[Review of] Clara E. Rodriguez, ed. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media

The anthology Latin Looks is an important contribution to the literature on Latinos and their relationship to the mass media in the United States. It builds on the earlier work by Rosa Linda Fregoso, George Hadley-Garcia, Chon Noriega, Luis Reyes, Peter Ruble, Allen Woll, and others. The book focuses primarily on television and film; however, there is no discussion of the films produced in other countries, or the Spanish language films produced in the United States. The images that are developed in music, literature, or magazines are also not discussed, although there is an admission that these are an important sources which require analysis

Afrocentrism and the Peopling of the Americas

This essay focuses on a theory of human development that has been promoted aggressively by a group of Afrocentrists in recent years - that the Western Hemisphere was first populated by Africoids or Black people who came to the Americas by way of Asia and the Bering Straits with little or no change in their physical or racial characteristics. As discussed in this article, the theory has no support in the evidence collected by scientists in various fields. The essay focuses on the basic claims and methods used by the Afrocentrists to support their theory, including their misuse or misinterpretation of mostly outdated scholarship produced in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A brief concluding section makes reference to the potential repercussions of this theory on relations between African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos of Native American and part Native American background

The power of please: How courtesy scripts improve self-control and reduce peer conflict by creating new language patterns

This teacher inquiry project describes how one first grade teacher learned to use coached language supports to improve children’s self-control and cooperation. Courtesy scripts were created in the process. The development of courtesy scripts and their application in early elementary classrooms is presented. Courtesy scripts are specific phrases explicitly taught (I do, we do, you do), reinforced, and used in conversations by both the speaker and listener. Children learned how to make requests while also honoring the needs of others. Use of these pragmatic language supports helped to create a peaceful classroom community. A practical method for teaching courteous language patterns to young children is described by presenting scripts that can be easily adopted or modified by teachers. Scripts for peer requests and for sharing are provided as examples. The courtesy scripts method may be of interest to scholars studying the relationship between language usage and prosocial behavior in early childhood settings. Teacher educators may also be interested in the method when providing professional development related to social, emotional and character development or when teaching classroom management

The Effect of Public Pre-Kindergarten Attendance on First Grade Reading and Social Achievement: A District Level Analysis

The purpose of this study was to test the relationship between attending a school district Pre-K program and children\u27s later literacy and behavior outcomes in the beginning and middle of first grade. Children\u27s text level, letter-sound identification, sight words, spelling and citizenship skills were measured. The study included 880 children who attended the division Pre-K program and 176 children who attended no formal or institutional preschool of any kind. Selection bias was addressed through propensity score matching, completed using optimal matching. Independent-samples t tests were run on literacy and behavior measures. Subgroup analysis was performed to test the effect of Pre-K attendance on first grade behavior across different levels of school quality experienced in kindergarten. Literacy measures in first grade included the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) and the Developmental Reading Assessment, 2nd Edition (DRA 2). Behavior was measured using a single behavior sum score composed of seven citizenship grades drawn from report cards. The study found significant effects of attending Pre-K, in the small to medium range, on all reading measures administered in both the beginning and the middle of first grade. The average effect size across all literacy measures was .35, a small to moderate effect. Behavior results for the two groups were nearly identical. Further subgroup analysis by school quality found that children who attended New Day Pre-K and also went on to a fair quality school in kindergarten, as opposed to a low quality school, had significantly better behavior than children who had no preschool experience. The study strengthens the evidence supporting the ability of Pre-K to significantly improve children\u27s literacy results with persistent gains into the middle of first grade. The study also raises the concern that children\u27s social and emotional development is not receiving adequate instructional focus in the form of lesson plans, activities or time in the division Pre-K in order to make a meaningful difference for children in later grade school. The study contributes to the PK – 3 alignment discourse and offers a valuable case study in universal Pre-K access. Implications are shared for practice, policy and research

[Review of] Chon Noriega and Ana M. Lopez, eds., The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the relationship between the media arts and the Latino communities of the United States. A number of important books and essays have been published on the subject, most notably Chon Noriega, ed. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), George Hadley-Garcia, Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures (New York: Carol Publishing, 1993), and Gary D. Keller, Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook (Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1994). In fact, there have been so many books, edited collections, and essays published on the subject in recent years that they are beginning to bump into each other in dramatic ways. A very recent example of this is the re-publication in Clara E. Rodriguez, ed. Latin Looks: (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997) of Lillian Jimenez\u27s 1993 essay Moving from the Margin to the Center: Puerto Rican Cinema in New York, which also appears in this excellent, slightly earlier collection of essays edited by Chon Noriega and Ana M. Lopez.The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts is in fact limited mostly to a discussion of film and video

A Novel Fourier Transform B-spline Method for Option Pricing

We present a new efficient and robust framework for European option pricing under continuous-time asset models from the family of exponential semimartingale processes. We introduce B-spline interpolation theory to derivative pricing to provide an accurate closed-form representation of the option price under an inverse Fourier transform. We compare our method with some state-of-the-art option pricing methods, and demonstrate that it is extremely fast and accurate. This suggests a wide range of applications, including the use of more realistic asset models in high frequency trading. Examples considered in the paper include option pricing under asset models, including stochastic volatility and jumps, computation of the Greeks, and the inverse problem of cross-sectional calibration

Generalized routhian calculations within the Skyrme-Hartree-Fock approximation

We consider here variational solutions in the Hartree-Fock approximation upon breaking time reversal and axial symmetries. When decomposed on axial harmonic oscillator functions, the corresponding single particle triaxial eigenstates as functions of the usual cylindrical coordinates (r, $\theta$, z) are evaluated on a mesh in r and z to be integrated within Gauss-Hermite and Gauss-Laguerre approaches and as Fourier decompositions in the angular variable $\theta$. Using an effective interaction of the Skyrme type, the Hartree-Fock hamiltonian is also obtained as a Fourier series allowing a two dimensional calculation of its matrix elements. This particular choice is shown to lead in most cases to shorter computation times compared to the usual decomposition on triaxial harmonic oscillator states. We apply this method to the case of the semi-quantal approach of large amplitude collective motion corresponding to a generalized routhian formalism and present results in the A=150 superdeformed region for the coupling of global rotation and intrinsic vortical modes in what is known after Chandrasekhar as the S-ellipsoid coupling case.Comment: LaTeX using elsart, 32 pages, 4 included figures, submitted to Nuclear Physics A (revised version