Hollywood Homeless Youth Point-in-Time Estimate Project: An Innovative Method for Enumerating Unaccompanied Homeless Youth

Homeless youth are greatly undercounted in the United States.  Census methods for homeless adults are inappropriate for homeless youth; thus, nationally, organizations are determining new methods for counting homeless youth.  In collaboration with the Hollywood Homeless Youth Partnership, we utilized an agency-based approach to count and survey all homeless youth entering their facilities and encountered on their outreach activities. Between October 19 and October 25, 2012, 460 unique homeless youth were counted and surveyed in Hollywood. Of these, 222 experienced literal homelessness on the night of Thursday, October 18, 2012, and 381 experienced literal homelessness within the previous year.  Literal homelessness refers to youth who are either living in emergency or transitional housing or living on the streets or in parks, abandoned buildings, cars, subway tunnels, or other places not meant for human habitation. Of the surveyed youth who experienced literal homelessness in the last year, 65% were male, their average age was 21 years, their average age of first literal homelessness experience was17 years, and 43% were from Los Angeles. Our week-long, agency-based approached was successful in enumerating homeless youth in Hollywood.

Town of Strafford NROC Projects

The three Strafford committees formed through the work with the Natural Resources Outreach Coalition in 2004 and supported by the grant award from the New Hampshire Estuaries Project have succeeded in furthering land protection, water quality protection, and managing growth here in Strafford. The original NROC meetings brought many new volunteer citizens into the process, but even their enthusiasm and willingness to work could not have earned these results without the financial support of the NHEP grant award. Hours of letter writing and personal contact with landowners by the volunteers of the Land Protection Group have raised awareness of the need for land protection and the ways it can be accomplished. The previous experience of the Strafford Conservation Commission in working with a landowner who was donating an easement showed us that the legal and logistical work involved is daunting. The NHEP grant allowed the land Protection Group to contract the professional services of Dan Kern of Bear-Paw Regional Greenways. His work streamlined the process for the landowners, and the Land Protection Group was able to celebrate the closing of two donated easements in 2006. Several other landowners have begun the process to protect their lands, and the Land Protection Group will continue its volunteer work. The Water Quality Group was pleased to have more than a dozen volunteers willing to focus on the need for tributary monitoring as a way to gauge and protect Bow Lake’s water quality. Testing supplies from the grant funds were essential. The sample gathering carried out at two-week intervals took place at a critical time for Bow Lake studies. Both Strafford and Northwood were in a period of legal moratorium on new development, and tributary monitoring at this time provides unique baseline data. It was not only useful in the establishment of Strafford’s Wetlands Overlay District ordinance, but will be used in future Bow Lake studies. After the Managed Growth Committee spent its time discovering gaps between the goals of the 2002 Strafford Master Plan and the present Strafford ordinances, Strafford Regional Planning Commission members helped with research for ordinances that had worked in other towns. The grant funds allowed the Committee to keep the public involved in the process and aware of the slate of proposed new ordinances that were coming up on the 2006 ballot. The blanket mailing to every Strafford address and the public meeting that followed are largely responsible for the successful passage of three new growth control ordinances. The Committee continued its work and has new measures to present to the town in 2007. The impetus and organization from NROC, and the financial support from NHEP have been a great gift to the Town of Strafford. Our thanks will be evident in the continued work and progress we make in protecting our land and water and the very nature of our town

Scaffold design and characterisation for osteochondral tissue regeneration

El objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral es el diseño de un andamio polimérico bicapa macroporoso para la regeneración del complejo osteocondral. El material empleado para la fabricación del constructo ha sido el ácido poli(L-láctico), un polímero biodegradable de la familia de los poliésteres. Una de las capas del andamio ha sido diseñada para asistir la regeneración del cartílago articular. La otra capa sirve de anclaje al hueso subcondral, y se diferencia de la anterior en sus propiedades mecánicas y bioactividad. Este comportamiento ha sido logrado por combinación del ácido poli(L-láctico) con nanopartículas inorgánicas. Ambas capas están unidas entre sí por una fina capa de material no poroso que evita el flujo de células de una parte a otra del constructo. Para lograr este objetivo se realizó un primer estudio de diseño variando la morfología de los andamios hasta obtener aquella arquitectura más adecuada para la regeneración de ambos tejidos. Se varió parámetros de síntesis tales como la concentración de polímero y el ratio entre polímero y porógeno. Los andamios fueron evaluados mecánica y fisicoquímicamente y se seleccionó los parámetros de síntesis del ácido poli(L-láctico) que dieron mejores resultados. En la regeneración del tejido es esencial conocer cómo variarán las propiedades del material una vez sea implantado y comience su degradación. Por lo tanto, fue considerado oportuno realizar un estudio de degradación del material in vitro en diversas condiciones. El estudio de la degradación fue realizado en condiciones estáticas durante 6, 12, 18, 24 semanas y 1 año y en condiciones dinámicas durante 1, 2, 4 y 6 semanas. Se evaluó tanto las características mecánicas como las fisicoquímicas tras los diversos tiempos de la degradación. Posteriormente, y para aumentar las características mecánicas y la bioactividad del anclaje óseo, se incorporó distintas cantidades de nanopartículas inorgánicas de hidroxiapatita y sílice a los andamios.Deplaine ., H. (2012). Scaffold design and characterisation for osteochondral tissue regeneration [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14638Palanci

Review of Pre-K Stories: Playing with Authorship and Integrating Curriculum in Early Childhood

