National slowdown hits Texas

Petroleum industry and trade

Groove Comes to the Cumberlands: The Importance of Percussion Education in Appalachia

The purpose of this qualitative ethnographic study is to determine the effects and influences of percussion ensemble literature in underprivileged secondary schools in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. This study was conducted within the framework of psychologist Yuri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of development. The aim was to research the importance of percussion pedagogy on the global musical knowledge and cultural understandings of high school music students and their communities from underprivileged schools in eastern Kentucky. The study sought to determine how percussion students, non-percussion students, and non-music students conceptualized these diverse and modern pieces of percussion literature. The study also sought to determine the frequency at which music educators from eastern Kentucky program music from cultures outside of the traditional Western classical canon, or program pieces by underrepresented composers. Additionally, this study sought to determine the level of authenticity when teaching global instruments, and the depth of discussion when performing musical styles from other parts of the world. Finally, there was an emphasis placed on determining how well students from eastern Kentucky related to pieces that were representative of or composed by traditionally underrepresented groups. The study included percussion students, non-percussion students, and non-music students from a multi-county area of eastern Kentucky. To determine this information, a series of focus groups were conducted with the stakeholders. The findings revealed that exposure to the study of percussion literature and percussion instruments drastically influences students’ worldviews and conceptualization of global cultures and styles

Is there life after oil in Midland and Odessa?

Petroleum industry and trade

Link2Practice: A Model of Ongoing Teacher and Teacher Candidate Professional Learning

A common complaint about teacher education programs is that it follows a linear model—where theory and teaching skills are learned at the university and then applied in practicum experiences—that is inadequate and does not accurately represent teacher candidates’(TC) experiences (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005; Korthagen, Loughran & Russell, 2006). Indeed, teacher education programs have long been faced with the challenge of a “theory/practice divide”, creating what has been seen as a mechanistic separation between university programs (where it is implied theory is learned) and the practicum (where it is implied skills and strategies are learned). This divide continues once teacher candidates become teachers in their own classrooms, where the divide further widens by valuing of the practical over the theoretical. We need a new frame of reference to understand teacher education as a whole (throughout a professional career), as emerging from interconnected, non-linear, and at times unpredictable structures. Teacher education programs should form in relation to teacher professional learning, student learning, and the realities of dynamically evolving modern-day schools. In our institutions, the ongoing tension between learning sites of campus and schools is reduced in the teacher education partnership called Link2Practice, where TCs’ courses are integrated in a school district program with teachers who are making inquiries into their practice. This partnership responds to the increasing need for educators to understand and remain current about the interactions between TCs, K-12 public schools’ students and the pedagogy practices, informed by theory, that they advocate. This paper describes the development of the Link2Practice model and discusses its importance for teacher education. Keywords: Teacher education; partnerships; integration; professional learning On reproche souvent aux programmes de formation des enseignants de suivre un modèle linéaire—selon lequel la théorie et les compétences pédagogiques sont acquises à l’université pour ensuite être appliquées pendant les stages—qui est inadéquat et qui ne représente pas avec exactitude les expériences des stagiaires (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005; Korthagen, Loughran & Russell, 2006). En effet, les programmes de formation des enseignants font face depuis longtemps au défi que représente l’écart entre la théorie et la pratique ayant créé ce qu’on perçoit comme étant une séparation mécaniste entre les programmes universitaires (où il est sous-entendu que les étudiants apprennent la théorie) et les stages (où il est sous-entendu que les étudiants apprennent des habiletés et des stratégies). Cet écart se poursuit quand les stagiaires commencent à enseigner dans leur propre salle de classe et se creuse par la valorisation de la pratique aux dépens de la théorie. Il nous faut un nouveau cadre de référence qui permettra de comprendre la formation des enseignants dans son ensemble (tout au long de la carrière d’enseignant) comme produit de structures interconnectées, non linéaires et parfois imprévisibles. Les programmes de formation des enseignants devraient exister en relation avec le perfectionnement professionnel des enseignants, l’apprentissage des élèves et les réalités des écoles modernes en évolution dynamique. Dans nos institutions, la tension constante entre les deux sites d’apprentissage—le campus et les écoles—est réduit grâce à un partenariat éducatif nommé Link2Practice par lequel les stagiaires sont intégrés dans un programme de district scolaire avec des enseignants qui font enquête sur leur pratique. Ce partenariat répond au besoin croissant qu’ont les enseignants de comprendre les interactions entre les stagiaires, les élèves M-12 des écoles publiques et les pratiques pédagogiques informées par la théorie qu’ils préconisent, et de rester au courant de ces interactions. Cet article décrit le développement du modèle Link2Practice et discute de son importance dans la formation des enseignants. Mots clés : formation des enseignants; partenariats; intégration; perfectionnement professionne

"Pre-semantic" cognition revisited: Critical differences between semantic aphasia and semantic dementia

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal “pre-semantic” tasks: e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are atypical of the domain and “regularisation errors” (irregular/atypical items are produced as if they were domain-typical). The emergence of this pattern across diverse tasks in the same patients indicates that semantic memory plays a key role in all of these types of “pre-semantic” processing. However, this claim remains controversial because semantically-impaired patients sometimes fail to show an influence of regularity. This study demonstrates that (a) the location of brain damage and (b) the underlying nature of the semantic deficit affect the likelihood of observing the expected relationship between poor comprehension and regularity effects. We compared the effect of multimodal semantic impairment in the context of semantic dementia and stroke aphasia on the seven “pre-semantic” tasks listed above. In all of these tasks, the semantic aphasia patients were less sensitive to typicality than the semantic dementia patients, even though the two groups obtained comparable scores on semantic tests. The semantic aphasia group also made fewer regularisation errors and many more unrelated and perseverative responses. We propose that these group differences reflect the different locus for the semantic impairment in the two conditions: patients with semantic dementia have degraded semantic representations, whereas semantic aphasia patients show deregulated semantic cognition with concomitant executive deficits. These findings suggest a reinterpretation of single case studies of comprehension-impaired aphasic patients who fail to show the expected effect of regularity on “pre-semantic” tasks. Consequently, such cases do not demonstrate the independence of these tasks from semantic memory

Analyzing Learned Molecular Representations for Property Prediction

Advancements in neural machinery have led to a wide range of algorithmic solutions for molecular property prediction. Two classes of models in particular have yielded promising results: neural networks applied to computed molecular fingerprints or expert-crafted descriptors, and graph convolutional neural networks that construct a learned molecular representation by operating on the graph structure of the molecule. However, recent literature has yet to clearly determine which of these two methods is superior when generalizing to new chemical space. Furthermore, prior research has rarely examined these new models in industry research settings in comparison to existing employed models. In this paper, we benchmark models extensively on 19 public and 16 proprietary industrial datasets spanning a wide variety of chemical endpoints. In addition, we introduce a graph convolutional model that consistently matches or outperforms models using fixed molecular descriptors as well as previous graph neural architectures on both public and proprietary datasets. Our empirical findings indicate that while approaches based on these representations have yet to reach the level of experimental reproducibility, our proposed model nevertheless offers significant improvements over models currently used in industrial workflows