Ripples of Gratitude: The Flow-on Effects of Practicing Gratitude in the Classroom Environment

This research explores God’s call to gratitude, summarizes current research on the benefits of gratitude, identifies key gratitude disciplines/practices, and utilizes a conceptual framework to study gratitude in the context of educational settings. In contribution to the relatively recent discussion on gratitude, especially in the education field, the researchers explored the effects when pre-service teachers practice an inner attitude of gratitude and intentionally express gratitude in the classroom setting. This study expands the current educational research of gratitude by incorporating three primary gratitude practices – the State of Preparedness, gratitude language, and gratitude journaling – and examining both personal benefits and flow-on effect toward the teaching-learning process. Fourteen pre-service elementary school teachers were invited to practice gratitude during nine weeks of their full-time fieldwork placements. Participants experienced personal benefits such as enhanced well-being, strengthened relationships, and heightened cognitive skills. Ripples of gratitude were observed as positive flow-on effects in their classrooms: a more positive and calmer classroom atmosphere, better behaved students, and students more willing to focus effort towards learning. Pre-service teachers also experienced a flow-on effect towards themselves through increased resiliency when facing adversity and greater satisfaction in teaching. These findings are significant for the field of education as the power of gratitude can foster positive transformation through promoting engaged environments and strengthened relationships for both teacher and student

An Independent Evaluation of the Strategic Legal Fund for Vulnerable Young Migrants

The Strategic Legal Fund for Vulnerable Young Migrants1 (SLF) was set up by the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund (DPOWMF) in 2011. When the Diana Fund closed down in late 2012, Trust for London agreed to take over the hosting of the SLF and provided additional funding with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation for a second phase (December 2012 to March 2014 initially, though this has now been extended).In 2012 an interim evaluation of the SLF concluded that it was achieving results, and suggested some changes of focus and operation for the future. One year on, the purpose of this further evaluation is: a. to identify the full range of outcomes, benefits and changes to which the SLF project has contributed in order to understand the value of what has been funded to date. b. to help Trust for London, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and other potential funders discuss and decide if and how they want to take forward the funding of strategic legal work on migration issues in the current climate. c. to take stock of the model being used to identify, assess, support and review SLF grants and learn lessons about this which can: i) help improve current ways of working; ii) enable decisions about how such a fund should be administered in the future. d. to stimulate discussions about the potential use of such a model in funding strategic legal work in other areas of law

plavi

plavi is an audiovisual collaboration between composers Louise Harris and Jane Stanley, for Regeneration, an arts-science project inspired by stem cell biology and regenerative medicine; the proliferation of sonic and visual cells being reflective of regenerative biological processes

Detecting binocular 3-D motion in static 3-D noise: No effect of viewing distance.

Relative binocular disparity cannot tell us the absolute 3-D shape of an object, nor its 3-D trajectory if it is moving, unless the visual system has independent access to how far away the object is at any moment. Indeed, as the viewing distance is changed, the same disparate retinal motions will correspond to very different real 3-D trajectories. In this paper we were interested in whether binocular 3-D motion detection is affected by viewing distance. We used a visual search task in which the observer is asked to detect a target dot, moving in 3-D, amidst 3-D stationary distractor dots. We found that distance does not affect detection performance. Motion-in-depth is consistently harder to detect than the equivalent lateral motion, for all viewing distances. For a constant retinal motion with both lateral and motion-in-depth components, detection performance is constant despite variations in viewing distance that produce large changes in the direction of the 3-D trajectory. We conclude that binocular 3-D motion detection relies on retinal, not absolute visual signals

Doing More for Our Children: Modeling a Universal Child Allowance or More Generous Child Tax Credit

Child poverty in the United States remains stubbornly high, with 12.2 million children living in poverty in 2013. Nearly 17 percent of children in the United States lived in poverty in 2013 -- a higher rate than for other age groups, and considerably higher than the child poverty rate in other advanced industrialized countries. The U.S. deep child poverty rate -- children who live in families with incomes less than half of the poverty line -- was 4.5 percent of all children in 2013, meaning nearly 1 in 20 children live in families that cannot even afford half of what is considered a minimally adequate living.One key policy for reducing child poverty is the child tax credit (CTC) -- which reduces the child poverty rate from 18.8 percent to 16.5 percent of American children. There is broad acceptance of the importance of the CTC, and key expansions to the CTC were made permanent at the end of 2015. At a moment when leaders ranging from President Barack Obama to Speaker Paul Ryan are talking about poverty, now is an opportune time to explore policy options that would build on this success. This report models two approaches to reduce child poverty in the United States even further -- a universal child allowance and an expanded CTC.A universal child allowance is a cash benefit that is provided to all families with children without regard to their income, earnings, or other qualifying conditions, and that could be subject to taxes for families with high incomes. The U.S. child tax credit, in contrast, is provided only to families that meet a threshold for earnings, phasing in as earnings increase and then phasing out as earnings rise higher. While most other advanced industrialized countries have some kind of universal support for children, the United States does not.For each approach, we begin with a modest reform, and then model increasingly generous versions. In our simulations, we find that even the modest reforms generate important poverty reductions. Our results also make clear that the more we spend on these programs, the greater the reduction in poverty the United States can achieve

