945 research outputs found
Cross-State Analyses of Results of 2012-13 Teaching Empowering Leading and Learning (TELL) Survey Research Report
New Teacher Center worked collaboratively with nine state coalitions - including governors, state education agencies, teacher associations, stakeholder groups and practitioners - to implement the Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) survey statewide in nine states from the spring of 2012 to the spring of 2103. The TELL survey is a full-population survey of school-based licensed educators designed to report the perceptions about the presence of teaching and learning conditions that research has shown increase student learning and teacher retention.The conditions assessed in the TELL survey include:TimeFacilities and ResourcesProfessional DevelopmentSchool LeadershipTeacher LeadershipInstructional Practices and SupportManaging Student ConductCommunity Support and InvolvementNew Teacher Support (for teachers in their first three years in the profession)This report compares the results of the TELL survey at the state level across the country, providing an additional contextual lens for interpreting the results from each participating state to better understand their own findings
The Rich Get Richer: The Rise of Income Inequality in the United States and the World / Assets and the Poor: a New American Welfare Policy
Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data
Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental
planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial
applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such
purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However,
our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial
enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work
contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant
commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for
mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations,
articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study
within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these
were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of
mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and
transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held
notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the
behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based
services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and
data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and
also follow best-practice
Semiclassical Gravity in the Far Field Limit of Stars, Black Holes, and Wormholes
Semiclassical gravity is investigated in a large class of asymptotically
flat, static, spherically symmetric spacetimes including those containing
static stars, black holes, and wormholes. Specifically the stress-energy
tensors of massless free spin 0 and spin 1/2 fields are computed to leading
order in the asymptotic regions of these spacetimes. This is done for spin 0
fields in Schwarzschild spacetime using a WKB approximation. It is done
numerically for the spin 1/2 field in Schwarzschild, extreme
Reissner-Nordstrom, and various wormhole spacetimes. And it is done by finding
analytic solutions to the leading order mode equations in a large class of
asymptotically flat static spherically symmetric spacetimes. Agreement is shown
between these various computational methods. It is found that for all of the
spacetimes considered, the energy density and pressure in the asymptotic region
are proportional to 1/r^5 to leading order. Furthermore, for the spin 1/2 field
and the conformally coupled scalar field, the stress-energy tensor depends only
on the leading order geometry in the far field limit. This is also true for the
minimally coupled scalar field for spacetimes containing either a static star
or a black hole, but not for spacetimes containing a wormhole.Comment: 43 pages, 2 figures. Reference added, minor changes, PRD versio
The emergence of the global debt society: governmentality and profit extraction through fabricated abundance and imposed scarcity
As a result of the financialization of household and national economies, indebtedness has become a system of domination shaping the making of contemporary subjects. Th is sort of governmentality through debt is a multifaceted phenomenon affecting people's economic and political behavior in both the North and the South. Disguised and legitimized by the moral obligation to repay debts, and by promises of upward social mobility (for the working classes in the North) and of development (for the population of the Global South), indebtedness disciplines households and neutralizes political agency under finance capitalism, as our ethnographic examples on the mortgage crisis in Spain and on microfinance in Peru reveal
The unit of resilience: unbeckoned degrowth and the politics of (post)development in Peru and the Maldives
Abstract This article asks how people envision lives without economic growth in contexts where conventional development ceases to be feasible. It presents ethnographic research I conducted in Peru and in the Maldives, which policymakers see as two climate crisis frontiers. I argue for defining resilience as a grounded, necessarily local, actor's theory of permanence; it is a theory people from diverse social classes and institutions generate in situations of vulnerability and crisis. In the Andes' Colca Valley, which some residents predict has only several habitable decades left due to increasing water scarcity, sustainable development projects are attenuating their presence as their budgets shrink, while mining enterprises and their corporate social responsibility programs have emerged as development's new agenda setters. The Maldives is one of the world's lowest-lying nations, which rising seas could soon render uninhabitable. Between 2008 and 2012, President Mohamed Nasheed made addressing the climate crisis a policy priority by substituting conventional industrial development with a short-lived quest for national carbon neutrality. Examining this contrapuntal pair of frontier sites, I argue that defining the unit of resilience is a political act: forging this definition means prioritizing what, in a human-driven ecosystem, should remain permanent and what should be left behind. Keywords: resilience, degrowth, climate change, Peru, Maldive
Accurate Noise Projection for Reduced Stochastic Epidemic Models
We consider a stochastic Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR)
epidemiological model. Through the use of a normal form coordinate transform,
we are able to analytically derive the stochastic center manifold along with
the associated, reduced set of stochastic evolution equations. The
transformation correctly projects both the dynamics and the noise onto the
center manifold. Therefore, the solution of this reduced stochastic dynamical
system yields excellent agreement, both in amplitude and phase, with the
solution of the original stochastic system for a temporal scale that is orders
of magnitude longer than the typical relaxation time. This new method allows
for improved time series prediction of the number of infectious cases when
modeling the spread of disease in a population. Numerical solutions of the
fluctuations of the SEIR model are considered in the infinite population limit
using a Langevin equation approach, as well as in a finite population simulated
as a Markov process.Comment: 38 pages, 10 figures, new title, Final revision to appear in Chao
Displacement Echoes: Classical Decay and Quantum Freeze
Motivated by neutron scattering experiments, we investigate the decay of the
fidelity with which a wave packet is reconstructed by a perfect time-reversal
operation performed after a phase space displacement. In the semiclassical
limit, we show that the decay rate is generically given by the Lyapunov
exponent of the classical dynamics. For small displacements, we additionally
show that, following a short-time Lyapunov decay, the decay freezes well above
the ergodic value because of quantum effects. Our analytical results are
corroborated by numerical simulations
Preliminary Assessment of Climatic Sensitivity of Riparian Old-Growth Eastern Hemlock
Eastern hemlock is a long-lived, slow growing climax species in North America currently undergoing a major decline in population due to a combination of effects derived from hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) as well as changing climate patterns. Data was collected in an old-growth, riparian hemlock forest within the West Virginia University Research Forest to understand the effect of monthly climate factors (mean temperature, mean precipitation, and climate moisture index (CMI)) on hemlock radial growth. Results indicated that March mean temperature and May CMI of the current growth year are positively associated with hemlock growth whereas prior year summer conditions of each climate variable resulted in negative correlations. Spring temperature as well as winter precipitation of the current year also lessened hemlock growth. Many of the significant relationships ascertained by this study were well supported by other studies; however, increased June precipitation and CMI resulting in a reduction in growth may be explained by summer storm damage or root anoxia, resulting in lessened growth1,2. Also, previous studies conducted south of the study area found winter precipitation to positively affect growth; this incongruence is explainable by differences in precipitation types and how heavy snow could contribute to hemlock damage2. Through the establishment of these relationships, it may be better understood how riparian, old-growth hemlock stands within central Appalachia will respond to changing monthly climate patterns
- …