An Outline of the Procedures to Reduce Budget Expenditures in the Edwards County Community Unit School District No. 1 for the 1978-79 Fiscal Year

The purpose of this study was to discover ways to reduce expenditures in the budget of the Edwards County Community Unit School District No. 1 for the 1978-79 fiscal year in the light of a projected loss of revenues complicated by inflationary trends. The need arose due to three factors: A loss of a portion of the district\u27s state aid due to a previous overpayment. A rise in the assessed valuation which would mean an additional loss of state aid: It was projected that local monies collected would not offset the loss of state aid. Spiraling inflation was creating an increasing burden on the district\u27s budget. Three alternatives for meeting the need were presented to the Board of Education: They could ask the voters of Edwards County for more working capital by means of a referendum. They could continue with the existing staff and/or programs and incur debt as needed to maintain the staff and/or programs. They could cut staff and/or programs in order to maintain the present fiscal balance. The Board of Education decided to reduce staff and/or programs, which defined the problem: Which staff and/or programs could be cut while still providing a quality program of instruction? When considering the limitation or elimination of various programs, two factors became involved: The decision had to be made as to which reductions would affect the fewest students the least. State-mandated programs would have to be maintained. The plan of action devised was based upon the desire to involve all facets of the school community, teachers, parents, taxpayers, administration, and the Board of Education in the deliberation process. It was decided that alternatives for budget reductions originate from the building level. The Central Office would concentrate on programs/expenditures not within the jurisdiction of any one building. The staff was informed from the beginning and encouraged to submit cost-saving ideas. A Citizens Advisory Council was established to: Act as a sounding board to the administration and board for cuts to be made Generate new ideas Make recommendations to the Board of Education concerning the cuts deliberated upon by the council Recommendations submitted by the Citizens Advisory Council were: To eliminate three elementary teaching positions, one high school English position, and change the position of vocational director to vocational coordinator. To develop a written purchasing procedure policy To take the following list of eight long-range goals under advisement: a. Maintain an advisory councilb. Employ a curriculum directorc. Establish priorities for maintaining buildings and equipmentd. Develop a school policies manuale. Study competency testingf. Consider the purchase of a heavy equipment buildingg. Establish a mandatory parent-teacher conference dayh. Hold a referendum As a result of the project, the following budgets, positions, and/or programs were altered or eliminated: Three teachers were dismissed due to a reduction in force. The vocational director\u27s position was altered. $1,000 was trimmed from the library budget. Additional custodial and clerical help was funded through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. One less school bus was purchased for the 1978-79 school year. The adoption of high school textbooks was postponed for one year until they became eligible for funding under the Illinois Textbook Loan Program. In his evaluation the author deems the project a limited success. He states that the reductions did equal the loss in state aid. Five of the eight long-range goals submitted by the Citizens Advisory Council either have been accomplished or are under study. The author warns, however, that the solutions are temporary, citing rises in approved budgets, the purchase of needed equipment, and a probable rise in salaries. Recommendations as a result of the study include: The Board of Education should maintain a Citizens Advisory Council. A program of zero-based budgeting should be studied for possible implementation in the future. A systematic schedule of the replacement of equipment and materials should be established. The district should pass a local referendum

Numerical simulation of a linear stochastic oscillator with additive noise

The ability of numerical methods to reproduce long-time features of a linear stochastic oscillator is examined. It is shown that certain, widely-used, methods fail to capture the correct second moment growth rate, whereas a customized extension of the partitioned Euler method behaves well in this respect. It is also shown that the partitioned Euler method inherits an infinite-oscillation property. A weaker oscillation result is proved for a wide class of numerical methods

Processing counterfactual and hypothetical conditionals: An fMRI investigation

Counterfactual thinking is ubiquitous in everyday life and an important aspect of cognition and emotion. Although counterfactual thought has been argued to differ from processing factual or hypothetical information, imaging data which elucidate these differences on a neural level are still scarce. We investigated the neural correlates of processing counterfactual sentences under visual and aural presentation. We compared conditionals in subjunctive mood which explicitly contradicted previously presented facts (i.e. counterfactuals) to conditionals framed in indicative mood which did not contradict factual world knowledge and thus conveyed a hypothetical supposition. Our results show activation in right occipital cortex (cuneus) and right basal ganglia (caudate nucleus) during counterfactual sentence processing. Importantly the occipital activation is not only present under visual presentation but also with purely auditory stimulus presentation, precluding a visual processing artifact. Thus our results can be interpreted as reflecting the fact that counterfactual conditionals pragmatically imply the relevance of keeping in mind both factual and supposed information whereas the hypothetical conditionals imply that real world information is irrelevant for processing the conditional and can be omitted. The need to sustain representations of factual and suppositional events during counterfactual sentence processing requires increased mental imagery and integration efforts. Our findings are compatible with predictions based on mental model theory

