Temperament in the Classroom

Variance in academic performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that whether students fail or thrive depends not only on circumstance, but also on relatively stable individual differences in how children respond to circumstance. More academically talented children generally outperform their less able peers, but much less is known about how traits unrelated to general intelligence influence academic outcomes. This paper addresses several related questions: What insights can be gleaned from historical interest in the role of temperament in the classroom? What does recent empirical research say about the specific dimensions of temperament most important to successful academic performance? In particular, which aspects of temperament most strongly influence school readiness, academic achievement, and educational attainment? What factors mediate and moderate associations between temperament and academic outcomes? What progress has been made in deliberately cultivating aspects of temperament that matter most to success in school? And, finally, for researchers keenly interested in better understanding how and why temperament influences academic success, in which direction does future progress lie?

The Improvement of the Estate

Originally published in 1994. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth contends that understanding Mansfield Park is fundamental to appreciating Jane Austen's body of work. Professor Duckworth understands Mansfield Park as underscoring the central uniting theme in Austen's work—her concept of the "estate" and its "improvement." The author illustrates Austen's connection to the values of Christian humanism, which she conveys through the uniting theme of estate improvement. According to Duckworth, the estate represents moral and social heritage, so the manner in which individuals seek to improve their estates in Jane Austen's novels represents the direction in which she saw the state and society moving. Finally, Duckworth underscores Austen's awareness of the importance of a society of individuals whose behavior is socially informed

bak deletion stimulates gastric epithelial proliferation and enhances Helicobacter felis-induced gastric atrophy and dysplasia in mice

Helicobacter infection causes a chronic superficial gastritis that in some cases progresses via atrophic gastritis to adenocarcinoma. Proapoptotic bak has been shown to regulate radiation-induced apoptosis in the stomach and colon and also susceptibility to colorectal carcinogenesis in vivo. Therefore we investigated the gastric mucosal pathology following H. felis infection in bak-null mice at 6 or 48 wk postinfection. Primary gastric gland culture from bak-null mice was also used to assess the effects of bak deletion on IFN-γ-, TNF-α-, or IL-1β-induced apoptosis. bak-null gastric corpus glands were longer, had increased epithelial Ki-67 expression, and contained fewer parietal and enteroendocrine cells compared with the wild type (wt). In wt mice, bak was expressed at the luminal surface of gastric corpus glands, and this increased 2 wk post-H. felis infection. Apoptotic cell numbers were decreased in bak-null corpus 6 and 48 wk following infection and in primary gland cultures following cytokine administration. Increased gastric epithelial Ki-67 labeling index was observed in C57BL/6 mice after H. felis infection, whereas no such increase was detected in bak-null mice. More severe gastric atrophy was observed in bak-null compared with C57BL/6 mice 6 and 48 wk postinfection, and 76% of bak-null compared with 25% of C57BL/6 mice showed evidence of gastric dysplasia following long-term infection. Collectively, bak therefore regulates gastric epithelial cell apoptosis, proliferation, differentiation, mucosal thickness, and susceptibility to gastric atrophy and dysplasia following H. felis infection

Temperament in the Classroom

Some students fare better than others, even when researchers control for family background, school curriculum, and teacher quality. Variance in academic performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that whether students fail or thrive depends on not only circumstance but also relatively stable individual differences in how children respond to circumstance. More academically talented children, for instance, generally outperform their less able peers. Indeed, general intelligence, defined as the ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought (Neisser et a!., 1996, p. 77), has a monotonic, positive relationship with academic performance, even at the extreme right-tail of the population (Gottfredson, 2004; Lubinski, 2009). Much less is known about how traits unrelated to general intelligence influence academic outcomes. This chapter addresses several related questions: What insights can be gleaned from historical interest in the role of temperament in the classroom? What does recent empirical research say about the specific dimensions of temperament most important to successful academic performance? In particular, which aspects of temperament most strongly influence school readiness, academic achievement, and educational attainment? What factors mediate and moderate associations between temperament and academic outcomes? What progress has been made in deliberately cultivating aspects of temperament that matter most to success in school? And, finally, for researchers keenly interested in better understanding how and why temperament influences academic success, in which direction does future progress lie

Self-Regulation and School Success

Some children fare better academically than others, even when family background and school and teacher quality are controlled for (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005 ). Variance in performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that individual differences play an important role in determining whether children thrive or fail in school. In this chapter, we review research on individual differences in self-regulation and their relation to school success

