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Designing A Comprehensive Waste Management Plan For K-12 Public School Systems: Ridgefield High School Zero-Waste Initiative Case Study
No full textWaste management is fundamental to reducing the anthropogenic impact on the environment. It allows humans to recycle plastic, cardboard, aluminum, etc waste that would otherwise pile in a landfill, and compost food and napkin scraps. Ridgefield High School, a local Connecticut public school, initially diverted all of its cafeteria waste to landfills, with recycling bins only in teachers’ offices and select classrooms. Through the first waste audit conducted on their cafeteria trash, out of 258 lbs of waste collected, there is an 82.5% opportunity for diversion out of the waste stream including liquid, mixed recyclables, food, paper, 5-cent recyclables, and cardboard. Creating the necessary infrastructure for recycling and composting alone will not solve their or any K-12 School waste management problem. This is illustrated through the discussion of the history of environmental education in K-12 schools, environmental psychology, and improved environmental design of infrastructure is essential to create a cultural shift in students to encourage recycling and composting. This is accomplished through promoting sustainable behavior and Community-Based Social Marketing. Chapter 1 includes quantitative and qualitative data on what solid waste is and its environmental effects, the current state of waste management in the US and K-12 school system, and an introduction to the Ridgefield High School Case Study. Chapter 2’s focus is on the history of the k-12 school system’s waste management to the emergence of the K-12 environmental education movement in the late 20th century and early 21st century, as well as the history of RHS’ waste management. Chapter 3 explains how environmental psychology motivates students, with a focus on CBSM and other proven methods. Chapter 4 utilizes environmental design. Starting with the process of conducting a waste audit and designing the physical infrastructure, institutional practices, and curriculum necessary for sustainable behavior. Chapter 5 discusses dialogue with attempted solutions, both already implemented and from personal experience. It will state what attempted policy solutions worked in the RHS case study and what did not
A Critical Phenomenology of Black and Latinx Student Trust in the Pandemic Landscape
No full textIncreasingly, student trust occurs in more varied school environments. The empirical research on school trust has primarily examined faculty trust in students, families, leadership, and colleagues. Few studies have investigated how student trust is characterized and manifests from student perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six recent high school graduates enrolled at an American urban charter school. Collectively, participants defined trust in teachers as a collaborative bond that emerges from and is maintained through commonality and shared vulnerability. Trust emerged when teachers demonstrated a desire for and competency in their being and becoming; engaged in facilitating being and becoming in their students; and when they employed a benevolent pedagogy. A critical phenomenology, this study contributes to extant research on student trust through an emerging adult lens. It aimed to explore the what and how of student-teacher trust and to evoke pedagogic reflection among educators. Altogether, participants represented trust in their teachers as a function of complementarity (Pirttilä-Backman et al., 2017). They called for an end to perfunctory pedagogy and an infusion of humanity in physical and distance education classrooms. The researcher called for the evaluation of student-teacher relationships and more integrative teacher preparation programs that do not silo instruction from relationship development. New research might compare teacher- and student-informed conceptualizations of trust and examine its trajectory among emerging adults in other communities and contexts
Distributed Learning in a Quantum-Classical Hybrid System
No full textMachine learning and deep learning have made significant advances in recent years, transforming the way we approach and solve complex problems. However, the viability of machine learning and deep learning on classical computers has began to come into question as the need for complex problem solving has increased since classical computers are limited in terms of their processsing power. Quantum computing has emerged as a new form of computing that uses quantum mechanics to process and manipulate information. Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously. This property allows quantum computers to perform computations more efficiently than classical computers. However, publicly available quantum resources are limited to five or seven qubits per machine which limits the complexity of the problems that can be solved. A potential solution to resource limitation challenges is the use of a distributed system which is a network of interconnected computers that work together to achieve a common goal. In this thesis, a distributed quantum system is introduced. Our system allows for the efficient management of qubits on individual machines while expanding the qubits available by managing a distributed system of quantum computers. This solution will lead to the ability to solve increasingly complex problems while maximizing the use of limited quantum resources
