Behavior Management

Behavior management strategies are extremely influential in a successful classroom setting. Curriculum is obviously a major concern of education reform, but can students really learn the curriculum in a classroom that is not well managed? Having a classroom that is well managed allows for students to take the risks they need to in order to access new knowledge and grow as citizens of our communities. Carefully designed survey questions were distributed to multiple educators in a school of poverty to gauge the feelings of those working in the classroom on the successes and hardships of behavior management programs. Data collection occurred anonymously. Completed surveys were then analyzed for common themes of successful strategies found among educators of students living in poverty. Keywords: behavior management, poverty, Positive Behavior Management Strategies, PBI

Germany's comeback: Worth the wait? EPC Commentary, 26 March 2018

During the six months of tedious negotiations to put a German coalition in place, governments across Europe, and France in particular, have been waiting impatiently for a push for European reform from Berlin. The new coalition agreement between the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and her Bavarian sister party CSU puts Europe high on the agenda, at least rhetorically. However, both domestic constraints and unbridgeable differences between France and Germany could derail the reform agenda. If Chancellor Merkel wants to go beyond a muddling-through approach she will have to invest a sizeable share of her political capital – domestically and at the European level. But is she ready to do so

The distinct and overlapping phenotypic spectra of FOXP1 and FOXP2 in cognitive disorders

Rare disruptions of FOXP2 have been strongly implicated in deficits in language development. Research over the past decade has suggested a role in the formation of underlying neural circuits required for speech. Until recently no evidence existed to suggest that the closely related FOXP1 gene played a role in neurodevelopmental processes. However, in the last few years, novel rare disruptions in FOXP1 have been reported in multiple cases of cognitive dysfunction, including intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder, together with language impairment. As FOXP1 and FOXP2 form heterodimers for transcriptional regulation, one may assume that they co-operate in common neurodevelopmental pathways through the co-regulation of common targets. Here we compare the phenotypic consequences of FOXP1 and FOXP2 impairment, drawing on well-known studies from the past as well as recent exciting findings and consider what these tell us regarding the functions of these two genes in neural development. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00439-012-1193-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Estimating spatially varying health effects in app-based citizen science research

Wildland fire smoke exposures present an increasingly severe threat to public health, and thus there is a growing need for studying the effects of protective behaviors on improving health. Emerging smartphone applications provide unprecedented opportunities to study this important problem, but also pose novel challenges. Smoke Sense, a citizen science project, provides an interactive platform for participants to engage with a smartphone app that records air quality, health symptoms, and behaviors taken to reduce smoke exposures. We propose a new, doubly robust estimator of the structural nested mean model that accounts for spatially- and time-varying effects via a local estimating equation approach with geographical kernel weighting. Moreover, our analytical framework is flexible enough to handle informative missingness by inverse probability weighting of estimating functions. We evaluate the new method using extensive simulation studies and apply it to Smoke Sense survey data collected from smartphones for a better understanding of the relationship between smoke preventive measures and health effects. Our results estimate how the protective behaviors' effects vary over space and time and find that protective behaviors have more significant effects on reducing health symptoms in the Southwest than the Northwest region of the USA

Analysis of economics of a TV broadcasting satellite for additional nationwide TV programs

The influence of a TV broadcasting satellite, transmitting four additional TV networks was analyzed. It is assumed that the cost of the satellite systems will be financed by the cable TV system operators. The additional TV programs increase income by attracting additional subscribers. Two economic models were established: (1) each local network is regarded as an independent economic unit with individual fees (cost price model) and (2) all networks are part of one public cable TV company with uniform fees (uniform price model). Assumptions are made for penetration as a function of subscription rates. Main results of the study are: the installation of a TV broadcasting satellite improves the economics of CTV-networks in both models; the overall coverage achievable by the uniform price model is significantly higher than that achievable by the cost price model