The effectiveness of creative drama education on the teaching of social communication skills in mainstreamed students

AbstractThe present study was conducted in order to evaluate the effectiveness of creative drama education on teaching the social communication skills of greeting, joining the group and initiating a conversation in preschool level disabled students integrated into mainstream education. A six-year-old hearing impaired female student attending the nursery class of a primary school administered by the Provincial Directorate of National Education in the Province of Konya was included in the study. The “Social Communication Skills Evaluation Observation Form”, which was developed by the researchers, was used as the data collection tool As the result of the study, it was found that creative drama education had a significant positive effect on the social communication skills of the subject

A Framework for Trajectory based Visual Event Retrieval

This paper presents a framework of a system for the query and retrieval of video data based on video events in huge video repositories. the events are formulated using domain-independent event primitives which are represented by spatio-temporal relationships between objects in the video scenes. Complex events are expressible as combinations of simpler events. This facilitates support of event queries from a variety of points of view. in addition, the framework is expected to provide adaptability of the framework to multiple domains

Shadow Detection by Combined Photometric Invariants for Improved Foreground Segmentation

Detection and tracking of moving objects are the essential steps of many video understanding applications such as traffic monitoring, video surveillance and visual event recognition. Moving object detection process segments the scene into foreground (moving) and background regions. Moving cast shadows cause serious problems in this process because they can easily be misclassified as foreground. This misclassification may lead to drastic changes in the shapes of objects or merging of multiple objects. in this paper, we present a method to detect moving cast shadows to improve the performance of moving object detection. the foreground regions are processed in terms of intensity, chromaticity, and reflectance ratio. to further refine the results, compactness constraint is enforced on the foreground and shadow masks. the algorithm exploits spatial and spectral information; no a priori knowledge about camera, illumination or object/scene characteristics are required. Obtained results show better performance compared to other work in recent literature

Does It Matter How and How Much Politicians are Paid?

An important question in representative democracies is how to ensure that politicians behave in the best interest of citizens rather than their own private interests. Aside from elections, one of the few institutional devices available to regulate the actions of politicians is their pay structure. In this paper, we provide fresh insights into the impact of politician salaries on their performance using a unique law change implemented in 2012 in Turkey. Specifically, the members of the parliament (MPs) in Turkey who are retired from their pre-political career jobs earn a pension bonus on top of their MP salaries. The law change in 2012 significantly increased the pension bonus by pegging it to 18 percent of the salary of the President of Turkey, while keeping the salaries of non-retired MPs unchanged. By exploiting the variation in total salaries caused by the new law in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the salary increase had a negative impact on the performance of the retired MPs. In particular, the overall performance of these MPs was lowered by 12.3 percent of a standard deviation as a result of the increase in salary caused by the new law. This finding is robust to numerous specification tests. Furthermore, the results obtained from an auxiliary analysis suggest that one of the mechanisms through which MPs reduce their performance is absenteeism

Variability of Low-ionization Broad Absorption Line Quasars Based on Multi-epoch Spectra from The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present absorption variability results for 134 bona fide \mgii\ broad absorption line (BAL) quasars at 0.46~$\lesssim z \lesssim$~2.3 covering days to $\sim$ 10 yr in the rest frame. We use multiple-epoch spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has delivered the largest such BAL-variability sample ever studied. \mgii-BAL identifications and related measurements are compiled and presented in a catalog. We find a remarkable time-dependent asymmetry in EW variation from the sample, such that weakening troughs outnumber strengthening troughs, the first report of such a phenomenon in BAL variability. Our investigations of the sample further reveal that (i) the frequency of BAL variability is significantly lower (typically by a factor of 2) than that from high-ionization BALQSO samples; (ii) \mgii\ BAL absorbers tend to have relatively high optical depths and small covering factors along our line of sight; (iii) there is no significant EW-variability correlation between \mgii\ troughs at different velocities in the same quasar; and (iv) the EW-variability correlation between \mgii\ and \aliii\ BALs is significantly stronger than that between \mgii\ and \civ\ BALs at the same velocities. These observational results can be explained by a combined transverse-motion/ionization-change scenario, where transverse motions likely dominate the strengthening BALs while ionization changes and/or other mechanisms dominate the weakening BALs.Comment: 24 pages, accepted for publication in ApJ

Growth and evolution in three Philadelphia artist collectives: The Clay Studio, Nexus/Foundation for Today's Art, Vox Populi

