Enriching Human Capital: How to Empower ESL/FL Learners Through P2P Design to Instruction

This field project seeks marry students’ desire for classroom collaboration with a shift to student-centered instruction. It demonstrates how such collaboration can increase student engagement and motivation while lowering their anxiety and inhibitions toward foreign language learning. Potential opportunities for cross-curricular collaboration are also highlighted to better satisfy students\u27 academic and emotional needs. This project includes an interest-based language acquisition manual designed to elicit an authentic exchange of language and culture between ESL/FL students working in pairs. Nearly 20% of the entire LHS student body, accounting for the struggles of ELL students – low graduation rate and high chronic absenteeism rate – and FL students -increase in plagiarism, less than 3% of students qualifying for the California State Seal of Biliteracy - enrolled at Liberty High School (LHS, Brentwood, Contra Costa Country, CA), and drawing on the experience that I have in working with both student populations, it is evidently clear that collaboration between the English Language Development and Foreign Languages departments and their respective groups of students can effectively, and economically, address the affective factors - anxiety, low level of motivation, low level of engagement - that greatly determine ELL and FL students’ academic achievement, and can serve as a catalyst in the overall improvement of our school as a safe and inclusive institution for higher learning. Without a collaborative pedagogical framework and working partnership between ELD and FL faculty/students, both student populations continue to labor and struggle parallel and unbeknownst to one another. Consequently, it is imperative that we as teachers, and language educators in particular, come together to devise cross-curricular, student-centered instruction that calls for increased peer-to-peer collaboration and cooperative learning strategies among and between both groups of students. Such cooperative-based learning will empower our students with agency to help one another achieve their respective personal and academic goals in second language acquisition, while affording them greater learner autonomy, thus holding them more accountable for their own education

The Ideological Foundation of Osama bin Laden

One name is above all others when examining modern Islamic fundamentalism - Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has earned global notoriety because of his role in the September 11th attacks against the United States of America. Yet, Osama does not represent the beginning, nor the end of Muslim radicals. He is only one link in a chain of radical thought. Bin Laden's unorthodox actions and words will leave a legacy, but what factors influenced him? This thesis provides insight into understanding the ideological foundation of Osama bin Laden. It incorporates primary documents from those individuals responsible for indoctrinating the Saudi millionaire, particularly Abdullah Azzam and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Additionally, it identifies key historic figures and events that transformed bin Laden from a modest, shy conservative into a Muslim extremist

British Naval Power and its Influence on Indonesia, 1795–1942: An Historical Analysis

In Indonesian history, Britain has never been considered a prominent player in the politics of the archipelago. From an Indonesian perspective, the British presence only lasted a brief five years (1811–1816) during short-lived interregnum regime led by Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826). This began with the British seizure of Java from the Franco-Dutch administration of Marshal Daendels (1808-11) and his successor, General Janssens (May-September 1811), and ended with the formal return of the colony to the Netherlands on 19 August 1816. However, as this article demonstrates, Britain has had a long-lasting and decisive influence on modern Indonesian history, dating from the time when the archipelago entered the vortex of global conflict between Britain and Republican France in the 1790s. The presence of the British navy in Indonesian waters throughout the century and a half which followed Britain’s involvement in the War of the First Coalition (1792-97) dictated inter alia the foundation of new cities like Bandung which grew up along Daendels’ celebrated postweg (military postroad), the development of modern Javanese cartography, and even the fate of the exiled Java War leader, Prince Diponegoro. in distant Sulawesi (1830-55). This British naval presence had pluses and minuses for the Dutch. On the one hand, it was a guarantor of Dutch security from foreign seaborne invasion. On the other, it opened the possibility for British interference in the domestic politics of Holland’s vast Asian colony. As witnessed in the 20th-century, the existence of the Dutch as colonial masters in the Indonesian Archipelago was critically dependent on the naval defence screen provided by the British. When the British lost their major battleships (Prince of Wales and Repulse) to Japanese attack off the east coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941 and Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was sealed. Today, the vital role played by the Royal Navy in guaranteeing the archipelago’s security up to February 1942 has been replaced by that of the Honolulu-based US Seventh Fleet but the paradoxes of such protection have continued

