Does emotional resilience enhance foster placement stability? A qualitative investigation.

Frequent changes of foster placement are known to have a detrimental effect on the long-term well-being of cared for children. Foster carers who take on children with challenging behaviours have to draw on resources, both internal and external, to help them build and maintain a relationship with the child that will last. Not all foster carers are successful in this regard. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the role that the emotional resilience of foster carers plays in promoting placement stability. Seven foster carers, who had a track-record of stable placements (according to national criteria) with children exhibiting challenging behaviours, were recruited from a Local Authority in the North East of England. They attended a focus group and one-to-one interview. Verbatim transcripts were subjected to an inductive grounded theory analysis. Three potential underlying constructs, namely emotional resilience, interpersonal characteristics and external factors, were found to emerge from the data and identified as likely to influence foster placement outcomes. These data provide a springboard for further quantitative investigation with the potential to screen prospective carers to identify those best suited to ‘difficult’ placements in order to maximise success for the benefit of all concerned

The pseudo-compartment method for coupling PDE and compartment-based models of diffusion

Spatial reaction-diffusion models have been employed to describe many emergent phenomena in biological systems. The modelling technique most commonly adopted in the literature implements systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), which assumes there are sufficient densities of particles that a continuum approximation is valid. However, due to recent advances in computational power, the simulation, and therefore postulation, of computationally intensive individual-based models has become a popular way to investigate the effects of noise in reaction-diffusion systems in which regions of low copy numbers exist. The stochastic models with which we shall be concerned in this manuscript are referred to as `compartment-based'. These models are characterised by a discretisation of the computational domain into a grid/lattice of `compartments'. Within each compartment particles are assumed to be well-mixed and are permitted to react with other particles within their compartment or to transfer between neighbouring compartments. We develop two hybrid algorithms in which a PDE is coupled to a compartment-based model. Rather than attempting to balance average fluxes, our algorithms answer a more fundamental question: `how are individual particles transported between the vastly different model descriptions?' First, we present an algorithm derived by carefully re-defining the continuous PDE concentration as a probability distribution. Whilst this first algorithm shows strong convergence to analytic solutions of test problems, it can be cumbersome to simulate. Our second algorithm is a simplified and more efficient implementation of the first, it is derived in the continuum limit over the PDE region alone. We test our hybrid methods for functionality and accuracy in a variety of different scenarios by comparing the averaged simulations to analytic solutions of PDEs for mean concentrations.Comment: MAIN - 24 pages, 10 figures, 1 supplementary file - 3 pages, 2 figure

Illuminated instruction: a paratextual, intertextual, and iconotextual study of William Blake

Traditional Blake scholarship has rarely ascribed value to the materiality of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. This dissertation demonstrates the necessity of studying the materiality of Blake’s texts by using an interdisciplinary methodological framework to highlight the pedagogical functions of illuminated printing. Exploring the composition, printing, and distribution of Blake’s prints in a series of focussed micro-histories and paratextual micro-studies demonstrates the various ways in which Blake manipulated his media to educate his readers. In unravelling the pedagogical potential of Blake’s works, the dissertation promotes an understanding of a material medium which has remained largely unexplored in terms of its print culture contexts, revealing how Blake’s unique position as an engraver, artisan, and educator was hinged upon the materiality of his prints

The Carnegie Effect: Elevating Practical Training over Liberal Education in Curricular Reform

The Carnegie Foundation issued its book-length report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report) in 2007. Although there have been numerous responses to it, relatively few have engaged it with any degree of critical analysis. Law schools across the country have enthusiastically mentioned the Carnegie Report in connection with curricular changes intended to “prepare” students, in the words of the Report, for the practice of law. Mostly these changes amount to adding clinical options or even clinical requirements, adding units to legal writing programs, and updating professional responsibility courses. Very few, if any law schools, however, have publicly considered the full implications of what it means to be “prepared” for the practice of law, or what the Report meant by that term. For the most part, the legal education community has assumed this simply means more training in practical skills. For the Report, however, being prepared for the practice of law means much more. As I will discuss in this Article, the Report’s primary argument is that traditional legal pedagogy has overemphasized legal theory and underemphasized practical skills and development. By focusing on theory in the abstract setting of the classroom, the Report argues, traditional legal education undermines the ethical foundations of law students and thus fails to prepare them for the practice of law in not only the practical sense but also in the ethical sense. The Report, therefore, calls for law schools not simply to produce better-skilled practitioners, but rather to infuse lawyers with a highly developed sense of moral and ethical identity, which will then lead to a reform of the profession itself. As I will discuss, however, even if one accepts the Carnegie Report’s vision of professional identity, it is not at all clear that reforming legal education, by itself, will have a significant impact on the profession as a whole. In this Article I will argue that, even if legal educators wish to embrace a more progressive vision of the profession, and even if we agree that legal education should take the lead in bringing it about, the Carnegie Report’s perspective is far too narrow. Specifically, the Report failed to consider whether the erosion of professional ethics is symptomatic both of a much broader trend in higher education as a whole and of significant changes in the profession itself

