Preparing Teachers for Integrating Visual Arts for Academic Success of Elementary School Students

The majority of people agree that students’ education should provide them with the essential skills to be successful in the 21st-century workforce. Although these same sets of skills are commonly practiced through the process of making art, art education continues to hold an inferior status in schools. This disconnection raises the question, what has led to the devaluation of art in academics? This senior capstone will explore how teachers are prepared to integrate visual arts into the classroom. Through the use of a literature review, interviews with three in-service teachers, and a survey of students majoring in Liberal Studies at CSUMB, the result findings indicate that there is a lack of adequate teacher preparation and professional development in visual art integration that has contributed to the academic success of elementary school students

DCU-Paris13 systems for the SANCL 2012 shared task

The DCU-Paris13 team submitted three systems to the SANCL 2012 shared task on parsing English web text. The first submission, the highest ranked constituency parsing system, uses a combination of PCFG-LA product grammar parsing and self-training. In the second submission, also a constituency parsing system, the n-best lists of various parsing models are combined using an approximate sentence-level product model. The third system, the highest ranked system in the dependency parsing track, uses voting over dependency arcs to combine the output of three constituency parsing systems which have been converted to dependency trees. All systems make use of a data-normalisation component, a parser accuracy predictor and a genre classifier

Handling unknown words in statistical latent-variable parsing models for Arabic, English and French

This paper presents a study of the impact of using simple and complex morphological clues to improve the classification of rare and unknown words for parsing. We compare this approach to a language-independent technique often used in parsers which is based solely on word frequencies. This study is applied to three languages that exhibit different levels of morphological expressiveness: Arabic, French and English. We integrate information about Arabic affixes and morphotactics into a PCFG-LA parser and obtain stateof-the-art accuracy. We also show that these morphological clues can be learnt automatically from an annotated corpus

From news to comment: Resources and benchmarks for parsing the language of web 2.0

We investigate the problem of parsing the noisy language of social media. We evaluate four all-Street-Journal-trained statistical parsers (Berkeley, Brown, Malt and MST) on a new dataset containing 1,000 phrase structure trees for sentences from microblogs (tweets) and discussion forum posts. We compare the four parsers on their ability to produce Stanford dependencies for these Web 2.0 sentences. We find that the parsers have a particular problem with tweets and that a substantial part of this problem is related to POS tagging accuracy. We attempt three retraining experiments involving Malt, Brown and an in-house Berkeley-style parser and obtain a statistically significant improvement for all three parsers

Combining PCFG-LA models with dual decomposition: a case study with function labels and binarization

It has recently been shown that different NLP models can be effectively combined using dual decomposition. In this paper we demonstrate that PCFG-LA parsing models are suit- able for combination in this way. We experiment with the different models which result from alternative methods of extracting a gram- mar from a treebank (retaining or discarding function labels, left binarization versus right binarization) and achieve a labeled Parseval F-score of 92.4 on Wall Street Journal Section 23 – this represents an absolute improvement of 0.7 and an error reduction rate of 7% over a strong PCFG-LA product-model base- line. Although we experiment only with binarization and function labels in this study, there is much scope for applying this approach to other grammar extraction strategies

Foreebank: Syntactic Analysis of Customer Support Forums

International audienceWe present a new treebank of English and French technical forum content which has been annotated for grammatical errors and phrase structure. This double annotation allows us to empirically measure the effect of errors on parsing performance. While it is slightly easier to parse the corrected versions of the forum sentences, the errors are not the main factor in making this kind of text hard to parse

Nursing informatics skills relevance and competence for final year nursing students

The increasing use of technology in nursing practice requires nursing students to be competent in nursing informatics with an attitude of acceptance of technology in the healthcare environment. The objectives of the study were to determine final year nursing students’ perceptions and skills in nursing informatics and their attitudes towards computerisation in nursing practice

Le temps partiel moins attractif ?

