The Economic Benefits of Closing Educational Achievement Gaps: Promoting Growth and Strengthening the Nation by Improving the Educational Outcomes of Children of Color

This report quantifies the economic benefits of closing one of the most harmful racial and ethnic gaps: the educational achievement gap that exists between black and Hispanic children and native-born white children. Gaps in academic achievement are a function of a host of factors, such as income and wealth inequality, access to child care and preschool programs, nutrition, physical and emotional health, environmental factors, community and family structures,differences in the quality of instruction and school, and educational attainment. This suggests there are a wide range of public policies that could help narrow educational achievement gaps; this report demonstrates that there are enormous payoffs to closing the gaps through public policies. It also outlines effective public policy strategies to achieve this goal, though their details are left to future research. After briefly summarizing the analysis's findings, this report places the educational achievement gaps in context to help explain their significance and the reasons they exist. In particular, the report reviews data on growing inequality, demographic changes, and intensifying global economic competition. This clarifies the need to address educational achievement gaps and helps explain why the benefits of closing gaps are great. The report then describes factors that cause educational achievement gaps and offers public policies that could help close them. The subsequent sections of the report discuss the literature on the importance of academic achievement to economic growth, the methodology used in the analysis, and its detailed findings

Systematic Synthesis and Study of the Structure-property Relationships of Arylene Vinylene Polymers.

Much is known about the electronic, vibrational and steric effects resulting from the addition of differing organic functional groups as side chains, to the parent conjugated polymer. However the same cannot be said about the substitution of constituents of the polymer backbone itself. To this end a study is presented here which systematically studies the effects of naphthalene and anthracene substitution of the properties of poly phenylene vinylene (PPV) derivative conjugated polymers. The synthesis by the Witting-Horner reaction of derivatives is presented whereby the phenylene units of the PPV structure are methodically substituted by naphthylene and anthrylene units to form a homologous series of structures. Alkyloxy substituents are added to all aromatic systems to aid solubility. The 2,6-attachment of the vinylene linkage on the naphthylene and anthrylene ring provides novel structures whose properties may be compared to the soluble PPV derivative POPV. All intermediates, polymerisation starting materials and polymers are fully structurally characterised by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), and Raman spectroscopies. The molecular weights of the polymer materials are characterised by gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and these results are supported by end group analysis of the proton NMR spectra. The electronic properties if the polymers are investigated using ultra violet-visible (UV-vis) and fluorescence soectroscopies. The introduction of naphthylene units results in a hypsochromatic shift in the absorption and emission spectra, while the introduction of anthrylene units lead to a bathochromatic shift relative to the naphthalene structures. The observed structural variation of the spectroscopic properties is explained in terms of a combination of the increased conjugation of the substituent acene units and the decreased electronic contribution across the vinylene linkage. The electronic properties of the series are shown to follow a well defined trend using a relationship derived from each polymer constituent’s electron affinity to estimate the total energetics of each system. The substitution of different aromatic units into the polymer backbone will result in the introduction of differing characteristics frequencies which may result in a damping of the electron-phonon coupling which results in the non-radiative decay of the excited state. This damping is anticipated to increase radiative decay efficiency. To investigate this, the fluorescence quantum yield is measured for each polymer and the results confirm that the co-polymers have the highest quantum yield in line with the above hypothesis. As a major restriction in the commercialisation of organic display technologies is the stability of the active material, the kinetics of the photooxidative degradation of each of the polymers is investigated. It is found that all substitutions improve the stability of the p[olymers and that the materials containing naphthylene units are particularly stable due an alactron deficient vinylene bond

Intuition and Experience

If words become disassociated from experience, and subjectivity is not encouraged towards communication, then the architectural imagination becomes disembodied and open to picturesque interpretations. Without words, we cannot think; if we do not draw we cannot see. Can ‘thinking and seeing as an architect’ manifest without insight and intuition

Effect of fumaric acid, calcium formate and mineral levels in diets on the intake and growth performance of newly weaned pigs

peer-reviewedThe weaned pig has limited ability to acidify its stomach contents. The objective of this study (comprising three experiments) was to examine the effect of feeding diets containing fumaric acid (FA), calcium formate (CF) or diets of low acid binding capacity (ABC) on post-weaning pig performance. In all three experiments, pigs (10 per treatment) were weaned at 19 to 24 days, blocked on sex and weight and assigned at random to one of six treatments. In Experiment 1, treatments were: (1) control diet, (2) control 20 g/kg FA, (3) control 15 g/kg CF, (4) low Ca (2.8 g/kg) and P (5.1 g/kg) (LCaP) diet for seven days followed by the control diet, (5) LCaP diet for seven days followed by control 20 g/kg FA, and (6) LCaP diet for seven days followed by control 15 g/kg CF. In Experiment 2, treatments were: (1) control diet, (2) control 20 g/kg FA, (3) control 15 g/kg CF, (4) LCaP diet for 14 days followed by the control diet, (5) LCaP diet for 14 days followed by control 20 g/kg FA, and (6) LCaP diet for seven days followed by control diet. In Experiment 3, treatments were: (1) high Ca (HC) diet (12 g/kg), (2) medium Ca (MC) diet (9 g/kg), (3) low Ca (LC) diet (6 g/kg), (4) HC 20 g/kg FA, (5) MC 20 g/kg FA, and (6) LC 20 g/kg FA. Pigs were individually fed for 26 days. In Experiment 1, CF tended to depress daily feed intake (DFI) in the final two weeks (691 v. 759 and 749, (s.e. 19) g/day, P = 0.07) and overall average daily gain (322 v. 343 and 361 (s.e. 11) g/day, P = 0.09) compared with the control and FA supplemented diets, respectively. Feeding diets with LCaP for seven days post weaning increased DFI (208 v. 178, (s.e. 8) g/day, P < 0.01) in week 1 and tended to improve feed conversion rate in the first two weeks (1.65 v. 1.85, s.e. 0.10, P = 0.09). In Experiment 2, treatment had no significant effect on pig performance but feed conversion rate in weeks three and four was improved for Treatment 5 compared with Treatment 4 (1.30 v. 1.39 (s.e. 0.06) g/g, P < 0.01). In experiment 3, FA increased (P < 0.05) pig weight at day 14 (8.4 v. 7.7 (s.e. 0.2) kg) and feed intake in weeks one and two (223 v. 251, (s.e. 9) g/day). It is concluded that CF did not improve performance but reducing diet ABC or including FA in the diet did improve performance

