Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority

To assist our residents in attaining and maintaining a high standard for their quality of life. The Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority will provide services and opportunities associated with affordable, desirable, and secure housing to individuals and families. We will provide customer service, programs and amenities which are the best possible. The BMHA also has a number of goals: to provide safe, clean, affordable housing to residents of the City of Buffalo that will be considered housing of choice; to encourage and participate in strategic redevelopment of city\u27s neighborhoods; to offer all residents equal access to desirable housing and communities; to foster a sense of purpose and pride that will encourage family self-sufficiency; to encourage tenant participation and involvement in BMHA operations and services as well as providing access to entrepreneurial development and employment opportunities

Listening skills instruction: practical tips for processing aural input

Two listening challenges faced by English L2 learners are (1) successfully identifying words in continuous speech and (2) understanding a speaker’s intended meaning. Listening is a skill L2 learners report wanting to improve, yet teaching practices often fail to advance learner knowledge and control of listening processes. Instructors can benefit from empirically-supported recommendations to help learners parse continuous speech, and discern speaker intent. This Teaching Tip shares two 3-part strategies to facilitate processing utterance content and interpreting message meaning. The practical tips presented here are consistent with a return in the larger TESOL field to a true communicative approach, relying on authentic materials and real communicative contexts rather than mere mimicry of connected speech features or particular intonation contours.Published versio

Teaching talk, tell-backs, and a declarative to procedural knowledge interface

Can explicit, declarative knowledge be converted to implicit, procedural knowledge? This Teaching Tip advocates the use of Teaching Talk, defined as succinct and therefore retrievable language of instruction, restated by learners as Tell-Backs for the purpose of internalizing pronunciation concepts to establish declarative knowledge. The intervening mechanism is prompted production, a form of error feedback that is achieved when the language of intervention matches the language of instruction that was used to introduce a target feature, and is in turn consistent with the tell-backs that learners use to internalize those features. Prompted production promotes self-monitoring and self-correction, and serves as an interface to bridge the declarative to procedural knowledge gap.Published versio

Public School Discipline: Alternatives to Suspension

Most public school districts rely heavily on suspensions for student discipline. Section 2801 of the Education Law requires that school districts create a code of conduct, and one of the most common punishments for a violation of the code is out of school suspension

Asymmetrical cognitive load Imposed by processing native and non-native speech

Intonation affects information processing and comprehension. Previous research has found that some international teaching assistants (ITAs) fail to exploit English intonation, potentially posing processing difficulties to students who are native English speakers. However, researchers have also found that non-native listeners found it easier to process sentences given by a non-native speaker with a shared language background, leading to an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB). Therefore, how native speaker teaching assistant (NSTA)’s and ITA’s classroom speech affects the processing, comprehension, and attitudes of listeners with different language backgrounds needs to be further investigated. Using a dual-task paradigm, a comprehension questionnaire, and an attitudinal questionnaire, the present study investigates how the pronunciation and intonation of a NSTA and an ITA affect native English speakers’ and Mandarin-speaking English learners’ processing and comprehension of a lecture, and attitudes towards the two instructors. The present study found shared processing advantages when the listeners shared the L1 of the speaker, but overall lecture comprehension and attitude were unaffected. These findings support and extend prior research studies surveying ITAs’ intonational patterns and ISIB. These findings also have implications for research on the teaching of English pronunciation to non-native instructors.Published versio

The ‘grand scheme of things’: biological invasions, their detection, impacts and management

Editorial of Management of Biological Invasions: International Journal of Applied Research on Biological Invasions, Volume 5, Issues 3

Closing the factory doors until better times: CGE modelling of drought using a theory of excess capacity

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional economic impacts of a prolonged period of recurrent droughts. The model used for analysis is TERM-H2O, a dynamic successor to the bottom-up, comparative static TERM (The Enormous Regional Model). We concentrate on the regions of the southern Murray-Darling basin. Large change simulations are a challenge for modellers. Drought brings substantial inward supply shifts for farm sectors. This paper outlines various theoretical modifications undertaken to improve the modelling of drought in a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework and then applies them to the period from 2005–06 on. In particular, we apply a theory of sticky capital adjustment to downstream processing sectors, whereby processors temporarily retire capital in response to scarcer farm products, limiting upward price movements in farm outputs and resulting in more realistic modelling of drought. Results are explained using a back-of-the-envelope approach. This framework allows us to estimate the economic impacts of allowing water trade. In addition, the approach provides some estimate as to the impact of prolonged drought on structural change in predominantly rural regions of south-eastern Australia.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Carbon and energy performance of housing : a model and toolset for policy development applied to a local authority housing stock

The area of strategy formulation for energy and carbon performance of housing is coming under increasing focus. A model has been developed based on simulation results aligned with knowledge of the housing stock which can be used to calculate energy, carbon and cost results from a reduced number of input parameters. The context of the model can be varied to reflect different climates and patterns of use. The model is embedded in a user friendly java tool which can be used to give results for a dwelling or the housing stock of an organisation, region or country. It is possible to investigate the effect of housing upgrade options, future building regulations, climates, patterns of use, renewable energy systems etc. and support formulation of future policy. In this paper the tool is briefly described and an example given showing its application to a local authority rented housing stock

The effect of metacognitive strategy instruction on L2 learner beliefs and listening skills

This pilot study investigated the effect of semester-long strategy-based instruction on learner beliefs and skills in the processing of aural input by adult learners of English as a second language at metacognitive and procedural levels. The study addressed two frequently encountered learner beliefs thought to impede L2 processing of aural input: The little words aren’t important; intonation is merely decorative. Working on the premise that learner beliefs underpin learner strategies for processing aural input and are reflected in learner productive and receptive skills, pre- and post-instruction instruments measured both learners’ awareness of connected speech processes and the functions of intonation, and their ability to segment a continuous speech stream, and to process utterances for speaker intent. Findings using repeated measures analysis of variance support strategy-based metacognitive training in connected speech and stress and intonation to promote listening skills awareness, aid word segmentation, and facilitate understanding utterance content and intended meaning.Published versio

The Art of Healing: Mary Gove Nichols\u27s Crusade for Women\u27s Wellness

This thesis uses the life of 19th-century American reformer Mary Gove Nichols to explore antebellum feminism through the lens of health and marriage reform. Using primary sources including the subjects own personal publications, this thesis traces one theme throughout Nichols’s life: her passionate drive to educate women on their own health, and to make such knowledge accessible, so that they could acquire it for themselves. This particular theme manifested in two forms: wellness acquired via homeopathic medicine, specifically the water cure; and wellness acquired from a safe and loving marriage. Her life’s work, an early form of feminism, aimed to not only aid in women’s personal well-being, but opened the door that would allow them to become stewards of wellness for others