An Investigation Into Rate-building and Cues on Conditional Discrimination Performance Using a Repeated Acquisition Procedure

The present study consisted of eleven experiments divided between two series of studies. The first part of Series 1 aimed at replicating the findings of Porritt (2007) and Porritt et al. (2009). Findings from Series 1 showed that rate-building, when number of practices and reinforcement rate are controlled, enhance training accuracy. However, the greater response rates did not improve retention accuracy, a failure to replicate. Given the contrary outcomes, the studies in the second part of Series 1 attempted to fully replicate Porritt by using variables that have been shown to improve retention accuracy. These results replicated Porritt only when similar behaviours were trained under like conditions between the Training and Retention components. An interpretation of the Series 1 data suggests that, rather than response rate, response duration may contribute towards retention accuracy. The second series of studies investigated the role of stimuli in the repeated acquisition procedure. Findings show the use of colour cues generated the greatest accuracy while completing behaviour chains. However, both colour cues and position of last response were found to govern chain completion accuracy. Findings from Series 2 suggest attention should be paid to the use of cues when the repeated acquisition procedure is used in rate-building experiments. Overall, the present study found that focusing on duration-reduction, in an animal analogue study using a repeated acquisition procedure with no-colour cues, may reveal the prime contributor to greater retention in Precision Teaching

A Good Education for All? Desegregation and Educational Reform in Albany’s Schools

Public and private schools throughout American history have been segregated due to policies crafted and implemented by local school boards. The Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case said segregated public schools were inherently flawed and that the idea of separate-but-equal had no place in public education. But how were school boards to integrate the schools? Cities such as Albany had neighborhoods that had a majority black proportion, meaning that the schools within these neighborhoods were going to be segregated. Policies pursued by the Albany School Board of Education did not provide a solution and The Brothers sought to mobilize the members of the South End and Arbor Hill communities to take action for the state of education in the schools. Using documents from the Albany School Board, The Brothers, and looking at local public and private schools, this paper argues that the policies and programs pursued not only by public but private schools as well, inhibited the educational growth of the children and continued the segregation persisting within these schools. Dealing with the racial imbalance, admissions policies, and practices within the schools, the city of Albany had to find ways to deal with the growing problem of segregation. The history of Albany’s schools shows the challenges when dealing with segregation in the educational system, and if left alone, these problems would continue into future generations

An analysis of supervisor training programs

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University, 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Online Timing Slack Measurement and its Application in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Reliability, power consumption and timing performance are key concerns for today's integrated circuits. Measurement techniques capable of quantifying the timing characteristics of a circuit, while it is operating, facilitate a range of benefits. Delay variation due to environmental and operational conditions, and degradation can be monitored by tracking changes in timing performance. Using the measurements in a closed-loop to control power supply voltage or clock frequency allows for the reduction of timing safety margins, leading to improvements in power consumption or throughput performance through the exploitation of better-than worst-case operation. This thesis describes a novel online timing slack measurement method which can directly measure the timing performance of a circuit, accurately and with minimal overhead. Enhancements allow for the improvement of absolute accuracy and resolution. A compilation flow is reported that can automatically instrument arbitrary circuits on FPGAs with the measurement circuitry. On its own this measurement method is able to track the "health" of an integrated circuit, from commissioning through its lifetime, warning of impending failure or instigating pre-emptive degradation mitigation techniques. The use of the measurement method in a closed-loop dynamic voltage and frequency scaling scheme has been demonstrated, achieving significant improvements in power consumption and throughput performance.Open Acces

A Road to Injustice Paved with Good Intentions: Maggie\u27s Misguided Crackdown on Drowsy Driving

Sleep-deprived drivers pose a serious threat to the public, killing and injuring tens of thousands of Americans each year. Nevertheless, this problem was largely ignored until the summer of 2003, when the New Jersey legislature made national headlines by passing Maggie\u27s Law. Maggie\u27s Law is a unique revision to New Jersey\u27s vehicular homicide statute that permits unprecedented criminal penalties for drowsy drivers who are involved in deadly automobile accidents. The law\u27s passage has had an effect far outside New Jersey\u27s borders, leading many other states and the federal government to consider similar legislation. This Note details the history and language of Maggie\u27s Law, and acknowledges that drowsy driving is a major safety concern that policymakers have failed to address adequately. This Note argues, however, that the language of Maggie\u27s Law will significantly reduce its effectiveness. In particular, this Note addresses problems concerning the law\u27s under- and over-inclusiveness, ambiguity, and focus. In addition, this Note highlights the difficulty of enforcing the law effectively. Recognizing that steps must be taken to address the danger created by drowsy drivers, this Note proposes alternative language to the current version of Maggie\u27s Law. It contends that a totality of the circumstances approach rather than the twenty-four-hour limit in Maggie\u27s Law provides better structures for criminal sanctions against drowsy drivers. This Note also emphasizes the need to couple non-judicial strategies with tougher criminal penalties in order to more effectively reduce drowsy driving accidents

The Topology ToolKit

This system paper presents the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a software platform designed for topological data analysis in scientific visualization. TTK provides a unified, generic, efficient, and robust implementation of key algorithms for the topological analysis of scalar data, including: critical points, integral lines, persistence diagrams, persistence curves, merge trees, contour trees, Morse-Smale complexes, fiber surfaces, continuous scatterplots, Jacobi sets, Reeb spaces, and more. TTK is easily accessible to end users due to a tight integration with ParaView. It is also easily accessible to developers through a variety of bindings (Python, VTK/C++) for fast prototyping or through direct, dependence-free, C++, to ease integration into pre-existing complex systems. While developing TTK, we faced several algorithmic and software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. In particular, we present an algorithm for the construction of a discrete gradient that complies to the critical points extracted in the piecewise-linear setting. This algorithm guarantees a combinatorial consistency across the topological abstractions supported by TTK, and importantly, a unified implementation of topological data simplification for multi-scale exploration and analysis. We also present a cached triangulation data structure, that supports time efficient and generic traversals, which self-adjusts its memory usage on demand for input simplicial meshes and which implicitly emulates a triangulation for regular grids with no memory overhead. Finally, we describe an original software architecture, which guarantees memory efficient and direct accesses to TTK features, while still allowing for researchers powerful and easy bindings and extensions. TTK is open source (BSD license) and its code, online documentation and video tutorials are available on TTK's website