Predicting and Comparing the Stock Value of Chick-fil-A

This project focuses on estimating the stock value of Chick-fil-A as if it were a publicly traded company using a comparable analysis method or CAM. We begin by obtaining financial information from Chick-fil-A as well as the amount of locations there are chain-wide. Next we find two publicly traded fast food companies, one that is larger, and one that is smaller than Chick-fil-A and obtain the same information from them. The idea is that Chick-fil-A will lie between theses two companies and we can use the CAM to estimate their stock value. The CAM gives us a multiple of the valuation of Chick-fil-A in comparison to the companies we use and that information is what will be used to estimate the stock value. Lastly, we can compare Chick-fil-A with the larger company and then with the smaller company and average these two values which will give us a more accurate estimate

Optical and infrared observations of the nature and evolution of active galaxies

The work of this thesis divides into two main areas, the evolution of the environments of powerful, high-redshift radio galaxies, and the astrophysics of low-redshift active galaxies as inferred from optical, near- and far-infrared observations.A study of the relationship between the radio and infrared luminosities of a sample of 60 high-redshift 3C radio galaxies reveals that the two quantities are correlated for the most powerful (and thus most distant) examples. It is suggested that the most powerful radio galaxies are subject to galaxy cannibalism, and will tend to lie in rich environments. Imaging of a sample of 26 powerful radio galaxies (0.15 < z < 0.82) is presented in order to test this hypothesis. It is found that radio galaxies at z > 0.3 lie in environments as rich as Abell class 0-1 clusters. The environments of these galaxies are four to five times richer than those at low redshift (z < 0.3). However, it is not possible to establish unequivocally whether radio luminosity or epoch is the fundamental parameter determining the richness of environment. About half of the classical-double (FR II) type sources lie in rich environments.Deep IR AS observations of 18 3C radio galaxies (0.01 < z < 0.2) are discussed, and the spectral energy distributions of the six detected objects constructed. The two broad-line radio galaxies show a peak at 25 /xm, possibly associated with a warm (T ~ 180 K) dust component. Most of their luminosity is radiated in this component. The narrow-line radio galaxies have large farinfrared luminosities, and this component has a much greater luminosity than either the X -ray or radio components. However, there is no evidence for a 25 μ peak.Near-simultaneous optical and infrared spectrophotometry of a sample of eight optically bright quasars and one broad-line radio galaxy are presented. Study of their Paα/Hα and Hα/H/ß ratios reveals that they can not be well modelled by either reddened or unreddened photoionization models. The observed line-ratios of 3C273 are used as reference points, and reddenings are derived for rest of the sample with respect to this quasar. Three of the quasars have 1-2 mag. of dust with respect to 3C273, and data at other wavelengths supports this conclusion. Two further quasars have infrared line-ratios which suggest that they too are subject to reddening

Congressional Debates Over Prisoner Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country. The causes for the large number of prisoners can be traced, in part, to a politicized war on crime that resulted in harsh sentencing and high recidivism rates. Prisoner education provides the potential for slowing the revolving door of prison by helping to create engaged citizens, who are committed to bettering themselves and their communities. However, there is a paucity of support for programs such as Pell Grants, which could facilitate emancipatory education in prisons. The purpose of this work is to examine why prisoners are provided few meaningful educational opportunities while incarcerated. This study seeks to understand the genealogy of prisoner education policy through an examination of the debate surrounding the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill and its prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, as well as the 2008 Second Chance Act and its reentry programs. The study analyzes the ideological underpinnings of key decision makers and how their values are often embedded in the narratives of neoliberalism. In addition, the work examines elite stakeholders’ discursive attempts, both manifest and subtle, to influence and maintain social policy through the creation of legitimizing myths, including the viewpoints that prisoners are hopelessly flawed or that they have potential only as human capital. Counter-hegemonic discourse is also described. The study methods are critical discourse analysis which looks at the ways text and talk maintain inequities in society and critical policy analysis. Utilizing transcripts from legislative debates, the study analyzes the discourses of members of Congress to expose the tropes that often lie beneath the surface of the debate over prisoner education. Their rhetoric appears to generate and maintain widespread support for legislation that is frequently deleterious to marginalized out-groups. The study should add to the literature examining the role of legitimizing myths that maintain inequities in educational access

Individual Differences in Spelling Ability Influence Phonological Processing during Visual Word Recognition.

In the research reported here, we investigated how phonological processing in the lexical decision task is influenced by individual differences in the reading and spelling abilities of participants. We used phonological neighborhood spread as a measure of phonological processing. Spread refers to the number of phoneme positions in a word that can be changed to form a phonological neighbor. Replicating previous research, we found that words forming neighbors across three positions (P3) were recognized more rapidly than those forming neighbors across only two positions (P2). Importantly, we found that this spread effect interacted with spelling ability. The difference between P3 and P2 was largest when spelling recognition was high and spelling production low. These opposing effects of spelling ability are explained in terms of a language system that consists of separate orthographic systems for reading and spelling. Although these two orthographic systems are separate, they share information through a shared response buffer (Jones & Rawson, 2016). Within this framework, it is argued that lexical decisions are made once the information in the response buffer reaches threshold and that time to reach this threshold is influenced by two sources. One is the quality of the orthographic connections in the reading system and is measured by spelling recognition. The other is the quality of the orthographic connections in the spelling system and is measured by spelling production