The Role of Morphological Awareness in Elementary Students Early Reading Skills
No full textWhile the extant literature emphasizes the role of Phonological Awareness (PA) and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) in children’s developing reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition skills, there has been a paucity of information on the contributions made by other factors such as Morphological Awareness (MA). Although evidence of a relationship between MA and children\u27s literacy development has emerged, questions remain about both the direction of that relationship and the underlying factors at play. As such, this study evaluated MA from a subword, word, and sentence level perspective, as a means of ascertaining the role it plays in elementary students (N = 78) literacy competence. The results revealed: 1) MA (subword and word levels) uniquely predicts elementary students’ reading comprehension skills above and beyond their PA and RAN abilities; and 2) MA (subword, word, and sentence levels) uniquely predicts elementary students\u27 vocabulary knowledge above and beyond their PA and RAN abilities. Overall, the findings demonstrate that instruction in MA holds promise as an early identification and intervention approach to enhancing children’s literacy competence. Limitations and future directions are discussed in light of these findings
Specks: Spectrogram of Large Scale Knowledgebase for Interpreting Stereotypes in Dataset
No full textIn this study, we propose a novel approach for identifying stereotypical biases in text using deep graph neural networks (DGNNs). Our approach utilizes graph-based representations of text data to capture complex relationships between words and demographics. The DGNN is trained using a set of novel loss functions that impose specific constraints on the individual operator properties to identify the underlying biases in the text data effectively. Experimental results on a dataset of text data show that our approach is able to achieve high accuracy in identifying biases. Our approach does not compare to a baseline model as it is a novel approach; it is explicitly designed to identify biases in text data. However, it is important to note that our approach did not directly address the issue of reducing biases but only identifying them. The high loss could be indicative of overfitting. Future work could include implementing regularization techniques such as dropout and evaluating the model\u27s performance on a held-out test set to address this issue. Our study provides a new approach to identifying stereotypical biases in text, and it has the potential to inform future research on how to mitigate biases in natural language processing (NLP) systems. The use of graph-based representations and attention mechanisms in DGNNs allows for improved performance in identifying biases in text. However, it is necessary to consider overfitting when using these models and take appropriate steps to mitigate this risk. Further research is required to address the issue of reducing biases
Katz, Gloria
No full textGloria Katz’s family immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, moving up from the Lower East Side to the Bronx on Park Avenue. She describes her many relatives coming to New York and making lives for themselves, including her parents meeting on a singles cruise around Manhattan for young immigrants and getting married. Her older brother was born in 1934, and was a rebellious and hyperactive child, getting kicked out of yeshiva and sent to public school. Katz was born in September 1944. She explains that because her father did not have stable employment in the fur industry during the Great Depression, like many parents, they waited to have another child until things were better during the war. She grew up surrounded by relatives all older than her. She lived on 180th street, in an apartment building full of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, those that got out before, and non-Jews. She thought it was a very Jewish environment, but she realizes now it was not exclusively, with Italian neighbors and darker skinned classmates in her elementary school class photos.
They lived near the Bronx River, and remember seeing it deteriorate in the time she was there, and her building faced Bronx Park. Most of her family lived in the Bronx, including in a house in Pelham Parkway, but one of her aunts did not make it over in time and died in the Holocaust, which the family never forgot. Her family now is very diverse, because of intermarriages. She attended PS 6 on Tremont Avenue, and a supplementary Yiddish Yeshiva at the Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul. Though she speaks Yiddish from home and Spanish from school, she used the Spanish more as a school psychologist later in life. She attended Herman Ritter, then, at Bronx High School of Science, she wore all black and had few friends, but did get an Irish boyfriend. Katz liked school, and she would read encyclopedias her parents bought. She felt little difference in her classmates of different races or religious backgrounds until she attend Bronx Science, where she felt the socioeconomic differences, and so was relieved to be at City College. Her father was in a communist union, though he never joined the party, but they did try to send his brother to communist summer camp with their neighbors.