Stephen Leacock: Humour And Humanity

Stephen Leacock is often regarded as a writer without an imaginative centre, as an author who lacked a vision of sufficient power and clarity to sustain a lifetime of serious writing. Leacock\u27s writings emerge, however, from a centre that is the confluence of the two traditions of humanism and Toryism. Without an understanding of Leacock\u27s Tory-humanism, which he provides most fully in The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920) and Our Heritage of Liberty (1942), even his theory of humour will seem curiously limp in its insistence on the need for kindliness in humorous literature. Moreover, Leacock\u27s Tory-humanism and theory of humour--the theory which he presents in Humour, Its Theory and Technique (1935) and Humour And Humanity (1937)--are crucial to a full understanding of his two most accomplished works of fiction, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914). Sunshine Sketches portrays the Tory-humanist\u27s qualified ideal Canadian community of Mariposa in opposition to the individualism and materialism of Josh Smith. In opposition to the failure of Mariposa\u27s Anglican Church, the Sketches offers the redemptive romance of Peter Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh. The concluding sketch, L\u27Envoi. The Train to Mariposa, considers Mariposa in retrospect from the Mausoleum Club and suggests the need for a continual revival of the values of community life. L\u27Envoi also points forward to Arcadian Adventures, the book which centres on another Mausoleum Club in a city of the United States and focuses on the plutocratic machinations of a league of capitalists who eventually realize a municipal government of the plutocracy. Considered together, the Sketches and the Adventures reveal what was for Leacock a real difference between the United States and Canada: the ascent to dominance in the former of liberal individualism (Plutoria) and the presence for imaginative retrieval in the latter of an interdependent community (Mariposa)

Design and Optimization of Broadband Matching Networks for Widely Steerable Phased Array Radar Systems

The use of phased arrays have become prevalent in radar systems for military and weather applications due to their planar configuration and ability of electronic steering. However, mutual coupling between surrounding antenna elements causes degradation in performance at wide scan angles and broad bandwidth. This mutual coupling creates impedance mismatches at the element-level. A matching network can be used to correct this, but broadband matching networks that consider scan angle have not been explored. This work introduces a novel optimization method for designing matching networks. This method seeks to improve performance for wide-scanning broadband phased arrays, especially NASA’s Ecological Synthetic Aperture Radar (EcoSAR). The fabricated static matching network achieves a 78% reduction in the optimizer objective function and provides a 10 dB match for the majority of the scanning range of -40° to 40° at a fractional bandwidth of 28.7%. This method is also used to design a tunable matching network that achieves a measured 99.95% reduction in the optimizer objective function and provides a 15 dB match across frequency and scanning range for the EcoSAR array using frequency bins. This novel design method shows great promise for improving performance for future wide-scanning broadband phased array systems

Preferential Options and Palimpsests: Transferring the Founders’ Catholic Charism from Vowed Religious Educators to Lay Educators

A decline in the number of vowed religious who teach and administer in Catholic high schools has placed the responsibility for transferring the founders’ Charism, the traditional mission and identity of the schools, in the hands of lay educators. This study examined how one Catholic independent single-sex high school established programs and methods to transfer the founders’ Charism to its lay educators and students in the areas of social justice, diversity, and social and political awareness. The researcher collected data about Charism transference by interviewing five adults selected as a purposive sample and conducting focus groups with 15 students selected on a nominative basis. Additional research included prolonged researcher emic observation and an analysis of school documents and archives; the data were codified and an emergent analysis of the data was performed. The analysis focused on social justice, diversity, and social and political awareness at the school. Informing the analysis were the theories of Catholic Social Teaching, critical pedagogy, and liberation theology. The emergent analysis identified that the school institutionalized the founders’ Charism, established an atmosphere of care for others in the areas of social justice and diversity, and promoted awareness of feminine identity and a sense of students as leaders, as well as an understanding of social justice and diversity issues. However, factors including social reproduction, social capital, cultural capital, and class complicated the transformational praxis of action in the areas of social justice and political and social awareness