Dear Mentor: A Reflection on the Impact of Mentorship in Higher Education

The purpose of this paper is to understand the importance of mentoring in the field of student affairs in order to help potential and emerging professionals in various ways. Mentoring has strong implications for the proliferation of the field as well as the resilience of emerging professionals and the reduction of professional attrition. In constructing this narrative, the author chose to use two approaches. First, the author created a scholarly personal narrative to understand the effects of mentorship as is reflected in scholarship. Second, through the collection of letters, the author designed a qualitative content analysis to understand how mentors have helped current professionals gain insight, confidence, and direction. Key themes identified in the analysis are the modeling of professional behaviors and success, belief, empowerment and validation, challenge and support, and identity development

Reclaiming Sacred Space

I wrote this piece for myself as a hybrid of personal discovery and academic inquiry, and I hope it can guide and empower others like myself. In this piece, I examine the intersections of queer identity with religious and spiritual identity development and discuss how practitioners can help students reclaim sacred space. Foregrounding my personal narrative and expanding with scholarship, I show why this development deserves attention from student affairs professionals. I give both programmatic and institutional considerations to review when centering religious and spiritual development for LGBTQ students

Concrete Pavement Repair & Restoration

Extend the service life of your concrete pavement by applying the right fix at the right time. Join us to learn how to identify and execute alternative repair techniques, whether the work is performed by agency crews or by qualified contractors

A kinematic wave theory of capacity drop

Capacity drop at active bottlenecks is one of the most puzzling traffic phenomena, but a thorough understanding is practically important for designing variable speed limit and ramp metering strategies. In this study, we attempt to develop a simple model of capacity drop within the framework of kinematic wave theory based on the observation that capacity drop occurs when an upstream queue forms at an active bottleneck. In addition, we assume that the fundamental diagrams are continuous in steady states. This assumption is consistent with observations and can avoid unrealistic infinite characteristic wave speeds in discontinuous fundamental diagrams. A core component of the new model is an entropy condition defined by a discontinuous boundary flux function. For a lane-drop area, we demonstrate that the model is well-defined, and its Riemann problem can be uniquely solved. We theoretically discuss traffic stability with this model subject to perturbations in density, upstream demand, and downstream supply. We clarify that discontinuous flow-density relations, or so-called "discontinuous" fundamental diagrams, are caused by incomplete observations of traffic states. Theoretical results are consistent with observations in the literature and are verified by numerical simulations and empirical observations. We finally discuss potential applications and future studies.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure

Path Planning Problems with Side Observations-When Colonels Play Hide-and-Seek

Resource allocation games such as the famous Colonel Blotto (CB) and Hide-and-Seek (HS) games are often used to model a large variety of practical problems, but only in their one-shot versions. Indeed, due to their extremely large strategy space, it remains an open question how one can efficiently learn in these games. In this work, we show that the online CB and HS games can be cast as path planning problems with side-observations (SOPPP): at each stage, a learner chooses a path on a directed acyclic graph and suffers the sum of losses that are adversarially assigned to the corresponding edges; and she then receives semi-bandit feedback with side-observations (i.e., she observes the losses on the chosen edges plus some others). We propose a novel algorithm, EXP3-OE, the first-of-its-kind with guaranteed efficient running time for SOPPP without requiring any auxiliary oracle. We provide an expected-regret bound of EXP3-OE in SOPPP matching the order of the best benchmark in the literature. Moreover, we introduce additional assumptions on the observability model under which we can further improve the regret bounds of EXP3-OE. We illustrate the benefit of using EXP3-OE in SOPPP by applying it to the online CB and HS games.Comment: Previously, this work appeared as arXiv:1911.09023 which was mistakenly submitted as a new article (has been submitted to be withdrawn). This is a preprint of the work published in Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI

Mapping the invisible hand: a body model of a phantom limb

After amputation, individuals often have vivid experiences of their absent limb (i.e., a phantom limb). Therefore, one’s conscious image of one’s body cannot depend on peripheral input only (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998). However, the origin of phantom sensations is hotly debated. Reports of vivid phantoms in the case of congenital absence of the limb show that memory of former body state is not necessary (Brugger et al., 2000). According to one view, phantoms may reflect innate organization of sensorimotor cortices (Melzack, 1990). Alternatively, phantoms could reflect generalization from viewing other people’s bodies (Brugger et al., 2000), a sensorimotor example of the classic theory that understanding oneself follows from understanding the “generalized other” (Mead, 1934, p. 154). Because phantom limbs cannot be stimulated, sensory testing cannot directly compare visual and somatosensory influences on representations of phantom limbs. Consequently, empirical investigation of phantoms is limited

The Evolution of a Center as Seen Through the Eyes of Man

The Center of Recreation and Tourism Development at the University of Colorado at Boulder was established in 1984 to address the research, service and educational needs specific to recreation and tourism development in rural communities that were rapidly emerging in the Rocky Mountain Region. The Center is dedicated to the enhancement of recreation and tourism development at local, state and regional settings and it\u27s primary activities include (1) technical assistance in recreation and tourism development for smaller Colorado communities through the Colorado Rural Recreation Development Project, (2) technical assistance in rural recreation and tourism development to representatives of six states within the Rocky Mountain region, (3) hospitality training for public and private sector representatives and (4) entrepreneurial training and development for youth an adults. The Center also provides other forms of technical assistance to select communities including economic impact studies, recreation impact assessments, and other forms of service and research

On the Role of Task Preference and Work Removal for Identifying Escape Functions

Abstract On the Role of Task Preference and Work Removal for Identifying Escape Functions Brian P. Long Students within the public school system may exhibit severe challenging behavior to escape from academic demands. Procedures to identify the reinforcers that maintain challenging behavior, such as functional analysis, may improve the probability of treatment success. Functional analysis involves manipulating contingencies to determine if positive (e.g., attention following challenging behavior) or negative (e.g., escape from aversive events such as task demands) reinforcers may maintain challenging behavior (Iwata et al., 1982). The absence of evocative tasks could produce inaccurate results when testing for effects of negative reinforcement during a functional analysis. Structured assessments to identify evocative tasks to include in a functional analysis may increase the possibility of conclusive results. In this study, we used a structured assessment called the paired-stimulus demand analysis (PSDA; Zangrillo et al., 2020) to identify tasks for a functional analysis for escape. Also, we tested for differences in response rate based on removal of materials during escape periods in the functional analyses. The PSDA involved presenting teacher-nominated tasks in pairs and recording which task the student selected. The functional analysis involved three conditions: the least-selected task with removal during escape, the least-selected task without removal during escape, and the most-selected task without removal during escape. Although the PSDA identified a clear preference for tasks for all participants, an escape function was identified for only 1 of 4 participants. For all participants, removal and non-removal of materials contingent on challenging behavior produced no differential effects