This book review discusses salient themes within Bentley and Souto-Manning’s (2019) Pre-K stories: Playing with authorship and integrating curriculum in early childhood. Bentley and Souto-Manning present a case study of one pre-K classroom in which a teacher-researcher endeavored to honor young children’s strengths and authentic stories as they co-constructed an emergent curriculum together. This text considers researchers and practitioners as it includes theoretical discussions in addition to teacher reflections and classroom vignettes. The first three chapters explore the researchers’ theoretical foundation of emergent curriculum and a sociocultural view of play-based authorship. The following four chapters trace the development of the ‘book project’ as students engaged in creative writing, poetry, and disciplinary writing in Science, Mathematics, and Social Studies. The final three chapters discus the pedagogical implications of co-constructing an emergent curriculum with students

Les TICE au service de l'apprentissage d'une langue vivante étrangère en cycle 3, pourquoi et comment ? L'exemple de la webquest

Utiliser des webquests pour s'inscrire dans la démarche actionnelle préconisée par les programmes pour l'apprentissage d'une langue vivante étrangère par des élèves de cycle 3 est-il vraiment réalisable ? Pour répondre à cette question, plusieurs étapes seront nécessaires. Tout d'abord, dans une première partie, il paraît important d'expliciter ce que sont les TIC afin de bien comprendre de quoi il s'agit, mais également les TICE (puisque la webquest en fait partie), afin d'en saisir les origines et la nuance. Ensuite, nous mettrons en relation ces deux notions avec les programmes, puisque ce sont eux qui déterminent les enseignements dispensés à l'école, et qu'il est donc nécessaire de faire un lien entre la technologie et les techniques d'apprentissage. Nous découvrirons alors le rôle des TICE dans la pédagogie des langues vivantes, leur utilisation et leur utilité au cycle 3. Dans une deuxième partie, nous pourrons étudier la webquest en proposant une définition et en expliquant ses origines, avec son fondateur, ses principes, son utilité, son fonctionnement, etc. Cette dernière partie sera donc consacrée à la mise en place d'une webquest au cycle 3, à l'observation des points forts, des atouts et des limites, dans le but de proposer une remédiation possible afin d'en améliorer l'efficacité

A MDL-based Model of Gender Knowledge Acquisition

This paper presents an iterative model of\ud knowledge acquisition of gender information\ud associated with word endings in\ud French. Gender knowledge is represented\ud as a set of rules containing exceptions.\ud Our model takes noun-gender pairs as input\ud and constantly maintains a list of\ud rules and exceptions which is both coherent\ud with the input data and minimal with\ud respect to a minimum description length\ud criterion. This model was compared to\ud human data at various ages and showed a\ud good fit. We also compared the kind of\ud rules discovered by the model with rules\ud usually extracted by linguists and found\ud interesting discrepancies

Piggybacking In? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Argumentation Schemes

In this paper, Douglas Walton’s Argumentation Schemes and corresponding critical questions are taken through Thomas Huckin’s (1997) Critical Discourse Analysis in order to further demonstrate that a schematic-pragmatic approach to argument evaluation needs to account for bias in and of itself. Building on the work of Audrey Yap (2013, 2015) and Ciurria and Al Tamini (2014) which demonstrates how the schemes have not addressed, and may even intensify, various disadvantages people with systemic identity prejudices face, Huckin’s approach offers additional nuance as to how these concerns can be exacerbated by the schemes. As the schemes have been devised through observations of “stereotypical patterns of reasoning (Walton, 1990)… [and because t]hey represent patterns used in everyday conversational argumentation, and in other contexts such as legal and scientific argumentation” (Walton & Macagno, 2016, p.1), social biases have the potential for having piggybacked into the schemes. What is often fallacious in one social context is cogent in another, often based on what counts as credible testimony and evidence. Therefore, we must consider how social biases may be built into the tools we use to evaluate arguments, as well as how our tools (do not) handle, or even perpetuate, these biases

Niho taniwha : communicating tsunami risk : a site-specific case study for Tūranganui-a-Kiwa; an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

For some people living in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, tsunami are recognised as a natural hazard that could threaten the entire East Cape region at any time. However for most, an ethnographic study of local residents reveals high levels of complacency within the Gisborne urban community when it comes to being aware and prepared for tsunami risk. A recent study by Dhellemmes, Leonard & Johnston (2016) was conducted along the East Coast of the North Island of Aotearoa to explore the changes of tsunami awareness and preparedness between 2003–2015. Results from this study revealed coastal communities including Tūranga had low levels of tsunami awareness and high expectations of receiving a formal warning before evacuation (Dhellemmes, et al. 2016). As a result Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) with the Joint Centre for Disaster Research (JCDR) have identified that the population needs to respond with urgency to natural warning signs (one being an earthquake) rather than assuming an official warning will come through formal Civil Defence channels. There is also a need to raise tsunami awareness by understanding what influences tsunami preparedness in communities. The tangata whenua of Tūranganui-a-Kiwa hold various bodies of knowledge that can contribute to our society and future risk management. Māori oral traditions are often mapped to the whenua and anchored in our genealogies, which King, Goff & Skipper (2007) explains enables the transfer of knowledge down through the generations. The method of acknowledging the contextual location of Tūranga is crucial in understanding the community’s need to raise tsunami awareness for their own iwi, hapū and whanau. This process proposes that by allowing the community to share responsibility for their response to an unfolding crisis, it opens up new opportunities to raise awareness. This design-led research explores how Human-Centred-Design (HCD) methodology underpinned by Mātauranga Māori principles can contribute new ways of designing novel tsunami communications for Tūranganui-a-Kiwa. This project intends to create a site-specific work based on an extensive community-based design