New York City\u27s J-51 Program: Controversy and Revision

New York City administers a real estate tax incentive program, called the J-51 program, for eligible building owners who rehabilitate existing structures. Despite the need for such a program, various problems and abuses arose, emphasizing the need for major reform. Economic conditions changed the housing market and the tax incentives demonstrated several deleterious effects which contravene the original legislative intent of the program. After long negotiations surrounding several competing arguments, reforms were made. The current revisions were necessary to correct the abuses and to return the program to its original purpose of providing adequate housing for moderate and lower income families. This goal may be realized by eliminating the award of financial incentives for rehabilitation work performed in specified geographic areas and for the benefit of economic groups for which this type of assistance cannot be justified by considerations of social policy

A Case for Student Teacher Placement as Preparation for Future Urban Educators

Do schools of education effectively train young, white, and middle-class teacher candidates to work in urban classrooms? How can schools of education prepare teachers and future teachers for classrooms that are diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, nationality, social class, language and other differences (Nieto, 2004) Classrooms that used to be homogeneous are now diverse, yet the predominant face and gender of the teacher has remained the same. Dramatic inequalities exist in the access that students around the globe have to an excellent, high quality education; inequalities that are lamentably too frequently based on race, social class, language, and other differences (Orfield, 2001). Using data from a descriptive survey, this paper will draw from the experience of eleven teacher candidates in racially diverse urban elementary schools through their first year of teaching to provide recommendations for future program improvements to strengthen existing teacher education programs internationally. Using both qualitative surveys and descriptive statistics, this research strives to answer the question of how to educate the strongest teacher candidates for urban classrooms worldwide

Overview of Learning Theories (Chapter 1 of Faith-Based Education that Constructs)

Virtually everyone would agree that the role of the school is to help students learn. The school, as an institution of education, must incorporate a sense of morality or values. This said, the methods of incorporating morality and values into education vary. This chapter explores three of the most common learning theories of the last fifty years: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Each section will take a brief glance at the history, background, and definition of each of the theories. Then, the chapter will turn to the strengths and weaknesses of each of the theories, illuminating their role in supporting students\u27 learning. In addition, we will examine how these specific learning theories can be combined with faith in the classroom, in the home-school environment, and in other educational settings. Table 1.1 offers a summary of the three learning theories discussed in this chapter

Teaching for a Multifaith World; From Bubble to Bridge: Educating Christians for a Multifaith World

Similar but different is the metaphor to describe both multifaith books reviewed here—similar in that both are exploring the many facets of how to live in our multifaith world today, and different because the books are written for different audiences and ages. Teaching for a Multifaith World, edited by Eleazar S Fernandez, is written for an audience of seminarians. The language is pastoral and the book is a compilation from writers from many well-respected seminaries across the United States. The title of the book implies that this might be a textbook in a course within a religious studies program. From Bubble to Bridge, written by Marion Larson and Sara Shady, with several coauthors, may more likely be used more broadly, from senior capstone courses in Christian universities to churchbased small-group studies. Both books focus on issues within the United States, and some of the views could be carried to other developed countries outside the USA. Neither book is mission-oriented or directly intended for use in conversion of people to the Christian faith

A model of time dependent behavior in concurrent software systems

A great difficulty in building distributed systems lies in being able to predict what the systems behavior will be. A distributed or communicating system is defined here to be one in in which the hardware consists of a set of processors each with their own memory, connected by some communication medium (there is no shared memory), and the software is assumed to be of the CSP (Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes) type.In the past few years some theories have been proposed to model features of communicating systems. Milner's Calculus of communicating Systems (CCS), Winskel's Synchronization Trees (ST), Hennessy's Acceptance Trees (AT), and Hoare and Brookes's theory of communicating processes are examples of formal models of such systems. All of these models concentrate on modelling observable properties of a system.Event Dependency Trees (EDT) is a new representation of communicating systems that models the time dependent nature of such systems. None of the representations mentioned above explicitly represent time but time is precisely the factor that introduces so much variability and complexity into such software and systems. EDT provides a representation based on trees and a set of operations over the EDT trees that can be used to produce deadlock-free software. The model supplies potentially important information for the design and construction of distributed, parallel software systems

Integrating testing techniques through process programming

Integration of multiple testing techniques is required to demonstrate high quality of software. Technique integration has three basic goals: incremental testing capabilities, extensive error detection, and cost-effective application. We are experimenting with the use of process programming as a mechanism of integrating testing techniques. Having set out to integrate DATA FLOW testing and RELAY, we proposed synergistic use of these techniques to achieve all three goals. We developed a testing process program much as we would develop a software product from requirements through design to implementation and evaluation. We found process programming to be effective for explicitly integrating the techniques and achieving the desired synergism. Used in this way, process programming also mitigates many of the other problems that plague testing in the software development process

Elastic suspension of a wind tunnel test section

Experimental verification of the theory describing arbitrary motions of an airfoil is reported. The experimental apparatus is described. A mechanism was designed to provide two separate degrees of freedom without friction or backlash to mask the small but important aerodynamic effects of interest

Expectation Formation of Older Married Couples and the Rational Expectations Hypothesis

This paper tests the Rational Expectations (RE) hypothesis regarding retirement expectations of married older American couples, controlling for sample selection and reporting biases. In prior research we found that individual retirement expectation formation was consistent with the Rational Expectation hypothesis, but in that work spousal considerations were not analyzed. In this research we take advantage of panel data on expectations to test the RE hypothesis among married individuals as well as joint expectations among couples. We find that regardless of whether we assume that married individuals form their own expectations taking spouse’s information as exogenous, or the reports of the couple are the result of a joint expectation formation process, their expectations are consistent with the RE hypothesis. Our results support a wide variety of models in economics that assume rational behavior for married couples.

Graphical programming and the use of simulation for space-based manipulators

Robotic manipulators are difficult to program even without the special requirements of a zero-gravity environment. While attention should be paid to investigating the usefulness of industrial application programming methods to space manipulators, new methods with potential application to both environments need to be invented. These methods should allow various levels of autonomy and human-in-the-loop interaction and simple, rapid switching among them. For all methods simulation must be integrated to provide reliability and safety. Graphical programming of manipulators is a candidate for an effective robot programming method despite current limitations in input devices and displays. A research project in task-level robot programming has built an innovative interface to a state-of-the-art commercial simulation and robot programming platform. The prototype demonstrates simple augmented methods for graphical programming and simulation which may be of particular interest to those concerned with Space Station applications; its development has also raised important issues for the development of more sophisticated robot programming tools. Both aspects of the project are discussed

What to Expect when you are Expecting Rationality: Testing Rational Expectations using Micro Data

This paper tests the Rational Expectations (RE) hypothesis regarding retirement expectations, controlling for sample selection, reporting biases, and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that retirement expectations in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) are consistent with the RE hypothesis. We also examine how a wide array of factors, such as wealth, income, health insurance, pensions, and health status influence retirement expectations formation using panel data from all available waves of the HRS. We further analyze how new information affects the evolution of retirement expectations and discover that, on average, individuals correctly anticipate most uncertain events when planning their retirement, except for some health conditions and economic factors. Our results have important implications for a wide variety of models in economics that assume rational behavior.