How the 1992 legislation will affect European financial services

European Economic Community

School Boards and Team Learning: A Phenomenological Study of the Beliefs of School Board Presidents in Central New York

The Boards of Education in New York State schools face formidable challenges in an educational environment characterized by accelerated and complex change. This contemporary context requires boards to function as high-performing teams to generate outcomes. Board members typically are well-intentioned yet unprepared for such challenges. This research study used a qualitative phenomenological design to examine the beliefs of school board presidents about how boards develop the capacity to work together to create results. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with school board presidents in Central New York. Interview questions were guided by the theoretical framework of team learning. The analysis revealed four major categories and conclusions: (a) school boards develop the capacity of their teams through acquisition and sharing of knowledge, balanced board composition, and board president leadership; (b) boards interact as a team through communication, adhering to governance structures, understanding of roles, and mutual respect; (c) boards are confronted with challenges to address including personal agendas, micromanagement, and time; and lastly, (d) school boards create results by establishing students as the highest priority and continually reflecting on performance. A group of individuals does not constitute a team; rather, successful teams (boards) perform as a unit and are accountable to a collective performance. The study recommends that boards be mindful of the beliefs of the board presidents captured in the research as they work together to create results that will benefit future generations of school children. Information gleaned from this study adds to the literature and understanding of school boards and informs school board learning and preparation

Deep Multi-view Models for Glitch Classification

Non-cosmic, non-Gaussian disturbances known as "glitches", show up in gravitational-wave data of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or aLIGO. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-view convolutional neural network to classify glitches automatically. The primary purpose of classifying glitches is to understand their characteristics and origin, which facilitates their removal from the data or from the detector entirely. We visualize glitches as spectrograms and leverage the state-of-the-art image classification techniques in our model. The suggested classifier is a multi-view deep neural network that exploits four different views for classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model improves the overall accuracy of the classification compared to traditional single view algorithms.Comment: Accepted to the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP'17

Composite Reflective/Absorptive IR-Blocking Filters Embedded in Metamaterial Antireflection Coated Silicon

Infrared (IR) blocking filters are crucial for controlling the radiative loading on cryogenic systems and for optimizing the sensitivity of bolometric detectors in the far-IR. We present a new IR filter approach based on a combination of patterned frequency selective structures on silicon and a thin (50 $\mu \textrm{m}$ thick) absorptive composite based on powdered reststrahlen absorbing materials. For a 300 K blackbody, this combination reflects $\sim$50\% of the incoming light and blocks \textgreater 99.8\% of the total power with negligible thermal gradients and excellent low frequency transmission. This allows for a reduction in the IR thermal loading to negligible levels in a single cold filter. These composite filters are fabricated on silicon substrates which provide excellent thermal transport laterally through the filter and ensure that the entire area of the absorptive filter stays near the bath temperature. A metamaterial antireflection coating cut into these substrates reduces in-band reflections to below 1\%, and the in-band absorption of the powder mix is below 1\% for signal bands below 750 GHz. This type of filter can be directly incorporated into silicon refractive optical elements

Social Change and Social Action

We define social action as a strategy to obtain limited social change at the intermediate or macro levels of society which is generally used in nonconsensus situations and employs both norm-adhering and norm-testing modes of intervention. In this formulation, the key concept is social change. This paper proposes to explore certain aspects of social change as they apply to social action. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first is a brief summary of pertinent social change theory, presented as background for part two in which are presented and discussed certain propositions about planned change that are critical to any social action endeavor. This treatment, obviously, will not cover every subconcept of social change that is applicable to social action. Nor does it include a direct discussion of power, crucial as this is for social action; that requires a separate treatment of its own. Only five concepts are selected and discussed: social movements, crisis, conflict, resistance to change, and legitimacy

Effect of supervised exercise on physical function and balance in patients with intermittent claudication

Background The aim of the study was to identify whether a standard supervised exercise programme (SEP) for patients with intermittent claudication improved specific measures of functional performance including balance. Methods A prospective observational study was performed at a single tertiary vascular centre. Patients with symptomatic intermittent claudication (Rutherford grades 1–3) were recruited to the study. Participants were assessed at baseline (before SEP) and 3, 6 and 12 months afterwards for markers of lower-limb ischaemia (treadmill walking distance and ankle : brachial pressure index), physical function (6-min walk, Timed Up and Go test, and Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) score), balance impairment using computerized dynamic posturography with the Sensory Organization Test (SOT), and quality of life (VascuQoL and Short Form 36). Results Fifty-one participants underwent SEP, which significantly improved initial treadmill walking distance (P = 0·001). Enrolment in a SEP also resulted in improvements in physical function as determined by 6-min maximum walking distance (P = 0·006), SPPB score (P < 0·001), and some domains of both generic (bodily pain, P = 0·025) and disease-specific (social domain, P = 0·039) quality of life. Significant improvements were also noted in balance, as determined by the SOT (P < 0·001). Conclusion Supervised exercise improves both physical function and balance impairment

Classifying the unknown: discovering novel gravitational-wave detector glitches using similarity learning

The observation of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences by LIGO and Virgo has begun a new era in astronomy. A critical challenge in making detections is determining whether loud transient features in the data are caused by gravitational waves or by instrumental or environmental sources. The citizen-science project \emph{Gravity Spy} has been demonstrated as an efficient infrastructure for classifying known types of noise transients (glitches) through a combination of data analysis performed by both citizen volunteers and machine learning. We present the next iteration of this project, using similarity indices to empower citizen scientists to create large data sets of unknown transients, which can then be used to facilitate supervised machine-learning characterization. This new evolution aims to alleviate a persistent challenge that plagues both citizen-science and instrumental detector work: the ability to build large samples of relatively rare events. Using two families of transient noise that appeared unexpectedly during LIGO's second observing run (O2), we demonstrate the impact that the similarity indices could have had on finding these new glitch types in the Gravity Spy program