Discrete event simulation tool for analysis of qualitative models of continuous processing systems

An artificial intelligence design and qualitative modeling tool is disclosed for creating computer models and simulating continuous activities, functions, and/or behavior using developed discrete event techniques. Conveniently, the tool is organized in four modules: library design module, model construction module, simulation module, and experimentation and analysis. The library design module supports the building of library knowledge including component classes and elements pertinent to a particular domain of continuous activities, functions, and behavior being modeled. The continuous behavior is defined discretely with respect to invocation statements, effect statements, and time delays. The functionality of the components is defined in terms of variable cluster instances, independent processes, and modes, further defined in terms of mode transition processes and mode dependent processes. Model construction utilizes the hierarchy of libraries and connects them with appropriate relations. The simulation executes a specialized initialization routine and executes events in a manner that includes selective inherency of characteristics through a time and event schema until the event queue in the simulator is emptied. The experimentation and analysis module supports analysis through the generation of appropriate log files and graphics developments and includes the ability of log file comparisons

Effects of Simulated Student Interaction on Student Perceptions of Teaching Presence

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of the instructor posting in online discussions as a simulated student; particularly the impact simulated student interaction (SSI) had on the instructor/student relationship. Student perceptions were examined using a modified version of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) survey to determine what impact SSI had on teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence within the online classroom. The full 34 item CoI Survey was piloted in the summer of 2014 at a small comprehensive university located in northeast Texas. A factor analysis was conducted on the data and the top items from each factor in the instrument extracted. The resulting 17 item instrument demonstrated both validity and reliability. This modified CoI Survey was used in the fall of 2014 with three special education courses making up a control group and an intervention group in a pre-post experimental design. An ANOVA was performed to compare the results of the pre-course and post-course surveys by group. The ANOVA showed a statistically significant difference for all three factors for the intervention group between the pre- and post-course survey, while no significance between surveys was shown for the control group

"Properties of Vibrissa follicle cells during follicle development and regeneration, and their interactions with embryonic stem cells."

Follicular dermal cells possess properties that regulate induction of follicle formation, hair growth, and follicle end bulb regeneration after amputation. While the molecular basis for these developmental interactions are being uncovered, it is evident that innervation, pigmentation and vascular! sation of the follicle, together with its role as a stem cell repository, make interpretations of molecular function within the follicle, complex. This thesis examined aspects of vibrissa follicle development using immunohistochemistry, and demonstrated that segregation of the follicle dermis and epithelial differentiation were defined by lamin-A antibody. Versican, a proteoglycan recently implicated in dermal papilla induction, was absent from early dermal condensations, but its expression correlated with follicle innervation during development and the adult hair growth cycle. When lower follicle regeneration was studied with in situ hybridisation and immunohistochemistry, versican showed two distinct expression domains. These were the dermal components of the end bulb and the follicle neck. BrdU labelling of cell division showed regeneration of the epithelial component to be consistent with stem cell location. Paucity of dermal cell proliferation left the precise origin of the new dermal papilla unresolved, but a-smooth muscle actin expression showed that dermal sheath cells moved through the glassy membrane. Sonic hedgehog expression indicated that epithelial-mesenchymal interactions, evident in follicle development, were mirrored in regeneration. A co-culture model investigated the capacity of follicular dermal cells to induce embryonic stem (ES) cell differentiation. Unexpectedly, follicle cells were seen to maintain ES cells in an undifferentiated condition. Differentiation assays demonstrated that ES cells remained pluripotent after co-culture, lnterleukin-6 family cytokines, known to maintain ES cell pluripotency, were detected by RT-PCR in cultured cells and vibrissa follicles. Thus, since the follicle dermis produces these cytokines, they may be acting to inhibit the differentiation of follicular epithelial stem cells and/or maintain multipotent stem cell populations in the follicle

Clients As Teachers

If there ever were a time in which we need lawyers who are wise and offer a healthy dose of reflective skepticism, it is now. Everyday we are invited to engage in cognitive shortcuts to reinforce bias and pump up fear. As law professors, we have a choice: we are either complicit in ensuring that our students are good soldiers for the status quo or we develop teaching strategies to ensure that the future lawyers we are training have an appreciation of their roles in the preservation of justice. As teachers we can work to inspire students to use their legal skills to bring about a more just society. It is very tempting for us, as law professors, to resist taking responsibility for what our students take from our classes and do with their lives. Do teachers have any obligation to teach students to do good? I think we are obliged to take responsibility for what we produce. Too often the products of our classrooms do little to improve the world. If our teaching methods merely reproduce the status quo, we cannot sit back in our ivory towers and bemoan the state of the world. As educators we can make a significant difference in the ways in which our students engage in the critical value decisions that confront them as actors in the community