Is Rewarding Beneficial to Behavior?

What effect does a reward system have on ninth grade student behavior? Is there a way to have my students behave better than they currently are? There is plenty of research that has been conducted on different types of distracting behavior as well as different types of systems and programs that try to influence that behavior. A ninth grade class has been selected, observed, and data has been recorded on any disruptive or unwanted behavior for three weeks. The first three weeks the student had no clue they were being checked for behavior. For the second three weeks, a reward system was implanted for the class. The class was given the opportunity to earn a “free day” in physical education class by decreasing their disruptive behavior during class. In this study the students proved that if given the chance to work towards something they would work harder and behave better

Public diplomacy: meeting new challenges. Report of Wilton Park Conference 902

What is the role of public diplomacy in the delivery of international objectives? Is there scope for more intergovernmental collaboration? Do governments understand their audiences and how best to reach them? In what ways can practitioners take advantage of new technology? What can be learnt from non-governmental actors? How to ensure sharing of best practice

Consequences of the existence of Auslander-Reiten triangles with applications to perfect complexes for self-injective algebras

In a k-linear triangulated category (where k is a field) we show that the existence of Auslander-Reiten triangles implies that objects are determined, up to shift, by knowing dimensions of homomorphisms between them. In most cases the objects themselves are distinguished by this information, a conclusion which was also reached under slightly different hypotheses in a theorem of Jensen, Su and Zimmermann. The approach is to consider bilinear forms on Grothendieck groups which are analogous to the Green ring of a finite group. We specialize to the category of perfect complexes for a self-injective algebra, for which the Auslander-Reiten quiver has a known shape. We characterize the position in the quiver of many kinds of perfect complexes, including those of lengths 1, 2 and 3, rigid complexes and truncated projective resolutions. We describe completely the quiver components which contain projective modules. We obtain relationships between the homology of complexes at different places in the quiver, deducing that every self-injective algebra of radical length at least 3 has indecomposable perfect complexes with arbitrarily large homology in any given degree. We find also that homology stabilizes away from the rim of the quiver. We show that when the algebra is symmetric, one of the forms considered earlier is Hermitian, and this allows us to compute its values knowing them only on objects on the rim of the quiver.Comment: 27 page

“A cheap trafficking in human misery”: the reverse Freedom Rides of 1962

Shortly after 7 o'clock on the morning of 20 April 1962, Louis and Dorothy Boyd arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The journey from their native New Orleans had taken forty-three hours. With the Boyds were their eight children, five girls and three boys aged between three and twelve years old. Between them the family carried their entire worldly possessions in three cardboard boxes and an old foot locker

Closing Ranks: Montgomery Jews and civil rights, 1954–1960

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition

Positive solutions of a boundary value problem with integral boundary conditions

We consider boundary-value problems studied in a recent paper. We show that some existing theory developed by Webb and Infante applies to this problem and we use the known theory to show how to find improved estimates on parameters μ*, λ so that some nonlinear differential equations, with nonlocal boundary conditions of integral type, have two positive solutions for all λ with μ*< λ < λ