Using Google tools to enhance secondary writing instruction

This literature review analyzes the use of Google Apps for Education and other Google tools as a way for teachers to improve writing instruction. It focuses on 30 studies conducted in the United States and internationally which investigate varying uses of technology tools with secondary and college-aged students. The results showed that students’ writing improves and students experience more engagement when technology is used to enhance collaboration, feedback, editing, and revision, and that students generally enjoy using Google tools to accomplish writing tasks. Recommendations include guidelines for teachers when assigning technology-based writing activities, but further research needs to be conducted with American secondary students to ascertain the full role that Google can play in the writing classroom

A Case Study of Private School Choice and Education Litigation in South Carolina: SAFE Grants and \u3cem\u3eAdams v. McMaster\u3c/em\u3e (S.C. 2020)

The ideology behind private school choice endures in South Carolina. Arguments for parental choice have resurfaced periodically throughout the state’s history, particularly in moments of “crisis.” The current “crisis” moment is the COVID-19 pandemic, which created a perfect storm for the private school choice movement to gain momentum. When Governor McMaster received South Carolina’s emergency education relief funds, he capitalized on this movement with his proposed SAFE Grants program. His intention was for the SAFE Grants program to provide support through one-time tuition grants to low-income families who have children in private schools. Governor McMaster’s announcement incited an overwhelming media response, with various individuals and organizations reacting to the program. A media content analysis on the SAFE Grants program allows for interesting conclusions about private school choice and education litigation in South Carolina. The following research aims to explore the ways that various media outlets frame the issue of Governor McMaster’s SAFE Grants and the subsequent Adams v. McMaster (S.C. 2020) lawsuit. Major findings reveal that news media outlets represent the public’s understanding of the SAFE Grants as either providing greater access for a child’s school of choice, or as diverting crucial resources away from children in public schools. The use of parental choice rhetoric reflects positively on the SAFE Grants, especially in the context of a global pandemic where education has become increasingly less “one-size-fits-all.” In contrast, characterizing the grants as “school vouchers” holds inherent negative connotations for public school supporters and those wary of education privatization. An investigation of the SAFE Grants issue reveals South Carolina’s unique relationship to school choice and adds to larger conversations surrounding the education policy of today

A Review of Animal-Assisted Interventions in Long-Term Care Facilities

Past research fails to make connections comparing appropriate settings for the benefits of different species of therapy and resident animals in long-term care facilities specifically for the elderly. Two types of animal-assisted interactions (therapy and resident) and four animal species (birds, cats, dogs, and fish) were compared. The findings were sorted into five categories of benefits (behavioral, mental, physical, physiological, and social) and three additional structural variables (affordability, accessibility, and cons). Appropriate activities for each species were also suggested. The review revealed it is important for the facility to consider its budget, number and ailments of residents, type of preferred accessibility, and preferred goal. By being aware of different characteristics of each animal species, such as benefits and affordability, facilities would be able to make an informed decision when considering which animal-assisted intervention would be an appropriate fit for their residents

AccessMod 3.0: computing geographic coverage and accessibility to health care services using anisotropic movement of patients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Access to health care can be described along four dimensions: geographic accessibility, availability, financial accessibility and acceptability. Geographic accessibility measures how physically accessible resources are for the population, while availability reflects what resources are available and in what amount. Combining these two types of measure into a single index provides a measure of geographic (or spatial) coverage, which is an important measure for assessing the degree of accessibility of a health care network.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This paper describes the latest version of AccessMod, an extension to the Geographical Information System ArcView 3.×, and provides an example of application of this tool. AccessMod 3 allows one to compute geographic coverage to health care using terrain information and population distribution. Four major types of analysis are available in AccessMod: (1) modeling the coverage of catchment areas linked to an existing health facility network based on travel time, to provide a measure of physical accessibility to health care; (2) modeling geographic coverage according to the availability of services; (3) projecting the coverage of a scaling-up of an existing network; (4) providing information for cost effectiveness analysis when little information about the existing network is available. In addition to integrating travelling time, population distribution and the population coverage capacity specific to each health facility in the network, AccessMod can incorporate the influence of landscape components (e.g. topography, river and road networks, vegetation) that impact travelling time to and from facilities. Topographical constraints can be taken into account through an anisotropic analysis that considers the direction of movement. We provide an example of the application of AccessMod in the southern part of Malawi that shows the influences of the landscape constraints and of the modes of transportation on geographic coverage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>By incorporating the demand (population) and the supply (capacities of heath care centers), AccessMod provides a unifying tool to efficiently assess the geographic coverage of a network of health care facilities. This tool should be of particular interest to developing countries that have a relatively good geographic information on population distribution, terrain, and health facility locations.</p

