Digital learning objects: a local response to the California State University system initiative

The purpose of this paper is to present a virtual library plan created by library directors of the 23 California State University (CSU) system campuses. The information literacy portion of the project offers a repository of high quality interactive digital learning objects (DLOs) in the MERLOT repository. Therefore, DLOs created locally at the Dr Martin Luther King, Jr Library at San José State University (SJSU) focus on topics that supplement the “core” DLO collection

Patient acceptability, safety and access : A balancing act for selecting age-appropriate oral dosage forms for paediatric and geriatric populations

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The selection and design of age-appropriate formulations intended for use in paediatric and geriatric patients are dependent on multiple factors affecting patient acceptability, safety and access. The development of an economic and effective product relies on a balanced consideration of the risks and benefits of these factors. This review provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of oral dosage forms considering key aspects of formulation design including dosage considerations, ease of use, tolerability and safety, manufacturing complexity, stability, supply and cost. Patient acceptability has been examined utilising an evidence-based approach to evaluate regulatory guidance and literature. Safety considerations including excipients and potential risk of administration errors of the different dosage forms are also discussed, together with possible manufacturing and supply challenges. Age appropriate drug product design should consider and compare i) acceptability ii) safety and iii) access, although it is important to recognise that these factors must be balanced against each other, and in some situations a compromise may need to be reached when selecting an age-appropriate formulation.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Pre-service Teachers' Attitudes Toward Hawaii Creole English

This study investigates pre-service public school teachers' attitudes concerning Hawaii Creole English (HCE), a variety of English commonly spoken by many of Hawaii's public school students. The study also explores how attitudes might differ depending on teachers' language background and whether there are differences in ratings of competence and solidarity traits. Thirty-six teachers, including 24 HCE speakers and 12 non-HCE speakers, rated five speech samples representing the following varieties of English: HCE, standard English (SE), and foreign-accented English (a distracter). A 7-point semantic differential scale was used by all raters. Raters were asked to give their first impressions of the students speaking. Multivariate and univariate analyses of variance indicated that teachers rated the SE samples significantly higher than the HCE samples. ln addition, univariate analyses of variance revealed that the non-HCE-speaking teachers rated HCE lower than did the HCE-speaking teachers. However, this second finding should be cautiously interpreted since the multivariate analysis did not show statistically significant differences. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance indicated that teachers rated HCE higher in solidarity than competence, while the opposite was the case for their ratings of SE. It is suggested that an ethnographic study be done to get a more holistic picture of pre-service teachers' attitudes toward HCE

Aboriginal Fractions: Enumerating Identity in Taiwan

Notions of identity in Taiwan are configured in relation to numbers. I examine the polyvalent capacities of enumerative technologies in both the production of ethnic identities and claims to polit- ical representation and justice. By critically historicizing the manner in which Aborigines in Taiwan have been, and continue to be, constructed as objects and subjects of scientific knowledge production through technologies of measuring, I examine the genetic claim made by some Taiwanese to be ‘‘fractionally’’ Aboriginal. Numbers and techniques of measuring are used ostensibly to know the Aborigines, but they are also used to construct a genetically unique Taiwanese identity and to incor- porate the Aborigines within projects of democratic governance. Technologies of enumeration thus serve within multiple, and sometimes contradictory, projects of representation and knowledge production

Identifying high-impact sub-structures for convolution kernels in document-level sentiment classification

Convolution kernels support the modeling of complex syntactic information in machine-learning tasks. However, such models are highly sensitive to the type and size of syntactic structure used. It is therefore an important challenge to automatically identify high impact sub-structures relevant to a given task. In this paper we present a systematic study investigating (combinations of) sequence and convolution kernels using different types of substructures in document-level sentiment classification. We show that minimal sub-structures extracted from constituency and dependency trees guided by a polarity lexicon show 1.45 point absolute improvement in accuracy over a bag-of-words classifier on a widely used sentiment corpus

Requiring Individuals to Obtain Health Insurance: A Constitutional Analysis

[Excerpt] This report analyzes certain constitutional issues raised by requiring individuals to purchase health insurance under Congress’s authority under its taxing power or its power to regulate interstate commerce. It also addresses whether the exceptions to the minimum coverage provision to purchase health insurance satisfy First Amendment freedom of religion protections. Finally, this report discusses some of the more publicized legal challenges to ACA, as well additional issues that are currently before the Court

Deformation-Driven Diffusion and Plastic Flow in Two-Dimensional Amorphous Granular Pillars

We report a combined experimental and simulation study of deformation-induced diffusion in compacted two-dimensional amorphous granular pillars, in which thermal fluctuations play negligible role. The pillars, consisting of bidisperse cylindrical acetal plastic particles standing upright on a substrate, are deformed uniaxially and quasistatically by a rigid bar moving at a constant speed. The plastic flow and particle rearrangements in the pillars are characterized by computing the best-fit affine transformation strain and non-affine displacement associated with each particle between two stages of deformation. The non-affine displacement exhibits exponential crossover from ballistic to diffusive behavior with respect to the cumulative deviatoric strain, indicating that in athermal granular packings, the cumulative deviatoric strain plays the role of time in thermal systems and drives effective particle diffusion. We further study the size-dependent deformation of the granular pillars by simulation, and find that different-sized pillars follow self-similar shape evolution during deformation. In addition, the yield stress of the pillars increases linearly with pillar size. Formation of transient shear lines in the pillars during deformation becomes more evident as pillar size increases. The width of these elementary shear bands is about twice the diameter of a particle, and does not vary with pillar size.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Charlene J. Sato's "A Nonstandard Approach to Standard English": A Major Contribution to the Field of Sociolinguistics

In her article, "A nonstandard approach to standard English" (1989), Charlene Sato addresses several issues rerated to the controversy over the use of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) and standard English (SE) in the crassroom. Opposing an assimilationist perspective and taking a pluralistic position toward language use in society, Sato stresses the importance ofunderstanding the differences between SE and minority, or nonstandard, varieties in legitimizing the educational experience of language minority groups. Sato defends her "nonstandard" approach by showing how a pruralistic perspective can contribute to the school success of minority ranguage students. She bases this view on empirical studies that show minority varieties ofEngrish are different from SE both linguistically and in discourse structure, and thus adjustments in the classroom must be made to accommodate these differences ifchirdren are to be given the opportunity to succeed. Sato also offers suggestions on what teachers can do to contribute toward equal education for minority language speakers. we will summarize Sato,s points and discuss the significance of her article