2010 Commencement Address: Mark Shriver \u2786

Mark Shriver ’86, vice president and managing director of Save the Children, will receive an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross and address this year’s graduates during the College’s Commencement ceremonies on Friday, May 28 at 10:30 a.m. on the campus. Shriver manages U.S. programs for the international organization Save the Children. In the U.S., Save the Children works in rural communities in Appalachia, the Southeast, the Mississippi River Delta, the Gulf Coast, the Southwest and California’s Central Valley, providing early childhood development, literacy, physical activity, and nutrition programming as well as emergency relief. A history major at Holy Cross, Shriver has devoted his career to social and public service. Soon after graduation, he became a member of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Advisory Council, and also served on the Board of Directors of the Public Justice Center, the Maryland Governor’s Task Force on Alternative Sanctions to Incarceration, and the Maryland Governor’s Commission on Service. In 1994, he was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, the lower house of the Maryland state legislature, representing Montgomery County, Maryland, District 15, and was reelected in 1998. In addition to serving as a delegate, he worked on the Task Force on the Maryland Prepaid-Tuition Savings Program in 1996, and on the Task Force to Study the Governance, Coordination, and Funding of the University System of Maryland. He was a founder and executive Director of The Choice Program, an at-risk youth intervention project of the Shriver Center at University of Maryland. He then served on the Advisory Board on After-School Opportunity Programs from 1999 to 2003. Shriver is married to Jeanne Ripp Shriver ’87. He is the son of the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, former Holy Cross trustee and honorary degree recipient in 1979 and of R. Sargent Shriver, who received an honorary degree in 1986. His sister Maria Shriver received an honorary degree in 1998.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/commence_address/1005/thumbnail.jp

An exploratory investigation of proximity control in a large-group unstructured setting

Proximity control is a common component of many classroom management strategies and has been shown to reduce disruptive behavior as well as increase academic engagement among students. Much of the research on proximity control to date has been conducted in structured classroom settings or in combination with other behavioral management techniques. This applied study investigated the effect of proximity control on student behavior in a large, unstructured setting using an ABAB withdrawal design. Results indicate that staff proximity was effective at reducing inappropriate student behavior. The study also explored the acceptability of the treatment among staff participants. Staff reported lower levels of acceptability for the implementation of proximity control compared to pretreatment methods of monitoring. A discussion of these findings and implications is included

Increasing On-Task Behavior Using Teacher Attention Delivered on a Fixed-Time Schedule

The effectiveness of fixed-time delivery of attention to increase the on-task behavior of 2 students in general education was examined. The teacher in this study provided attention to students on a 5-min fixed-time schedule and responded to students in her typical manner between cued intervals. An ABAB withdrawal design was used to test the effects of the intervention. The results of this study indicate that a fixed-time schedule of attention was effective in increasing students’ on-task behavior and decreasing their off-task behavior. Implications of the study for research and practice are discussed

An investigation of matching symmetry in the human pinnae with possible implications for 3D ear recognition and sound localization

The human external ears, or pinnae, have an intriguing shape and, like most parts of the human external body, bilateral symmetry is observed between left and right. It is a well-known part of our auditory sensory system and mediates the spatial localization of incoming sounds in 3D from monaural cues due to its shape-specific filtering as well as binaural cues due to the paired bilateral locations of the left and right ears. Another less broadly appreciated aspect of the human pinna shape is its uniqueness from one individual to another, which is on the level of what is seen in fingerprints and facial features. This makes pinnae very useful in human identification, which is of great interest in biometrics and forensics. Anatomically, the type of symmetry observed is known as matching symmetry, with structures present as separate mirror copies on both sides of the body, and in this work we report the first such investigation of the human pinna in 3D. Within the framework of geometric morphometrics, we started by partitioning ear shape, represented in a spatially dense way, into patterns of symmetry and asymmetry, following a two-factor anova design. Matching symmetry was measured in all substructures of the pinna anatomy. However, substructures that stick out' such as the helix, tragus, and lobule also contained a fair degree of asymmetry. In contrast, substructures such as the conchae, antitragus, and antihelix expressed relatively stronger degrees of symmetric variation in relation to their levels of asymmetry. Insights gained from this study were injected into an accompanying identification setup exploiting matching symmetry where improved performance is demonstrated. Finally, possible implications of the results in the context of ear recognition as well as sound localization are discussed

cis-Regulatory Changes in Kit Ligand Expression and Parallel Evolution of Pigmentation in Sticklebacks and Humans

SummaryDramatic pigmentation changes have evolved within most vertebrate groups, including fish and humans. Here we use genetic crosses in sticklebacks to investigate the parallel origin of pigmentation changes in natural populations. High-resolution mapping and expression experiments show that light gills and light ventrums map to a divergent regulatory allele of the Kit ligand (Kitlg) gene. The divergent allele reduces expression in gill and skin tissue and is shared by multiple derived freshwater populations with reduced pigmentation. In humans, Europeans and East Asians also share derived alleles at the KITLG locus. Strong signatures of selection map to regulatory regions surrounding the gene, and admixture mapping shows that the KITLG genomic region has a significant effect on human skin color. These experiments suggest that regulatory changes in Kitlg contribute to natural variation in vertebrate pigmentation, and that similar genetic mechanisms may underlie rapid evolutionary change in fish and humans