Kenya : a closer look at culture and early childhood education

Includes bibliographical references.This project is a study of the culture of South Eastern Kenya and its effects on the education system in those regions. Cultural issues such as religion, gender perceptions, and community are covered. The research for this project was compiled from magazines, journals, and books written by professionals who have experienced life in Kenya. Informational also came from personal contact with a native of Kenya. In this paper it can be seen that early childhood education has changed greatly and gained higher importance recently. It shows that Kenyan's are working very hard, in cooperation with several United States groups, to improve educational opportunities for all children, both urban and rural. The research illustrated the strong connection between culture and education. In Kenya, they are nearly inseparable.B.S.Ed. (Bachelor of Science in Education

Annular variability and eddy-zonal flow interactions in a simplified atmospheric GCM. Part 1: Characterization of high and low frequency behaviour

Experiments have been performed using a simplified, Newtonian forced, global circulation model to investigate how variability of the tropospheric jet can be characterized by examining the combined fluctuations of the two leading modes of annular variability. Eddy forcing of this variability is analyzed in the phase space of the leading modes using the vertically integrated momentum budget. The nature of the annular variability and eddy forcing depends on the time scale. At low frequencies the zonal flow and baroclinic eddies are in quasi equilibrium and anomalies propagate poleward. The eddies are shown primarily to reinforce the anomalous state and are closely balanced by the linear damping, leaving slow evolution as a residual. At high frequencies the flow is strongly evolving and anomalies are initiated on the poleward side of the tropospheric jet and propagate equatorward. The eddies are shown to drive this evolution strongly: eddy location and amplitude reflect the past baroclinicity, while eddy feedback on the zonal flow may be interpreted in terms of wave breaking associated with baroclinic life cycles in lateral shear

Personality characteristics associated with susceptibility to false memories

Accepted ManuscriptThis study examined whether certain personality characteristics are associated with susceptibility to false memories. Participants first answered questions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in order to measure various personality characteristics. They then watched a video excerpt, the simulated eyewitness event. They were next encouraged to lie about the videotaped event during an interview. A week later, some participants recognized confabulated events as being from the video. Two personality characteristics in particular—the introversion-extroversion and thinking—feeling dimensions—were associated with susceptibility to false memories.Frost, P., Sparrow, S. & Barry, J. (2006). Personality Characteristics Associated with Susceptibility to False Memories. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(2), 193-204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2044533

A generalised multi-factor deep learning electricity load forecasting model for wildfire-prone areas

This paper proposes a generalised and robust multi-factor Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based Deep Learning (DL) model to forecast electricity load in distribution networks during wildfire seasons. The flexible modelling methods consider data input structure, calendar effects and correlation-based leading temperature conditions. Compared to the regular use of instantaneous temperature, the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) is decreased by 30.73% by using the proposed input feature selection and leading temperature relationships. Our model is generalised and applied to eight real distribution networks in Victoria, Australia, during the wildfire seasons of 2015-2020. We demonstrate that the GRU-based model consistently outperforms another DL model, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), at every step, giving average improvements in Mean Squared Error (MSE) and MAPE of 10.06% and 12.86%, respectively. The sensitivity to large-scale climate variability in training data sets, e.g. El Ni\~no or La Ni\~na years, is considered to understand the possible consequences for load forecasting performance stability, showing minimal impact. Other factors such as regional poverty rate and large-scale off-peak electricity use are potential factors to further improve forecast performance. The proposed method achieves an average forecast MAPE of around 3%, giving a potential annual energy saving of AU\$80.46 million for the state of Victoria

