Measuring the Effects of Parental Involvement in Academic and Extracurricular Activities on a Child’s Self-Efficacy

Abstract The purpose of this study was to see what effect parental involvement in both academic and extracurricular activities had on the academic achievement and self-efficacy of students in a parochial middle school class in eastern Tennessee. The researchers hypothesize that parental involvement has a positive effect on a child’s academic achievement and this study was conducted to provide evidence for this hypothesis. In this study, 39 parents and 16 students from an eighth grade classroom were surveyed. Among other things, the parents were questioned about how important they felt it was to do the following: attend extracurricular activities their child was involved in, help their child with homework, communicate to the child that he or she is smart and can succeed in school, and attend parent/teacher conferences. The researchers asked the students if they thought having their parents involved helped them in school, how they felt about their ability to perform well in school, and how motivated they felt to succeed. The results showed that most students felt confident in their ability to succeed in school and that most parents were supportive and involved

PROJECTIONS OF DEMAND FOR HEALTHCARE IN IRELAND, 2015-2030: FIRST REPORT FROM THE HIPPOCRATES MODEL. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 67 OCTOBER 2017

This report provides baseline estimates and projections of public and private healthcare demand for Irish health and social care services for the years 2015–2030. This is the first report to be published applying the Hippocrates projection model of Irish healthcare demand and expenditure which has been developed at the ESRI in a programme of research funded by the Department of Health. Development of the model has required a very detailed analysis of the services used in Irish health and social care in 2015. This is the most comprehensive mapping of both public and private activity in the Irish healthcare system to have been published for Ireland

Behaviour in captivity predicts some aspects of natural behaviour, but not others, in a wild cricket population

Funding was provided by NERC and Leverhulme Trust grants. Further support came from the University of Exeter's Postgraduate Research Enhancement Fund, awarded to D.N.F.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Biochemical characterization and chemical inhibition o PfATP4-associated Na+-ATPase activity in Plasmodium falciparum membranes

The antimalarial activity of chemically diverse compounds, including the clinical candidate cipargamin, has been linked to the ATPase PfATP4 in the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The characterization of PfATP4 has been hampered by the inability thus far to achieve its functional expression in a heterologous system. Here, we optimized a membrane ATPase assay to probe the function of PfATP4 and its chemical sensitivity. We found that cipargamin inhibited the Na+-dependent ATPase activity present in P. falciparum membranes from WT parasites and that its potency was reduced in cipargamin-resistant PfATP4-mutant parasites. The cipargamin-sensitive fraction of membrane ATPase activity was inhibited by all 28 of the compounds in the "Malaria Box" shown previously to disrupt ion regulation in P. falciparum in a cipargamin-like manner. This is consistent with PfATP4 being the direct target of these compounds. Characterization of the cipargamin-sensitive ATPase activity yielded data consistent with PfATP4 being a Na+ transporter that is sensitive to physiologically relevant perturbations of pH, but not of [K+] or [Ce2+]. With an apparent K-m for ATP of 0.2 mm and an apparent K-m for Na+ of 16 -17 mm, the protein is predicted to operate at below its half-maximal rate under normal physiological conditions, allowing the rate of Na+ efflux to increase in response to an increase in cytosolic [Na+]. In membranes from a cipargamin-resistant PfATP4-mutant line, the apparent K-m for Na+ is slightly elevated. Our study provides new insights into the biochemical properties and chemical sensitivity of an important new antimalarial drug target.This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE160101035 to A. M. L.), an Australian Research Council Linkage Project Grant (LP150101226 to K. K.), and a National Health and Medical Research Council Project Grant (1042272 to K. K.). The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest with the contents of this article

Causal interventions expose implicit situation models for commonsense language understanding

Accounts of human language processing have long appealed to implicit ``situation models'' that enrich comprehension with relevant but unstated world knowledge. Here, we apply causal intervention techniques to recent transformer models to analyze performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), where a single context cue shifts interpretation of an ambiguous pronoun. We identify a relatively small circuit of attention heads that are responsible for propagating information from the context word that guides which of the candidate noun phrases the pronoun ultimately attends to. We then compare how this circuit behaves in a closely matched ``syntactic'' control where the situation model is not strictly necessary. These analyses suggest distinct pathways through which implicit situation models are constructed to guide pronoun resolution.Comment: Findings of AC