Dans les secteurs de l’hôtellerie-restauration et du commerce, le temps partiel a longtemps été un outil privilégié de flexibilité pour les entreprises qui cherchaient à adapter leur volume de main-d’œuvre en fonction de leurs besoins, souvent difficiles à anticiper. Cependant, à partir de la fin des années 1990, les contrats à temps partiel sont devenus de moins en moins flexibles à mesure que le législateur en encadrait et en réglementait les usages. Les pouvoirs publics ont ainsi cherché à limiter les excès des périodes antérieures et la précarité associée à ces contrats, touchant essentiellement des femmes peu diplômées. L’article s’interroge sur les effets de ces changements législatifs dans les branches et dans les entreprises : comment les acteurs nationaux les ont-ils traduits dans les conventions collectives ? Comment les entreprises ont-elles réagi et abordent-elles cette nouvelle donne législative et conventionnelle ? À partir d’une étude qualitative réalisée de 2009 à 2011, nous revenons sur les enjeux du temps partiel dans les secteurs de services et sur les conséquences de la loi et de son appropriation par les acteurs à tous les niveaux de la régulation collective (articulations entre la loi, les conventions nationales, les accords d’entreprises et les pratiques sur le terrain). Nous avançons que de nouvelles configurations organisationnelles flexibles émergent dans les entreprises, associant au temps partiel un recours accru à la polyactivité, à la polyvalence et à la polycompétence.Part time work has long been a privileged management tool for companies in the “hotel and catering” and “retail trade” service sectors seeking to adjust employment volume to companies’ needs that are not easy to anticipate. However, since the end of the nineties, these part time contracts have become less and less flexible as the legislator has increased their legal framework and regulated their use. The aim of public authorities was to minimise the lack of job security which characterised part time positions, mainly occupied by unskilled women. This article deals with the implementation of these legislative changes within the service sector: how did national industrial partners translate them into collective bargaining agreements? How did companies react to these new labour laws? Based on a qualitative study conducted from 2009 to 2011, this article analyses the issues of part time work in the service sector and the effects of new legislation at every level of collective regulation: legal structures, collective bargaining agreements, company agreements, and practical experiments in companies. The authors also give an account of new flexible organizational patterns in companies, linking part time work to more polyvalence, polyactivity and polycompetence

First abundance estimates of Heaviside's (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) and Dusky (Lagenorhynchus obscurus) dolphins off Namibia using a novel visual and acoustic line transect survey

Knowledge of a population’s abundance is of primary importance for conservation management. However, robust estimates of abundance are often difficult to obtain, especially for cetaceans which spend most of their lives submerged. Cetacean abundance is commonly estimated using aerial or vessel-based line transect surveys and distance sampling methods. During 2012–2014, the first line transect surveys to estimate cetacean abundance were conducted in Namibian waters. Surveys took place in the Namibian Islands’ Marine Protected Area (NIMPA), a large MPA located along the southern Namibian coastline. A combined visual and acoustic double-platform survey configuration was used to investigate the factors affecting detectability of the endemic Heaviside’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii) and dusky dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obscurus obscurus). The present analysis estimates the probability of detection on the transect line (g(0)) for these two species and generates density and abundance estimates which incorporate a correction for both animals missed on the transect line and attractive responsive movement. The average annual baseline density and abundance estimates for Heaviside’s dolphins in the NIMPA region during 2012–2014 were 0.08 individuals/km2 (CV = 28.6%, 95% CI = 0.04–0.15 individuals/km2 ) and 1594 individuals (CV = 28.6%, 95% CI = 776–3275), respectively. The average annual baseline density and abundance estimates for dusky dolphins in the NIMPA region during 2012– 2014 were 0.16 individuals/km2 (CV = 26.2%, 95% CI = 0.10–0.28 individuals/km2 ) and 3493 individuals (CV = 26.2%, 95% CI: 2015–6052), respectively. A discussion on the distribution of Heaviside’s and dusky dolphins is provided for this region where such information is urgently needed. Based on existing knowledge of the species and area, these estimates are regarded as reasonable. They indicate moderate sized populations of animals within the NIMPA and provide an important first baseline on which future estimates can build.The Namibian Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR); Nedbank Go Green Fund; Rufford Small Grants Foundation; SCOR Visiting Scholar Fund; Fulbright U.S. Research Fellowship; National Geographic Society Explorers Grant in conjunction with the Waitt Foundation; University of Pretoria’s Zoology Department; Stellenbosch University.http://frontiersin.org/Marine_Sciencepm2020Mammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog