A Study of Retardation in Five Negro High Schools in Fort Bend County, Texas 1942-1943

Educators throughout the United States are seriously concerned with the problem of retardation, for it is fundamentally important to every community. A vast number of students are retarded year after year and it is perhaps a conservative estimate that one-third of the nation\u27s children have fallen behind a year or more. This widespread prevalence of retardation has a detrimental effect upon our schools of today. This is not only a significant problem from the standpoint of the cost to the schools and to the parents, but also from the standpoint of the humiliated and often discouraged pupil. One failure may not do serious injury to a student, but once the habit of failure is formed this habit often tends to hinder the social development of the child. Irwin and Marks1 are convinced that repeating grades is the greatest crime against the educational development of the child that the school can commit. Too much time and thought cannot be given toward analysis of the important problem and for suggestive remedial measures for the betterment of the situation. This investigation is a study of retardation in five Negro High Schools in Fort Bend County, Texas for the school year 1942-43. The problem involved in this study finds expression in a series of questions. 1. What is the status of retardation of children in the Five Negro High Schools of Fort Bend County, Texas? 2. Is the status of retardation of the children in Five Negro High Schools of Fort Bend County, Texas similar to the status of other children in the nation? 3. What are the causes of retardation? 1E. A. Irwin, and L. A. Marks, Fitting the Child to the School, New York City: The MacMillan Company, (1928), p. 317

Improving child protection : a systematic review of training and procedural interventions

Aim: To synthesise published evidence regarding the effectiveness of training and procedural interventions aimed at improving the identification and management of child abuse and neglect by health professionals. Methods: Systematic review for the period 1994 to 2005 of studies that evaluated child protection training and procedural interventions. Main outcome measures were learning achievement, attitudinal change, and clinical behaviour. Results: Seven papers that examined the effectiveness of procedural interventions and 15 papers that evaluated training programmes met the inclusion criteria. Critical appraisal showed that evaluation of interventions was on the whole poor. It was found that certain procedural interventions (such as the use of checklists and structured forms) can result in improved recording of important clinical information and may also alert clinical staff to the possibility of abuse. While a variety of innovative training programmes were identified, there was an absence of rigorous evaluation of their impact. However a small number of onegroup pre- and post-studies suggest improvements in a range of attitudes necessary for successful engagement in the child protection process. Conclusion: Current evidence supports the use of procedural changes that improve the documentation of suspected child maltreatment and that enhance professional awareness. The lack of an evidence based approach to the implementation of child protection training may restrict the ability of all health professionals to fulfil their role in the child protection process. Formal evaluation of a variety of models for the delivery of this training is urgently needed with subsequent dissemination of results that highlight those found to be most effective

When Shape Matters: correcting the ICFs to derive the chemical abundances of bipolar and elliptical PNe

The extraction of chemical abundances of ionised nebulae from a limited spectral range is usually hampered by the lack of emission lines corresponding to certain ionic stages. So far, the missing emission lines have been accounted for by the ionisation correction factors (ICFs), constructed under simplistic assumptions like spherical geometry by using 1-D photoionisation modelling. In this contribution we discuss the results (Goncalves et al. 2011, in prep.) of our ongoing project to find a new set of ICFs to determine total abundances of N, O, Ne, Ar, and S, with optical spectra, in the case of non-spherical PNe. These results are based on a grid of 3-D photoionisation modelling of round, elliptical and bipolar shaped PNe, spanning the typical PN luminosities, effective temperatures and densities. We show that the additional corrections --to the widely used Kingsburgh and Barlow (1994) ICFs-- are always higher for bipolars than for ellipticals. Moreover, these additional corrections are, for bipolars, up to: 17% for oxygen, 33% for nitrogen, 40% for neon, 28% for argon and 50% for sulphur. Finally, on top of the fact that corrections change greatly with shape, they vary also greatly with the central star temperature, while the luminosity is a less important parameter.Comment: Oral contribution (4 pages, 2 figures) to IAU Symposium 283: "Planetary Nebulae: An Eye to the Future" held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain in July 25th-29th 201

Laryngeal somatosensory deficits in Parkinson’s disease: implications for speech respiratory and phonatory control

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is often associated with substantial impairment of speech respiratory and phonatory control. However, the degree to which these impairments are related to abnormal laryngeal sensory function is unknown. This study examined whether individuals with PD exhibited abnormal and more asymmetric laryngeal somatosensory function compared with healthy controls, and whether these deficits were associated with disease and voice severity. Nineteen PD participants were tested and compared with 18 healthy controls. Testing included endoscopic assessment of laryngeal somatosensory function, with aerodynamic and acoustic assessment of respiratory and phonatory control, and clinical ratings of voice and disease severity. PD participants exhibited significantly abnormal and asymmetric laryngeal somatosensory function compared with healthy controls. Sensory deficits were significantly associated with timing of phonatory onset, voice intensity, respiratory driving pressure, laryngeal resistance, lung volume expended per syllable, disease severity, and voice severity. These results suggest that respiratory and phonatory control are influenced by laryngeal somatosensory function, that speech-related deficits in PD are related to abnormal laryngeal somatosensory function, and that this function may degrade as a function of disease severity. Thus, PD may represent a model of airway sensorimotor disintegration, highlighting the important role of the basal ganglia and related neural networks in the integration of laryngeal sensory input for speech-related motor control

Practice of Design Science Research in a Developing Country: Circumscription Knowledge Informed by the Socio-cultural Context

Team or group work has become the quasi-standard in teaching when it comes to alternatives for the traditional lecture. Since team work also causes problems like social loafing or dissatisfaction, we study the potential improvement of team work in a small IS course through the usage of personality traits. Personality traits that describe humans in stereotypes and allow to understand behavior, have been studied in different areas of IS and other disciplines. The usage of characteristics to optimize teams have not yet been considered. We present the first application of personality traits in a small seminar at a German university. Teams with specific personality characteristics (neuroticism and conscientiousness) performed better than the control group. We further observed differences in terms of shared mental models in relation to the personality traits