The personal program plan in secondary programs : an analysis of selected Saskatchewan school division practises and policies

The first of the three purposes of this study was to describe and analyze current Saskatchewan and local secondary school Personal Program Plan (PPP) policies. The second purpose was to compare the perceptions of current school and classroom practises to current provincial policy. The third purpose was to explore the perceptions of selected stakeholders in relation to effective and ineffective PPP practises for students with learning disabilities (LD) among Saskatchewan secondary programs. This was an inductive study conducted in a multiple phase case study design. Research was conducted through individual and group interviews in six voluntary secondary programs. The study also included the analysis of 100 survey responses from 19 secondary programs. In addition, this study analysed 25 Saskatchewan school division PPP policies then compared these policies to the provincial PPP policy. The conceptual framework was based on a policy model which included influential factors, stakeholders interpretations, implementation variables, with perceived effective or ineffective practises. The provincial policy was designed for all students with special needs, including those with LD. However, some school division policies delimited PPPs to particular populations (i.e. to only students with designated funding). Additionally, school division polices varied in specificity and detail creating inconsistencies in and across programs. In some cases the PPP content and implementation followed the provincial policy; however, in other cases the PPPs were not aligned to the provincial policy guidelines. Funding was found to be the most influential factor to the design and implementation of PPPs. Other factors included the timing and range of distribution of the PPP, teacher response to added responsibilities, adequacy of communication between stakeholders, and level of implementation training. Where stakeholders evidenced an understanding of the policy, the PPPs were used effectively used and appreciated by those involved in the process. Participants who used PPPs indicated that they felt this increased their ability to teach students with LD and contributed to students’ success. Perceptions of ineffective practises associated with the policy included inconsistency, insufficient time for planning, development and implementation of PPPs, poorly written PPPs, and the lack of professional development. Implications for theory included the influences at the various stages of policy design and PPP policy implementation. This resulted in the reconceptualization of the framework wherein the implementation of the PPP policy and the influencing factors are highlighted. Among the implications for policy was the attention that needs to be given to policy intention, implementation and experience in order to close the gaps. Implications for practise included considerations related to pre- and in-service training, preparation time for teachers, communication between programs, and a common understanding of funding purposes. Implications for future research included the continuity of services from elementary to middle to secondary programs for students with LD. In addition, the researcher suggests that future research of exemplary inclusive classrooms and the effective use of the PPPs in these settings

Quantifying prosthetic and intact limb use in upper limb amputees via egocentric video: an unsupervised, at-home study

Analysis of the manipulation strategies employed by upper-limb prosthetic device users can provide valuable insights into the shortcomings of current prosthetic technology or therapeutic interventions. Typically, this problem has been approached with survey or lab-based studies, whose prehensile-grasp-focused results do not necessarily give accurate representations of daily activity. In this work, we capture prosthesis-user behavior in the unstructured and familiar environments of the participants own homes. Compact head-mounted video cameras recorded ego-centric views of the hands during self-selected household chores. Over 60 hours of video was recorded from 8 persons with unilateral amputation or limb difference (6 transradial, 1 transhumeral, 1 shoulder). Of this, almost 16 hours of video data was analyzed by human experts using the 22-category ‘TULIP’ custom manipulation taxonomy, producing the type and duration of over 27,000 prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation tags on both upper limbs, permitting a level of objective analysis not previously possible with this population. Our analysis included unique observations on non-prehensile manipulations occurrence, determining that 79% of transradial body-powered device manipulations were non-prehensile, compared to 60% for transradial myoelectric devices. Conversely, only 16-19% of intact limb activity was non-prehensile. Additionally, multi-grasp terminal devices did not lead to increased activity compared to 1DOF devices

Decoding Ventromedial Hypothalamic Neural Activity during Male Mouse Aggression

The ventromedial hypothalamus, ventrolateral area (VMHvl) was identified recently as a critical locus for inter-male aggression. Optogenetic stimulation of VMHvl in male mice evokes attack toward conspecifics and inactivation of the region inhibits natural aggression, yet very little is known about its underlying neural activity. To understand its role in promoting aggression, we recorded and analyzed neural activity in the VMHvl in response to a wide range of social and nonsocial stimuli. Although response profiles of VMHvl neurons are complex and heterogeneous, we identified a subpopulation of neurons that respond maximally during investigation and attack of male conspecific mice and during investigation of a source of male mouse urine. These “male responsive” neurons in the VMHvl are tuned to both the inter-male distance and the animal's velocity during attack. Additionally, VMHvl activity predicts several parameters of future aggressive action, including the latency and duration of the next attack. Linear regression analysis further demonstrates that aggression-specific parameters, such as distance, movement velocity, and attack latency, can model ongoing VMHvl activity fluctuation during inter-male encounters. These results represent the first effort to understand the hypothalamic neural activity during social behaviors using quantitative tools and suggest an important role for the VMHvl in encoding movement, sensory, and motivation-related signals