After college, Katz was a teacher in the Bronx, and would go on to become a school psychologist and get her doctorate in school administration and supervision from Fordham University. As a kindergarten teacher, her class was mostly Hispanic and Black with some white, primarily Irish, students, with huge class sizes. She remembers participating in the 1967/1968 Teachers Strikes and protesting Vietnam. She grew up celebrating all the Jewish holidays and eating Jewish foods with family, and has a strong Jewish identity while considering herself an atheist. Being surrounded by family is remembered most, and Katz believes her Bronx upbringing prepared her for anything.
Keywords:
Lower East Side, World War One, World War Two, immigration, the Great Depression, 180th Street, race, 1967/1968 Teachers Strike, Vietnam War, Bronx High School of Science, Yiddish, educatio
Brandon, Alfred
No full textAlfred Brandon was born on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx in 1941 to second-generation Polish immigrants. Both sets of Brandon’s grandparents had immigrated to New York in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and his mother’s family owned a store before leaving New York for Los Angeles in 1942. Alfred’s paternal grandfather was trained as an upholsterer and likewise had his own store. When Alfred was nine months old, his family moved from their Bathgate Avenue apartment to White Plains Road, where he lived until he was nine.
Brandon grew up attending Congregation Brothers of Israel and attended Hebrew school in addition to his public school education. Brandon describes his Jewish upbringing as quasi-orthodox. However, his brother was far more religious, with Alfred considering himself a rebel against his family’s religiosity. Additionally, Brandon remembers the racial and ethnic divisions that existed both at school and in his neighborhood and recalls being treated differently as a Jewish student at predominantly Protestant PS16.
Brandon lived in the Bronx with his family until fourth grade, when they moved to Yonkers and then eventually to Mount Vernon. However, despite only living in the Bronx for the first decade of his life, he describes his memories as being extraordinarily positive. More so than the places he grew up, his parents made his childhood as amazing as it was, spending time with him, encouraging his interests, and being what Alfred describes as incredibly patient and careful.
Key Words: Bathgate Avenue, White Plains Road, Arthur Rothstein, Castle Garden, PS16, World War One, World War Two, Vietnam War, Morris High School, Bronx Scienc
\u27James\u27
No full textSummarizer: Sophia Maier
‘James,’ born 1951, grew up on Narragansett Avenue in the Bronx. He remembers the neighborhood as heavily Italian, with a sprinkling of Jews, Irish, and others. It was primarily small, private homes, many attached like their own. Their own neighbor expressed a dislike of living next door to Jews, directly to his parents’ faces. Yet, James grew up to become friends with the non-Jewish neighbors. He describes their own practice of Judaism as less prosperous and traditional than other parts of the Bronx.
James attend PS 108 with many of the Jewish kids in the neighborhood, as the Catholic kids went to parochial school, before going to Castle Hill Junior High School, JHS 127, where he started meeting people from different neighborhoods. He would go to Lydig Avenue for Jewish foods, though he loved the Italian food of his neighborhood. James says it was not unusual to see Holocaust survivors in his neighborhood. James’ father owned a wholesale food and produce store in the Bronx Terminal Market after serving in WWII. James’ brother was a hemophiliac, and most of the responsibility of his care was on James’ mother. He remembers his varied relationships with his grandparents, particularly the warmth of his maternal grandparents. The family went to Morris Park Hebrew Center, a “Conservadox” synagogue where James went to Hebrew School and was bar mitzvah’d, and where he later had disagreements with the rabbi.
James speaks on the deterioration of the Bronx and demographic shifts that caused older Jews to leave to Co-op City and the suburbs, in addition to the conflicts surrounding the 1968 Teachers Strikes. In his time, they read the Bible in elementary school, fought to incorporate a Hannukah song in the holiday festivities, and protested to wear jeans to Bronx High School of Science. Outside of school, they played sports and card games and went to “the wall.” He describes the contradictions of modern life with traditional Jewish values, such as the kosher status of certain drugs and the importance of marrying Jewish.
