Self-perceived leader behavior and characteristics of black and white chief administrators of colleges and universities: a comparative study

This study was designed to examine and compare self-perceived leader behavior and characteristics of black and white chief administrators of colleges and universities. The population for this study included chief administrators of the 538 four year colleges and universities, both public and private, within the 15 Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states. A randomly selected sample of 18 black and 12 white (total n=150) chief administrators was used for this study. Data collected by the LBDQ-S focuses on two types of self-perceived leader behavior, initiating structure and consideration. The demographic questionnaire collected data which included respondents, race, gender, age, years in present position, present salary, highest degree earned, and college majors. Data were analyzed at the 0.05 alpha level of significance using the General Linear Model of the Statistical Analysis System (SAS). Other data relating to demographics were presented in frequent distributions and analyzed through the comparison of percentiles. The results of the study follow. There was a statistically significant difference found between black and white chief administrators in the area of initiating structure seif-perceived leader behavior. Additionally, significant differences were found in the following demographic areas of consideration, the age group of 55 to 59, and the college majors humanities, higher education and other . An observation of demographics through frequency distributions revealed the most characteristics were very similar. The area that did reveal noticeable differences was the area of college majors. Whites were more likely to major in social science and blacks were more likely to major in administration/management, education, and “other”. The following major conclusions were drawn from the study\u27s findings: (1) There was not a statistically significant difference found between black and white chief administrators consideration self-perceived leader behavior, but a difference was found in initiating structure; (2) Both black and white chief administrators scored high in initiating structure and consideration self-perceived leader behavior, indicating that both are effective leaders; (3) In relation to demographic characteristics, respondents had similar profiles

The Supreme Court and the Not-So-Privileged Press

The first amendment mandates freedom of the press, but the extent of that freedom has been the issue in scores of Supreme Court opinions. Whether press freedom is above and beyond that provided the general public by the first amendment has been a fertile question for debate. The question is more than academic, however; its answer has determined, for example, that reporters must be jailed for refusing to comply with subpoenas and that newsrooms can be searched for evidence of criminal activities

Supreme Court Reform and American Democracy

In How to Save the Supreme Court, we identified the legitimacy challenge facing the Court, traced it to a set of structural flaws, and proposed novel reforms. Little more than a year later, the conversation around Supreme Court reform has only grown louder and more urgent. In this Essay, we continue that conversation by engaging with critics of our approach. The current crisis of the Supreme Court is, we argue, inextricable from the question of the Supreme Court’s proper role in our democracy. For those interested in reform, there are three distinct strategies for ensuring the Supreme Court maintains its proper role relative to democracy: internal restraints, external constraints, and structural reforms. We argue that internal restraints and external constraints both suffer from serious drawbacks as strategies for restraining the Court. Structural reforms remain the most promising option for reforming and saving the Supreme Court

The Fourth Amendment and General Law

For decades, Fourth Amendment protections have turned on “reasonable expectations of privacy.” But a new era may be dawning. There is growing interest among judges and scholars in turning away from privacy toward property or positive law as the touchstone for Fourth Amendment protections. Yet many questions remain about how that approach should work, such as where judges should look for positive law and precisely what role positive law should play in Fourth Amendment analysis. This Article answers those questions, and in so doing lays forth a new, comprehensive theory of the Fourth Amendment. We argue that courts should interpret the Fourth Amendment’s protections by looking to “general law”—the common law under the control of no particular sovereign. Courts looking to general law would draw on ancient property concepts such as trespass, license, and bailments in determining the scope of protections. But they would also draw on custom, social practices, and modern legal developments to identify and flesh out common-law rules unknown at the Founding. The general-law approach has numerous advantages over competitor theories. It makes better sense of the Fourth Amendment’s text and has deeper roots in its history. It is surprisingly easy to reconcile with a great deal of Fourth Amendment doctrine, while also suggesting important refinements in various areas. And it gives courts the flexibility to protect Fourth Amendment values in a changing world while also structuring and guiding the judicial task more than an untethered inquiry into privacy expectations. Private law, then, holds the key to understanding the Fourth Amendment’s limits on public power

Natural Language Processing Methods for Acoustic and Landmark Event-Based Features in Speech-Based Depression Detection

