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Renovating America\u27s Electrical Grid: Renewable Sources and Resilient Delivery
No full textSince the late 1800s, America’s electrical grid systems have relied primarily upon fossil fuels for sources of electricity. Due to the outdated structural foundations and glaring holes in distribution networks, the existing electrical grids struggle with electricity escaping, and modern issues such as cybersecurity, resilience, and weather-related events associated with climate change. This essay discusses ongoing problems with current electric grid systems and aims at explaining the importance of incorporating renewables as a solution for these problems into a new grid system. In the first chapter, a detailed explanation is provided regarding the current issues present in America\u27s grid systems. The second chapter offers insight into how America built its grid systems and how this old foundation has led to many ongoing problems. The third chapter offers a perspective on the economic impact of renewable energy implementation. More specifically this chapter covers the short-term costs and long-term benefits of renewable investment as well as the amount of potential financial savings from cybersecurity issues, natural events as a result of climate change, and overall maintenance. The fourth chapter explains the socio-political impact of developing a new grid system and how communities across all incomes will participate in this system. The fifth chapter concludes with how renewable energy grid-based policy recommendations will move America toward a future of resiliency and sustainability
Parenting Stress and Competence, Parent-Child Relationship, and Child Behavior Problems: The Role of Satellite Baby Experience Among Chinese Immigrants in New York City
No full textThere has been a unique form of movement in Chinese immigrant communities, whereby American-born babies, often referred to as “satellite babies,” are sent by their parents to their extended families in China and returned to the United States at school ages. Substantial research has revealed the negative effects of parent-child separation on children and parents, which, however, have been less studied using empirical data. This dissertation uses quantitative data from a sample of 200 Chinese immigrant parents in New York City to examine satellite baby experience, parenting and child behavior outcomes. The findings show that the satellite baby experience is negatively associated with parenting competence, parenting stress, and child internalizing behavior problems. Analyses also suggest that parenting stress significantly mediates the relationship between the satellite baby experience and child internalizing behavior problems. For parents with satellite baby experience, less parenting stress reduces child internalizing behavior problems. And child gender, social support, and parents’ education and employment status are significant moderators in the relationships between the satellite baby experience and some of the dependent variables. Parents with satellite baby experience have better parenting outcomes if the child is a boy, parents have less than high school education, or parents are employed. Additionally, parents with satellite baby experience are associated with more child externalizing behavior problems if they receive high level social support. The findings provide important implications for policymakers and social work practitioners to provide culturally sensitive parenting services and social support to help parents improve parenting competence and reduce the negative impact on families with satellite babies
Prognostic Understanding, Anxiety, and Prognostic Acceptance in Patients with Advanced Cancer: A Mediation Analysis
No full textPrognostic understanding in patients with advanced cancer is integral to end-of-life decision-making and care, and research has sought to understand its relationship with psychological outcomes, which have also been identified as important at end of life. This study investigated the relationship between prognostic understanding, anxiety, and prognostic acceptance in a sample of 64 patients with advanced cancer at an inpatient palliative care hospital. Regression analyses were used to explore the relationship between these variables as well as the individual characteristics of intolerance of uncertainty and need for control. Results revealed no significant relationship between prognostic understanding and other study variables. Anxiety was associated with difficulty accepting one’s prognosis. Perceptions that having cancer is unfair and negatively impacts daily life (i.e., struggle with illness) was associated with intolerance of uncertainty. This study provides preliminary data on the use of the Prognostic Understanding Perceptions Scale and Peace, Equanimity, Acceptance in Cancer scales in inpatient palliative care samples, addressing measurement challenges identified in past literature. Additional, longitudinal, research is needed to better understand the relationship between different aspects of prognostic understanding and anxiety following diagnosis of advanced cancer. Given the association between anxiety and difficulty accepting one’s prognosis, research is also needed to examine the feasibility and efficacy of various mental health treatments (e.g., CBT, MCP) in inpatient palliative care
Technology-Related Professional Development Experiences of Secondary Mathematics Teachers in Response to COVID-19
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic exposed a gap in the preparation for virtual instruction and an effective use of technology. As teachers used technology and digital resources, perhaps unfamiliar to them, in response to the pandemic, there became an apparent need to determine what technology-related professional development, if any, teachers were provided for virtual instruction. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the perspectives and experiences of secondary mathematics teachers engaging in professional development in response to virtual instruction. The study also explored what digital resources were used to enhance student-centered instruction, and the pedagogical challenges and opportunities teachers experienced as a result of professional development that addressed these digital resources. Phenomenological methodology was used to gather data through semi-structured interviews with 10 secondary mathematics teachers with teaching experience prior to the pandemic. Findings evolved into three key takeaways that emerged from the data to answer the research questions with considerations for the following: (a) student-centered digital resources and pedagogical challenges and opportunities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) characteristics of desired, effective, and meaningful professional development; and (c) knowledge of, communication about, access to, and availability of digital resources. Participants suggested that technology provides pedagogical opportunities that may enhance learning with personalized experiences when technology is appropriately introduced with and supported by effective professional development. Participants explained the importance of learning lessons from the pandemic to inform future instruction. Schools should pay close attention to the experiences of teachers as they describe these personal lessons
