The Impact of Peer Mediation on Student Mediators

This qualitative study sought to expand the current knowledge of how student mediators view themselves and how their involvement in a peer mediation program impacted them. Twenty-three students, from three different elementary schools in the Elk River School System, were individually interviewed. All subjects were between the ages of 10-13, were currently involved in a peer mediation program, and had been involved for at least six months The semi-structured interviews focused on subjects\u27 views of the impact involvement in a peer mediation program had on their self-esteem, leadership skills, relationship skills, and school attitudes. Common themes addressed in the data include: a desire to help others as the driving factor for most students\u27 involvement in peer mediation, improved ability to problem solve, fun in peer mediation, the impact of peer mediation on schools, drawbacks of mediation, and personal gains by mediators such as in relationships or self-esteem. The implications of this research for social workers along with future research ideas are discussed as well as limitations of this study

Pliny\u27s defense of empire

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for over half of a millennium Pliny has been considered little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshalling of his materials. It is my contention that Pliny’s encyclopedic text is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansion grounded in a sophisticated conception of man as the only being capable of passing down its discoveries to its descendants. According to Pliny’s theory of human nature, man is distinguished from the beasts by his ability to acquire new faculties and forms of knowledge through time. Once acquired, man’s capacities for speech and memory provide him with the unique ability to share his discoveries with his children, and the process of development characteristic of the life of the individual is thereby recapitulated at the level of the species as a whole, with the accumulation of discoveries through time uniting men as men across the succession of generations. Prior to the establishment of the Roman Empire, however, political and linguistic boundaries had divided the human race, preventing the inclusion of all men within a single process of species development. Importantly, for Pliny, the supersession of the bounded forms of human order characteristic of the Hellenic and Hellenistic worlds by the unbounded form of the Roman Empire was thus a necessary precondition for the fullest realization of the human animal. Pliny’s Natural History, written in a newly established universal language, incarnates the collective memory of the human race, and in the encyclopedist and his encyclopedia, the process of human development is brought to perfection at both the level of the individual and the level of the species. The publication of Pliny’s text is thus itself the ultimate justification for Rome’s conquest of the world

A molten salt test loop for component and instrumentation testing

Molten salt is an effective coolant for a wide range of applications, including nuclear reactors, concentrated solar power, and other high temperature industrial heat transfer processes. The technical readiness level of components and instrumentation for high-temperature molten salt applications needs improvement for molten salt to be more widely adopted. A molten salt test loop was designed, built, and commissioned as a test bed to address these issues. The molten salt test loop at Abilene Christian University was built out of 316 stainless steel with a forced flow centrifugal-type pump, and was instrumented for remote operation. A low-temperature molten nitrate salt was used in this system, which was designed to operate at temperatures up to 300 ◦C and flow rates up to 90 liters per minute. This paper describes the loop design, computational fluid dynamics modeling, construction, and commissioning details. An outline of the data acquisition and control systems is presented. Salt samples were taken before and after introduction into the loop, and melting points were measured both before and after salt circulation. Performance of the system is discussed as well as improvements required for higher temperature loops envisioned for the future

Housing Quality

Poster / Soc 397A / 2022 Poverty in Tucson Field WorkshopThis item is part of the Poverty in Tucson Field Workshop collection. For more information about this course, or about the posters in this collection, contact Brian Mayer, UA School of Sociology, [email protected] forms on file. January 2023, Kimberl