Implementation and Outcome Evaluation of the Intensive Aftercare Program: Final Report

This Report presents the findings from a 5-year, multisite evaluation of the implementation and outcomes of the Intensive Aftercare Program (IAP), which was sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). IAP was a major initiative in aftercare programming during the 1990s and has received considerable national attention. It addresses a critical problem facing the nation's juvenile justice system: how to effectively intervene with high-risk, incarcerated juvenile offenders who have demonstrated high recidivism rates and continue to offend as adults

DCU-Paris13 systems for the SANCL 2012 shared task

The DCU-Paris13 team submitted three systems to the SANCL 2012 shared task on parsing English web text. The first submission, the highest ranked constituency parsing system, uses a combination of PCFG-LA product grammar parsing and self-training. In the second submission, also a constituency parsing system, the n-best lists of various parsing models are combined using an approximate sentence-level product model. The third system, the highest ranked system in the dependency parsing track, uses voting over dependency arcs to combine the output of three constituency parsing systems which have been converted to dependency trees. All systems make use of a data-normalisation component, a parser accuracy predictor and a genre classifier

Bases biologiques du traitement cognitif de l'information. Pour repenser l'éducation

URL des Cahiers : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/CAHIERS-MSECahiers de la Maison des Sciences Economiques 2005.81 - ISSN : 1624-0340How to facilitate how we learn? How to improve and generalize knowledge transfers? How to increase our creativity? These questions are the economic stakes of the 21st century. In this article we present how the brain development is the result of evolutionary process of the alive, and how the brain development is itself dependent on its surrounding environment. We will further explain the plasticity of the brain that allows us to acquire new knowledge and skills through instruction or experience Ñ without brain plasticity and its capacity to change with learning any learning, nor memorization, nor memories, nor cultural experiences would be possible. Finally, we will demonstrate how the development of mathematical logic relies on perceptive memories that have been embedded as "potential memories" in our innate or acquired neuronal connectivity thanks to individual mental pictures. With this recent learning in neurobiology, the path that leads to the "cognitive neuropedagogy" is now opened.Comment faciliter les apprentissages, améliorer et généraliser les transferts de connaissance ? Comment favoriser notre créativité ? Ce sont des enjeux économiques pour le XXIe siècle. Dans cet article nous rappelons comment la mise en place du cerveau est une émergence du processus évolutif du vivant, comment le développement cérébral est lui-même dépendant de son environnement global. Nous nous attardons sur la plasticité cérébrale sans laquelle il n'y a ni apprentissage, ni mémorisation, ni souvenirs, ni création culturelle possible. Nous montrons comment la logique mathématique elle-même ne se déroule qu'en prenant appui sur des souvenirs perceptifs encodés sous forme potentielle dans notre "connectique" neuronale innée et acquise selon des imageries mentales individuelles. Ce survol des acquis récents en neurobiologie ouvre la voie à la "neuropédagogie cognitive" avec pour retombée un espoir d'amélioration des systèmes d'apprentissage

From news to comment: Resources and benchmarks for parsing the language of web 2.0

We investigate the problem of parsing the noisy language of social media. We evaluate four all-Street-Journal-trained statistical parsers (Berkeley, Brown, Malt and MST) on a new dataset containing 1,000 phrase structure trees for sentences from microblogs (tweets) and discussion forum posts. We compare the four parsers on their ability to produce Stanford dependencies for these Web 2.0 sentences. We find that the parsers have a particular problem with tweets and that a substantial part of this problem is related to POS tagging accuracy. We attempt three retraining experiments involving Malt, Brown and an in-house Berkeley-style parser and obtain a statistically significant improvement for all three parsers

CRITICAL EXPONENTS OF THE 3D ANTIFERROMAGNETIC THREE-STATE POTTS MODEL USING THE COHERENT-ANOMALY METHOD

The antiferromagnetic three-state Potts model on the simple-cubic lattice is studied using the coherent-anomaly method (CAM). The CAM analysis provides the estimates for the critical exponents which indicate the XY universality class, namely $\alpha=-0.011$, $\beta= 0.351$, $\gamma= 1.309$ and $\delta= 4.73$. This observation corroborates the results of the recent Monte Carlo simulations, and disagrees with the proposal of a new universality class.Comment: 11 pages, latex, 1 postscript figure, changes: an incorrect reference omitte

Influence of Age on Decision Making by Ovipositing Pieris rapae (Lepidoptera: Pieridae).

