Racial Conflicts In Schools

That racially motivated conflicts occur in schools is an indisputable fact that becomes evident upon review of both academic literature and popular media. Events such as the Jena 6 incident (Maxwell & Zehr, 2007), school wide racially motivated riots (latimes.com), and court rulings (theithican.org) are distressing examples that racial barriers are real and potentially dangerous for many students in this country. However, little is written about the nature of racial conflicts, including the actual process school leaders engage in when determining how or even whether to intervene in racial conflicts, and the affect those racial conflicts have on the school climate and relevant stakeholders (e.g. directly involved students, other students, and school staff). To address this concern the current study is designed to provide insight into the decision-making process of school counselors in the intervention of racial conflicts that occur between students. The findings of this study will be pertinent and beneficial to all educational professionals as well as students. The following review provides context for understanding racial conflicts in schools, and addresses such issues as prevalence rates, causes, consequences, theories, and interventions to address such conflicts. Finally, the review concludes with a description of limitations in the research and a description of a proposed study

On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks

Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction, motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality. Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on human motion prediction.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 1

Global isoform-specific transcript alterations and deregulated networks in clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

Extensive genome-wide analyses of deregulated gene expression have now been performed for many types of cancer. However, most studies have focused on deregulation at the gene-level, which may overlook the alterations of specific transcripts for a given gene. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is one of the best-characterized and most pervasive renal cancers, and ccRCCs are well-documented to have aberrant RNA processing. In the present study, we examine the extent of aberrant isoform-specific RNA expression by reporting a comprehensive transcript-level analysis, using the new kallisto-sleuth-RATs pipeline, investigating coding and non-coding differential transcript expression in ccRCC. We analyzed 50 ccRCC tumors and their matched normal samples from The Cancer Genome Altas datasets. We identified 7,339 differentially expressed transcripts and 94 genes exhibiting differential transcript isoform usage in ccRCC. Additionally, transcript-level coexpression network analyses identified vasculature development and the tricarboxylic acid cycle as the most significantly deregulated networks correlating with ccRCC progression. These analyses uncovered several uncharacterized transcripts, including lncRNAs FGD5-AS1 and AL035661.1, as potential regulators of the tricarboxylic acid cycle associated with ccRCC progression. As ccRCC still presents treatment challenges, our results provide a new resource of potential therapeutics targets and highlight the importance of exploring alternative methodologies in transcriptome-wide studies

Implementation Challenges and Training Needs for Comprehensive School Counseling Programs in Wisconsin High Schools

The data from this study details the challenges to implementing comprehensive school counseling programs in Wisconsin high schools. Results suggest that current professional development training practices may be ineffective in assisting high school counselors to implement key components of the ASCA National Model in their schools. This article discusses obstacles to conducting more rigorous, statewide evaluations, and describes connections to markers of student success

Continuous data assimilation with blurred-in-time measurements of the surface quasi-geostrophic equation

An intrinsic property of almost any physical measuring device is that it makes observations which are slightly blurred in time. We consider a nudging-based approach for data assimilation that constructs an approximate solution based on a feedback control mechanism that is designed to account for observations that have been blurred by a moving time average. Analysis of this nudging model in the context of the subcritical surface quasi-geostrophic equation shows, provided the time-averaging window is sufficiently small and the resolution of the observations sufficiently fine, that the approximating solution converges exponentially fast to the observed solution over time. In particular, we demonstrate that observational data with a small blur in time possess no significant obstructions to data assimilation provided that the nudging properly takes the time averaging into account. Two key ingredients in our analysis are additional boundedness properties for the relevant interpolant observation operators and a non-local Gronwall inequality.Comment: 44 page

Point-by-point inscription of apodized fiber Bragg gratings

We demonstrate apodized fiber Bragg gratings inscribed with a point-by-point technique. We tailor the grating phase and coupling amplitude through precise control over the longitudinal and transverse position of each laser-inscribed modification. This method of apodization is facilitated by the highly-localized, high-contrast modifications generated by focussed IR femtosecond laser inscription. Our technique provides a simple method for the design and implementation of point-by-point fiber Bragg gratings with complex apodization profiles.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, article in revie

Communications

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute, by J. Michael Martinez in the summer 2008 issue along with the response of the author