An Overview of Double-Crested Cormorant Management to Protect Natural Resources in Michigan: The First Five Years (2004-2008)

Michigan, like other Great Lakes states, experienced a tremendous increase of double-crested cormorants (DCCO) in the 1990s that prompted substantial concern about their impacts on natural resources such as sport fish, nesting birds and vegetation. To address these issues, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued the Public Resource Depredation Order (PRDO) in November 2003 that created a new authority for managing DCCO damage. In this overview, we provide a summary of the collective implementation of the new authority by two agencies, i.e., USDA, Wildlife Services (WS) and five Native American governments for the first five years of PRDO in Michigan. DCCO management under PRDO has been implemented primarily to protect fish species important to both sport and commercial fisheries in many locations but can be categorized in three types of circumstances: 1) during spring migration at locations where DCCOs congregate in large numbers for a period of approximately three weeks; 2) at or near nesting colonies during and shortly after nesting; and 3) in the vicinity of fish stocking sites until the fish disperse. While it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, there is evidence that suggests that as a result of management, in some locations DCCO numbers have been reduced and that the corresponding fisheries have improved

The application of business analytics techniques to analyze unstructured text from various sources to complement state-of-the-art opinion leaderidentification and management in the european public procurement law

The objective of the dissertation is to analyze tenders with the techniques of business analytics in order to uncover characteristics narrowing the competition in the specification for tenders resp. documents in which the requirement for competition was bypassed. Consequently, this has an impact on the probability of a provider being awarded a contract and at the same time discloses the motivation for actively influencing a tender. Among others, this verifies the assumption that a large part of public tenders has already been influenced by opinion leaders before they are published. It is not only possible to provide evidence of this influence with business analytics techniques, the assertion of influence also enables the identification of the opinion leaders involved. Modern business analytics procedures provide for an extensive analysis of the tender documents and at the same time a prediction of the probability of being awarded a contract. Therefore, the main research question referred to the findings on opinion leaders to be acquired regarding their significance and influence in the context of the public tender using business analytics techniques. Public tenders are of particular interest, as the public sector is one of the biggest demanders on the German market with an annual volume of about 496 billion euro. The IT sector alone scheduled expenses in the amount of 20.9 billion euro for 2014. For this reason the economic interest driving the influencing of a tender should not be underestimated. Parts of the examination have already been published in papers by the author of this dissertation. The line of argument is based on a segment of capital goods that is associated with significant cognitive control and characterized by an influencing approach that differs from the patterns of the mass market. Within these segments the identification was focused on the complex capital goods of information technology. This segment is shaped by a number of characteristic features, including great innovational strength, short product lifecycles, disruptive technologies, low market entry barriers and insufficient market transparency, among others. These characteristics make it possible for experts with domain-specific know-how to establish an inverse connection between the product-specific features and the number of possible vendor addressees. As already pointed out, the opinion leader assumes a key role in the entire examination, as his higher level of information places him in the center of the process of influencing of tender. His relay and multiplier function as well as extensive knowledge enable him to assert cognitive and emotional influence and to assume a key position in the process of discussion and evaluation. Especially the topic-specific multiplier function for product and brand messages is of particular interest for companies. Another role of the opinion leader, which is significant in particular for this dissertation, is the influencing function, e.g. to eliminate behavioral and decision-making insecurities. This is to be verified using the business analytics procedures. Within the framework of the examination a higher-level process model was developed to answer the research question experimentally applied to the “storage” system. The purpose was to achieve five derived objectives by applying business analytics procedures. The first objective was to identify opinion leaders. This was successfully achieved by means of a correlation analysis using the text mining approach on different sources of information. The second and third goals involved extracting vendor-specific functionalities that lead to a narrowing of the competition and therefore an evaluation of the level of influence asserted on a tender. Using an especially developed domain-specific taxonomy based on 697 extracted indicators, it was possible to transfer 495 tenders to a model for displaying the degree of influencing. 86% of all analyzed documents showed a significant narrowing of the competition or clearly vendor-specific characteristics. Only 14% of the tenders were actually neutral resp. only displayed a minor narrowing of the competition. The fourth objective involved the prediction of the probability for each tender that a vendor is rewarded the contract. The tools of regression, the decision tree and the neural network were applied in the course. The most reliable predictions based on the misclassification rate were achieved by the neural network and by the regression approach. 15 expert interviews were conducted with vendors, partners and customers in order to triangulate and validate the findings from the applied business analytics procedures. Subsequently, the more than nine hours of audio material were interpreted using the method of qualitative content analysis. The interview focused on the content design of a tender as well as the actual process, the information search as well as questions regarding the experts’ self-designation. Thanks to the correlation of the entire material, it was possible to create an all-encompassing reconstruction of the procurement process, while shedding light on different strategies of influencing a tender. An early limitation of the number of bidders, e.g. by providing a description of an operational concept, and creating artificial USPs are the most prominent examples of active influencing. Furthermore, it was possible to design a sociometric network that displays the influencing communication channels and protagonists in detail. By triangulating the findings from the expert interviews it was possible to confirm the detected patterns in the tender documents using the procedure of business analytics. Moreover, the interviews revealed additional influencing strategies that could not be evaluated in the context of text mining, but which should be considered as part of the influencing. As a conclusion, in consideration of all aspects referred to in this dissertation, it is possible to identify influence asserted by vendors in many public tenders, in addition to the fact that this exercise of influence can be traced back to the opinion leader with the techniques of business analytics. In any case the identification of the opinion leader, or knowing about the act of influencing, offers a number of interesting consequential courses of action. These include opinion leader management and the purposeful application of resources resp. an adjusted pricing strategy when replying to a tender.DerechoCiencias de la Comunicació

