Resources for Child Caring: An Early Childhood Intermediary?

While Minnesota's early childhood (EC) system has many assets, the existing high degree of fragmentation creates resource accessibility problems for both families and providers. Recently, there has been a growing call for a unified voice to facilitate change in Minnesota's early childhood system. This presents an opportunity for an organization like Resources for Child Caring (RCC), a well?established regional organization, to assume a prominent role in efforts to reform the EC system by becoming an intermediary organization. Becoming an intermediary would provide RCC an opportunity to grow and become a leader in efforts to improve services and outcomes for Minnesota's children.Before taking this path, RCC will need to carefully consider the benefits and consequences of such a change and whether such a move would fit the mission and vision of the organization. To help RCC assess its capacity for growth and to fulfill an intermediary role, we conducted an in?depth study of the organization's current state, as well as research on the Minnesota early childhood field and existing models of intermediary organizations. This report presents our literature review, organizational audit of current conditions, and organizational gap analysis

Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach

Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system for action prediction, and serves to inform hypotheses about agents’ beliefs and desires, which are in turn used to predict and interpret behavior

Beyond ‘Interaction’: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition

Space-time foam in 2D and the sum over topologies

It is well-known that the sum over topologies in quantum gravity is ill-defined, due to a super-exponential growth of the number of geometries as a function of the space-time volume, leading to a badly divergent gravitational path integral. Not even in dimension 2, where a non-perturbative quantum gravity theory can be constructed explicitly from a (regularized) path integral, has this problem found a satisfactory solution. -- In the present work, we extend a previous 2d Lorentzian path integral, regulated in terms of Lorentzian random triangulations, to include space-times with an arbitrary number of handles. We show that after the imposition of physically motivated causality constraints, the combined sum over geometries and topologies is well-defined and possesses a continuum limit which yields a concrete model of space-time foam in two dimensions.Comment: 13 pages, 6 Postscript figures; contribution to the proceedings of the Workshop on Random Geometry, Krakow, May 15-17, 200

COP improvement of refrigerator/freezers, air-conditioners, and heat pumps using nonazeotropic refrigerant mixtures

With the February, 1992 announcement by President Bush to move the deadline for outlawing CFC (chloro-fluoro-carbon) refrigerants from the year 2000 to the year 1996, the refrigeration and air-conditioning industries have been accelerating their efforts to find alternative refrigerants. Many of the alternative refrigerants being evaluated require synthetic lubricants, are less efficient, and have toxicity problems. One option to developing new, alternative refrigerants is to combine existing non-CFC refrigerants to form a nonazeotropic mixture, with the concentration optimized for the given application so that system COP (Coefficient Of Performance) may be maintained or even improved. This paper will discuss the dilemma that industry is facing regarding CFC phase-out and the problems associated with CFC alternatives presently under development. A definition of nonazeotropic mixtures will be provided, and the characteristics and COP benefits of nonazeotropic refrigerant mixtures will be explained using thermodynamic principles. Limitations and disadvantages of nonazeotropic mixtures will be discussed, and example systems using such mixtures will be reviewed

Star Formation Density and Halpha Luminosity Function of an Emission Line Selected Galaxy Sample at z ~ 0.24

We use narrowband imaging (FWHM = 70 A) to select a sample of emission line galaxies between 0.20 <~ z <~ 1.22 in two fields covering 0.5 sq. deg. We use spectroscopic follow-up to select a sub-sample of Halpha emitting galaxies at z ~ 0.24 and determine the Halpha luminosity function and star formation density at z ~ 0.24 for both of our fields. Corrections are made for imaging and spectroscopic incompleteness, extinction and interloper contamination on the basis of the spectroscopic data. When compared to each other, we find the field samples differ by \Delta \alpha = 0.2 in faint end slope and \Delta \log [ L* (ergs/s) ] = 0.2 in luminosity. In the context of other recent surveys, our sample has comparable faint end slope, but a fainter L* turn-over. We conclude that systematic uncertainties and differences in selection criteria remain the dominant sources of uncertainty between Halpha luminosity functions at this redshift. We also investigate average star formation rates as a function of local environment and find typical values consistent with the field densities that we probe, in agreement with previous results. However, we find tentative evidence for an increase in star formation rate with respect to the local density of star forming galaxies, consistent with the scenario that galaxy-galaxy interactions are triggers for bursts of star formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. The paper contains 14 figures and 7 table

A Review of FDA Imports Refusals - US Seafood Trade 2000-2010

The United States is the third largest consumer of seafood products in the world. The percentage of imported seafood consumed in the U.S. has steadily increased from 66% in 1999 to over 84% in 2009 (NOAA, 2010). Food safety, especially of imported foods and products from developing countries, has raised increasing concerns among American consumers and policy makers. Accordingly, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) (Ababouch et al. 2000) border inspection system is considered critical for ensuring the safety of domestic seafood consumers. However, the potential non-tariff barrier to trade posed by FDA regulations, especially for many developing country exporters have been frequently cited in the literature. This paper investigates trends and patterns in U.S. import detentions and refusals of seafood products between 2000 and 2010. Data from U.S. FDA import refusal report is used to uncover patterns of detainments and import refusals across major exporting countries, World Bank income classification and time. The analysis in this paper suggests that the FDA’s approach to food safety regulation for seafood at U.S. ports of entry does follow random selection based inspections. Instead, a system of Import Alerts results in targeted inspections and mandatory “flagging” of repeat code violation. We find evidence of increasing levels of seafood shipment detentions without physical examinations targeted at predominantly lower-middle income seafood exporting countries which make up the majority of the U.S. seafood supply.Import refusal reports, FDA, Import Alerts, Seafood, Trade barriers, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Development, International Relations/Trade,