Promoting Transition to Postsecondary Education: Creating Opportunities for Social Change

Multiple studies document that students with disabilities participate at significantly lower rates than their peers without disabilities in post-secondary education, post-school employment, independent living, and community participation. This article exposits a program model at Ohio University, Gateway to Success, which addresses this inequity through a combined effort of various stakeholders. Particular consideration is given to evidence based predictors related to post-school success, the need for intervention, and the social justice implications of increased participation in post-secondary education for students with disabilities

Analysis of prehistoric brown earth paleosols under the podzol soils of Exmoor, UK

The deforestation of the upland landscapes in southwest Britain during prehistory is an established archaeological narrative, documenting human impacts on the environment and questioning the relationship of prehistoric societies to the upland landscapes they inhabited. Allied to the paleoenvironmental analyses of pollen sequences, which have provided the evidence of this change, there has been some investigation of prehistoric paleosols fossilized under principally Bronze Age archaeological monuments. These analyses identified brown earth soils that were originally associated with temperate deciduous woodland, on occasion showing evidence of human impacts such as tilling. However, the number of analyses of these paleosols has been limited. This study presents the first analysis of a series of pre‐podzol brown earth paleosols on Exmoor, UK, two of which are associated with colluvial soil erosion sediments before the formation of peat. This study indicates these paleosols are spatially extensive and have considerable potential to inform a more nuanced understanding of prehistoric human impacts on the upland environments of the early‐mid Holocene and assess human agency in driving ecosystem change

Commentary: On School-Based Counseling Policy and Evaluation

The writers of this commentary advocate for increased attention to school-based policy development, effective policy implementation, and high quality policy research across the world. A new organization (International Society for Policy Research and Evaluation in School-Based Counseling) focused on these topics is introduced. In closing, the article contents comprising the first issue of Society’s scholarly journal are overviewed

An archaeological deposit model of Site A, London Gateway Port Development

During 2008 an ecological compensation scheme as part of the London Gateway container port development, adjacent to the Thames estuary near Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, required the creation of an intertidal habitat, through a reduction of the land surface by 1m and a sea wall breach of an area of reclaimed salt marsh. This compensation area became known as Site A. Deposit modelling was undertaken across Site A, using gouge coring and resistivity transects to define the interface of the Holocene-Pleistocene deposits and to characterise the sedimentary architecture of the postglacial sequence. A gradiometer survey was also undertaken as part of the deposit modelling programme to identify archaeological remains within the upper 1m of the sediment sequence, which was the limit of the impact depth from ground reduction. The deposit model allowed a geoarchaeological zonation of the site, with Zone 1 interpreted as a buried river terrace containing the potential for deeply stratified and well-preserved archaeological remains. Evaluation trenching targeted key archaeological features across the site to characterise the depths and potential of any recorded archaeological and palaeoenvironmental remains. This approach of targeted evaluation, informed by deposit modelling, allowed for a reduced trenching strategy compared to a standard blanket evaluation process of an agreed percentage area. In turn, this allowed the archaeological process to proceed quickly from evaluation into excavation mitigation and facilitated post-excavation analysis of the sequences, providing a rich archaeological narrative

Cascaded Neural Networks for Identification and Posture-Based Threat Assessment of Armed People

This paper presents a near real-time, multi-stage classifier which identifies people and handguns in images, and then further assesses the threat-level that a person poses based on their body posture. The first stage consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that determines whether a person and a handgun are present in an image. If so, a second stage CNN is then used to estimate the pose of the person detected to have a handgun. Lastly, a feed-forward neural network (NN) makes the final threat assessment based on the joint positions of the person’s skeletal pose estimate from the previous stage. On average, this entire pipeline requires less than 1 second of processing time on a desktop computer. The model was trained using approximately 2,000 images and achieved a pistol and person detection rate of 22% and 55%, respectively. The final stage NN correctly identified the severity of the threat with 84% accuracy. The images used to train each stage of our multi-classifier model are available online. With an expanded dataset the accuracy of detecting people and pistols can likely be improved in the future