Three collectives located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are examined to uncover the critical issues affecting the success and direction of artist collectives. The purpose of this study is to better understand the Artist Cooperative movement as a visual art organizational model and to unveil the key aspects or components that allow the artist cooperative to grow and transform successfully throughout its life cycle. Through investigation of the histories of The Clay Studio, Nexus/Foundation for Today’s Art, and Vox Populi, critical issues and trends are discovered contributing to these collectives success, including the necessity of artists as stakeholders, artists involvement in governance, and the availability of long-term affordable physical space.M.S., Arts Administration -- Drexel University, 201

X-ray and multi-epoch optical/UV investigations of BAL to non-BAL quasar transformations

We report on an X-ray and optical/UV study of eight Broad Absorption Line (BAL) to non-BAL transforming quasars at $z\,\approx\,$1.7-2.2 over 0.29-4.95 rest-frame years with at least three spectroscopic epochs for each quasar from the SDSS, BOSS, $Gemini$, and ARC 3.5-m telescopes. New $Chandra$ observations obtained for these objects show their values of $\alpha_{\rm ox}$ and $\Delta{\alpha}_{\rm ox}$, as well as their spectral energy distributions, are consistent with those of non-BAL quasars. Moreover, our targets have X-ray spectral shapes that are, on average, consistent with weakened absorption with an effective power-law photon index of $\Gamma_{\rm eff}\,=\,1.69^{+0.25}_{-0.25}$. The newer $Gemini$ and ARC 3.5-m spectra reveal that the BAL troughs have remained absent since the BOSS observations where the BAL disappearance was discovered. The X-ray and optical/UV results in tandem are consistent with at least the X-ray absorbing material moving out of the line-of-sight, leaving an X-ray unabsorbed non-BAL quasar. The UV absorber might have become more highly ionized (in a shielding-gas scenario) or also moved out of the line-of-sight (in a wind-clumping scenario).Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA

Brain Atrophy and Hypomyelination Associated with Iatrogenic Cushing’s Syndrome in an Infant

Prolonged use of topical corticosteroids, particularly in infants, albeit rare, may lead to Cushing's syndrome. Central nervous system abnormalities including brain atrophy and delayed myelination on cranial magnetic resonance imaging has been reported in patients with corticosteroid treatment. We herein report a 5-month-old female infant with brain atrophy and myelination delay that might be due to iatrogenic Cushing's syndrome caused by topical corticosteroid use

X-ray Insights into the Nature of Quasars with Redshifted Broad Absorption Lines

We present $Chandra$ observations of seven broad absorption line (BAL) quasars at $z=0.863$-2.516 with redshifted BAL troughs (RSBALs). Five of our seven targets were detected by $Chandra$ in 4-13 ks exposures with ACIS-S. The $\alpha_{\rm ox}$ values, $\Delta\alpha_{\rm ox}$ values, and spectral energy distributions of our targets demonstrate they are all X-ray weak relative to expectations for non-BAL quasars, and the degree of X-ray weakness is consistent with that of appropriately-matched BAL quasars generally. Furthermore, our five detected targets show evidence for hard X-ray spectral shapes with a stacked effective power-law photon index of $\Gamma_{\rm eff}=0.5^{+0.5}_{-0.4}$. These findings support the presence of heavy X-ray absorption ($N_{\rm H}\approx 2 \times 10^{23}$ cm$^{-2}$) in RSBAL quasars, likely by the shielding gas found to be common in BAL quasars more generally. We use these X-ray measurements to assess models for the nature of RSBAL quasars, finding that a rotationally-dominated outflow model is favored while an infall model also remains plausible with some stipulations. The X-ray data disfavor a binary quasar model for RSBAL quasars in general.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, and 3 table

Fast Stiffness Matrix Calculation for Nonlinear Finite Element Method

We propose a fast stiffness matrix calculation technique for nonlinear finite element method (FEM). Nonlinear stiffness matrices are constructed using Green-Lagrange strains, which are derived from infinitesimal strains by adding the nonlinear terms discarded from small deformations. We implemented a linear and a nonlinear finite element method with the same material properties to examine the differences between them. We verified our nonlinear formulation with different applications and achieved considerable speedups in solving the system of equations using our nonlinear FEM compared to a state-of-the-art nonlinear FEM. © 2014 Emir Gülümser et al