The serialized past: archaeology news online

Maintaining the public’s interest in the past has long been a major concern among archaeologists, and practitioners since Mortimer Wheeler have appreciated the value of reporting their finds through mass media outlets (Moshenska and Schadla-Hall 2011). While teaching the honors module Archaeology in Contemporary Society at the University of Chester in 2015, I wanted to assess the portrayal of our discipline in the news. I put together a computer lab session that collated headlines into word clouds and found some peculiarities of reporting across news sources. Yet when it came time to producing essays, few students chose to write about this subject. While there have been some great studies of archaeology in the media, they are aging fast and new work has yet to catch up with the digital world of online news

Fluctuation bounds for chaos plus noise in dynamical systems

We are interested in time series of the form $y_{n} = x_{n} + \xi_{n}$ where ${x_{n}}$ is generated by a chaotic dynamical system and where $\xi_{n}$ models observational noise. Using concentration inequalities, we derive fluctuation bounds for the auto-covariance function, the empirical measure, the kernel density estimator and the correlation dimension evaluated along $y_{0}, ..., y_{n}$, for all $n$. The chaotic systems we consider include for instance the H\'{e}non attractor for Benedicks-Carleson parameters.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, submitte

Domination in the Anthropocene

The critique of human domination is a tenet of environmental thinking. Now, the rise of the Anthropocene has increased the risk that survivalism obscures nonhuman emancipation as a public and private goal: if the conversation about the Anthropocene keeps focusing on the dangerous disruption of planetary systems, fear of extinction can relegate nonhuman emancipation indefinitely. Furthermore, the language of the Anthropocene privileges terms such as «transformation» or «hybridization», overshadowing how nature has been, and continues to be, colonized by human beings. Unsurprisingly, the name of the new epoch puts humanity at the center of Earth's history, turning the «anthropos» into the main character of the planetary drama. It would thus seem that the Anthropocene's irruption hinders the critique and removal of domination. However, as this paper will argue, that is not necessarily the case. The Anthropocene can provide a more realistic account of socionatural relations and thus put past and present domination into a wider context. In turn, this opens up new possibilities for the critique of domination -possibilities that do not rely on traditional arguments regarding capitalism's rapaciousness or human's lack of empathy. While the complete absence of domination will remain an ideal goal for the time being, an enlightened or managed domination can meaningfully reduce the harm done to nature in a non-ideal world and prepare us for a future where humanity self-consciously overcomes the acquired habit of domination

El uso de estrategias de comunicación de aprendices de inglés como L2 con diferentes niveles de competencia en un contexto oral interactivo

Indexación: Web of Science; Scielo.Abstract: This study aims to examine the different communication strategies (CSs) EFL learners employ when communicating orally, and determine the relationship between the learners’ proficiency level and their CS use. Spoken data from three conversations held by Spanish learners of English of different levels were analysed in order to determine the type of CSs they used when interacting with a native speaker (NS) in an informal environment outside the classroom. The identification of the CSs was carried out following Dörnyei and Körmos’ taxonomy (1998). Overall results show that there is an association between the learners’ proficiency level and their CS usage. Results from a detailed analysis confirmed this relationship and revealed that the learners’ linguistic competence is not only related to the frequency of the CSs used but mostly to the type of CS.Resumen: El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar las diferentes estrategias de comunicación (EsC) que utilizan aprendices de inglés como L2 al comunicarse oralmente, y determinar la relación entre la competencia lingüística de estos estudiantes y el uso de las EsC. Se analizó un corpus oral obtenido de tres conversaciones entre estudiantes de inglés de distintos niveles de competencia con el propósito de descubrir el tipo de EsC que éstos utilizan al interactuar con un hablante nativo en un ambiente informal fuera del aula. La identificación de las EsC utilizadas se realizó mediante la taxonomía propuesta por Dörnyei y Körmos (1998). Desde un punto de vista general los resultados muestran que existe una asociación entre el nivel de competencia lingüística de los estudiantes y las EsC que éstos utilizan. Esto fue corroborado mediante un análisis más detallado de los datos que demostró una relación no sólo entre el nivel de competencia y la frecuencia de uso de las EsC sino principalmente con el tipo de estrategias utilizadas por cada nivel.http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-09342016000100004&script=sci_abstrac

Arbor View High School Marching Band

The social issue that the AVHS Band and the Band Boosters face is the lack of funding for the program. The Clark County School District has been reducing the budget of many schools in the past decade. This year, over $17.6 million has been cut from all high schools in the county and Arbor View has loss$579 thousand dollars in budget cuts (Forest 2018).https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/educ_sys_202/1081/thumbnail.jp

The design of optimal education policies when individuals differ in inherited wealth and ability

In this paper I consider the role of optimal education policies in redistribution when individuals differ in two aspects: ability and inherited wealth. I discuss the extent to which the rules that emerge in unidimensional settings apply also in the bidimensional setting considered in this paper. The main conclusion is that, subject to some qualifications, the same type of rules that determine optimal education policies when only ability heterogeneity is considered apply to the case where both parameters of heterogeneity are considered. This rules imply a widening of the education gap between high- and low-ability individuals in second-best with respect to the first-best gap. The qualifications regard the implementation of the optimal allocation of resources to education and not on the way the optimal allocation in first- and in second-best differ.Optimal taxation, education, public provision, multidimensional screening

A model of school behavior: tuition fees and grading standards

This paper uses a hybrid human capital / signaling model to study grading standards in schools when tuition fees are allowed. The paper analyzes the grading standard set by a profit maximizing school and compares it with the efficient one. The paper also studies grading standards when tuition fees have limits. When fees are regulated a profit maximizing school will set lower grading standards than when they are not regulated. Credit constraints of families also induce schools to lower their standards. Given that in the model presented competition is not feasible, these results show the importance of regulation of grading standards.

Social security, income taxation and poverty alleviation

In this paper I consider the normative arguments that justify a public social security system as a redistributive device when goverment is concerned with individual utility and poverty. Redistribution can be done using social security, income taxation or both. The main objective of this paper is to show how the consideration of a planner that cares about poverty and utility increases the desirability of social with respect to the case when the planner only cares about utility.Welfarism, poverty, income taxation, social security