Leveraging Technology to Engage Parents at Scale: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

While leveraging parents has the potential to increase student performance, programs that do so are often costly to implement or they target younger children. We partner text-messaging technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of information to parents at scale. In a field experiment across 22 middle and high schools, we used this technology to send automated text-message alerts to parents about their child’s missed assignments, grades and class absences. We pre-specified five primary outcomes. The intervention reduces course failures by 38% and increases class attendance by 17%. Students are more likely to be retained in the district. The positive effects are particularly large for students with below-average GPA and students in high school. There are no effects on standardized test scores however. We randomly chose either the mother or the father to receive the alerts, but there were no differential effects across these subgroups. As in previous research, the intervention appears to change parents’ beliefs about their child’s performance and increases parent monitoring. Our results show that this type of automated technology can improve student effort relatively cheaply and at scale

Strain Modulations as a Mechanism to Reduce Stress Relaxation in Laryngeal Tissues

Vocal fold tissues in animal and human species undergo deformation processes at several types of loading rates: a slow strain involved in vocal fold posturing (on the order of 1 Hz or so), cyclic and faster posturing often found in speech tasks or vocal embellishment (1–10 Hz), and shear strain associated with vocal fold vibration during phonation (100 Hz and higher). Relevant to these deformation patterns are the viscous properties of laryngeal tissues, which exhibit non-linear stress relaxation and recovery. In the current study, a large strain time-dependent constitutive model of human vocal fold tissue is used to investigate effects of phonatory posturing cyclic strain in the range of 1 Hz to 10 Hz. Tissue data for two subjects are considered and used to contrast the potential effects of age. Results suggest that modulation frequency and extent (amplitude), as well as the amount of vocal fold overall strain, all affect the change in stress relaxation with modulation added. Generally, the vocal fold cover reduces the rate of relaxation while the opposite is true for the vocal ligament. Further, higher modulation frequencies appear to reduce the rate of relaxation, primarily affecting the ligament. The potential benefits of cyclic strain, often found in vibrato (around 5 Hz modulation) and intonational inflection, are discussed in terms of vocal effort and vocal pitch maintenance. Additionally, elderly tissue appears to not exhibit these benefits to modulation. The exacerbating effect such modulations may have on certain voice disorders, such as muscle tension dysphonia, are explored

Promotion, Relative Performance Information, and the Peter Principle

My dissertation consists of two main parts. In the first part, I present my experimental study in which I examine the effects of providing workers with relative performance information (RPI) on employers’ promotion decisions and the impact of those decisions on worker performance. In my experimental setting, the job after promotion requires higher-level abilities than the current job. I find that workers increase their effort to improve their current job performance after a promotion opportunity is announced because they expect this to increase their chances of promotion even though the new task requires higher-level abilities. Moreover, because employers anticipate that workers who have RPI will react negatively if they see that the best current job performer is not promoted, employers promote the best current job performer rather than the worker best suited for the next job more often when workers have RPI than when they do not. Finally, consistent with the Peter Principle, I find that the promoted worker’s performance after promotion is lower when workers have RPI than when they do not because the promoted worker lacks the ability to perform the new job well. My results suggest that providing workers with RPI can have a downside that offsets the benefits documented in previous studies. In the second part of my dissertation, I discuss how three common firm practices could potentially help firms mitigate the sorting problem I identified in my experimental study. Specifically, I discuss how the communication of the promotion criteria, group incentive plans, and subjective performance evaluation could help employers improve the sorting of workers through promotions. However, while each approach has advantages, each also has drawbacks. It appears that there is no promotion-based incentive system that provides optimal effort incentives to workers while simultaneously achieving the best match between workers and their jobs. This conflict between the incentive and sorting roles of promotion is difficult to resolve and firms must ultimately trade-off between them

Using a knowledge management evaluation framework for improving an ERP system - a Hong Kong construction industry case study

Organisations need to rely on leadership, information support and human capital in order to ensure a knowledge advantage over their competitors. Knowledge management (KM) provides organisations with sustainable competitive advantage, because it becomes extremely difficult for an organisation to cut expenditure and increase revenue by simply reengineering its business model. Project delivery and success has been traditionally viewed and measured as management of a three-legged stool, with the legs defined as cost, schedule and quality. However, KM can be linked to success by organisations becoming more effective as well as being more efficient.This paper uses a KM framework, the Knowledge Advantage (K-Adv), developed initially for use by construction organisations. It assesses the impact of leadership and its supporting information communication technology infrastructure on the ability of people (by effectively creating, sharing, disseminating and using knowledge) to facilitate sustainable competitive advantage.A case study that is presented is based upon the experience of a leading construction company using an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system to demonstrate the effectiveness of KM from a cost management business unit perspective. Results are evaluated using a capability maturity model (CMM) - that forms the core of the K-Adv tool - to help improve processes that meet the needs of the organisation operating in a highly dynamic business environment. The case study is part of a broader doctoral research project that uses action learning to facilitate and measure ERP improvement.<br /

