What Effect Does a Career Intervention Have on At-Risk Middle School Students’ Career Maturity Levels, Self-Esteem, and Academic Achievement?

A brief overview and analysis of the article, Impact of a career intervention on at-risk middle school students’ career maturity levels, academic achievement, and self-esteem, originally published in Professional School Counseling. The authors present a summary of the key components of the article including the introduction, method and results of the study. They offer an additional analysis of implications for future practice, including an indication of conflicting empirical and perceptional data on the effectiveness of the Career Targets intervention

CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL ECONOMIC STATUS. PRESENT AND PERSPECTIVES

Climate change, currently affecting the entire planet, is considered by the specialists the result of the increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. Sectors such as agriculture, transport, energy, tourism and also food security, population health, water resources, and ecosystems become vulnerable to the changes in climate. The climate change could generate costs and benefits for the Romanian seaside and mountain tourism, the multiple linear regression models proving that the tourism demand (arrivals and overnights) is depending on tourism offer (bed-places’ number, tourism capacity in function), but also on climate parameters (air temperature, layer of snow).climate change, costs, economy, tourism

Signalizers in groups of Lie type

We classify all CG(t)-signalizers, where G is a finite group of Lie type and t is an automorphism of G of prime order s > 3. Our results extend existing work by Korchagina ([Ko], [Ko2])

Opportunities and challenges in using AI Chatbots in Higher Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) conversational chatbots have gained popularity over time, and have been widely used in the fields of e-commerce, online banking, and digital healthcare and well-being, among others. The technology has the potential to provide personalised service to a range of consumers. However, the use of chatbots within educational settings is still limited. In this paper, we present three chatbot prototypes, the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, are currently developing, and discuss the potential opportunities and technical challenges we face when considering AI chatbots to support our daily activities within the department. Three AI virtual agents are under development: 1) to support the delivery of a taught Master's course simulation game; 2) to support the training and use of a newly introduced educational application; 3) to improve the processing of helpdesk requests within a university department. We hope this paper is informative to those interested in using chatbots in the educational domain. We also aim to improve awareness among those within the chatbot development industry, in particular the chatbot engine providers, about the educational and operational needs within educational institutes, which may differ from those in other domains

SOA services in higher education

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a recent architectural framework for distributed software system development in which software components are packaged as Services. It has become increasingly popular in academia and in industry, but has been principally used in the business domain. However, in higher education, SOA has rarely been applied or investigated. In this paper, we propose the idea of applying SOA technologies in the education domain, to increase both interoperability and flexibility within the e-learning environment. We expect that both students and teachers in higher educational institutions can benefit from this approach. We also describe a number of possible SOA services, along with a high level service roadmap to support a university's learning and teaching activities

OER Hub Researcher Pack

The OER Hub researcher pack will be of interest to anyone conducting research into the impact of open educational resources (OER) or open education. Building on the earlier release of tools developed, used and released by the OER Hub, the researcher pack provides explanation and guidance on how to use these tools. All material and tools are CC BY licensed and are available for reuse

Becoming a networked researcher: using social media for research and researcher development

Unable to conduct PhD fieldwork overseas, Dr Sarah-Louise Quinnell found herself searching for new ways to communicate with actors dispersed across the globe. Now, her website, a virtual research environment, has become the hub of her research and she utilises forums, blogs and twitter to interact with more actors and increase her impact through different audiences

Researcher studies nervous system development

Ashley Purdy, who recently finished a master’s degree in biology at VCU and is now pursuing her Ph.D., is studying nerve cells in zebrafish in hopes of unlocking secrets about the human nervous system. The research could shed light on how neurodevelopmental disorders like multiple sclerosis or epilepsy occur

Classroom research as teacher-researcher

In the field of education, research projects that involve both the researcher and teacher being the same person are common today, as attested by the significant number of teacher-researcher studies. One issue confronting the dual role of teacher-researcher is the nature of interaction between the underlying goals that come with each of these roles. There are some researchers who express concern that the combination of these goals within the teacher-researcher may compromise either or both of the work of teaching and research in an unproductive way. This paper is an account of my adventure in attempting to fulfil both teaching and research goals in my work as teacher-researcher in a year 7 (Secondary One) geometry class in Singapore. My experience is then re-interpreted in the context of the ongoing conflicting-versus-complementary talk on the interaction between teacher/researcher &lsquo;selves&rsquo;. A model is proposed to account for the seemingly opposite sides of the camp as reported in the literature on this issue.<br /

Approximate resilience, monotonicity, and the complexity of agnostic learning

A function $f$ is $d$-resilient if all its Fourier coefficients of degree at most $d$ are zero, i.e., $f$ is uncorrelated with all low-degree parities. We study the notion of $\mathit{approximate}$ $\mathit{resilience}$ of Boolean functions, where we say that $f$ is $\alpha$-approximately $d$-resilient if $f$ is $\alpha$-close to a $[-1,1]$-valued $d$-resilient function in $\ell_1$ distance. We show that approximate resilience essentially characterizes the complexity of agnostic learning of a concept class $C$ over the uniform distribution. Roughly speaking, if all functions in a class $C$ are far from being $d$-resilient then $C$ can be learned agnostically in time $n^{O(d)}$ and conversely, if $C$ contains a function close to being $d$-resilient then agnostic learning of $C$ in the statistical query (SQ) framework of Kearns has complexity of at least $n^{\Omega(d)}$. This characterization is based on the duality between $\ell_1$ approximation by degree-$d$ polynomials and approximate $d$-resilience that we establish. In particular, it implies that $\ell_1$ approximation by low-degree polynomials, known to be sufficient for agnostic learning over product distributions, is in fact necessary. Focusing on monotone Boolean functions, we exhibit the existence of near-optimal $\alpha$-approximately $\widetilde{\Omega}(\alpha\sqrt{n})$-resilient monotone functions for all $\alpha>0$. Prior to our work, it was conceivable even that every monotone function is $\Omega(1)$-far from any $1$-resilient function. Furthermore, we construct simple, explicit monotone functions based on ${\sf Tribes}$ and ${\sf CycleRun}$ that are close to highly resilient functions. Our constructions are based on a fairly general resilience analysis and amplification. These structural results, together with the characterization, imply nearly optimal lower bounds for agnostic learning of monotone juntas