Smoothed particle hydrodynamic modelling of the cerebrospinal fluid for brain biomechanics: accuracy and stability

The Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) can undergo shear deformations under head motions. Finite Element (FE) models, which are commonly used to simulate biomechanics of the brain, including traumatic brain injury, employ solid elements to represent the CSF. However, the limited number of elements paired with shear deformations in CSF can decrease the accuracy of their predictions. Large deformation problems can be accurately modelled using the mesh-free Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, but there is limited previous work on using this method for modelling the CSF. Here we explored the stability and accuracy of key modelling parameters of an SPH model of the CSF when predicting relative brain/skull displacements in a simulation of an in vivo mild head impact in human. The Moving Least Squares (MLS) SPH formulation and Ogden rubber material model were found to be the most accurate and stable. The strain and strain rate in the brain differed across the SPH and FE models of CSF. The FE mesh anchored the gyri, preventing them from experiencing the level of strains seen in the in vivo brain experiments and predicted by the SPH model. Additionally, SPH showed higher levels of strains in the sulci compared to the FE model. However, tensile instability was found to be a key challenge of the SPH method, which needs to be addressed in future. Our study provides a detailed investigation of the use of SPH and shows its potential for improving the accuracy of computational models of brain biomechanics

RePAST: Relative Pose Attention Scene Representation Transformer

The Scene Representation Transformer (SRT) is a recent method to render novel views at interactive rates. Since SRT uses camera poses with respect to an arbitrarily chosen reference camera, it is not invariant to the order of the input views. As a result, SRT is not directly applicable to large-scale scenes where the reference frame would need to be changed regularly. In this work, we propose Relative Pose Attention SRT (RePAST): Instead of fixing a reference frame at the input, we inject pairwise relative camera pose information directly into the attention mechanism of the Transformers. This leads to a model that is by definition invariant to the choice of any global reference frame, while still retaining the full capabilities of the original method. Empirical results show that adding this invariance to the model does not lead to a loss in quality. We believe that this is a step towards applying fully latent transformer-based rendering methods to large-scale scenes

Oral iron exacerbates colitis and influences the intestinal microbiome

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is associated with anaemia and oral iron replacement to correct this can be problematic, intensifying inflammation and tissue damage. The intestinal microbiota also plays a key role in the pathogenesis of IBD, and iron supplementation likely influences gut bacterial diversity in patients with IBD. Here, we assessed the impact of dietary iron, using chow diets containing either 100, 200 or 400 ppm, fed ad libitum to adult female C57BL/6 mice in the presence or absence of colitis induced using dextran sulfate sodium (DSS), on (i) clinical and histological severity of acute DSS-induced colitis, and (ii) faecal microbial diversity, as assessed by sequencing the V4 region of 16S rRNA. Increasing or decreasing dietary iron concentration from the standard 200 ppm exacerbated both clinical and histological severity of DSS-induced colitis. DSS-treated mice provided only half the standard levels of iron ad libitum (i.e. chow containing 100 ppm iron) lost more body weight than those receiving double the amount of standard iron (i.e. 400 ppm); p<0.01. Faecal calprotectin levels were significantly increased in the presence of colitis in those consuming 100 ppm iron at day 8 (5.94-fold) versus day-10 group (4.14-fold) (p<0.05), and for the 400 ppm day-8 group (8.17-fold) versus day-10 group (4.44-fold) (p<0.001). In the presence of colitis, dietary iron at 400 ppm resulted in a significant reduction in faecal abundance of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, and increase of Proteobacteria, changes which were not observed with lower dietary intake of iron at 100 ppm. Overall, altering dietary iron intake exacerbated DSS-induced colitis; increasing the iron content of the diet also led to changes in intestinal bacteria diversity and composition after colitis was induced with DSS

Sensing Subjective Well-being from Social Media

Subjective Well-being(SWB), which refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, is of great use to public policy-makers as well as economic, sociological research, etc. Traditionally, the measurement of SWB relies on time-consuming and costly self-report questionnaires. Nowadays, people are motivated to share their experiences and feelings on social media, so we propose to sense SWB from the vast user generated data on social media. By utilizing 1785 users' social media data with SWB labels, we train machine learning models that are able to "sense" individual SWB from users' social media. Our model, which attains the state-by-art prediction accuracy, can then be used to identify SWB of large population of social media users in time with very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables, 10th International Conference, AMT 2014, Warsaw, Poland, August 11-14, 2014. Proceeding