The Primary Dilemma: Determining And Overcoming Barriers To A Focus On Prekindergarten Through Grade 3

In 2017, reporters of national data in regard to reading ability among American, fourth grade students indicated low proficiency and achievement gaps. These results were also consistent within the state and district under study. There is a need to increase the focus on prekindergarten and primary grade education taking place prior to the grades in which federally mandated, accountability assessments for student learning take place. The purpose of this study is to determine the potential barriers to a paradigm shift at the state and district levels from a focus on state-assessed grade levels to prekindergarten and primary grade levels. The context of this study is a large public school district, the state in which it is located, and the federal education law under which both entities operate. My study demonstrates the gap in priorities between the state and local education leaders in regard to which grade levels should receive the majority of focus on an elementary school campus. I suggest the addition of quality measures for public prekindergarten and primary grade classrooms in order to improve professional development efforts and increase administrative focus

Identificación de los principales actores y sus posiciones sobre asuntos internacionales de política forestal en Argentina

Desde la Cumbre de la Tierra, en 1992, el manejo y conservación de los bosques se han convertido en temas importantes en la política forestal internacional. Como resultado, distintas iniciativas internacionales abordaron el tema de manera directa o indirecta, conformándose un cuerpo normativo de leyes y acuerdos fragmentado sobre los bosques de alcance internacional. Los temas que conforman este régimen normativo se convierten en relevantes de distinta manera por medio de varios actores en diferentes países. El objetivo del presente trabajo fue identificar los principales temas de política forestal internacional relevantes en Argentina así como los principales actores involucrados y sus posiciones frente a los mismos como resultado de sus intereses. Para la identificación de estos temas se consultaron fuentes públicas (diarios nacionales, páginas web) así como expertas (entrevistas y publicaciones profesionales) entre el 2008 - 2012. Los actores más importantes fueron identificados y categorizados. Las posiciones de los distintos actores se obtuvieron mediante el análisis de las fuentes. Los temas de política forestal internacional identificados en la Argentina fueron: cambio climático y bosques, biodiversidad en sistemas forestales, iniciativas de políticas forestales regionales, competencia de sistemas de certificación forestal, desertificación,disputas bilaterales referentes a bosques y financiamiento de organismos internacionales en temas forestales. Los diferentes actores identificados presentaron posiciones encontradas con respecto a los temas, detectándose el cambio climático y bosques como el más conflictivo entre actores, principalmente entre ONG ambientalistas y asociaciones forestales y la Secretaría de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sustantable y el Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganadería y Pesca.Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, forest management and conservation have become important issues in international forest-related politics and policies. As a result, different international initiatives have dealt with the subject directly or indirectly, building up a fragmented international forest regime complex made of international laws and agreements about forests. The diverse elements of this regime complex are differently made relevant by various actors in different countries. The aim of this study was to identify the most relevant forest issue elements in Argentina as well as the main involved actors and their positions towards these elements as a result of their interests. To identify the issues, content analysis of documents was employed on public sources (newspapers, websites) as well as expert sources (personal interviews and professional journals) from 2008 - 2012. The most relevant actors were identified and categorized. The positions of the different actors were obtained analyzing the different sources. The forest issue elements found to be relevant in Argentina are: climate change and forests, forest biodiversity, regional forest-related policy initiatives, competing forest certification schemes, desertification, bilateral forest related disputes and forest-related support by international organizations. The various actors identified showed different positions regarding a diversity of issues, being climate change and forests the most conflictive concern among actors, especially among environmental NGOs and forestry associations and the Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.Laboratorio de Investigación de Sistemas Ecológicos y Ambientales (LISEA

Identificación de los principales actores y sus posiciones sobre asuntos internacionales de política forestal en Argentina