Rural Older Adults and Functional Health Literacy:Testing Self-efficacy, Knowledge and Skills Resulting from Hands-on Health Promotion

Functional Health Literacy (FHL) involves the knowledge, skills and belief in self-efficacy to use health care information in self-care. FHL is critical for rural older adults since they are at risk of poor health care outcomes. As part of the Senior Health University project, we measured the FHL of rural older adults before and after educational sessions that included hands-on skill building. Ninety-eight participants aged 60 and older were recruited from five rural congregate meal sites over two years. Survey methods allowed for paired sample t-tests of FHL variables. Findings included significant post-training increases in FHL, suggesting the potential benefit of FHL training for rural older adults. Andersen’s (1995) Behavioral Model of Health Services Use guided this study of the effects of health promotion on health services use, standardization of practical measurement tools, and examination of modalities in rural settings. Research is needed to test the relationship of increased FHL and use of health services by rural participants and to explore the role of online resources and service use in vulnerable older adult populations

Semantically Guided Depth Upsampling

We present a novel method for accurate and efficient up- sampling of sparse depth data, guided by high-resolution imagery. Our approach goes beyond the use of intensity cues only and additionally exploits object boundary cues through structured edge detection and semantic scene labeling for guidance. Both cues are combined within a geodesic distance measure that allows for boundary-preserving depth in- terpolation while utilizing local context. We model the observed scene structure by locally planar elements and formulate the upsampling task as a global energy minimization problem. Our method determines glob- ally consistent solutions and preserves fine details and sharp depth bound- aries. In our experiments on several public datasets at different levels of application, we demonstrate superior performance of our approach over the state-of-the-art, even for very sparse measurements.Comment: German Conference on Pattern Recognition 2016 (Oral

The Unexpected Role of Evolving Longitudinal Electric Fields in Generating Energetic Electrons in Relativistically Transparent Plasmas

Superponderomotive-energy electrons are observed experimentally from the interaction of an intense laser pulse with a relativistically transparent target. For a relativistically transparent target, kinetic modeling shows that the generation of energetic electrons is dominated by energy transfer within the main, classically overdense, plasma volume. The laser pulse produces a narrowing, funnel-like channel inside the plasma volume that generates a field structure responsible for the electron heating. The field structure combines a slowly evolving azimuthal magnetic field, generated by a strong laser-driven longitudinal electron current, and, unexpectedly, a strong propagating longitudinal electric field, generated by reflections off the walls of the funnel-like channel. The magnetic field assists electron heating by the transverse electric field of the laser pulse through deflections, whereas the longitudinal electric field directly accelerates the electrons in the forward direction. The longitudinal electric field produced by reflections is 30 times stronger than that in the incoming laser beam and the resulting direct laser acceleration contributes roughly one third of the energy transferred by the transverse electric field of the laser pulse to electrons of the super-ponderomotive tail

Agricultural Seasonality and the Organization of Manufacturing During Early Industrialization: The Contrast Between Britain and the United States

The United States differed dramatically from Britain in the way manufacturing was organized during early industrialization. Even before widespread mechanization, American production was almost exclusively from centralized plants, whereas the British and other European economies were characterized by extensive cottage manufacture. This paper argues that this contrast was rooted in a salient disparity between the land-to-labor ratios of the two countries. Together with its later settlement, the relative abundance of land in the U.S. led its agricultural sector to be much less concentrated in grain than was British agriculture. Since the labor requirements of grain production were much more seasonal than were those of the other major agricultural products of the era (dairy products, livestock, wood, and cleared land), and agriculture was the dominant sector in both economies, there were more seasonal fluctuations in British labor markets than in the American. We argue that this difference in the extent of seasonality is crucial, because cottage manufacture had a relative advantage in the use of offpeak or part-time labor. Quantitative evidence and a general equilibrium model are employed to present the analysis, and subject it to tests of consistency with the empirical record .