Engaging Disadvantaged Young People in the Course of Their Lives: The Importance of Staff/Student Relationships in Alternative Education

Students who drop out, or disengage, prior to completing secondary education are at an increased risk of a range of poor social and well-being outcomes, and in turn experience reduced opportunities over the course of their lives. Although there is a body of literature identifying strategies within educational settings to counter risk factors for young people dropping out, little is known about perceptions of students in receipt of these strategies. This paper reports on a study conducted within a high school in Melbourne, Australia. Most students attending the school are at high risk of dropping out due to socio-cultural, behavioral, or mental health issues. The school utilizes alternative education practices to provide a calm and therapeutic environment to re-engage students with education, while providing a curriculum that adheres to mainstream standards. This paper reports on findings from an online questionnaire conducted with 62 students attending the school. The findings suggest that the students disengaged from mainstream schools because of a lack of support from their teachers, bullying, or behavioral issues. Students described their reasons for re-engaging with this current school as being the culture and structure of the school as well as their relationships with staff. Based on these findings, it appears that positive staff/student relationships developed and maintained under the therapeutic approach may be an effective strategy for engaging young people in education

DVM: The World’s Biggest Game of Hide-and-Seek

Diel vertical migration (DVM) refers to the daily, synchronized movement of marine animals between the surface and deep layers of the open ocean. This behavior is the largest animal migration on the planet and is undertaken every single day by trillions of animals in every ocean. Like a big game of hide-and-seek, animals that perform DVM spend the day hiding from predators in the deep ocean, and then migrate to the surface to feed under the cover of darkness. In this article we will explore this incredible strategy for survival. We will introduce the animals involved, describe how the environment of the open ocean drives DVM, and reveal the questions still to be answered as the ocean environment continues to change

Pedagogical Media Competencies of Preservice Teachers in Germany and the United States: A Comparative Analysis of Theory and Practice

Teachers need knowledge and skills to make effective use of the growing variety of media and technology texts and tools available for use in elementary and secondary education. For this reason, pedagogical media competencies are highly relevant for teachers’ professional development. The theory of media pedagogical competencies is first defined and then located in the context of the relevant scholarly literature from both Germany and the United States. We conducted a comparative analysis of German and U.S. pedagogical media competency models and report data on a survey of teacher education programs in Germany and the United States to identify the proportion of programs of study that include courses in media didactics, media and school reform, and media education. We consider the implications of the missing connections between the theoretical framework of pedagogical media competencies and the current practice of media pedagogical teacher training, revealing implications for further work needed to improve the integration of media in various school-related contexts

Hallucination Improves the Performance of Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning

Contrastive learning models based on Siamese structure have demonstrated remarkable performance in self-supervised learning. Such a success of contrastive learning relies on two conditions, a sufficient number of positive pairs and adequate variations between them. If the conditions are not met, these frameworks will lack semantic contrast and be fragile on overfitting. To address these two issues, we propose Hallucinator that could efficiently generate additional positive samples for further contrast. The Hallucinator is differentiable and creates new data in the feature space. Thus, it is optimized directly with the pre-training task and introduces nearly negligible computation. Moreover, we reduce the mutual information of hallucinated pairs and smooth them through non-linear operations. This process helps avoid over-confident contrastive learning models during the training and achieves more transformation-invariant feature embeddings. Remarkably, we empirically prove that the proposed Hallucinator generalizes well to various contrastive learning models, including MoCoV1&V2, SimCLR and SimSiam. Under the linear classification protocol, a stable accuracy gain is achieved, ranging from 0.3% to 3.0% on CIFAR10&100, Tiny ImageNet, STL-10 and ImageNet. The improvement is also observed in transferring pre-train encoders to the downstream tasks, including object detection and segmentation.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision(ICCV), 202

Beginning Teachers’ Experiences Working with a District-Employed Mentor in a North Carolina School District

This study is concerned with the experiences of beginning teachers working with a district-employed mentor. Based on Illeris’s (2002) Three Dimensions of Learning, the study sought to understand the cognitive, emotional, and social processes involved in working with a mentor through the use of one-on one, in-depth interviews. Nine beginning teachers participated in the study. Their assignments included elementary (n=4), middle grades (n=2), and high school (n=3). Data collection took place at the end of the school year and included Year 1 and Year 2 teachers. The study uncovered four findings related to these beginning teachers: mentors were helpful; mentor scheduling needed improvement; mentor support varied based on each participant’s individual school and mentor; and mentors positively impacted teacher self-efficacy through validation

Perceptions of Employers in Spokane County Regarding Employing Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

There is limited research available addressing employment opportunities for adolescents or adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With the growing population of adults with ASD in the United States, there will likely be an increase in the demand for support to help them live independently. The purpose of this research is to obtain employers’ perceptions on employing individuals with ASD. Businesses in Spokane County were mailed invitations to participate in an on-line survey. Results will be analyzed and shared with local agencies for potential program development

Satellite formation flying for an interferometry mission

The autonomous formation flying of multiple spacecraft to replace a single large satellite will be an enabling technology for many future missions. In this research, the current status of formation flying missions and technologies is determined, and the Darwin nulling interferometry mission, which aims to detect and characterise extrasolar planets, is selected as the research focus. Darwin requires high precision formation flying of multiple telescopes near the Sun-Earth L2 point. A comprehensive account of current research in astrobiology is presented which provides the motivation for a Darwin-type mission. Astrobiology is integral to the definition of formation manoeuvres and target identification. The system design issues associated with developing a higher resolution, Planet Imager mission are also explored through a preliminary mission design. Relative dynamics models for satellite formation flying control in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and L2 are developed and methods of incorporating the Earth oblateness perturbation (J2) into the equations of relative motion to improve model fidelity are investigated. The linearised J2 effect is included in the Hill equations in time averaged and time varying form. The models are verified against the Satellite Tool Kit (STK) numerical orbit propagator, and applied to optimal control system design and evaluation for formation keeping tasks. The ‘reference orbit’ modelling approach applied in LEO is applied to the development of a new formation flying model at L2. In this case, linearised equations of motion of the mirror satellites relative to the hub are derived and performance evaluated for different initial conditions. These and other higher order models are compared to STK. The linearised model is applied to controller design for station keeping and formation manoeuvring tasks suitable for a Darwin-type mission, and the role of the model in developing controllers for a load levelling guidance system is explored.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Copper accumulation from antifouling paints in five marinas on Puget Sound

Marinas have been shown to contribute elevated levels of metals to marine waters, copper (Cu) in particular. The Cu comes primarily from antifouling paints which are designed to discourage biofouling (barnacles, mussels, and other organisms) of boat hulls. In 2011 the Washington State Legislature passed SSB5436 to phase out Cu in marine antifouling paints. This legislation states that new recreational vessels with Cu-containing bottom paint may not be sold in the state after January 1, 2018. This study provides baseline data for Cu in five marinas of different configuration and size within Puget Sound and assesses potential impacts to marine biota. Four sampling events were conducted between September 2016 and June 2017. Sample media included: water (dissolved and total fractions of metals), sediments (suspended and bottom), and biota (transplanted mussels and biofilms). We found strong evidence, across sample media that Cu accumulate inside marinas to higher levels than outside marinas, regardless of marina configuration. Marinas that are more enclosed, where water is slower to flush in and out, accumulated higher levels of Cu than more open marinas. However, concentrations of Cu were rarely high enough to be above the state water quality criterion for acute impacts to aquatic life. Sediment Cu was also not above the state criteria for the protection of benthic invertebrates. This study provides an adequate baseline dataset to measure progress as a result of recent legislation towards the reduction of Cu to Puget Sound from marinas