Desde la Cumbre de la Tierra, en 1992, el manejo y conservación de los bosques se han convertido en temas importantes en la política forestal internacional. Como resultado, distintas iniciativas internacionales abordaron el tema de manera directa o indirecta, conformándose un cuerpo normativo de leyes y acuerdos fragmentado sobre los bosques de alcance internacional. Los temas que conforman este régimen normativo se convierten en relevantes de distinta manera por medio de varios actores en diferentes países. El objetivo del presente trabajo fue identificar los principales temas de política forestal internacional relevantes en Argentina así como los principales actores involucrados y sus posiciones frente a los mismos como resultado de sus intereses. Para la identificación de estos temas se consultaron fuentes públicas (diarios nacionales, páginas web) así como expertas (entrevistas y publicaciones profesionales) entre el 2008 - 2012. Los actores más importantes fueron identificados y categorizados. Las posiciones de los distintos actores se obtuvieron mediante el análisis de las fuentes. Los temas de política forestal internacional identificados en la Argentina fueron: cambio climático y bosques, biodiversidad en sistemas forestales, iniciativas de políticas forestales regionales, competencia de sistemas de certificación forestal, desertificación,disputas bilaterales referentes a bosques y financiamiento de organismos internacionales en temas forestales. Los diferentes actores identificados presentaron posiciones encontradas con respecto a los temas, detectándose el cambio climático y bosques como el más conflictivo entre actores, principalmente entre ONG ambientalistas y asociaciones forestales y la Secretaría de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sustantable y el Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganadería y Pesca.Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, forest management and conservation have become important issues in international forest-related politics and policies. As a result, different international initiatives have dealt with the subject directly or indirectly, building up a fragmented international forest regime complex made of international laws and agreements about forests. The diverse elements of this regime complex are differently made relevant by various actors in different countries. The aim of this study was to identify the most relevant forest issue elements in Argentina as well as the main involved actors and their positions towards these elements as a result of their interests. To identify the issues, content analysis of documents was employed on public sources (newspapers, websites) as well as expert sources (personal interviews and professional journals) from 2008 - 2012. The most relevant actors were identified and categorized. The positions of the different actors were obtained analyzing the different sources. The forest issue elements found to be relevant in Argentina are: climate change and forests, forest biodiversity, regional forest-related policy initiatives, competing forest certification schemes, desertification, bilateral forest related disputes and forest-related support by international organizations. The various actors identified showed different positions regarding a diversity of issues, being climate change and forests the most conflictive concern among actors, especially among environmental NGOs and forestry associations and the Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.Laboratorio de Investigación de Sistemas Ecológicos y Ambientales (LISEA

Learning-based Position and Stiffness Feedforward Control of Antagonistic Soft Pneumatic Actuators using Gaussian Processes

Variable stiffness actuator (VSA) designs are manifold. Conventional model-based control of these nonlinear systems is associated with high effort and design-dependent assumptions. In contrast, machine learning offers a promising alternative as models are trained on real measured data and nonlinearities are inherently taken into account. Our work presents a universal, learning-based approach for position and stiffness control of soft actuators. After introducing a soft pneumatic VSA, the model is learned with input-output data. For this purpose, a test bench was set up which enables automated measurement of the variable joint stiffness. During control, Gaussian processes are used to predict pressures for achieving desired position and stiffness. The feedforward error is on average 11.5% of the total pressure range and is compensated by feedback control. Experiments with the soft actuator show that the learning-based approach allows continuous adjustment of position and stiffness without model knowledge.© 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Potential of natural language processing for metadata extraction fromenvironmental scientific publications

Summarizing information from large bodies of scientific literature is anessential but work-intensive task. This is especially true in environmentalstudies where multiple factors (e.g., soil, climate, vegetation) cancontribute to the effects observed. Meta-analyses, studies thatquantitatively summarize findings of a large body of literature, rely onmanually curated databases built upon primary publications. However, giventhe increasing amount of literature, this manual work is likely to requiremore and more effort in the future. Natural language processing (NLP)facilitates this task, but it is not clear yet to which extent theextraction process is reliable or complete. In this work, we explore threeNLP techniques that can help support this task: topic modeling, tailoredregular expressions and the shortest dependency path method. We apply thesetechniques in a practical and reproducible workflow on two corpora ofdocuments: the Open Tension-diskInfiltrometer Meta-database (OTIM) and the Meta corpus. The OTIM corpus contains the sourcepublications of the entries of the OTIM database of near-saturated hydraulicconductivity from tension-disk infiltrometer measurements(https://github.com/climasoma/otim-db, last access: 1 March 2023). The Meta corpus is constituted ofall primary studies from 36 selected meta-analyses on the impact ofagricultural practices on sustainable water management in Europe. As a firststep of our practical workflow, we identified different topics from theindividual source publications of the Meta corpus using topic modeling.This enabled us to distinguish well-researched topics (e.g., conventionaltillage, cover crops), where meta-analysis would be useful, from neglectedtopics (e.g., effect of irrigation on soil properties), showing potentialknowledge gaps. Then, we used tailored regular expressions to extractcoordinates, soil texture, soil type, rainfall, disk diameter and tensionsfrom the OTIM corpus to build a quantitative database. We were able toretrieve the respective information with 56 % up to 100 % of allrelevant information (recall) and with a precision between 83 % and100 %. Finally, we extracted relationships between a set of driverscorresponding to different soil management practices or amendments (e.g.,"biochar", "zero tillage") and target variables (e.g., "soilaggregate", "hydraulic conductivity", "crop yield") from thesource publications' abstracts of the Meta corpus using the shortestdependency path between them. These relationships were further classifiedaccording to positive, negative or absent correlations between the driverand the target variable. This quickly provided an overview of the differentdriver-variable relationships and their abundance for an entire body ofliterature. Overall, we found that all three tested NLP techniques were ableto support evidence synthesis tasks. While human supervision remainsessential, NLP methods have the potential to support automated evidencesynthesis which can be continuously updated as new publications becomeavailable