Generating samples of extreme winters to support climate adaptation

Recent extreme weather across the globe highlights the need to understand the potential for more extreme events in the present-day, and how such events may change with global warming. We present a methodology for more efficiently sampling extremes in future climate projections. As a proof-of-concept, we examine the UK’s most recent set of national Climate Projections (UKCP18). UKCP18 includes a 15-member perturbed parameter ensemble (PPE) of coupled global simulations, providing a range of climate projections incorporating uncertainty in both internal variability and forced response. However, this ensemble is too small to adequately sample extremes with very high return periods, which are of interest to policy-makers and adaptation planners. To better understand the statistics of these events, we use distributed computing to run three 1000-member initial-condition ensembles with the atmosphere-only HadAM4 model at 60km resolution on volunteers’ computers, taking boundary conditions from three distinct future extreme winters within the UKCP18 ensemble. We find that the magnitude of each winter extreme is captured within our ensembles, and that two of the three ensembles are conditioned towards producing extremes by the boundary conditions. Our ensembles contain several extremes that would only be expected to be sampled by a UKCP18 PPE of over 500 members, which would be prohibitively expensive with current supercomputing resource. The most extreme winters we simulate exceed those within UKCP18 by 0.85 K and 37% of the present-day average for UK winter means of daily maximum temperature and precipitation respectively. As such, our ensembles contain a rich set of multivariate, spatio-temporally and physically coherent samples of extreme winters with wide-ranging potential applications

A comparison of model ensembles for attributing 2012 West African rainfall

In 2012, heavy rainfall resulted in flooding and devastating impacts across West Africa. With many people highly vulnerable to such events in this region, this study investigates whether anthropogenic climate change has influenced such heavy precipitation events. We use a probabilistic event attribution approach to assess the contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, by comparing the probability of such an event occurring in climate model simulations with all known climate forcings to those where natural forcings only are simulated. An ensemble of simulations from 10 models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) is compared to two much larger ensembles of atmosphere-only simulations, from the Met Office model HadGEM3-A and from weather@home with a regional version of HadAM3P. These are used to assess whether the choice of model ensemble influences the attribution statement that can be made. Results show that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have decreased the probability of high precipitation across most of the model ensembles. However, the magnitude and confidence intervals of the decrease depend on the ensemble used, with more certainty in the magnitude in the atmosphere-only model ensembles due to larger ensemble sizes from single models with more constrained simulations. Certainty is greatly decreased when considering a CMIP5 ensemble that can represent the relevant teleconnections due to a decrease in ensemble members. An increase in probability of high precipitation in HadGEM3-A using the observed trend in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) for natural simulations highlights the need to ensure that estimates of natural SSTs are consistent with observed trends in order for results to be robust. Further work is needed to establish how anthropogenic forcings are affecting the rainfall processes in these simulations in order to better understand the differences in the overall effect

Cross-sectional study of approaches to diagnosis and management of dogs with immune-mediated haemolytic anaemia in primary care and referral veterinary practices in the United Kingdom.

ObjectivesTo determine whether veterinarians in primary care practices (PCPs) and board-certified clinicians (BCCs) approach treatment of dogs with immune-mediated haemolytic anaemia (IMHA) similarly, and whether practitioners with more experience treat similarly to those with less experience. We hypothesised those in PCPs would show more variation in their approach to similar cases than BCCs.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted by distributing a questionnaire to BCCs and veterinarians in PCPs. The questionnaire included direct questions and a number of clinical scenarios intended to capture approaches to common treatment problems.ResultsQuestionnaire responses were received from 241 veterinarians, including 216 in PCPs and 25 BCCs. Veterinarians in both settings used similar tests for diagnosis of IMHA, but BCCs performed more tests to exclude underlying causes of 'associative' disease. All veterinarians reported use of similar initial dosages of glucocorticoids (median 2 mg/kg per day in both groups, p = 0.92) but those used by more experienced practitioners were higher than those with less experience. Most veterinarians made allowances for the weight of dogs, using lower prednisolone dosages in a clinical scenario involving a 40 kg dog compared to a 9 kg dog (p = 0.025 for PCP, p = 0.002 for BCC). BCCs reported greater use of combinations of immunosuppressive drugs (pConclusionsApproaches to treatment of dogs with IMHA differ between BCCs and those in PCP. These differences may affect design and implementation of future research studies and clinical guidelines