Identification of English Language Learners in Special Education

This study investigated the knowledge and opinions of teachers with regards to the identification of English language learners (ELLs) for special education services. The participants were 22 general education and special education teachers at two schools in a school district in the Chicago suburbs. The data collected included responses to a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked teachers to consider different factors that influence the placement of ELLs in special education. The results indicated that teachers did not believe there is a disproportionate amount of ELLs being identified for special education. On average, approximately 90% of the teachers surveyed believe that teacher training, language barrier, response to intervention (RTI) implementation, and parent communication all are factors in ELL identification. Almost half believed that socioeconomic status did not influence ELL identification

Secure Identity Management Framework for Vehicular Ad-hoc Network using Blockchain

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a mobile network formed by vehicles, roadside units, and other infrastructures that enable communication between the nodes to improve road safety and traffic control. While this technology promises great benefits to drivers, it has many security concerns that are critical to road safety. It is essential to ensure that only authenticated vehicles transmit data and revoked vehicles do not interfere in this communication. Many current VANET technologies also depend on a central trusted authority that can cost computation and communication overhead and be a single point of failure for the network. By using blockchain technology in VANET, we can take advantage of the decentralized and distributed framework and thereby avoid a single point of trust. Moreover, blockchain technology ensures the immutability of the data strengthening the integrity of the system. In the proposed framework, Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain technology, is used for identity management in VANET. All the vehicles with their pseudo IDs are registered, validated, and revoked using the blockchain technology. The vehicles in the network check the validity of the safety messages received from the neighboring nodes, using the services provided by the road side units that have access to the blockchain. This framework works on looking-up the pseudo IDs and public keys on the blockchain for their validity, thus promising a light-weight authentication and reduced computation and communication overhead for vehicles to access the safety messages in the network

A complex web of factors influence children's commercial media literacy

If they don’t know an ad from information, how can they grasp how companies use their personal data? ask Sonia Livingstone, Kjartan Ólafsson and George Maie

School Selection for Their Children in Canada: What Do Chinese Parent-Students Consider?

In recent years, more and more Chinese students have come to Canada for their education. Some of them are parents, and they bring their children with them. Using a multiple case study design, this study explored these international parent-students in regards to how they select schools for their children. Six participants were recruited. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Data analysis reveals that participants viewed school selection for their children as their responsibility and thus they were highly engaged in the process. No significant challenges arose in the process of school selection as parents adopted different strategies. Participants considered five key factors when selecting schools for their children, including peers’ family background, school rank, language of instruction, impression of the teachers, and parents’ religious background. These factors were shaped by the Chinese culture, the participants’ class identity, and their anxiety and expectations towards their children’s future. Key words: International parent-student, parental involvement, school selection, social class identity Ces dernières années, de plus en plus d'étudiants chinois sont venus au Canada pour y faire leurs études. Certains d'entre eux sont des parents, et ils amènent leurs enfants avec eux. À l'aide d'un modèle d'étude de cas multiples, cette étude s'est intéressée à ces parents-étudiants internationaux et à la façon dont ils choisissent les écoles pour leurs enfants. Six participants ont été recrutés. Les données ont été recueillies par le biais d'entretiens semi-structurés. L'analyse des données révèle que les participants considèrent le choix de l'école pour leurs enfants comme leur responsabilité et qu'ils sont donc très engagés dans le processus. Aucun défi significatif ne s’est présenté au cours du processus de sélection des écoles, les parents ayant adopté différentes stratégies. Les participants ont pris en compte cinq facteurs clés lors du choix de l'école de leurs enfants, à savoir le milieu familial des pairs, le classement de l'école, la langue d'enseignement, l'impression des enseignants et l'appartenance religieuse des parents. Ces facteurs ont été façonnés par la culture chinoise, l'identité de classe des participants, ainsi que leur anxiété et leurs attentes quant à l'avenir de leurs enfants. Mots-clés : parent-étudiant international, implication des parents, choix de l'école, identité de classe social

Impact of Pharmacist Intervention on Health Promotion Activities in Asthmatic Patients.

Asthma is a highly variable disease where the pattern, frequency and intensity of symptoms may vary within an individual over a period of time and may also vary among individuals in duration and severity. While there is no cure for asthma, these changing characteristics make the management of the disease a challenge for both the health care professional and patient. Given the highly variable nature of the disease, it is important that patients have a good understanding of the disease process, are able to recognize worsening asthma symptoms, and are able to appropriately use and correctly administer the asthma medications.This study showed that improved patient knowledge on its own improve morbidity and mortality. Enabling patients to identify problems by providing the necessary skills, with the assistance of the health care team may revolutionize the world of asthma. This study confirmed that knowledge of asthma improved asthma control and asthma quality of life. A good correlation was found between knowledge and asthma quality of life. This study also addresses the issue of asthma management in the Indian rural setting. In rural area, asthma management practices have been shown to be poorer and asthma mortality rates considerably higher than those of metropolitan areas. There are a limited number of accesses to health care services and shortages in specialist services are increasing the asthma. The chronic shortage of medical practitioner's results in extremely long waiting times, and often patients fail to approach health care practitioners due to difficulty of access. Therefore, it becomes paramount that people with asthma in rural areas become involved in self-management of their asthma and that the communitybased health care providers be more proactive in facilitating these self-management behaviors

Hypertension control: results from the Diabetes Care Program of Nova Scotia registry and impact of changing clinical practice guidelines

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to determine the rate of blood pressure control according to 4 sets of Canadian guidelines published over a decade in patients with diabetes mellitus attending Diabetes Centres in the province of Nova Scotia. METHODS: One hundred randomly selected charts from each of 13 Diabetes Centres audited between 1997 and 2001 were extracted from the Diabetes Care Program of Nova Scotia Registry. Multivariate logistic regression analyses examined the relationship between individual characteristics and self-reported antihypertensive use. Included were 1132 adults, mean age 63 years (48% male), with 9 years mean time since diagnosis of diabetes. RESULTS: According to the 1992 guidelines, 63% of the patients and according to the 2003 guidelines, 84% of patients were above target blood pressure or receiving antihypertensive medications. Forty-seven percent of patients are considered to be hypertensive and not on treatment according to 2003 guidelines. The results of the multivariate analyses showed that the only factors independently associated with anti-hypertensive use was oral anti-hyperglycemic use. CONCLUSION: Hypertension is an additional risk factor in those with diabetes mellitus for macrovascular and microvascular complications. The health and budgetary impacts of addressing the treatment gap need to be further explored

Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking

Entity Resolution is a core data integration task that relies on Blocking to scale to large datasets. Schema-agnostic blocking achieves very high recall, requires no domain knowledge and applies to data of any structuredness and schema heterogeneity. This comes at the cost of many irrelevant candidate pairs (i.e., comparisons), which can be significantly reduced by Meta-blocking techniques that leverage the entity co-occurrence patterns inside blocks: first, pairs of candidate entities are weighted in proportion to their matching likelihood, and then, pruning discards the pairs with the lowest scores. Supervised Meta-blocking goes beyond this approach by combining multiple scores per comparison into a feature vector that is fed to a binary classifier. By using probabilistic classifiers, Generalized Supervised Meta-blocking associates every pair of candidates with a score that can be used by any pruning algorithm. For higher effectiveness, new weighting schemes are examined as features. Through extensive experiments, we identify the best pruning algorithms, their optimal sets of features, as well as the minimum possible size of the training set