Regionale Herkunft und Binnenmoblität der Studierenden. Zusatzbericht der Studierenden-Sozialerhebung 2009.

aus dem Inhaltsverzeichnis: Einleitung; Regionale Herkunft und Binnenmobilität (Hochschulstatistik); Binnenmobilität (Studierenden-Sozialerhebung); Gründe für die Studienortswahl; Pläne nach dem Studium; Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse im Überblick; Anhang: Tabellen und Grafiken; Literatur; Überblick: Die Studierendenpopulation im SS 2009

Attitude Discrepancy and Its Influence on Turnover Intention Among IS Professionals

Acquiring and retaining skilled IS professionals is a crucial success factor for organizations. Skilled IS professionals become even more important considering that organizations are constantly trying to improve through new innovative information technology. We plan to uncover the effects of conflicting explicit and implicit attitudes towards innovative technologies on job satisfaction and turnover intention, using blockchain technology as an example. We hypothesize that organizational factors such as IT capabilities and innovation support might have different effects on explicit and implicit attitudes, leading to attitude discrepancy, which negatively affects job satisfaction and increases turnover intentions. We plan to use a single concept implicit association test and a survey to assess implicit and explicit attitudes. Through our research, we expect to provide a better understanding of antecedents of job satisfaction and turnover intention on an organizational level that allows to derive better management practices for handling innovative technologies

Mapping the fragmentation of the international forest regime complex: institutional elements, conflicts and synergies

In the field of global environmental governance, a plethora of international regimes have emerged over the past decades. In some issue areas, multiple regimes aim to govern the issue, sometimes reinforcing, oftentimes conflicting with each other. Consequently, international regime complexes are an empirical phenomenon, which are inherently characterized by specific degrees of fragmentation. For any given issue area, one of the key questions is whether the institutional fragmentation encountered in such regime complexes is synergistic or conflictive in nature. Scrutinizing this question poses methodological challenges of how to delineate a regime complex and how to assess its fragmentation. Drawing on the highly fragmented case of the international forest regime complex, this paper aims to map its institutional fragmentation and to analyse the degrees to which it is conflictive or synergistic. For this we conceptualize the notion of institutional elements and develop a novel method for mapping regime complexes based on their core institutional elements. We then employ tools from the sub-discipline of policy analysis on the complex’s institutional elements for analysing in detail, which of the elements are mutually synergistic and conflictive with other elements of the regime complex. Our results indicate that synergistic relations mostly exist among rather vague elements, often built around sustainability as a core principle. On the contrary, conflictive relations prevail as soon as the elements are designed in more concrete and substantial ways. We conclude that the forest regime complex displays only degree of seemingly synergistic fragmentation through a number of non-decisions and the use of “sustainability” as an empty formula. De facto, conflictive fragmentation prevails among elements of concrete subject matter. This raises questions on whether vast parts of regime complexes merely serve symbolic functions, while conflicts on substance are being camouflaged.Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias y ForestalesLaboratorio de Investigación de Sistemas Ecológicos y Ambientale

Internationale Studierende. Zusatzbericht der Studierenden-Sozialerhebung 2011.

aus dem Inhaltsverzeichnis: Einleitung; Population der ausländischen Studierenden; Soziodemographischer Hintergrund; BildungsausländerInnen im österreichischen Hochschulsystem; Lebens- und Studiensituation von BildungsausländerInnen; Pläne nach Beendigung des Studiums in Österreich; Mit eigenen Worten: Anmerkungen von internationalen Studierenden; Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse im Überblick; Glossar; Literaturverzeichnis