The processing of speech as an explicit sequence of events is common in automatic speech recognition (linguistic events), but has received relatively little attention in paralinguistic speech classification despite its potential for characterizing broad acoustic event sequences. This paper proposes a framework for analyzing speech as a sequence of acoustic events, and investigates its application to depression detection. In this framework, acoustic space regions are tokenized to 'words' representing speech events at fixed or irregular intervals. This tokenization allows the exploitation of acoustic word features using proven natural language processing methods. A key advantage of this framework is its ability to accommodate heterogeneous event types: herein we combine acoustic words and speech landmarks, which are articulation-related speech events. Another advantage is the option to fuse such heterogeneous events at various levels, including the embedding level. Evaluation of the proposed framework on both controlled laboratory-grade supervised audio recordings as well as unsupervised self-administered smartphone recordings highlight the merits of the proposed framework across both datasets, with the proposed landmark-dependent acoustic words achieving improvements in F1(depressed) of up to 15% and 13% for SH2-FS and DAIC-WOZ respectively, relative to acoustic speech baseline approaches

Automatic Detection of COVID-19 Based on Short-Duration Acoustic Smartphone Speech Analysis

Currently, there is an increasing global need for COVID-19 screening to help reduce the rate of infection and at-risk patient workload at hospitals. Smartphone-based screening for COVID-19 along with other respiratory illnesses offers excellent potential due to its rapid-rollout remote platform, user convenience, symptom tracking, comparatively low cost, and prompt result processing timeframe. In particular, speech-based analysis embedded in smartphone app technology can measure physiological effects relevant to COVID-19 screening that are not yet digitally available at scale in the healthcare field. Using a selection of the Sonde Health COVID-19 2020 dataset, this study examines the speech of COVID-19-negative participants exhibiting mild and moderate COVID-19-like symptoms as well as that of COVID-19-positive participants with mild to moderate symptoms. Our study investigates the classification potential of acoustic features (e.g., glottal, prosodic, spectral) from short-duration speech segments (e.g., held vowel, pataka phrase, nasal phrase) for automatic COVID-19 classification using machine learning. Experimental results indicate that certain feature-task combinations can produce COVID-19 classification accuracy of up to 80% as compared with using the all-acoustic feature baseline (68%). Further, with brute-forced n-best feature selection and speech task fusion, automatic COVID-19 classification accuracy of upwards of 82–86% was achieved, depending on whether the COVID-19-negative participant had mild or moderate COVID-19-like symptom severity

Multi-context Use of Language: Toward Effective Thinking and Planning for Curriculum

The flexible, multi-contextual use of language is essential to integrated learning and thinking. Likewise, learning and thinking in an integrated way is essential to multi-dimensional teaching. This study examines the ways pre-service secondary teachers define their subjects. Students enrolled in a secondary reading methods course were asked to provide multiple definitions for a predetermined list of critical vocabulary terms common to multiple disciplines. We used these definitions to measure participants’ level of sophistication with regard to the multi-context use of language. Participants’ responses illuminated implications for curriculum development in secondary schools including the need for models for pre- and in-service teachers of authentic integrated curriculum

NICMOS Imaging of the Nuclei of Arp 220

We report high resolution imaging of the ultraluminous infrared galaxy Arp 220 at 1.1, 1.6, and 2.22 microns with NICMOS on the HST. The diffraction-limited images at 0.1--0.2 arcsecond resolution clearly resolve both nuclei of the merging galaxy system and reveal for the first time a number of luminous star clusters in the circumnuclear envelope. The morphologies of both nuclei are strongly affected by dust obscuration, even at 2.2 microns : the primary nucleus (west) presents a crescent shape, concave to the south and the secondary (eastern) nucleus is bifurcated by a dust lane with the southern component being very reddened. In the western nucleus, the morphology of the 2.2 micron emission is most likely the result of obscuration by an opaque disk embedded within the nuclear star cluster. The morphology of the central starburst-cluster in the western nucleus is consistent with either a circumnuclear ring of star formation or a spherical cluster with the bottom half obscured by the embedded dust disk. Comparison of cm-wave radio continuum maps with the near-infrared images suggests that the radio nuclei lie in the dust disk on the west and near the highly reddened southern component of the eastern complex. The radio nuclei are separated by 0.98 arcseconds (corresponding to 364 pc at 77 Mpc) and the half-widths of the infrared nuclei are approximately 0.2-0.5 arcseconds. At least 8, unresolved infrared sources -- probably globular clusters -- are also seen in the circumnuclear envelope at radii 2-7 arcseconds . Their near-infrared colors do not significantly constrain their ages.Comment: LaTex, 15 pages with 1 gif figure and 5 postscript figures. ApJL accepte

Evaluating the Role of Evapotranspirative Processes for Stormwater Management in Coastal South Carolina Watersheds with Shallow Groundwater

2014 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Informing Strategic Water Planning to Address Natural Resource, Community and Economic Challenge