James went on to City College before becoming a Legal Aid Society lawyer in the Bronx. He worked there throughout the crack epidemic, seeing the worst period and then the slow recovery the borough has made. He lives with his family on the Upper East Side, including a daughter and a seriously disabled son. James speaks to the great help he has able to get for his son in New York City and to joining a Reform synagogue in the neighborhood, very different from his own experiences growing up. His parents lived in the Bronx until his father passed away, and his mother eventually moved to 14th Street so she could get around easily on public transport and be involved with her grandchildren. James describes himself as still Bronx centric, knowing the Bronx and its inhabitants should not be written off.
Keywords: Narragansett Avenue, Lydig Avenue, Pelham Parkway, PS 108, JHS 127, Bronx High School of Science, antisemitism, race, racism, Italian, Holocaust, Bronx Terminal Market, WWII, hemophilia, health, Morris Park Hebrew Center, white flight, Co-op City, Legal Aid Society, Vitale, Teachers Strikes 1967-1968, Civil Rights Movement, City College, Yiddish, grandparents, immigration, drugs, gambling, intermarriage, folk music, intellectual disability, education, Temple Shaaray Tefila, crim
How Gender Shapes Music: A Comparison Within K-Pop
No full textIn this paper, I will discuss how Korean Pop (K-Pop) music gained such extensive popularity and prevalence in society in the past 5-10 years. Investigating the audiences in South Korea and the United States, I will examine what caused the rise in popularity and the steady increase in the audience of K-Pop music. Additionally, I will be looking into the demographics of these audiences. In looking at the target audience in both countries, I will be able to answer who the primary audience of K-Pop listeners is. Korean pop culture and music are still relatively new to the Western world. As such, it becomes challenging to define why the average American has not heard about Korean pop culture before now. As K-Pop has been an established genre since at least the 1990s, this could be explained because of the lack of social media and technology. While Korean Americans might have been exposed to Korean culture and Korean Pop music earlier than a non-Korean American, I aim to question what changed in the past few decades that allowed Korean culture to soar to new heights and popularity, opening a new age for both Koreans and Americans to enjoy Korean culture and music. Additionally, this thesis aims to define the differences between genders in K-Pop. In using BTS and BLACKPINK, prolific and famous boy groups and girl groups in K-Pop, as case studies, I questioned why gender has an effect on the levels of success and popularity of K-Pop idols. I argue that gender roles depend on where you’re at, with the United States and South Korea having very different ideals for what constitutes success in the music industry. While Western ideals and standards place more emphasis on traditional gender roles, Asian communities place far more emphasis on traditional Asian beauty standards. This is further seen in the way Korean audiences support K-Pop idols versus American audiences. When idols go through rough times and receive a lot of hatred, the support they do receive greatly differs based on the K-Pop idols gender. I argue that male K-Pop idols tend to receive more support than women K-Pop idols. This, in my opinion, creates an industry that is primarily more male friendly and encourages the success of men over women
Advancing United Nation’s Gender Mainstreaming: Female Peacekeepers in Haiti and Liberia
No full textThe United Nations (UN) is making efforts to implement a gender mainstreaming perspective throughout its organization, specifically including women in the peace processes. One aspect of this is increasing the number of female peacekeepers. To determine the success of these efforts, this paper explores whether the lives of women and girls were improved during UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Liberia. Using women’s and girls’ participation in education, law enforcement, and politics, as well as the Gender Development Index and the Gender Inequality Index, this paper finds that including women in peacekeeping roles adds a new dimension of skills and insights that result in greater mission success. The UN had better outcomes in Liberia than Haiti. This was achieved in part due to the work of its Indian all-female Formed Police Unit (FFPU), which was able to remain engaged longer in Liberia than the Bangladesh FFPU in Haiti. The Indian unit flourished because it had 1) attainable goals, 2) consecutive deployments that were able to build off the success of their predecessors, and 3) basic government institutions and infrastructure with the support of its host-country female leadership. Including women peacekeepers enhances the UN’s gender mainstreaming efforts and produces meaningful results that benefit not only women and girls but also the entire population