Assessing Student Co-Curricular Needs and Interests Through an Objective Method

Problem Previous research has shown that when potential dropouts are actively involved in the school program, the dropout rate is reduced. Co-curricular activities have been found to be the most effective method of getting potential dropouts involved. The problem has been that implementation of co-curricular activities has relied on the subjective value judgment of administrators. This project attempted to develop an objective method for assessing student co-curricular needs and interests. Method There were three phases to this project. The first phase was an extensive review of the literature in order to determine factual evidence. The second phase was the development of testing instruments. The third phase was the field testing of the instruments for the purpose of assessing co-curricular needs and interests. Results The results are that the patterns described in the Review of Literature were found to be present in the schools tested. The schools were found to be lacking co-curricular programs that interested students defined as potential dropouts. Conclusions As a result of this project, the schools tested need to make certain program changes and additions. Co-curricular needs and interests of the students can be objectively assessed and the results used to improve school programs

Reasoning about Program Interactions in the Presence of Mobility

Mobile computing is emerging as an important new paradigm which has the potential to reshape our thinking about distributed computation. Mobility has far-reaching implications on what designers and users can assume about communication patterns, resource availability, and applciation behaviors as components move from one location to another while joining or leaving groups of other components in their vicinity. New distributed algorithms are likely to be required as the nature of applications shifts with the emergence of this new kind of computing environment. Formal methods have an important role to play in the midst of these developments both in terms of helping the research community better understand fundamental issues germane to mobile computing and by providing pratical solutions to difficult design problems

Mobile UNITY Coordination Constructs Applied to Packet Forwarding for Mobile Hosts

With recent advances in wireless communication technology, mobile computing is an increasingly important area of research. A mobile system is one where independently executing components may migrate through some space during the course of the computation, and where the pattern of connectivity among the components changes as they move in and out of proximity. Mobile UNITY is a language and logic for specifying and reasoning about mobile systems, the components of which must operate in a highly decoupled way. In this paper it is argued that Mobile UNITY contributes to the modular development of system specifications because of the declarative fashion in which coordination among components is specified. The packet forwarding mechanism at the core of the Mobile IP protocol for routing to mobile hosts is taken as an example. A Mobile UNITY specification of packet forwarding and the mobile system in which it must operate is developed. Mobile hosts are the components that can disconnect from one location in the network and reconnect to another at any point during system execution. Finally, the role of formal program verification in the development of protocols like Mobile IP is discussed

Agriculture and climate change reshape insect biodiversity worldwide

Several previous studies have investigated changes in insect biodiversity, with some highlighting declines and others showing turnover in species composition without net declines1,2,3,4,5. Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change6,7, the potential for interaction between these drivers and insect biodiversity on the global scale remains unclear. Here we show that the interaction between indices of historical climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions of almost 50% in the abundance and 27% in the number of species within insect assemblages relative to those in less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming. These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm, whereas some positive responses of biodiversity to climate change occur in non-tropical regions in natural habitats. A high availability of nearby natural habitat often mitigates reductions in insect abundance and richness associated with agricultural land use and substantial climate warming but only in low-intensity agricultural systems. In such systems, in which high levels (75% cover) of natural habitat are available, abundance and richness were reduced by 7% and 5%, respectively, compared with reductions of 63% and 61% in places where less natural habitat is present (25% cover). Our results show that insect biodiversity will probably benefit from mitigating climate change, preserving natural habitat within landscapes and reducing the intensity of agriculture

Strategies for the Parallel Training of Simple Recurrent Neural Networks

Two concurrent implementations of the method of conjugate gradients for training Elman networks are discussed. The parallelism is obtained in the computation of the error gradient and the method is therefore applicable to any gradient descent training technique for this form of network. The experimental results were obtained on a Sun Sparc Center 2000 multiprocessor. The Sparc 2000 is a shared memory machine well suited to coarse-grained distributed computations, but the concurrency could be extended to other architectures as well

Mobile UNITY: A Language and Logic for Concurrent Mobile Systems

Traditionally, a distributed system has been viewed as a collection of fixed computational elements connected by a static network. Prompted by recent advances in wireless communications rechnology, the emerging field of mobile computing is challenging these assumptions by providing mobile hosts with connectivity that may change over time, raising the possibility that hosts may be called upon to operate while only weakly connected to or while completely disconnected from other hosts. We define a concurrent mobile system as one where independently executing coponents may migrate through some space during the course of the computation, and where the pattern of connectivity among the components changes as they move in and out of proximity. Note that this definition is general enough to encompass a system of mobile hosts moving in physical space as well as a system of migrating software agents implemented on a set of possibly non-mobile hosts. In this paper, we present Mobile UNITY, which is a notation for expressing such systems and a logic for reasoning about their temporal properties. Based on the UNITY language of Chandy and Misra, our goal is to find a minimalist model of mobile computation that will allow us to express mobile components in a modular fashion and to reason formally about the possible behaviors of a system composed from mobile components. We also show how the model can contribute to our understanding of mobility by exploring new abstractions for loosely coupled communication and coordination among components

Framing French Culture

Throughout this book, the concept of framing is used to look at art, photography, scientific drawings and cinema as visually constituted, spatially bounded productions. The way these genres relate to that which exists beyond the frame, by means of plastic, chemically transposed, pencil-sketched or moving images allows us to decipher the particular language of the visual and at the same time circumscribe the dialectic between presence and absence that is proper to all visual media. Yet, these kinds of re-framing owe their existence to the ruptures and upheavals that marked the demise of certain discursive systems in the past, announcing the emergence of others that were in turn overturned