Regional Disparities in Kentucky Academic Index Scores

Recent newspaper articles by columnist Bill Bishop in the Lexington Herald-Leader point to persistent regional disparities in achievement in Kentucky public schools. In spite of a mandate to create educational equality, the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) has not eliminated inequalities in school performance scores and the problem may even be getting worse according to Mr. Bishop. The objective of the present study is to determine what disparities exist among Kentucky’s eight Service Center Regions. The analysis uses school Academic Index scores, from 1992-93 to 1996-97, averaged by region. The regional averages (or means) are compared descriptively along with the statistical application of pairwise multiple comparisons. The study’s findings show that regional disparities in Academic Index scores clearly exist. These disparities are probably owing, at least in part, to contextual effects such as ruralmetropolitan differences and socioeconomic influences. A goal of KERA should be to narrow the gap between the schools in different regions. To assess the accomplishment of this goal, it will be useful to regularly monitor disparities in the gains that regions achieve in their scores over time. The present analysis concludes that after five years, schools in the eight Service Regions have generally kept pace with one another. Thus, although greater equality is still an unrealized ideal under KERA, improvement has taken place with little evidence thus far of a “widening gap” between the higher- and lower-scoring regions. Another five years of data should tell if a widening gap between the regions has become a persistent problem

Louisiana Waltz

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The application of human motor control principles to a collective robotic arm

Current robots are no match for biological organisms when adapting to real-world, dynamic environments. Collective control strategies, such as those used by synergistic biological systems composed of large numbers of identical parts like the human nervous system, provide a novel and alternative approach for the design of fault-tolerant, adaptable robotic systems that have traditionally relied on centralized control. In this research, a robotic arm composed of multiple identical segments in a collective computational architecture was tested for its ability to produce adaptive pointing and reaching behavior. The movement rules for these robotic arm segments were based on the concepts of the "reflex arc" and the "action system" in the human nervous system. Robotic arms of three to seven encapsulated segments were tested. These arms received no central directions and used no direct informational exchange. The arms were sensor-driven at their distal, or leading, outstretched ends to maximize pointing accuracy on a two-dimensional target plane. The remaining non-distal segments in the arms were moved in a sequential order using sensed locally-available movement information about neighboring segments. Successful pointing and reaching behavior was observed in situations with and without movement obstacles. This led to the conclusion that because such behavior was not specified within each segment, the overall arm behavior emerged due to the interaction and coordination of all segments, rather than due to any single segment, centrally-controlled influence, or explicit inter-segmental method of communication

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