essential attributes, practical application for the middle grades classroom is offered. These ideas are to assist teachers in meeting the needs of their students who come from a refugee background and to give a foundation in an area that is often overlooked in the current educational system

The Impact of Power Training on Balance and Visual Feedback Removal

Because power training has been known to augment stability, the purpose of this study was to assess whether the removal of visual input affects lower limb muscle power production in young women who are resistance trained to the same degree it affects the untrained. This provided insight as far as the need for resistance training protocols in a largely untrained visually impaired population. To study this, fourteen college-aged female participants (18-23 years) performed a seated double-leg press on a leg sled machine, isolating power production of the lower limbs. After establishing baselines, which involved finding an average of power produced during five trials, the subjects were asked to close their eyes for the following set of five pushes. The power production was assessed by utilizing a Tendo Unit, with placement on one of the limbs of the machine, to measure power output during leg extension (measured in Watts). Statistics analyzed in SPSS determined the average power deficit of the athletic population to be 11.57 Watts, whereas the general population had an average power deficit of 37.43 Watts. The deficits experienced by each respective group upon visual removal were significantly different from one another, as evidenced by a p-value of .048. This accentuated the power-trained group’s resilience. A suggested training plan regimen including cardiorespiratory, resistance, flexibility, and neuromotor exercises has been appended for persons experiencing visual impairment and seeking to better their balance through power

“Wonder” Through the Eyes of Empathy: A Middle Grades Teacher’s Guide

This Practitioner Perspective provides brief definitions to the three main components of empathy (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) and outline the importance of incorporating empathy education into the classroom, specifically looking at the areas of diversity, social skills, and moral development. In addition, the paper provides teachers with discussion questions, prompts, and a “how to” guide to assist students in exploring each character through the eyes of that individual, while also helping to build empathy as they read and discuss the book. The objective of this paper is to help teachers think more deeply about how to use literature to encourage empathy in their own classrooms. By connecting diversity, social skills, and moral development to empathy, middle grades teachers are not just teaching empathy but are also enhancing important life skills for their students and thereby helping to promote productive citizenship for the future

Retrograde Soul : A Song Cycle

The song cycle is a classical music genre originating from the German Lieder tradition with roots in the early romantic period. Its versatility as a compositional form has ensured its popularity from its 19th century origins on, and accounts for the diversity of works within the genre. This thesis is a creative project involving the composition of a song cycle for female voice, accompanied by a string quartet and containing an original poetic text. The purpose of the project was to allow acquired knowledge of music theory, history, and technique to inform the creative process of generating an original work. The overall theme of the piece is conveyed through the integration of words and music, necessitating careful attention to the inherent nature of the text and the relationship between music and poetry

Belief State Planning for Autonomously Navigating Urban Intersections

Urban intersections represent a complex environment for autonomous vehicles with many sources of uncertainty. The vehicle must plan in a stochastic environment with potentially rapid changes in driver behavior. Providing an efficient strategy to navigate through urban intersections is a difficult task. This paper frames the problem of navigating unsignalized intersections as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solves it using a Monte Carlo sampling method. Empirical results in simulation show that the resulting policy outperforms a threshold-based heuristic strategy on several relevant metrics that measure both safety and efficiency.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IV201

English as a Global Commodity

English is currently the language of diplomacy, higher education, business, science, the internet, and more. In order to understand what this means for the present state of English and its future, one must begin by looking at this language’s diachronic journey, followed by a synchronic picture of English today. In addition to statistics on English, this analysis will consider potential language competitors of Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and Hindi, among others, in displacing the English language. Compared to these prospective challengers, English has broad roots in world history, lending to its depth and growing breadth; however, not only do the diachronic implications of English carry weight in determining English’s future position but also its place at this moment in time, foreshadowing its secure outlook as the dominant global language for the years to come

Efficiency wage theory, labormarkets, and adjustment

Conventional labor theory argues that wages are determined by the interaction of labor supply and demand. Policy analysis on wage rigidity has emphasized distortions arising from exogenous intervention. One emphasis in adjustment lending has been deregulation of labor markets. Efficiency wage models of unemployment try to explain persistent real wage rigidities when unemployment persists. Their central assumption is that higher real wages can improve labor productivity. A major implication of these theories is that wages (and hence labor markets) may be unresponsive to typical macroeconomic policies that seek to lower real wages, change resource allocation, and reduce open unemployment. The three central macroeconomic implications of efficiency wage theory are : 1) there is an equilibrium"natural"level of open unemployment, which differs among groups in the labor force and cannot be affected by demand management policies; 2) when reducing the level of production, the typical firm will resort to laying off labor instead of reducing wages, thereby introducing a significant wage inertia and an overshooting of open unemployment; and 3) wages do not respond to clear the labor market and are not responsive to macroeconomic policies and microeconomic deregulation. The authors conclude that applying the theory in developing countries requires suitably defining labor costs and tackling the problem of segmentation of the labor market.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Youth and Governance