Experience with Diversity is Not Enough: A Pedagogical Framework for Teacher Candidates that Centers Critical Race Consciousness

Given the overwhelming whiteness of teacher education, we offer a pedagogical approach rooted in critical race theory, and draw on Carter’s (2008) notions of critical race consciousness to: 1) center a critical race perspective in methods-based coursework; and 2) employ critical race theory to analyze the function and role of clinical fieldwork. In this article, we provide examples of how we engage white teacher candidates to preemptively take stock of their own racial journey and biases prior to being responsible for educating students of color. We also focus on the process of selecting clinical placements and assignments. We explicate how current selection criteria for clinical sites and cooperating teachers are undergirded by systems of white supremacy, and problematize the reality of majority white clinical placements. We further provide suggestions for teacher education programs that pay particular attention to the roles and responsibilities of white teacher educators and predominantly white teacher education programs

Energy Conversion Alternatives Study (ECAS), Westinghouse phase 1. Volume 5: Combined gas-steam turbine cycles

The energy conversion efficiency of gas-steam turbine cycles was investigated for selected combined cycle power plants. Results indicate that it is possible for combined cycle gas-steam turbine power plants to have efficiencies several point higher than conventional steam plants. Induction of low pressure steam into the steam turbine is shown to improve the plant efficiency. Post firing of the boiler of a high temperature combined cycle plant is found to increase net power but to worsen efficiency. A gas turbine pressure ratio of 12 to 1 was found to be close to optimum at all gas turbine inlet temperatures that were studied. The coal using combined cycle plant with an integrated low-Btu gasifier was calculated to have a plant efficiency of 43.6%, a capitalization of $497/kW, and a cost of electricity of 6.75 mills/MJ (24.3 mills/kwh). This combined cycle plant should be considered for base load power generation

Crafting A Human Resource Strategy To Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the CEO of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change-hardy”. This case study briefly addresses AEHN’s approaches to business strategy and organization design, but focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are, or will be, studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm

Class Conditional Gaussians for Continual Learning

Dealing with representation shift is one of the main problems in online continual learning. Current methods mainly solve this by reducing representation shift, but leave the classifier on top of the representation to slowly adapt, in many update steps, to the remaining representation shift, increasing forgetting. We propose DeepCCG, an empirical Bayesian approach to solve this problem. DeepCCG works by updating the posterior of a class conditional Gaussian classifier such that the classifier adapts instantly to representation shift. The use of a class conditional Gaussian classifier also enables DeepCCG to use a log conditional marginal likelihood loss to update the representation, which can be seen as a new type of replay. To perform the update to the classifier and representation, DeepCCG maintains a fixed number of examples in memory and so a key part of DeepCCG is selecting what examples to store, choosing the subset that minimises the KL divergence between the true posterior and the posterior induced by the subset. We demonstrate the performance of DeepCCG on a range of settings, including those with overlapping tasks which thus far have been under-explored. In the experiments, DeepCCG outperforms all other methods, evidencing its potential.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, preprin

The Brieva-Rook Localization of the Microscopic Nucleon-Nucleus Potential

The nonlocality of the microscopic nucleon-nucleus optical potential is commonly localized by the Brieva-Rook approximation. The validity of the localization is tested for the proton+$^{90}$Zr scattering at the incident energies from 65 MeV to 800 MeV. The localization is valid in the wide incident-energy range.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Peri-urban wild dogs : diet and movements in north-eastern Australia

Knowledge of peri-urban dingo or wild dog ecology can assist management agencies in developing management approaches that alleviate human-wildlife conflicts. Here we summarise (1) the food and dietary items identified in wild dog scats and (2) wild dog movement ecology in urban areas. Individual prey species commonly observed in scats included agile wallabies, northern brown bandicoots and swamp wallabies. Dietary overlap analyses indicated that wild dogs ate the same types or sizes of prey in different regions. In general, wild dogs occupied small fragments of bushland within an urban matrix, were active at all times of the day, and lived within a few hundred meters of houses and humans at all times. These data suggest that urban wild dog management strategies should focus on the mitigation of impacts at the individual or group level, and not population-level reductions in numbers

