Dartmouth Outward Bound Center and the rise of experiential education 1957-1976

Purpose: The article discusses Outward Bound’s participation in the human potential movement through its incorporation of T-group practices and the reform language of experiential education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Design/methodology/approach: The article reports on original research conducted using materials from Dartmouth College and other Outward Bound collections from 1957-1976. It follows a case study approach to illustrate themes pertaining to Outward Bound’s creation and evolution in the United States, and the establishment of experiential education more broadly. Findings: Building on prior research (Freeman, 2011; Millikan, 2006), the present article elaborates on the conditions under which Outward Bound abandoned muscular Christianity in favor of humanistic psychology. Experiential education provided both a set of practices and a reform language that helped Outward Bound expand into the educational mainstream, which also helped to extend self-expressive pedagogies into formal and nonformal settings. Research implications: The Dartmouth Outward Bound Center’s tenure coincided with and reflected broader cultural changes, from the cold war motif of spiritual warfare, frontier masculinity, and national service to the rise of self-expression in education. Future scholars can situate specific curricular initiatives in the context of these paradigms, particularly in outdoor education. Originality/value: The article draws attention to one of the forms that the human potential movement took in education – experiential education – and the reasons for its adoption. It also reinforces emerging understandings of post-WWII American outdoor education as a product of the cold war and reflective of subsequent changes in the wider culture to a narrower focus on the self

Reduction of dimension for nonlinear dynamical systems

We consider reduction of dimension for nonlinear dynamical systems. We demonstrate that in some cases, one can reduce a nonlinear system of equations into a single equation for one of the state variables, and this can be useful for computing the solution when using a variety of analytical approaches. In the case where this reduction is possible, we employ differential elimination to obtain the reduced system. While analytical, the approach is algorithmic, and is implemented in symbolic software such as {\sc MAPLE} or {\sc SageMath}. In other cases, the reduction cannot be performed strictly in terms of differential operators, and one obtains integro-differential operators, which may still be useful. In either case, one can use the reduced equation to both approximate solutions for the state variables and perform chaos diagnostics more efficiently than could be done for the original higher-dimensional system, as well as to construct Lyapunov functions which help in the large-time study of the state variables. A number of chaotic and hyperchaotic dynamical systems are used as examples in order to motivate the approach.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Interpolation between multi-dimensional histograms using a new non-linear moment morphing method

A prescription is presented for the interpolation between multi-dimensional distribution templates based on one or multiple model parameters. The technique uses a linear combination of templates, each created using fixed values of the model's parameters and transformed according to a specific procedure, to model a non-linear dependency on model parameters and the dependency between them. By construction the technique scales well with the number of input templates used, which is a useful feature in modern day particle physics, where a large number of templates is often required to model the impact of systematic uncertainties.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures. Algorithm publicly available in RooFi

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies Prion genetics, transmission barriers, and disease control

Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE) are invariably fatal neurodegenerative diseases associated with misfolded prion protein. Host prion gene (PRNP) variation affects TSE transmission barriers within and between species, and forms the basis of disease control strategies. Reported herein are aspects of PRNP genetics related to prion transmission, species barriers, and management. A TSE species barrier in ruminant to carnivore transmission was investigated by the hypothesis that primary oral challenge with chronic wasting disease (CWD) causes a prion disease in mink. It was found that while CWD can cause a prion disease when given intracerebrally to mink, such disease is not characteristic of Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy (TME) and oral challenge does not result in disease. A novel PRNP variant at codon 27 variant may affect TSE transmission, possibly by altered membrane localization of normal prion protein. This study shows that CWD is poorly transmissible to non-cervid hosts, CWD is an unlikely cause of TME, and mink are an unlikely to be involved in natural CWD transmission. Thus, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is the only ruminant TSE orally transmissible to mink suggesting that a previously unrecognized prion-like disease was a cause of some cases of TME. The effect of PRNP promoter regions upon TSE transmission was examined by the hypothesis that transgenic incorporation of the cervid PRNP putative promoter (PP) region and open reading frame (ORF) renders transgenic mice susceptible to CWD administered by intracerebral, intraperitoneal, and oral routes. Transgenic insertion of a mule deer PRNP PP and ORF transgene resulted in stable transcription and translation in mice without developmental, anatomical, or behavioral abnormalities. Transgenic mice accumulated disease associated prion protein following challenge with CWD, thus providing an alternative system for study of peripheral exposure routes in CWD pathogenesis. To determine adverse affects of PRNP selection for scrapie control a hypothesis that the sheep PRNP 171 arginine (R) allele is associated with higher prevalence of ovine progressive pneumonia virus (OPPV) and higher OPPV provirus levels was tested. Results showed that OPPV presence and provirus levels are independent of the PRNP 171R allele indicating that PRNP selection will not adversely affect OPPV within a flock

nsolvency Experience, Risk-Based Capital, and Prompt Corrective Action in Property-Liability Insurance

In December 1992, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) adopted a life-health insurer risk-based capital (RBC) formula and model law that became effective with the 1993 annual statement filed in March 1994. In principle, well-designed RBC requirements can help achieve an efficient reduction in the expected costs of insolvencies. They can provide incentives for insurers to operate safely in cases where market incentives are weak due to government mandated guarantees of insurer obligations or asymmetries regarding solvency between insurers and buyers. RBC requirements also may facilitate or encourage prompt corrective action by solvency regulators by helping regulators to identify weak insurers and giving regulators legal authority to intervene when capital falls below specified levels. RBC requirements may force regulators to act in amore timely manner when confronted with external pressure to delay action. However, RBC capital requirements have a number ofpotential limitations. Unavoidable imperfections in any meaningful RBC system will likely distort some insurer decisions in undesirable and unintended ways. RBC requirements by themselves will do little or nothing to help regulators determine when an insurer s reported capital (surplus) is overstated due to understatement of liabilities or overstatement of assets. A well-designed RBC system should minimize costs associated with misclassification of insurers. The system should be able to identify a high proportion of troubled companies early enough to permit regulators to take prompt corrective action and should identify as troubled only a minimal proportion of financially sound insurers. This study analyzes data on solvent and insolvent property-liability insurers to determine whether modifications in the NAIC s RBC formula can improve its ability to predict firms that subsequently fail without substantially increasing the proportion of surviving insurers that are incorrectly predicted to fail. It uses logistic regression models to investigate whether changes in the weight for the major components in the RBC formula and incorporation of information on company size and organizational form improve the tradeoff between Type I error rates (the percentage of insurers that later failed that are incorrectly predicted not to fail) and the Type II error rates (the percentage of surviving insurers that are incorrectly predicted to fail). The data analyzed were for 1989-91 for firms that subsequently failed and for firms that survived through the first nine months of 1993. The authors make four main conclusions. First, less than half of the companies that later failed had RBC ratios within the proposed ranges for regulatory and company action. Second, total and component RBC ratios generally are significantly different for failed and surviving firms based on univariate tests. Third, estimation of multiple logistic regression models of insolvency risk indicated that allowing the weights of the RBC component to vary and including firm size and organizational form variables generally produce a material improvement in the tradeoff between sample Type I and Type II error rates. And, fourth,the RBC models are noticeably less successful in predicting large firm insolvencies than in predicting smaller insolvencies. Regarding the estimated weights in the logistic regression models, a major conclusion is the reserve component of the NAIC risk-based capital formula, which accounts for half of industry risk-based capital, has virtually no predictive power in any of the tests conducted. Given the high costs associated with large failures and the inferior performance of the models in predicting large insolvencies, a higher payoff in terms of reduced insolvency costs is likely to be achieved by developing models that perform better for large firms.