Lower-level qualifications as a stepping stone for young people

Lower-level qualifications (certificate I and II programs) provide little or no immediate return to the individual in terms of increased wages. However, lower-level qualifications are intended to prepare students who would otherwise not be capable of enrolling in and completing a higher-level qualification or making a successful transition into the workplace, because of their ability, social circumstances, or previous educational experiences. The aim of this report is to test whether lowerlevel qualifications serve a broader purpose by functioning as a ‘stepping stone’ to further study or into the labour market. The critical part of the methodology is the selection of the comparison group. Using data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), the research matches certificate I and II graduates to other young people who share similar characteristics but who have neither completed nor are undertaking study or training at a higher level. The report compares their further study, training, employment and overall wellbeing outcomes two years after graduation and at age 26. The findings do not relate to certificate I or II qualifications completed as part of an apprenticeship or traineeship

Introducing E-learning to Lower Level Learners of English: A Preliminary Study

本稿は大学の授業における下位英語学習者へのe-learning 教材導入の有効性及びその効 果的活用方法を検証し考察するものである。E-learning導入後のTOEICスコア変化と自律 学習アンケート結果を、統制群を用いて比較検証した。その結果、distance learning モデ ルである実験群では、TOEIC スコアに大きな伸びがみられたが、GTEC テストを用いた統 制群では、実験群のような著しい伸びは認められなかった。また、実験群では自律学習の アンケート結果から「意識要因」のMotivation とIdeal-Self の値が微増していることが分 かった。本研究は学内COE 教育支援経費を受けての予備調査であるものの、教員の適切な 指導と助言があれば、下位英語学習者へのdistance learning モデルにおいて効果的に e-learning教材が活用出来ることを示唆している

Reality Check: Seventeen Million Reasons Low-Wage Workers Need Strong Protection from Harrassment

In a recent five-to-four decision in Vance v. Ball State University, the Supreme Court watered down workplace protections from harassment. The Court held that supervisors who direct daily work activities - but lack the power to hire and fire - are mere coworkers, and that the tougher legal standard that applies in cases of coworker harassment also applies to harassment by these lower-level supervisors. The Court's cramped definition of supervisor ignores workplace realities, with negative consequences for millions of workers.The reality is that most lower-level supervisors have significant authority over their subordinates, even though they do not have the power to hire and fire. The report provides new data analysis showing that there are more than three million of these lower-level supervisors for more than 17 million low-wage workers - virtually all of the low-wage workforce. And another three million lower-level supervisors oversee millions of workers who do not earn low wages.The Vance decision puts all workers who are harassed by lower-level supervisors between a rock and a hard place. And it may be particularly damaging to workers in low-wage jobs who are very likely to report to a lower-level supervisor and especially vulnerable to harassment. These workers know that they may be putting their jobs on the line by reporting harassment. For those still willing to take the brave step of trying to hold their employers accountable despite the risk involved, they now stand a good chance of having their cases thrown out for failure to meet the definition of supervisor adopted in Vance. And their employers have fewer incentives to prevent and remedy harassment by lower-level supervisors, making harassment more likely to occur. The Center's report documents how the Vance decision is divorced from current workplace realities, with a particular focus on the low-wage workplace. The report offers a glimpse into the post-Vance future by chronicling cases of egregious harassment by lower-level supervisors in which women lost in court because the courts held that their harassers were coworkers, rather than supervisors. The report then highlights practical steps that Congress, states, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can take to address the mismatch between current law and workplace realities

Continuous Learning in a Hierarchical Multiscale Neural Network

We reformulate the problem of encoding a multi-scale representation of a sequence in a language model by casting it in a continuous learning framework. We propose a hierarchical multi-scale language model in which short time-scale dependencies are encoded in the hidden state of a lower-level recurrent neural network while longer time-scale dependencies are encoded in the dynamic of the lower-level network by having a meta-learner update the weights of the lower-level neural network in an online meta-learning fashion. We use elastic weights consolidation as a higher-level to prevent catastrophic forgetting in our continuous learning framework.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted as short paper at ACL 201

Centering lower-level interactions in multilevel models

In hierarchical designs, the effect of a lower level predictor on an outcome may oftentimes be confounded by an (un)measured upper level variable. When such confounding is left unaddressed, the effect of the lower level predictor will be estimated with bias. As to remove any such bias in a linear random intercept model, researchers often separate the lower level effect into a within- and between-component (under a specific set of confounding-assumptions). When the effect of the lower level predictor is additionally moderated by another lower level predictor, an interaction between both predictors needs to be included into the model. To again address any possible unmeasured upper level confounding, this interaction term also requires partitioning into a within- and between- cluster component. This can be achieved by first multiplying both predictors and to consequently centering that product term, or vice versa. We demonstrate that the former centering approach proves much more efficient and robust against misspecification of cross- and upper-level effects, compared to the latter

A Top-Down Approach to Managing Variability in Robotics Algorithms

One of the defining features of the field of robotics is its breadth and heterogeneity. Unfortunately, despite the availability of several robotics middleware services, robotics software still fails to smoothly handle at least two kinds of variability: algorithmic variability and lower-level variability. The consequence is that implementations of algorithms are hard to understand and impacted by changes to lower-level details such as the choice or configuration of sensors or actuators. Moreover, when several algorithms or algorithmic variants are available it is difficult to compare and combine them. In order to alleviate these problems we propose a top-down approach to express and implement robotics algorithms and families of algorithms so that they are both less dependent on lower-level details and easier to understand and combine. This approach goes top-down from the algorithms and shields them from lower-level details by introducing very high level abstractions atop the intermediate abstractions of robotics middleware. This approach is illustrated on 7 variants of the Bug family that were implemented using both laser and infra-red sensors.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Presented at DSLRob 2013 (arXiv:cs/1312.5952

Teaching pragmatics to lower level learners

The teaching and learning of the pragmatics (socio-culturally determined norms) of a second language is vital if migrants and refugees are to live and work in the country of resettlement without miscommunication (Yates, 2008). One way of teaching these is by having learners listen to and work with naturalistic samples of native speaker interaction (Burns & Joyce, 1997). Following a series of action research investigations into the teaching of pragmatic norms using elicited recorded samples of native speaker role-play at intermediate level (Denny, 2008), the authors have turned their attention to learners at lower levels of proficiency. There are indications that it may be difficult to use authentic or semi-authentic samples to teach at this lower level (Denny & Basturkmen, 2011). This project sought to discover if lower-level learners can learn pragmatics by being helped to notice pragmalinguistic features in recorded discourse samples created from native speaker role-play. The research showed that this is possible, but that the teaching methodology needed to be adapted to the needs of this group of learners, using more teacher-facilitated activities and scaffolding, and focussing on the teaching of formulaic expressions