KEY OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN: NEW EVIDENCE FROM GROWING UP IN IRELAND. ESRI Research Bulletin 2010/1/1

The welfare of children is a key concern of Irish society and of government policy. A major new project, Growing Up in Ireland, aims to describe the lives of a large scale representative sample of Irish children, and to analyse the factors associated with positive and negative outcomes in terms of such areas as health and education. Such evidence is of critical importance in guiding policy choices affecting children. The study is a longitudinal one, i.e. it will follow two groups or “cohorts” of children over time: a cohort of 11,000 infants (nine months old) and cohort of 8,500 nine-year olds. A recently published report† based on initial data gathered on the nine-year old group already provides a great deal of interesting evidence on several domains of child outcomes including: • physical health and well-being, • educational achievement and intellectual development, • social, emotional and behavioural well-being

Safe at School: Addressing the School Environment and LGBT Safety through Policy and Legislation

"The mistreatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students is worse today than many might realize, with unacceptable complicity by school personnel that continues to exacerbate the problem," according to Stuart Biegel, co-author of a groundbreaking new report released today. The report, Safe at School: Addressing the School Environment and LGBT Safety through Policy and Legislation, presents a series of recommendations and model legislation to make public schools safer for LGBT students. The new report is authored by Biegel and Sheila James Kuehl and is a collaboration between the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education and the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, with financial support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.Safe at School documents the persistence of hostile and unsafe school environments that can result in lower educational outcomes and higher rates of depression and suicide for LGBT students. Citing an extensive body of research, it also takes note of the growing legal exposure that schools face when they do not act to change these hostile environments. The authors note and respond to the lack of resources and institutional support that school administrators, teachers, and educational support professionals sometimes face in their attempts to make schools more welcoming to LGBT students.The report contains a series of policy recommendations to ensure schools are welcoming and safe for LGBT students. These recommendations cover areas such as school climate, curriculum, and the particular role of school sports in defining a school's culture.Safe at School also contains model legislation, offering a range of options for state legislatures to adopt, including general prohibitions against bullying, harassment and intimidation in schools, as well as sections that address teacher education and professional development. "The addition of a Model State Code to the analysis and recommendations in the report will encourage state legislatures to adopt a comprehensive and tested set of statutes to help remedy the problems of discrimination in our schools," said co-author Sheila Kuehl, a former State Senator from California.The authors explain that the overarching purpose of all their recommendations is to make schools safe and improve the quality of life for everyone within our education system. "In this area, educators are not required to change their personal values or religious beliefs," said co-author Biegel. "However, all students must be treated with equal dignity and equal respect by school officials, both under the law and as a matter of morality and common decency.

Heterogeneity in the Speed of Adjustment to Target Leverage: A UK Study

Responding to the need to address heterogeneity in the speed of adjustment (SOA) to target leverage in a manner that reflects the fractional nature of leverage, we estimate SOAs across sub-samples of UK firms using the Dynamic Panel Fractional estimator (DPF). Using firm risk as a categorising variable, we show that riskier firms tend to adjust to target leverage at a faster rate, suggesting opportunity costs of being away from target leverage are higher for riskier firms. We also demonstrate the bias in SOAs as estimated using a model that does not account for the fractional nature of leverage, and show that this bias can result in spurious inferences being made when comparing SOAs across sub-samples. Our results cast doubt on existing evidence relating to heterogeneity in SOAs of UK firms

Building Trust in Local Community Organizations: Where Do We Start, and How Can We Make a Difference?

Trust is the glue that binds organizations and communities together. Building trust in local community organizations has been identified as a viable strategy for the economic development of organizations, communities, and regions. In this article, we identify how Extension professionals can begin working with local boards (of any type) to promote the building of trust among members. We develop the board member accountability and expectations (BMAE) tool, which can be used to more clearly identify new board member expectations. More clearly identifying board member expectations is one of many steps that local boards should take to build trust among members

The effects of adult guidance and peer discussion on the development of children's representations: evidence from the training of pedestrian skills

It was hypothesised that practical training is effective in improving children's pedestrian skills because adult scaffolding and peer discussion during training specifically promote E3 level representation (linguistically-encoded, experientially-grounded, generalisable knowledge), as defined by Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) representational redescription (RR) model. Two studies were conducted to examine in detail the impact of this social input, in the context of simulation-based training in roadside search skills. Five- to eight-year-olds were pre-tested on ability to detect relevant road crossing features. They then participated in four training sessions designed to promote attunement to these, under peer discussion condition vs adult guidance conditions (Study 1), and adult-child vs adult-group conditions (Study 2). Performance at post-test was compared to that of controls who underwent no training. Study 1 found that children in the adult guidance condition improved significantly more than those in the peer discussion or control conditions, and this improvement was directly attributable to appropriation of E3 level representations from adult dialogue. Study 2 found that progress was greater still when adult scaffolding was supplemented by peer discussion, with E3 level representation attributable to children's exploration of conflicting ideas. The implications of these findings for the RR model and for practical road safety education are discussed

Hyperthermia as an Antineoplastic Treatment Modality

Preclinical evaluation of hyperthermia for treating tumerous cancers is discussed

The spontaneous formation of stereotypes via cumulative cultural evolution

All people share knowledge of cultural stereotypes of social groups—but what are the origins of these stereotypes? We examined whether stereotypes form spontaneously as information is repeatedly passed from person to person. As information about novel social targets was passed down a chain of individuals, what initially began as a set of random associations evolved into a system that was simplified and categorically structured. Over time, novel stereotypes emerged that not only were increasingly learnable but also allowed generalizations to be made about previously unseen social targets. By illuminating how cognitive and social factors influence how stereotypes form and change, these findings show how stereotypes might naturally evolve or be manipulated

Augmentation of Power Output of Axisymmetric Ducted Wind Turbines by Porous Trailing Edge Disks

This paper presents analytical and experimental results that demonstrated that the power output from a ducted wind turbine can be dramatically increased by the addition of a trailing edge device such as a porous disk. In addition, the trailing edge device can be designed to be geometrically adaptable, allowing the turbine to spin up at low wind speeds and providing relief from aerodynamic loads at high wind speeds.non