Black Male Student Success in Higher Education: A Report From the National Black Male College Achievement Study

The report presents insights from interviews with successful male African-American college students, highlighting factors that helped them succeed in a range of contexts: getting to college, choosing colleges, paying for college, transitioning to college, matters of engagement, and responding productively to racism

PREDATOR-PREY SYSTEMS IN PEST MANAGEMENT

The use of chemical pesticides frequently causes minor pests to become serious problems by disturbing the natural controls that keep them in check. As a result, it is possible to suffer heavier crop losses after pesticides are introduced than before their introduction. Efficient use of pesticides requires complete biological modeling that takes the appropriate predator-prey relationships into account. A bioeconomic model is introduced involving three key species: a primary target pest, a secondary pest, and a natural enemy of the secondary pest. Optimal decision rules are derived and contrasted with myopic decision making, which treats the predator-prey system as an externality. The issue of resistance in the secondary pest is examined briefly.Crop Production/Industries,

Men of Color: A Role for Policymakers in Improving the Status of Black Male Students in U.S. Higher Education

This report calls for greater involvement by federal and state policymakers and others to improve black male college readiness and completion. It presents policy-relevant trends concerning black male college students, highlights promising practices on campuses across the country, and proposes suggestions for policymakers and other stakeholders

MUSE CSP: An Extension to the Constraint Satisfaction Problem

This paper describes an extension to the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) called MUSE CSP (MUltiply SEgmented Constraint Satisfaction Problem). This extension is especially useful for those problems which segment into multiple sets of partially shared variables. Such problems arise naturally in signal processing applications including computer vision, speech processing, and handwriting recognition. For these applications, it is often difficult to segment the data in only one way given the low-level information utilized by the segmentation algorithms. MUSE CSP can be used to compactly represent several similar instances of the constraint satisfaction problem. If multiple instances of a CSP have some common variables which have the same domains and constraints, then they can be combined into a single instance of a MUSE CSP, reducing the work required to apply the constraints. We introduce the concepts of MUSE node consistency, MUSE arc consistency, and MUSE path consistency. We then demonstrate how MUSE CSP can be used to compactly represent lexically ambiguous sentences and the multiple sentence hypotheses that are often generated by speech recognition algorithms so that grammar constraints can be used to provide parses for all syntactically correct sentences. Algorithms for MUSE arc and path consistency are provided. Finally, we discuss how to create a MUSE CSP from a set of CSPs which are labeled to indicate when the same variable is shared by more than a single CSP.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Disproportionate Impact Of K-12 School Suspension And Expulsion On Black Students In Southern States

This report aims to make transparent the rates at which school discipline practices and policies impact Black students in every K-12 public school district in 13 Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia

GENDER'S ROLE IN MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTANCE: SEX IN THE JOURNAL

Women authors fare poorly at the hands of referees in some economics journals, especially when the review process is not blind. Using data on the 155 manuscripts submitted to the NJARE for publication during the period 1984-88, we found no evidence of differential referee acceptance rates for manuscripts with female and male lead authors.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Environmentally Responsible Management Strategies for Municipal Athletic Fields and Grounds

Municipal athletic fields and grounds provide opportunities for recreation and physical activity. However these sites are often exposed to over use, improper plant selection and other factors predisposing them to pest problems

They (Don't) Care About Education: A Counternarrative on Black Male Students' Responses to Inequitable Schooling

Focus group interviews and systematic content analysis of 304 essays written by black male undergraduates refute the dominant message that black men do not care about education. On the contrary, these students aspire to earn doctoral degrees in education despite acute understanding that the education system is stacked against them. The analysis asks what compels that dedication