Microspinning: Local Surface Mixing via Rotation of Magnetic Microparticles for Efficient Small-Volume Bioassays

The need for high-throughput screening has led to the miniaturization of the reaction volume of the chamber in bioassays. As the reactor gets smaller, surface tension dominates the gravitational or inertial force, and mixing efficiency decreases in small-scale reactions. Because passive mixing by simple diffusion in tens of microliter-scale volumes takes a long time, active mixing is needed. Here, we report an efficient micromixing method using magnetically rotating microparticles with patterned magnetization induced by magnetic nanoparticle chains. Because the microparticles have magnetization patterning due to fabrication with magnetic nanoparticle chains, the microparticles can rotate along the external rotating magnetic field, causing micromixing. We validated the reaction efficiency by comparing this micromixing method with other mixing methods such as simple diffusion and the use of a rocking shaker at various working volumes. This method has the potential to be widely utilized in suspension assay technology as an efficient mixing strategy

Systematic review of specialist selection methods with implications for diversity in the medical workforce

Purpose: There is growing concern that inequities in methods of selection into medical specialties reduce specialist cohort diversity, particularly where measures designed for another purpose are adapted for specialist selection, prioritising reliability over validity. This review examined how empirical measures affect the diversity of specialist selection. The goals were to summarise the groups for which evidence is available, evaluate evidence that measures prioritising reliability over validity contribute to under-representation, and identify novel measures or processes that address under-representation, in order to make recommendations on selection into medical specialties and research required to support diversity. Method: In 2020–1, the authors implemented a comprehensive search strategy across 4 electronic databases (Medline, PsychINFO, Scopus, ERIC) covering years 2000–2020, supplemented with hand-search of key journals and reference lists from identified studies. Articles were screened using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria designed to focus on empirical measures used in medical specialty selection decisions. Results: Thirty-five articles were included from 1344 retrieved from databases and hand-searches. In order of prevalence these papers addressed the under-representation of women (21/35), international medical graduates (10/35), and race/ethnicity (9/35). Apart from well-powered studies of selection into general practice training in the UK, the literature was exploratory, retrospective, and relied upon convenience samples with limited follow-up. There was preliminary evidence that bias in the measures used for selection into training might contribute to under-representation of some groups. Conclusions: The review did not find convincing evidence that measures prioritising reliability drive under-representation of some groups in medical specialties, although this may be due to limited power analyses. In addition, the review did not identify novel specialist selection methods likely to improve diversity. Nevertheless, significant and divergent efforts are being made to promote the evolution of selection processes that draw on all the diverse qualities required for specialist practice serving diverse populations. More rigorous prospective research across different national frameworks will be needed to clarify whether eliminating or reducing the weighting of reliable pre-selection academic results in selection decisions will increase or decrease diversity, and whether drawing on a broader range of assessments can achieve both reliable and socially desirable outcomes

Identifying emerging topics in the peer‑reviewed literature to facilitate curriculum renewal and development

This article reports a bibliometric analysis of emerging topics in the psychiatric literature indexed in the MEDLINE database as a technique for renewal of clinical training curricula. Summary data of English-language articles indexed in the MEDLINE database between 1971-2018 were downloaded. Emerging topics in nine demi-decades between 1972-1976 and 2012-2016 were identified by the incremental incidence of individual Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) compared with previous years. Co-word analysis was used to investigate and visualise the relationships between emerging topics in each demi-decade. Summaries of 18 million articles annotated with psychiatric/psychological MeSH were retrieved and used to identify emerging topics. Peaks in the number of articles annotated by the top 20 emerging topics in 9 demi-decades coincided with release of the third and fourth editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which codifies psychiatric diagnoses. Themes emerging from network visualisations of the most common emerging MeSH in each demi-decade were consistent with movements in psychiatric/psychological theory and practice since the 1970s, including the recent focus on psychological and social factors implicated in suicide and suicide prevention. The identification of emerging topics within the published medical literature is a viable technique for use in curriculum renewal projects as a counterweight to biases driven by expert judgement. While indices like MEDLINE make the published literature an appealing initial step in building an empirical basis for curriculum development, it also demonstrates the potential value of less public and less structured data, such as health service electronic medical record