African American Mothers\u27 and Professionals\u27 Perceptions of Transition to Special Needs Preschool

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) mandates services from birth through age 21 for children with disabilities and their families (U.S. Department of Education, 2004). Children experience significant transitions between formal parts of special education, including the transition from birth-to-age-three services, to age-three-to-five services (Fowler, Donegan, Lueke, Hadden, & Phillips, 2000). Barriers, problems, and positive factors in these transitions (Christenson, 2004; Feinberg, Beyer, & Moses, 2002; Mitchell & Sloper, 2002; Valle & Aponte, 2002) include stress, satisfaction/dissatisfaction in professional-parent interactions, resistance of professionals to working with parents, and agreement/disagreement over service provision (Christenson, 2004; Ladwig, 2003; Minke & Scott, 1995; Park, 2003; Valle & Aponte, 2002). The nature of the interactions and the quality of relationships between special education professionals and parents can facilitate or hinder the process and outcomes of special education (Gould, 2002; Hanson et al., 2000; Hoover, 2001). Previous studies have examined the positive and negative experiences of parents. Further inquiry into the relationships and viewpoints of both professionals and parents could assist in enhancing the quality of services, decreasing the need for conflict resolution, reducing stress, and making team interactions more cohesive and productive. However, more information is needed before such goals can be achieved. This study examined the experiences and perceptions of special education professionals and parents of children with disabilities who are in the process of transitioning from early intervention services (IDEIA, Part C) to special needs preschool services (IDEIA, Part B, Section 619). The perspective of African American parents is lacking in the research literature and was one focus of this study. A phenomenological qualitative investigation was conducted (Creswell, 1998). This research sought to examine: (a) the perceptions and experiences of three African American mothers across the transition process; (b) the perceptions the African American mothers had of the professionals they had contact with throughout the transition process; and (c) the perceptions professionals had of the African American mothers during the transition process. Results showed that cultural factors including parenting practices and developmental differences were more salient to participants than race. Professionals expected parents to be knowledgeable about their child, but uninformed about the process of transition. The three parents generally met this expectation. Parents and professionals viewed transition as a process about paperwork rather than focused on relationships or interactions, and viewed this process as primarily child-centered. Results also suggested that while all participants accepted that transition requires process, positive interactions and rapport were desired and helped to minimize difficulties throughout the transition

Die Schweizer Gemeinden im Wandel : Konvergenz oder Divergenz?

Switzerland is currently going through a phase of political restructuring. The numerous reform activities at the beginning of the twenty-first century leave almost no area of political life untouched. The reforms are particularly abundant in the 2′867 municipalities, spanning from amalgamations, intermunicipal co-operation, New Public Management, to reforms of the political systems. Accounting for the fact that there are big socio-economic differences between the municipalities as well as their political systems, we investigate whether the municipalities are headed for divergence or convergence as a result of these reforms. The empirical results are derived from three surveys of the local authorities conducted in 1988, 1994, and 1998. The results indicate that the communes do convergence in regard to their administrative and political structure. However, the convergence appears to be limited to the single cantons and observable only among certain types of municipalities

The Open Navigation Surface Project

Many hydrographic and oceanographic agencies have moved or are moving towards gridded bathymetric products. However, there is no accepted format to allow these grids to be exchanged while maintaining data and metadata integrity. This paper describes the Open Navigation Surface (ONS) Project, which aims to fill this gap. The ONS Project is an open-source software project designed to provide a freely available, portable source-code library to encapsulate gridded bathymetric surfaces with associated uncertainty values. The data file format is called a Bathymetric Attributed Grid (BAG). The BAG is developed and maintained by the ONS Working Group (ONSWG), and the source code is available via the ONS websit

Predicting mortality among patients with liver cirrhosis in electronic health records with machine learning

OBJECTIVE: Liver cirrhosis is a leading cause of death and effects millions of people in the United States. Early mortality prediction among patients with cirrhosis might give healthcare providers more opportunity to effectively treat the condition. We hypothesized that laboratory test results and other related diagnoses would be associated with mortality in this population. Our another assumption was that a deep learning model could outperform the current Model for End Stage Liver disease (MELD) score in predicting mortality. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We utilized electronic health record data from 34,575 patients with a diagnosis of cirrhosis from a large medical center to study associations with mortality. Three time-windows of mortality (365 days, 180 days and 90 days) and two cases with different number of variables (all 41 available variables and 4 variables in MELD-NA) were studied. Missing values were imputed using multiple imputation for continuous variables and mode for categorical variables. Deep learning and machine learning algorithms, i.e., deep neural networks (DNN), random forest (RF) and logistic regression (LR) were employed to study the associations between baseline features such as laboratory measurements and diagnoses for each time window by 5-fold cross validation method. Metrics such as area under the receiver operating curve (AUC), overall accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were used to evaluate models. RESULTS: Performance of models comprising all variables outperformed those with 4 MELD-NA variables for all prediction cases and the DNN model outperformed the LR and RF models. For example, the DNN model achieved an AUC of 0.88, 0.86, and 0.85 for 90, 180, and 365-day mortality respectively as compared to the MELD score, which resulted in corresponding AUCs of 0.81, 0.79, and 0.76 for the same instances. The DNN and LR models had a significantly better f1 score compared to MELD at all time points examined. CONCLUSION: Other variables such as alkaline phosphatase, alanine aminotransferase, and hemoglobin were also top informative features besides the 4 MELD-Na variables. Machine learning and deep learning models outperformed the current standard of risk prediction among patients with cirrhosis. Advanced informatics techniques showed promise for risk prediction in patients with cirrhosis