Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764-1960

Race and Education in New Orleans considers an important question for American historians: What forces created racial segregation? Using schooling as a focal point, Walter Stern skillfully unpacks the complex factors underlying white supremacy and the city’s social and racial order. Although New Orleans is critical for students of urban America, it possessed distinctive features that, over time, became transformed into a pattern resembling the rest the country

Comparative age and growth of two darters, Percina peltata (Stauffer) and Percina notogramma (Raney and Hubbs), in Virginia

Two closely related species or darters, Percina peltata and Percina notogramma, occur sympatrically in Virginia. An analysis or the number of scale annuli and standard length measurements on 447 peltata and 195 notogrannna revealed four year classes in both species, with very few individuals surviving to III-year class. Both species had approximately 1:1 sex ratios after the first year, in which males were predominant. The growth of both species was approximately the same after the first year; however peltata, the larger species, apparently gains an advantage during the first year which it never loses. The sexes did not differ significantly in either age or growth

Schooling In The Antebellum South: The Rise Of Public And Private Education In Louisiana, Mississippi, And Alabama

Antebellum Education Revised In nineteenth-century southern education, the lines distinguishing public and private were thin, and wisely Sarah L. Hyde casts a wide net in her new study, Schooling in the Antebellum South. Hyde writes against the common misconception that portrays inhabitants...

Narcissism, relationship satisfaction, and emotional intelligence among female college students

Emotional intelligence and narcissism have an influence on the overall relationship satisfaction people have with their significant others. Researchers have reported that as emotional intelligence increases, so does relationship satisfaction. However, researchers have also reported that as narcissism increases, relationship satisfaction decreases. No previous study has examined all three concepts together, which is the purpose of this study. Female college students (N = 169) were given a questionnaire comprised of measures to assess emotional intelligence, narcissism, and relationship satisfaction. Correlation analysis determined there was a weak relationship between emotional intelligence and narcissism (r = 0.28). Regression analysis found no relationship between emotional intelligence, narcissism, and relationship satisfaction with the student’s significant others

Probit models for capture-recapture data subject to imperfect detection, individual heterogeneity and misidentification

As noninvasive sampling techniques for animal populations have become more popular, there has been increasing interest in the development of capture-recapture models that can accommodate both imperfect detection and misidentification of individuals (e.g., due to genotyping error). However, current methods do not allow for individual variation in parameters, such as detection or survival probability. Here we develop misidentification models for capture-recapture data that can simultaneously account for temporal variation, behavioral effects and individual heterogeneity in parameters. To facilitate Bayesian inference using our approach, we extend standard probit regression techniques to latent multinomial models where the dimension and zeros of the response cannot be observed. We also present a novel Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs algorithm for fitting these models using Markov chain Monte Carlo. Using closed population abundance models for illustration, we re-visit a DNA capture-recapture population study of black bears in Michigan, USA and find evidence of misidentification due to genotyping error, as well as temporal, behavioral and individual variation in detection probability. We also estimate a salamander population of known size from laboratory experiments evaluating the effectiveness of a marking technique commonly used for amphibians and fish. Our model was able to reliably estimate the size of this population and provided evidence of individual heterogeneity in misidentification probability that is attributable to variable mark quality. Our approach is more computationally demanding than previously proposed methods, but it provides the flexibility necessary for a much broader suite of models to be explored while properly accounting for uncertainty introduced by misidentification and imperfect detection. In the absence of misidentification, our probit formulation also provides a convenient and efficient Gibbs sampler for Bayesian analysis of traditional closed population capture-recapture data.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS783 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Comparative Study of Adult Learners’ Motivation for Learning English as a Foreign Language According to Their Instruction by Single or Multiple Instructors at Geos Language Centre, Thailand

The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare adult learners’ motivation for learning English as a foreign language according to their instruction by either a single instructor or by multiple instructors over a period of six weeks at Geos Language Centre in Bangkok, Thailand. The sample population of this study consisted of 67 adult-learner students enrolled in private English as a foreign language courses during the period of April to July 2020. These students comprised two groups under investigation during the period of this study: 1) Those who received instruction from a single instructor, and 2) Those who received instruction from multiple instructors. The Questionnaire for Measuring Motivation for Learning English as a Foreign Language (QMMLEFL), adapted from the Attitude / Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) by Gardner (2004), was used to measure the level of adult learners’ motivation for learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) were calculated, and statistical hypothesis testing (comparative analysis using paired samples t-tests and an independent samples t-test) was performed from data collected to pursue the research objectives and accept or reject the research hypotheses of this study. The research findings did not indicate that there was a statistically significant difference in the gain in motivation for learning English as a foreign language over a six-week period of study between adult learners who studied with a single instructor and adult learners who studied with multiple instructors. Recommendations for adult learners and instructors of English as a foreign language and language institute administrators and future researchers are provided

Estimating age from recapture data: integrating incremental growth measures with ancillary data to infer age-at-length

Estimating the age of individuals in wild populations can be of fundamental importance for answering ecological questions, modeling population demographics, and managing exploited or threatened species. Significant effort has been devoted to determining age through the use of growth annuli, secondary physical characteristics related to age, and growth models. Many species, however, either do not exhibit physical characteristics useful for independent age validation or are too rare to justify sacrificing a large number of individuals to establish the relationship between size and age. Length-at-age models are well represented in the fisheries and other wildlife management literature. Many of these models overlook variation in growth rates of individuals and consider growth parameters as population parameters. More recent models have taken advantage of hierarchical structuring of parameters and Bayesian inference methods to allow for variation among individuals as functions of environmental covariates or individual-specific random effects. Here, we describe hierarchical models in which growth curves vary as individual-specific stochastic processes, and we show how these models can be fit using capture–recapture data for animals of unknown age along with data for animals of known age. We combine these independent data sources in a Bayesian analysis, distinguishing natural variation (among and within individuals) from measurement error. We illustrate using data for African dwarf crocodiles, comparing von Bertalanffy and logistic growth models. The analysis provides the means of predicting crocodile age, given a single measurement of head length. The von Bertalanffy was much better supported than the logistic growth model and predicted that dwarf crocodiles grow from 19.4 cm total length at birth to 32.9 cm in the first year and 45.3 cm by the end of their second year. Based on the minimum size of females observed with hatchlings, reproductive maturity was estimated to be at nine years. These size benchmarks are believed to represent thresholds for important demographic parameters; improved estimates of age, therefore, will increase the precision of population projection models. The modeling approach that we present can be applied to other species and offers significant advantages when multiple sources of data are available and traditional aging techniques are not practical

On thinning of chains in MCMC

1. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a simulation technique that has revolutionised the analysis of ecological data, allowing the fitting of complex models in a Bayesian framework. Since 2001, there have been nearly 200 papers using MCMC in publications of the Ecological Society of America and the British Ecological Society, including more than 75 in the journal Ecology and 35 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. 2. We have noted that many authors routinely ‘thin’ their simulations, discarding all but every kth sampled value; of the studies we surveyed with details on MCMC implementation, 40% reported thinning. 3. Thinning is often unnecessary and always inefficient, reducing the precision with which features of the Markov chain are summarised. The inefficiency of thinning MCMC output has been known since the early 1990’s, long before MCMC appeared in ecological publications. 4. We discuss the background and prevalence of thinning, illustrate its consequences, discuss circumstances when it might be regarded as a reasonable option and recommend against routine thinning of chains unless necessitated by computer memory limitations