Current Realities for Public Schools

Administrators in today\u27s schools work in a constant state of flux; change is the norm. Congress\u27 recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act, through the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), provides a signal example. Just as many were beginning to fully understand and adjust to the implications of the now defunct No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, there\u27s a new set of rules to play by

The Changing Landscape of Leadership

Leading a campus is not what it used to be (nor is teaching a class, being a student, or raising a child for that matter). The increasing pace of societal and technological change provides an ever-evolving backdrop against which educational leaders view and conduct their work. Overlay a culture of accountability enacted amid budget cuts, surging enrollments, and shifting demographics, and the roles of school leaders become clouded with uncertainty, imbued with responsibility, and demanding increased personal commitment and professional and technical knowledge. One principal preparation student recently commented that her teaching colleagues routinely asked her, Why in the world do you want to do that? Upon reflection, it\u27s a valid question we should all answer

Preparing Aspiring Superintendents to Lead School Improvement: Perceptions of Graduates for Program Development

Changes in the design and delivery of educational leadership preparation programs are advocated in order to meet the needs of leadership for 21st century schools (Byrd, 2001; Cox, 2002; McKerrow, 1998; Smylie & Bennett, 2005). The changing needs of the 21st century, coupled with accountability standards and more diverse populations of students within school districts, create challenges for leaders who are attempting to increase student achievement (Firestone & Shipps, 2005; Schlechty, 2008). Further, student performance demands have increased at the state and national level because of the No Child Left Behind Act (Wong & Nicotera, 2007). These standards have thus increased the emphasis of the administrator\u27s responsibility to positively impact student achievement (Taylor, 2001). With the graying of the profession and the need for exemplary school superintendents, the preparation of school superintendents who can successfully lead school improvement is vitally important (Lashway, 2006). According to the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, 2002), university preparation programs should seek current leaders\u27 perspectives of critical content components and the processes to be used in the preparation of educational leaders who can lead school improvement practices and processes

Dodecatheon meadia L.

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/herbarium_specimens_byname/16786/thumbnail.jp

Mycobacterial PE/PPE Proteins at the Host-Pathogen Interface

The mycobacterial PE/PPE proteins have attracted much interest since their formal identification just over a decade ago. It has been widely speculated that these proteins may play a role in evasion of host immune responses, possibly via antigenic variation. Although a cohesive understanding of their function(s) has yet to be established, emerging data increasingly supports a role for the PE/PPE proteins at multiple levels of the infectious process. This paper will delineate salient features of the families revealed by comparative genomics, bioinformatic analyses and genome-wide screening approaches and will summarise existing knowledge of subcellular localization, secretion pathways, and protein structure. These characteristics will be considered in light of findings on innate and adaptive host responses to PE/PPE proteins, and we will review the increasing body of data on B and T cell recognition of these proteins. Finally, we will consider how current knowledge and future explorations may contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of these intriguing proteins and their involvement in host pathogen interactions. Ultimately this information could underpin future intervention strategies, for example, in the area of new and improved diagnostic tools and vaccine candidates

Understanding tissue morphology: model repurposing using the CoSMoS process

We present CoSMoS as a way of structuring thinking on how to reuse parts of an existing model and simulation in a new model and its implementation. CoSMoS provides a lens through which to consider, post-implementation, the assumptions made during the design and implementation of a software simulation of physical interactions in the formation of vascular structures from endothelial cells. We show how the abstract physical model and its software implementation can be adapted for a different problem: the growth of cancer cells under varying environmental perturbations. We identify the changes that must be made to adapt the model to its new context, along with the gaps in our knowledge of the domain that must be filled by wet-lab experimentation when recalibrating the model. Through parameter exploration, we identify the parameters that are critical to the dynamic physical structure of the modelled tissue, and we calibrate these parameters using a series of in vitro experiments. Drawing inspiration from the CoSMoS project structure, we maintain confidence in the repurposed model, and achieve a satisfactory degree of model reuse within our in silico experimental system

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States

Although racial discrimination emerges some of the time at some stages of criminal justice processing-such as juvenile justice-there is little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias. Discrimination appears to be indirect, stemming from the amplification of initial disadvantages over time, along with the social construction of "moral panics" and associated political responses. The "drug war" of the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated the disproportionate representation of blacks in state and federal prisons. Race and ethnic disparities in violent offending and victimization are pronounced and long-standing. Blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, suffer much higher rates of robbery and homicide victimization than do whites. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black males and females. These differences result in part from social forces that ecologically concentrate race with poverty and other social dislocations. Useful research would emphasize multilevel (contextual) designs, the idea of "cumulative disadvantage" over the life course, the need for multiracial conceptualizations, and comparative, cross-national designs.Sociolog

Spotting Hallucinations in Inverse Problems with Data-Driven Priors

Hallucinations are an inescapable consequence of solving inverse problems with deep neural networks. The expressiveness of recent generative models is the reason why they can yield results far superior to conventional regularizers; it can also lead to realistic-looking but incorrect features, potentially undermining the trust in important aspects of the reconstruction. We present a practical and computationally efficient method to determine, which regions in the solutions of inverse problems with data-driven priors are prone to hallucinations. By computing the diagonal elements of the Fisher information matrix of the likelihood and the data-driven prior separately, we can flag regions where the information is prior-dominated. Our diagnostic can directly be compared to the reconstructed solutions and enables users to decide if measurements in such regions are robust for their application. Our method scales linearly with the number of parameters and is thus applicable in high-dimensional settings, allowing it to be rolled out broadly for the large-volume data products of future wide-field surveys.Comment: 7 pages 3 figures, Accepted at the ICML 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Astrophysic