Going solar: renewing Australia’s electricity options

Recent debates around electricity prices and renewable energy policy have ignored the crucial factors of rapidly dropping solar technology costs, and the critical risks involved in continuing with \u27business as usual\u27. Going solar is the first economic assessment of future electricity price shocks if fossil fuels continue to dominate. The report takes a close look at Australia’s electricity price security and singles out rising gas prices and more frequent droughts as key risks. Prices for gas-fired electricity are now linked to volatile international fuel prices. Water scarcity reduces supply from water-cooled coal plants, pushing up wholesale electricity prices. Without stable policies to support renewable energy, we risk future bill shocks of up to $250 a year for the average household, plus supply interruptions. Embracing the shift to renewable energy – a line powerfully supported by trends in the USA and China – can reduce vulnerability to electricity price shocks and energy insecurity. Rising popularity and rapidly falling costs put rooftop solar at the leading edge of this change, threatening traditional electricity business models

Music Therapy at an Inclusive Early Learning Center: A Grant Proposal

Music in early childhood can enhance the development of communication, language, cognitive, and social emotional skills. Music therapy administered by a board-certified music therapist can be tailored to fit the specific developmental needs of children with and without disabilities. The purpose of this comprehensive clinical project was to develop a music therapy program for the Early Learning Center at the Lexington Hearing and Speech Center and a grant proposal to fund this program. First, I piloted a mini program through my Graduate Clinical Placement in Music Therapy (MUS 633) and supervisory experiences through my teaching assistantship. I then developed a program proposal that originated from an assignment in MUS 630: Medical Music Therapy. I tailored that program based on iterative feedback from various sources and based on the needs of the center identified by communication with the Director of the Early Learning Center. The program is grounded in the Affirmative Model of Disability, and I incorporated information gleaned from the Therapeutic Function of Music process to develop the music therapy components. Once I established the refined program proposal, I searched for an appropriate funding source for nonprofit organizations. After I identified an appropriate funding source (Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc.), I completed the grant application and received and reflected on feedback from various professional sources and my thesis chair. The completed clinical project is a detailed process on how I developed a music therapy program and grant proposal for an inclusive early learning center and a reflection on what I learned and the barriers I faced while completing this project. Music therapists may use this project as a model for program development and funding acquisition

Marshall University Music Department Presents a Senior Recital, Heather Elliott and Laura Simpson, flutes, accompanied by Edwin Harkless, piano

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1437/thumbnail.jp

Public perception of the collection and use of critical care patient data beyond treatment: a pilot study

No abstract available

Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models

Pretrained machine learning models are known to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases in data, which can result in unfair outcomes that ultimately impact user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind those prejudicial biases to ensure that model performance does not result in discriminatory behaviour toward certain groups or populations. In this work, we define gender bias as our case study. We quantify bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning on three families of vision-and-language models. We investigate the connection, if any, between the two learning stages, and evaluate how bias amplification reflects on model performance. Overall, we find that bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning are independent. We then examine the effect of continued pretraining on gender-neutral data, finding that this reduces group disparities, i.e., promotes fairness, on VQAv2 and retrieval tasks without significantly compromising task performance.Comment: To appear in EMNLP 202

Go Baby Go Senior Design

https://pilotscholars.up.edu/egr_project/1019/thumbnail.jp

Mitigating social and economic sources of trauma:the need for Universal Basic Income during the Coronavirus Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic is projected to cause an economic shock larger than the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 and a recession as great as anything seen since the Great Depression in 1930s. The social and economic consequences of lockdowns and social distancing measures, such as unemployment, broken relationships and homelessness create potential for inter-generational trauma extending decades into the future. In this article, we argue that, in the absence of a vaccine, governments need to introduce Universal Basic Income as a means of mitigating this trauma