Teaching in the Middle Grades Today: Examining Teachers’ Beliefs About Middle Grades Teaching

Since the beginning of the middle school movement in the mid-1960s, middle level advocates have called for a school experience for young adolescents grounded in adolescent development that engages students in meaningful learning (Eichhorn, 1966; Alexander & Williams, 1965). The aim of this exploratory multi-case study was to understand middle level teachers’ beliefs about middle level instruction in the current educational environment. To gain this understanding, researchers asked ten current middle grades teachers with varying levels of experience to discuss their beliefs regarding their primary purpose as a middle grades teacher, the current status of middle level teaching, their best and worst instructional lessons, and their perceived barriers to teaching at the middle level. The teachers described the role of teaching in the middle grades as challenging and stressful, but of great importance. In general, they described instruction that included discovery, student engagement, and relevance in an effort to address students’ academic development. There was minimal mention of the non-academic aspects of adolescent development. Finally, teachers viewed curriculum restrictions, students’ attitudes toward learning, difficulty with differentiation, and lack of technology as significant barriers to their success in the classroom

The Status of Middle Schools in the Southeastern United States: Perceptions and Implementation of the Middle School Model

For more than 100 years, education communities have debated how best to educate the young adolescent. Proponents of both the junior high school model and the current middle school model have advocated for a specialized approach to educating adolescents that emphasizes the developmental needs of students. To accomplish this, various organizational structures and instructional approaches are recommended. This survey study examines the perceptions of these middle school practices and the implementation of those practices in middle schools in the Southeastern region of the United States. We note several key trends in our results and highlight key differences in perception of importance and implementation of middle school components and strategies compared to the most recent large scale survey administered by McEwin and Greene (2011)

Foreground Detection in Camouflaged Scenes

Foreground detection has been widely studied for decades due to its importance in many practical applications. Most of the existing methods assume foreground and background show visually distinct characteristics and thus the foreground can be detected once a good background model is obtained. However, there are many situations where this is not the case. Of particular interest in video surveillance is the camouflage case. For example, an active attacker camouflages by intentionally wearing clothes that are visually similar to the background. In such cases, even given a decent background model, it is not trivial to detect foreground objects. This paper proposes a texture guided weighted voting (TGWV) method which can efficiently detect foreground objects in camouflaged scenes. The proposed method employs the stationary wavelet transform to decompose the image into frequency bands. We show that the small and hardly noticeable differences between foreground and background in the image domain can be effectively captured in certain wavelet frequency bands. To make the final foreground decision, a weighted voting scheme is developed based on intensity and texture of all the wavelet bands with weights carefully designed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 201

The association of metacognitive beliefs with emotional distress after diagnosis of cancer.

Objective: Emotional distress after a diagnosis of cancer is normal and, for most people, will diminish over time. However, a significant minority of patients with cancer experience persistent or recurrent symptoms of emotional distress for which they need help. A model developed in mental health, the self-regulatory executive function model (S-REF), specifies that maladaptive metacognitive beliefs and processes, including persistent worry, are key to understanding why such emotional problems persist. This cross-sectional study explored, for the first, time whether metacognitive beliefs were associated with emotional distress in a cancer population, and whether this relationship was mediated by worry, as predicted by the S-REF model. Method: Two hundred twenty-nine participants within 3 months of diagnosis of, and before treatment for, primary breast or prostate cancer completed self-report questionnaires measuring anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, metacognitive beliefs, worry, and illness perceptions. Results: Regression analysis showed that metacognitive beliefs were associated with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD, and explained additional variance in these outcomes after controlling for age, gender, and illness perceptions. Structural equation modeling was consistent with cross-sectional hypotheses derived from the theory that metacognitive beliefs cause and maintain distress both directly and indirectly by driving worry. Conclusions: The findings provide promising first evidence that the S-REF model may be usefully applied in cancer. Further study is required to establish the predictive and clinical utility of these findings

Is there any Evidence for Regional Atmospheric 14C Offsets in the Southern Hemisphere?

Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) Tasmanian huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) decadal measurements for the interval AD 745–855 suggest a mean interhemispheric radiocarbon offset (20 ± 5 yr), which is considerably lower than the previously reported mean interhemispheric offset for the last 2 millennia (44 ± 17 yr). However, comparable University of Waikato (Wk) New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) measurements show significantly higher values (56 ± 6 yr), suggesting the possibility of a temporary geographic (intrahemispheric) offset between Tasmania, Australia, and Northland, New Zealand, during at least 1 common time interval. Here, we report 9 new Wk Tasmanian huon pine measurements from the decades showing the largest huon/kauri difference. We show statistically indistinguishable Wk huon and Wk kauri 14C ages, thus dispelling the suggestion of a 14C geographic offset between Tasmania and Northland

Through the eyes of others - The social experiences of people with dementia: A systematic literature review and synthesis

Psychosocial models suggest that the lived experience of dementia is affected by interpersonal factors such as the ways in which others view, talk about, and behave toward the person with dementia. This review aimed to illuminate how informal, everyday interpersonal relationships are experienced by people with dementia within their social contexts. A systematic review of qualitative literature published between 1989 and May 2016 was conducted, utilizing the electronic databases PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and CINAHL-Complete. This was followed by a critical interpretative synthesis to understand how people with dementia perceive the attitudes, views, and reactions of other people toward them, and the subjective impact that these have. Four major themes were derived from the findings of the 23 included studies: being treated as an “other” rather than “one of us”; being treated as “lesser” rather than a full, valued member of society; the impact of others’ responses; and strategies to manage the responses of others. Thus, people with dementia can feel outcast and relegated, or indeed feel included and valued by others. These experiences impact upon emotional and psychological well-being, and are actively interpreted and managed by people with dementia. Experiences such as loss and diminishing identity have previously been understood as a direct result of dementia, with little consideration of interpersonal influences. This review notes that people with dementia actively engage with others, whose responses can foster or undermine social well-being. This dynamic relational aspect may contribute to emerging understandings of social health in dementia

Defending Against Firmware Cyber Attacks on Safety-Critical Systems

In the past, it was not possible to update the underlying software in many industrial control devices. Engineering teams had to ‘rip and replace’ obsolete components. However, the ability to make firmware updates has provided significant benefits to the companies who use Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), switches, gateways and bridges as well as an array of smart sensor/actuators. These updates include security patches when vulnerabilities are identified in existing devices; they can be distributed by physical media but are increasingly downloaded over Internet connections. These mechanisms pose a growing threat to the cyber security of safety-critical applications, which are illustrated by recent attacks on safety-related infrastructures across the Ukraine. Subsequent sections explain how malware can be distributed within firmware updates. Even when attackers cannot reverse engineer the code necessary to disguise their attack, they can undermine a device by forcing it into a constant upload cycle where the firmware installation never terminates. In this paper, we present means of mitigating the risks of firmware attack on safety-critical systems as part of wider initiatives to secure national critical infrastructures. Technical solutions, including firmware hashing, must be augmented by organizational measures to secure the supply chain within individual plants, across companies and throughout safety-related industries

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI