Youth Civic Engagement Grantmaking: Strategic Review

Examines the impact, strengths, and weaknesses of RBF's strategy for building capacity among organizations that help train and empower low-income youth and youth of color working for social change. Recommends strategies for building shared infrastructure

The Influence of Selected Noncognitive Variables on the Academic Success of Urban Black High School Males in an Enrichment Pre-College Program

The thrust of this study was to examine the influence of selected noncognitive variables on the academic success of urban Black high school males in an enrichment Pre-College Program. The major research question was: Which of the selected noncognitive variables are most useful in predicting academic success for urban Black high school males? This study reinvestigated Sedlacek and Brooks\u27 (1976) proposed set of seven noncognitive variables related to academic success: (a) self-concept; (b) realistic self-appraisal; (c) understanding of and ability to deal with racism; (d) preference for long-term goals over more immediate, short-term needs; (e) availability of a strong support person; (f) successful leadership experience; and (g) demonstrated community service. Participants were 102 urban Black high school males in an enrichment Pre-College Program in six urban school districts located in North Carolina. Of the 102 urban Black high school males, 60 were declared academically successful and 42 were academically nonsuccessful (determined by cumulative grade point average and number of honors/advanced placement courses taken). Pearson Product-Moment Correlations were used to determine the relationship between academic success and the selected noncognitive variables. In addition, a discriminant function analysis was used to determine the overall relationship between the selected noncognitive variables in predicting academic success. The results of the analyses permitted the researcher to conclude that all of the seven noncognitive variables influenced academic success. However, “self-concept”, had the greatest influence followed by “prefers long-term goals to short-term,” “demonstrated community service,” “successful leadership experience,” “understands and deals with racism,” “availability of a strong support person,” and lastly “realistic self-appraisal.” These findings support previous research findings and are consistent with the self-empowerment and resilience theories

Towards analysis-driven scientific software architecture: The case for abstract data type calculus

Abstract. This article approaches scientific software architecture from three analytical paths. Each path examines discrete time advancement of multiphysics phenomena governed by coupled differential equations. The new object-oriented Fortran 2003 constructs provide a formal syntax for an abstract data type (ADT) calculus. The first analysis uses traditional object-oriented software design metrics to demonstrate the high cohesion and low coupling associated with the calculus. A second analysis from the viewpoint of computational complexity theory demonstrates that a more representative bug search strategy than that considered by Rouson et al. (ACM Trans. Math. Soft. 3

General and Special Educators’ Perceptions of Transition for Students With Disabilities

Students with disabilities (SWDs) require a transition process to support high school graduation and continuation to higher education or the workforce. In a rural district in a southern state, the problem investigated was only 37% of SWDs were graduating from high schools in the target district, compared to 79.9% of students without disabilities, which suggested that the transition design and implementation did not support SWDs’ needs. Using a transition-focused conceptual framework, the purpose of this basic qualitative study was to understand the perceptions of educators regarding the design and implementation of the transition process for SWDs at the high schools in the target district. The perceptions of general and special educators about the strengths of and barriers to the transition process were investigated through interviews with purposefully sampled participants from the target district. Six participants were general educators and special educators, including central office leaders who were experienced with the transition process for SWDs. Inductive analysis revealed patterns and themes including collaboration, systemic assessment, parent resistance, and a need for a more functional curriculum for SWDs. A white paper was developed to inform district stakeholders of the findings and offer recommendations for bolstering the transition planning process in the district. Implications for positive social change include strengthening strategic transition planning to better prepare SWDs for postsecondary outcomes by incorporating instructional content for transition in social, academic, independent living and employability skills which may result in increased independence as well as improved communication and coordination with parents and other relevant stakeholders

High-performance design patterns for modern Fortran

This paper presents ideas for using coordinate-free numerics in modern Fortran to achieve code flexibility in the partial differential equation (PDE) domain. We also show how Fortran, over the last few decades, has changed to become a language well-suited for state-of-the-art software development. Fortran’s new coarray distributed data structure, the language’s class mechanism, and its side-effect-free, pure procedure capability provide the scaffolding on which we implement HPC software. These features empower compilers to organize parallel computations with efficient communication. We present some programming patterns that support asynchronous evaluation of expressions comprised of parallel operations on distributed data. We implemented these patterns using coarrays and the message passing interface (MPI). We compared the codes’ complexity and performance. The MPI code is much more complex and depends on external libraries. The MPI code on Cray hardware using the Cray compiler is 1.5–2 times faster than the coarray code on the same hardware. The Intel compiler implements coarrays atop Intel’s MPI library with the result apparently being 2–2.5 times slower than manually coded MPI despite exhibiting nearly linear scaling efficiency. As compilers mature and further improvements to coarrays comes in Fortran 2015, we expect this performance gap to narrow.publishedVersio

Development and performance comparison of MPI and Fortran Coarrays within an atmospheric research model

A mini-application of The Intermediate Complexity Research (ICAR) Model offers an opportunity to compare the costs and performance of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) versus coarray Fortran, two methods of communication across processes. The application requires repeated communication of halo regions, which is performed with either MPI or coarrays. The MPI communication is done using non-blocking two-sided communication, while the coarray library is implemented using a one-sided MPI or OpenSHMEM communication backend. We examine the development cost in addition to strong and weak scalability analysis to understand the performance costs

Design metrics in quantum turbulence simulations: How physics influences software architecture,

Abstract. The information hiding philosophy of object-oriented programming encourages localizing data structures within objects rather than sharing data globally across different classes of objects. This emphasis on local data leads naturally to fine-grained data abstractions, particularly in scientific simulations involving large collections of small, discrete physical or mathematical objects. This paper focuses on a subset of such simulations where dynamically reconfigurable links bind the objects together. It is demonstrated that fine-grained data structures reduce the complexity of local operations on the data at the potential expense of increased global operation complexity. Two metrics are used to describe data structures: granularity is the number of instantiations required to cover the data space, whereas extent is the continuously traversable length of the data along a given direction. These definitions are applied to two abstractions for simulating the turbulent motion of quantum vortices in superfluid liquid helium. Several local and global operations on a fine-grained linked list are compared with those on a coarse-grained array. It is demonstrated that fine-grained data structures recover the simplicity of more coarse-grained structures if maximal extent is maintained as the granularity increases

High-Performance Design Patterns for Modern Fortran

This paper presents ideas for using coordinate-free numerics in modern Fortran to achieve code flexibility in the partial differential equation (PDE) domain. We also show how Fortran, over the last few decades, has changed to become a language well-suited for state-of-the-art software development. Fortran’s new coarray distributed data structure, the language’s class mechanism, and its side-effect-free, pure procedure capability provide the scaffolding on which we implement HPC software. These features empower compilers to organize parallel computations with efficient communication. We present some programming patterns that support asynchronous evaluation of expressions comprised of parallel operations on distributed data. We implemented these patterns using coarrays and the message passing interface (MPI). We compared the codes’ complexity and performance. The MPI code is much more complex and depends on external libraries. The MPI code on Cray hardware using the Cray compiler is 1.5–2 times faster than the coarray code on the same hardware. The Intel compiler implements coarrays atop Intel’s MPI library with the result apparently being 2–2.5 times slower than manually coded MPI despite exhibiting nearly linear scaling efficiency. As compilers mature and further improvements to coarrays comes in Fortran 2015, we expect this performance gap to narrow

Langevin PDF simulation of particle deposition in a turbulent pipe flow

The paper deals with the description of particle deposition on walls from a turbulent flow over a large range of particle diameter, using a Langevin PDF model. The first aim of the work is to test how the present Langevin model is able to describe this phenomenon and to outline the physical as- pects which play a major role in particle deposition. The general features and characteristics of the present stochastic model are first recalled. Then, results obtained with the standard form of the model are presented along with an analysis which has been carried out to check the sensitivity of the predictions on different mean fluid quantities. These results show that the physical repre- sentation of the near-wall physics has to be improved and that, in particular, one possible route is to introduce specific features related to the near-wall coherent structures. In the following, we propose a simple phenomenological model that introduces some of the effects due to the presence of turbulent coherent structures on particles in a thin layer close to the wall. The results obtained with this phenomenological model are in good agreement with experimental evidence and this suggests to pursue in that direction, towards the development of more general and rigorous stochastic models that provide a link between a geometrical description of turbulent flow and a statistical one.Comment: 40 pages, 8 figure