Book Review: Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education

Review of Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education

Book Review: The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

Review of Kevin Carey\u27s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

Beyond Boyer: SoTL in the Context of Interesting Scholarly Things

The positive effects of Ernest Boyer’s broader definition of scholarship have been attenuated by stress on published outcomes as indicators of all his scholarships, including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). At universities outside the research university sector, we need to find ways to recognize and reward a wide variety of interesting scholarly things related to teaching that are not likely to meet the formal assessment criteria that have come to define the SoTL category of scholarship. The faculty’s scholarliness in teaching should be recognized and evaluated directly

Methods for Reconstructing Networks with Incomplete Information.

Network representations of complex systems are widespread and reconstructing unknown networks from data has been intensively researched in statistical and scientific communities more broadly. Two challenges in network reconstruction problems include having insufficient data to illuminate the full structure of the network and needing to combine information from different data sources. Addressing these challenges, this thesis contributes methodology for network reconstruction in three respects. First, we consider sequentially choosing interventions to discover structure in directed networks focusing on learning a partial order over the nodes. This focus leads to a new model for intervention data under which nodal variables depend on the lengths of paths separating them from intervention targets rather than on parent sets. Taking a Bayesian approach, we present partial-order based priors and develop a novel Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for computing posterior expectations over directed acyclic graphs. The utility of the MCMC approach comes from designing new proposals for the Metropolis algorithm that move locally among partial orders while independently sampling graphs from each partial order. The resulting Markov Chains mix rapidly and are ergodic. We also adapt an existing strategy for active structure learning, develop an efficient Monte Carlo procedure for estimating the resulting decision function, and evaluate the proposed methods numerically using simulations and benchmark datasets. We next study penalized likelihood methods using incomplete order information as arising from intervention data. To make the notion of incomplete information precise, we introduce and formally define incomplete partial orders which subsumes the important special case of a known total ordering of the nodes. This special case lies along an information lattice and we study the reconstruction performance of penalized likelihood methods at different points along this lattice. Finally, we present a method for ranking a network's potential edges using time-course data. The novelty is our development of a nonparametric gradient-matching procedure and a related summary statistic for measuring the strength of relationships among components in dynamic systems. Simulation studies demonstrate that given sufficient signal moving using this procedure to move from linear to additive approximations leads to improved rankings of potential edges.PhDStatisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113316/1/jbhender_1.pd

Religiosity and music copyright theft among Canadian Baptist youth

This study examines the views of 706 Canadian Baptist youth (between the ages of 14 and 18 years) on the moral issue of music copyright theft, and explores the influence on these views of age, sex, Sunday church attendance, personal prayer, personal Bible reading, and conservative Bible believing. The participants were attending Springforth 2005 (a major Canadian Baptist Youth Conference). The data demonstrate a high level of acceptance of music copyright theft, with only 26% of the participants agreeing that downloading copyright music from the Internet without paying is always wrong. Employing multiple regression modelling, the data demonstrated that, as Canadian Baptist youth mature (grew older), as they became more familiar with Bible teaching (through frequent reading of the scriptures), and as they became more integrated within the community of faith (through frequent Sunday church attendance), so they take a tougher line against music copyright theft

Picking Pedagogical Practices Students Prefer: An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Teaching Tools in Face-to-Face Versus Online Delivery

This study explores graduate student perceptions of fourteen commonly used teaching methods. Convenience samples were drawn from a university exclusively delivering its MBA program via the Internet and a university providing traditional face-to-face classroom instruction. Overall, no significant preference differences were found for nine of the fourteen pedagogical methods. Students enrolled in online classes perceive textbooks, tutorials, and Internet activities as significantly more effective in helping them achieve their educational goals than students enrolled in face-to-face classes. Students enrolled in face-to-face classes rated guest speakers and team presentations as more effective learning tools than their online counterparts. The perceived comparative effectiveness rankings of the alternative teaching tools in assisting higher learning is discussed

Fish Assemblages Associated with Artificial Reefs of Concrete Aggregates or Quarry Stone Offshore Miami Beach, Florida, USA

Few studies have compared the suitability of different artificial reef construction materials in terms of their efficacy in acquiring diverse faunal assemblages. We compared the fishes associated with 12 co-located reefs constructed of limestone quarry boulders, concrete-gravel aggregate, or concrete-tire aggregate (four of each substrate) in 7 m of water, 200 m offshore Miami Beach, Florida, USA. All 12 reefs were deployed 100 m apart the same day in two lines of six. The four quarry stone reefs consist of a pile of 50 boulders each. The remaining eight reefs, of concrete-gravel aggregate and concrete-tire aggregate, were each constructed with 25 1.5 m edge and 25 1.2 m edge tetrahedron modules. Every two months from October 1998 to February 2001, SCUBA divers recorded fish species, abundance, and length, as well as spiny lobster, Panulirus argus, abundance. One hundred and forty-six species of fishes were recorded during the study period. The abundance and species richness of fish on each treatment exhibited a significant (p\u3c0.05) seasonal variation with summer months having the greatest numbers and winter the lowest. There was no significant difference in total fish or spiny lobster abundance or fish biomass amongst the three reef types (p\u3e0.05). Likewise, multi-dimensional scaling of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity indices did not indicate clustering of fish assemblages by reef type. Comparison of pre-deployment fish counts from the reef sites and neighboring hard bottom and jetty with counts from the same sites two years post-deployment indicate the artificial reefs increased both fish abundance and richness in the local area

Clinical evaluation of alignment methods using the Dioptron II

A clinical investigation into the significance of alignment methods as used with the Dioptron II Automated. Refractor was compared to the subjective refraction. A total of 110 eyes were tested. using two differing alignment modes: 1) instrument alignment target centered with the pupil, i.e. on the pupil axis; 2) instrument alignment target centered on the corneal light reflex, i.e. on the line of sight. Results showed no significant difference between either of the alignment methods when they were compared to the subjective refraction examination results