Ad Hoc Hypotheses and the Monsters within

Science is increasingly becoming automated. Tasks yet to be fully automated include the conjecturing, modifying, extending and testing of hypotheses. At present scientists have an array of methods to help them carry out those tasks. These range from the well-articulated, formal and unexceptional rules to the semi-articulated and variously understood rules-of-thumb and intuitive hunches. If we are to hand over at least some of the aforementioned tasks to machines, we need to clarify, refine and make formal, not to mention computable, even the more obscure of the methods scientists successfully employ in their inquiries. The focus of this essay is one such less-than-transparent methodological rule. I am here referring to the rule that ad hoc hypotheses ought to be spurned. This essay begins with a brief examination of some notable conceptions of ad hoc-ness in the philosophical literature. It is pointed out that there is a general problem afflicting most such conceptions, namely the intuitive judgments that are supposed to motivate them are not universally shared. Instead of getting bogged down in what ad hoc-ness exactly means, I shift the focus of the analysis to one undesirable feature often present in alleged cases of ad hoc-ness. I call this feature the ‘monstrousness’ of a hypothesis. A fully articulated formal account of this feature is presented by specifying what it is about the internal constitution of a hypothesis that makes it monstrous. Using this account, a monstrousness measure is then proposed and somewhat sketchily compared with the minimum description length approach

Numerical schemes for continuum models of reaction-diffusion systems subject to internal noise

We present new numerical schemes to integrate stochastic partial differential equations which describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of reaction-diffusion (RD) problems under the effect of internal fluctuations. The schemes conserve the nonnegativity of the solutions and incorporate the Poissonian nature of internal fluctuations at small densities, their performance being limited by the level of approximation of density fluctuations at small scales. We apply the new schemes to two different aspects of the Reggeon model namely, the study of its non-equilibrium phase transition and the dynamics of fluctuating pulled fronts. In the latter case, our approach allows to reproduce quantitatively for the first time microscopic properties within the continuum model.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in Physical Review E as a Rapid Communicatio

Stable transfection of protein kinase C alpha cDNA in hormone-dependent breast cancer cell lines

An inverse relationship between protein kinase C (PKC) activity and oestrogen receptor (ER) expression in human breast cell lines and tumours has been firmly established over the past 10 years. To determine whether specific alterations in PKC expression accompany hormone-independence, we examined the expression of PKC isozymes in the hormone-independent human breast cancer cell clones MCF-7 5C and T47D:C42 compared with their hormone-dependent counterparts, MCF-7 A4, MCF-7 WS8 and T47D:A18 respectively. Both hormone-independent cell clones exhibit elevated PKCα expression and increased basal AP-1 activity compared with the hormone-dependent cell clones. To determine whether PKCα overexpression is sufficient to mediate the hormone-independent phenotype, we stably transfected an expression plasmid containing PKCα cDNA to the T47D:A18 and MCF-7 A4 cell lines. This is the first report of PKCα transfection in T47D cells. In contrast to MCF-7 cells, T47D has the propensity to lose the ER and more readily forms tamoxifen-stimulated tumours in athymic mice. We find that in T47D:A18/PKCα clones, there is concomitant up-regulation of PKC βI and δ, whereas in the MCF-7 A4/PKCα transfectants PKC ɛ is up-regulated. In T47D:A18, but not in MCF-7 A4, PKCα stable transfection is accompanied by down-regulation of ER function whilst basal AP-1 activity is elevated. Our results suggest PKCα overexpression may play a role in growth signalling during the shift from hormone dependent to hormone-independent breast cancers. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig

What’s so bad about scientism?

In their attempt to defend philosophy from accusations of uselessness made by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, some philosophers respond with the charge of ‘scientism.’ This charge makes endorsing a scientistic stance, a mistake by definition. For this reason, it begs the question against these critics of philosophy, or anyone who is inclined to endorse a scientistic stance, and turns the scientism debate into a verbal dispute. In this paper, I propose a different definition of scientism, and thus a new way of looking at the scientism debate. Those philosophers who seek to defend philosophy against accusations of uselessness would do philosophy a much better service, I submit, if they were to engage with the definition of scientism put forth in this paper, rather than simply make it analytic that scientism is a mistake

Evaluating the Accuracy of Imputation Methods in a Five-Way Admixed Population

Genotype imputation is a powerful tool for increasing statistical power in an association analysis. Meta-analysis of multiple study datasets also requires a substantial overlap of SNPs for a successful association analysis, which can be achieved by imputation. Quality of imputed datasets is largely dependent on the software used, as well as the reference populations chosen. The accuracy of imputation of available reference populations has not been tested for the five-way admixed South African Colored (SAC) population. In this study, imputation results obtained using three freely-accessible methods were evaluated for accuracy and quality. We show that the African Genome Resource is the best reference panel for imputation of missing genotypes in samples from the SAC population, implemented via the freely accessible Sanger Imputation Server

Obesity: A Biobehavioral Point of View

Excerpt: If you ask an overweight person, “Why are you fat?’, you will, almost invariably, get the answer, “Because 1 eat too much.” You will get this answer in spite of the fact that of thirteen studies, six find no significant differences in the caloric intake of obese versus nonobese subjects, five report that the obese eat significantly less than the nonobese, and only two report that they eat significantly more