A Survey of the High School Drop-Outs at the Standing Rock Community High School, Fort Yates, North Dakota During a Four-Year Period 1950-54

The less talented pupils are being eliminated from the schools and caused to meet adult problems without adequate preparation due to the unflexible definition entertained of what constitutes an education. Efforts to achieve a high level of scholarship have been causing schools to be more selective than they should according to the spirit of the public school laws. The discouraged low-ability pupil tends to drop out of school at a lower grade level than would have been necessary providing the school programs were more adaptable to the individual differences of pupils. Schools have had a tendency to attempt to prepare all pupils for college entrance despite of the fact that only a minority of them actually do attend college. Many feel that there is a definite need for the high schools to set up separate programs for the prospective college students and for those who do not intend to continue their education in college. It is reasonable to believe that if the high school had a life career-program of studies for those not going to college then pupils would remain in school and complete such a program. Early drop-outs have terminated their formal education before they should thereby lowering the educational level of the community below that which the level would be had the drop-outs remained through high school and graduated. A greater recognition of individual differences and an adjustment of the school program to these differences in ability and personality would have helped prevent students from leaving school before graduation. Advance recognition of which pupils are likely to drop out of school early, in order that they may receive additional guidance or have their programs adjusted where necessary, would have enabled the school to hold some of them in school and prevented them from becoming drop-outs. In some ways the drop-out problem which is quite a serious and critical one for the individuals, for the schools, and for society needs critical study. As it affects the standard public schools, it also affects the Indian boys and girls enrolled in the schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is just as important that someone make a study of the facts and factors influencing drop-outs in the schools for the Indians as that these important matters be studied in the ordinary public schools attended by the whites. Doubtless a different pattern of factors will be found due to the fact of the Indians living under reservation conditions and situations with unlike background of traditions and a dissimilar set of social mores. Just now the writer does not know of any similar study on the matter having been made at this school at Fort Yates. However the school staff recognizes the lack of holding power of the school as a serious handicap in the process of achieving the educational objectives of the school. The next part of this paper seeks to give a clear description and explanation of the Indian School situation at Fort Yates, North Dakota

Expression and function of calcium-activated potassium channels following in-stent restenosis in a porcine coronary artery model

AbstractIn-stent restenosis (ISR) occurs due to proliferation and migration of smooth muscle cells from media to intima resulting in re-narrowing of the vessel lumen. This study aims to investigate changes in the three main KCa channels in response to stent implantation in porcine coronary arteries as their expression and function in ISR is yet to be defined. Twenty-eight days after stent implantation, immunofluorescent labelling with anti-desmin and anti-vWF confirm the presence of both endothelial and smooth muscle cells within the neointimal layer. Using real-time PCR, significant increase in the SK3 and IKCa and BKCa channel mRNA was observed within this layer alone. Western blot analysis confirms the expression of KCa channels in neointima. Although expression of BKCa was increased in the neointima in comparison with medial region of the artery, microelectrode recordings showed that the function of this channel was unchanged. However, the presence of functional BKCa in both medial and intimal cells suggests that smooth muscle cells migration may contribute to neointimal hyperplasia.Functional analysis using 1-EBIO and Bradykinin produced hyperpolarization of neointimal but not medial myocytes, which indicated the expression of functional endothelial SK3 and IKCa in the former and not in the latter. The expression of IKCa and SK3 within the neointimal layer suggested that some degree of recovery of both endothelial as well as smooth muscle regeneration had occurred. Future development of selective modulators of IKCa and SK3 channels may decrease the progression of ISR and improve coronary vascular function after stent placement, and is an area for future investigation

Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game

We introduce a large scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment, including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully

Learning to Reason and Memorize with Self-Notes

Large language models have been shown to struggle with multi-step reasoning, and do not retain previous reasoning steps for future use. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent chain-of-thought or scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think and write down its thoughts. This allows the model to perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context and even integrate previous reasoning steps, thus enhancing its memory with useful information and enabling multi-step reasoning. Experiments across a wide variety of tasks demonstrate that our method can outperform chain-of-thought and scratchpad methods by taking Self-Notes that interleave the input text

Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completion

Language models (LMs) have recently been shown to generate more factual responses by employing modularity (Zhou et al., 2021) in combination with retrieval (Adolphs et al., 2021). We extend the recent approach of Adolphs et al. (2021) to include internet search as a module. Our SeeKeR (Search engine->Knowledge->Response) method thus applies a single LM to three modular tasks in succession: search, generating knowledge, and generating a final response. We show that, when using SeeKeR as a dialogue model, it outperforms the state-of-the-art model BlenderBot 2 (Chen et al., 2021) on open-domain knowledge-grounded conversations for the same number of parameters, in terms of consistency, knowledge and per-turn engagingness. SeeKeR applied to topical prompt completions as a standard language model outperforms GPT2 (Radford et al., 2019) and GPT3 (Brown et al., 2020) in terms of factuality and topicality, despite GPT3 being a vastly larger model. Our code and models are made publicly available