Due to its effect on the time available for host selection and learning, butterfly age is expected to alter the degree of host specificity and potentially niche breadth. Here, we use the small cabbage white, Pieris rapae L., to test the effect of age on ovipositional specificity and decision-making time. Specifically, we examined the ovipositional behavior of P. rapae 4, 8, and 12 days post-emergence. Females were recorded in thirty-minute trials using leaves of two hosts, mustard leaves, Brassica juncea, and collard greens, Brassica oleracea Acephala group, and the non-host common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris. Subsequently, we measured the duration of drumming events (a proxy for decision-making time) and whether the leaves were accepted or rejected as ovipositional substrates. As would be expected if prior experience influenced ovipositional behavior, we saw a reduction in the duration of drumming events as females aged. In particular, we saw a reduction in duration of drumming events when rejecting the non-host between days 4 and days 8 and 12. We also detected a decrease in drumming time between days 4 and 8 when accepting hosts, but an increase in drumming time between days 8 and 12 when accepting hosts. These results suggest both an increased ability to recognize hosts and an increase in selectivity with age

Immunoglobulin G4 Sclerosing Cholangitis: An Unusual Cause of Obstructive Jaundice-Case Report and Literature Review.

IgG4-related sclerosing cholangitis (IgG4-SC) is one of the most common extra-pancreatic manifestation of IgG4-related disease (IgG4-RD) and is clinically distinct from primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). IgG4-RD is an increasingly recognized immune-mediated fibroinflammatory systemic disease, mostly affecting middle-aged and older male populations that can affect multiple organs. The presence of extra-biliary clinical manifestations of IgG4-RD, such as parotid and lacrimal swelling, lymphadenopathy, autoimmune pancreatitis, and retroperitoneal fibrosis, if present could provide important clues to diagnosis. High serum IgG4 levels, characteristic radiological (e.g., sausage-shaped pancreas or periaortitis) or biopsy findings (high percentage of IgG4+ plasma cells, lymphoplasmacytic infiltrate, storiform fibrosis, or obliterative phlebitis) in the setting of these features is diagnostic of this disease process. However, isolated IgG4-SC might be a diagnostic challenge, and the distinction is important as management of this disorder is vastly different from other causes of cholangitis such as PSC. Systemic corticosteroid therapy is the mainstay of therapy

Erlotinib in patients with previously irradiated, recurrent brain metastases from non-small cell lung cancer: Two case reports

Background: With the current improvements in primary lung care, the long-term control of brain metastases becomes a clinical challenge. No established therapeutic approaches exist for cranial relapse after response to previous radiotherapy and systemic therapy. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors like erlotinib with its proven activity in non-small cell lung cancer may provide clinical benefits in such patients. Patients and Methods: Two case reports are presented illustrating the efficacy of erlotinib in patients with recurrent brain metastases and parallel thoracic progression. Results: Both patients showed lasting partial remissions in the brain and lung, and clinical symptom improvement. Conclusion: The observed survival times of above 18 and 15 months, respectively, since occurrence of cranial disease manifestation in line with the achieved progression-free survival times of 9 and 6 months by the erlotinib third-line therapy are remarkable. The use of targeted therapies after whole-brain irradiation should be investigated more systematically in prospective clinical trials

SegICP: Integrated Deep Semantic Segmentation and Pose Estimation

Recent robotic manipulation competitions have highlighted that sophisticated robots still struggle to achieve fast and reliable perception of task-relevant objects in complex, realistic scenarios. To improve these systems' perceptive speed and robustness, we present SegICP, a novel integrated solution to object recognition and pose estimation. SegICP couples convolutional neural networks and multi-hypothesis point cloud registration to achieve both robust pixel-wise semantic segmentation as well as accurate and real-time 6-DOF pose estimation for relevant objects. Our architecture achieves 1cm position error and <5^\circ$ angle error in real time without an initial seed. We evaluate and benchmark SegICP against an annotated dataset generated by motion capture.Comment: IROS camera-read

Multifragmentation and the liquid-gas phase transition: an experimental overview

Two roads are presently being followed in order to establish the existence of a liquid-gas phase transition in finite nuclear systems from nuclear reactions at high energy. The clean experiment of observing the thermodynamic properties of a finite number of nucleons in a container is presently only possible with the computer. Performed with advanced nuclear transport models, it has revealed the first-order character of the transition and allowed the extraction of the pertinent thermodynamic parameters. The validity of the applied theory is being confirmed by comparing its predictions for heavy-ion reactions with exclusive experiments. The second approach is experimentally more direct. Signals of the transition are searched for by analysing reaction data within the framework of thermodynamics of small systems. A variety of potential signals has been investigated and found to be qualitatively consistent with the expectations for the phase transition. Many of them are well reproduced with percolation models which places the nuclear fragmentation into the more general context of partitioning phenomena in finite systems. A wealth of new data on this subject has been obtained in recent experiments, some of them with a new generation of multi-detector devices aiming at higher resolutions, isotopic identification of the fragments, and the coincident detection of neutrons. Isotopic effects in multifragmentation were addressed quite intensively, with particular attention being given to their relation to the symmetry energy and its dependence on density.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Contribution to Proceedings of INPC2004, Goeteborg, Sweden, June 27 - July 2, 200