From Wealth to Health: Modelling the Distribution of Income Per Capita at the Sub-National Level Using Night-Time Light Imagery

Background: Sub-national figures providing information about the wealth of the population are useful in defining the spatial distribution of both economic activity and poverty within any given country. Furthermore, since several health indicators such as life expectancy are highly correlated with household welfare, sub-national figures allow for the estimation of the distribution of these health indicators within countries when direct measurement is difficult. We have developed methods that utilize spatially distributed information, including night-time light imagery and population to model the distribution of income per capita, as a proxy for wealth, at the country and sub-national level to support the estimation of the distribution of correlated health indicators. Results: A first set of analysis are performed in order to propose a new global model for the prediction of income per capita at the country level. A second set of analysis is then confirming the possibility to transfer the country level approach to the sub-national level on a country by country basis before underlining the difficulties to create a global or regional models for the extrapolation of sub-national figures when no country data set exists. Conclusions: The methods described provide promising results for the extrapolation of national and sub-national income per capita figures. These results are then discussed in order to evaluate if the proposed methods could not represent an alternative approach for the generation of consistent country specific and/or global poverty maps disaggregated to some sub-national level

Evaluation of Liver Function Tests to Predict Operative Risk in Liver Surgery

Despite numerous studies in the past it is not possible yet to predict postoperative liver failure and safe limits for hepatectomy. In this study the following liver function tests ICG-ER (indocyaninegreen elimination rate), GEC (galactose elimination capacity) and MEGX-F (monoethylglycinexylidid formation) are examined with regard to loss of liver tissue and prediction of operative risk. Liver function tests were assessed in 20 patients prior to liver resection and on the 10th. postoperative day. Liver and tumor volume were measured by ultrasound and pathologic specimen and the parenchymal resection rate was calculated. In patients without cirrhosis (n = 10) ICG-ER and MEGX-F remained unchanged after resection, GEC was reduced but did not correspond to the resection rate. Patients with cirrhosis (n = 10) had a significantly lower ICG-ER and GEC before resection than patients without cirrhosis. After resection these tests were unchanged. Patients with liver related complications and cirrhosis (n = 5) had lower ICG-ER and GEC than patients with cirrhosis and no complications. In the postoperative course all liver function tests in these patients were significantly lower compared to preoperative results. Comparing liver function tests ICG serves best to indicate postoperative liver failure. Liver function tests do not correspond with loss of liver tissue