Diffusion in the Dark: A Diffusion Model for Low-Light Text Recognition

Capturing images is a key part of automation for high-level tasks such as scene text recognition. Low-light conditions pose a challenge for high-level perception stacks, which are often optimized on well-lit, artifact-free images. Reconstruction methods for low-light images can produce well-lit counterparts, but typically at the cost of high-frequency details critical for downstream tasks. We propose Diffusion in the Dark (DiD), a diffusion model for low-light image reconstruction for text recognition. DiD provides qualitatively competitive reconstructions with that of state-of-the-art (SOTA), while preserving high-frequency details even in extremely noisy, dark conditions. We demonstrate that DiD, without any task-specific optimization, can outperform SOTA low-light methods in low-light text recognition on real images, bolstering the potential of diffusion models to solve ill-posed inverse problems.Comment: WACV 2024. Project website: https://ccnguyen.github.io/diffusion-in-the-dark

Light Rare Earth Element Depletion During Deepwater Horizon Blowout Methanotrophy

Rare earth elements have generally not been thought to have a biological role. However, recent work has demonstrated that the light REEs (LREEs: La, Ce, Pr, and Nd) are essential for at least some methanotrophs, being co-factors in the XoxF type of methanol dehydrogenase (MDH). We show here that dissolved LREEs were significantly removed in a submerged plume of methane-rich water during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) well blowout. Furthermore, incubation experiments conducted with naturally methane-enriched waters from hydrocarbon seeps in the vicinity of the DWH wellhead also showed LREE removal concurrent with methane consumption. Metagenomic sequencing of incubation samples revealed that LREE-containing MDHs were present. Our field and laboratory observations provide further insight into the biochemical pathways of methanotrophy during the DWH blowout. Additionally, our results are the first observations of direct biological alteration of REE distributions in oceanic systems. In view of the ubiquity of LREE-containing MDHs in oceanic systems, our results suggest that biological uptake of LREEs is an overlooked aspect of the oceanic geochemistry of this group of elements previously thought to be biologically inactive and an unresolved factor in the flux of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the ocean

Improve construction knowledge management system by using the soft system methodology

The construction industry has a poor record in the management of its knowledge and results into huge wastage of resources and detrimental effect to quality. Research has shown that data and information management system plus knowledge management are a critical part of today\u27s project management practice for construction projects. Few people will deny that \u27quality information\u27 and \u27useful knowledge\u27 are extremely important to any decision-making. However, the current processes of handling information and knowledge in the construction industry and increasingly costly. One of the major reasons is the nature of this industry is not conducive to good knowledge management and the traditional data/information systems used in the industry has long been critisized. It is very common that information is often duplicated, inconsistent and not current. In turn, making knowledge becomes difficult to manage properly. Project managers have in the past found it very difficult to source and analyse data in order to make sound decisions. This paper is part of a doctoral research project which summarizes three exploratory surveys; namely ERP system, Partnering strategy and Leadership impact of a knowledge management system in a construction company. Those findings are described by using the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) which later becomes the basis for actions research. SSM is useful to reveal complexities of the knowledge management situations that occur in construction industry. The first stage was to conduct interviews of the different practices in knowledge and reporting process. Then, the SSM rich picture was developed to present the problematic areas including difficulties in inputting data to enable the knowledge platform in place. The research then develops root definition and CATWOE, and a conceptual model was formed. Interviewees were conducted with structured questions to identify prioritized actions and activities that can be undertaken to improve and manage the knowledge platform

Light Rare Earth Element Depletion During Deepwater Horizon Blowout Methanotrophy

Rare earth elements have generally not been thought to have a biological role. However, recent work has demonstrated that the light REEs (LREEs: La, Ce, Pr, and Nd) are essential for at least some methanotrophs, being co-factors in the XoxF type of methanol dehydrogenase (MDH). We show here that dissolved LREEs were significantly removed in a submerged plume of methane-rich water during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) well blowout. Furthermore, incubation experiments conducted with naturally methane-enriched waters from hydrocarbon seeps in the vicinity of the DWH wellhead also showed LREE removal concurrent with methane consumption. Metagenomic sequencing of incubation samples revealed that LREE-containing MDHs were present. Our field and laboratory observations provide further insight into the biochemical pathways of methanotrophy during the DWH blowout. Additionally, our results are the first observations of direct biological alteration of REE distributions in oceanic systems. In view of the ubiquity of LREE-containing MDHs in oceanic systems, our results suggest that biological uptake of LREEs is an overlooked aspect of the oceanic geochemistry of this group of elements previously thought to be biologically inactive and an unresolved factor in the flux of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the ocean

Radiative falloff in Einstein-Straus spacetime

The Einstein-Straus spacetime describes a nonrotating black hole immersed in a matter-dominated cosmology. It is constructed by scooping out a spherical ball of the dust and replacing it with a vacuum region containing a black hole of the same mass. The metric is smooth at the boundary, which is comoving with the rest of the universe. We study the evolution of a massless scalar field in the Einstein-Straus spacetime, with a special emphasis on its late-time behavior. This is done by numerically integrating the scalar wave equation in a double-null coordinate system that covers both portions (vacuum and dust) of the spacetime. We show that the field's evolution is governed mostly by the strong concentration of curvature near the black hole, and the discontinuity in the dust's mass density at the boundary; these give rise to a rather complex behavior at late times. Contrary to what it would do in an asymptotically-flat spacetime, the field does not decay in time according to an inverse power-law.Comment: ReVTeX, 12 pages, 14 figure