Leveraging Innovative Digital Media Technology: Voicing Scholarship on Multilingual Education
No full textVolume 12 of the Journal of Multilingual Education Research introduces their first two podcast episodes. These provide an insightful look at the editors of the journal. The first features an interview with JMER’s senior editor, Dr. Aída A. Nevárez-La Torre, in which she spoke about how inspiration, passion, and motivation led her to create JMER. The second presents JMER’s associate editors and editorial assistants, as well as their roles within JMER. This episode informs listeners about the journal’s sections, including Theory and Research, Practice, and Book/Multimedia Reviews and what the editors look for when screening submissions. Link to Podcasts
Since this volume is open-topic, it features articles on diverse issues related to multilingual schools
Transfer Learning Framework for Warping From Representations to Point of View (TWARP)
No full textWith the advancement in deep learning, neural network architectures like recurrent neural networks (RNN and LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown decent improvement in solving several Natual Language Processing (NLP) tasks like text classification,language modeling, machine translation, etc. However, the performance of deep learning models in NLP was not so pronounced, possibly due to the lack of large labeled text datasets. Most of the labeled text datasets are not big enough to train deep neural networks because these networks have a huge number of parameters and training such networks on small datasets will cause overfitting. This was the case with NLP until 2018 when the transformer-based model was introduced by Google. Ever since transfer learning in NLP is helping in solving many tasks with the state of the art performance and has been instrumental in the success of deep learning in computer vision. Contemporarily, The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transfomrers (BERT) from Google and OpenAI’s Generatrive Pretrained Transformer GPT are the two state of the art models available for several NLP-based tasks, we primarily used BERT for our study. We propose a dynamic-projections based framework to leverage transfer learning by using fine-tuned BERT word embeddings for text classification in order to understand data pertaining to violent political protests on social media and enhance the interpretability of text classification networks. The proposed framework uses an attention mechanism that includes multiple settings as per the number of labels. The individual attention layers provide a better understanding of what causes a black-box model to make a certain prediction. The novel architecture is based on siamese networks that can automatically select relevant data for supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation
Essays on Health and Out-of-Pocket Expenditures
No full textThis dissertation consists of two independent research papers on the topic of health and out-of-pocket expenditures in China. The former one focuses on literature, while the latter one focuses on the modelling of dynamic relationship between health and out-of-pocket expenditures. In the first chapter, I analyze the correlation between out-of-pocket expenditures and Activities of Daily Living or Instrumental Activities of Daily Living limitations and chronic conditions and bridges the gap in the literatures on the out-of-pocket expenditures of living with a disability and chronic health conditions in China. This paper provides findings on the correlation between Activities of Daily Living limitation/Instrumental Activities of Daily Living limitation/Chronic conditions and higher probability of incurring out-of-pocket expenditures and higher value of out-of-pocket expenditures. In the second chapter, I produce unbiased and consistent estimates of the effects of health measured by activity limitations and chronic conditions on out-of-pocket expenditures across different subgroups among the middle-aged and older adults in China and explore potentially different effects of activity limitations and chronic conditions on out-of-pocket expenditures. The results imply the poorer accessibility of health care service, especially among the most socioeconomically disadvantaged group and the association of chronic conditions with on out-of-pocket expenditures are larger than that of Activities of Daily Living or Instrumental Activities of Daily Living limitations
Several, Ruth
No full textRuth Several was born in 1951 and grew up living on the Grand Concourse, where her parents were living at the time. Her father worked at the Concourse Center of Israel, an orthodox synagogue on the Grand Concourse. They lived in a large apartment in an art deco style building. She remembers 95% of the building as Jewish, not including the non-Jewish superintendent. The neighborhood had many mom and pop stores, no chain stores, and many synagogues. Several attend a Jewish Day School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so her mother was a bookkeeper nearby who would take the train with her to school and so they could afford the private education. Her father was a choral director and trained cantors, a trained and well educated musician.
Several attended the High School of Music and Art for music and would get a master’s in musicology. She has liked classical music and cantorial music from a young age, and later the Beatles and disco. Her parents divorced in the mid-1960s. She enjoyed school, putting on plays, and more intellectual pursuits, as opposed to sports, like playing board games. She would go upstate to Rockland County every summer to stay with extended family and attend camp. School was a positive force in her life when her family life was difficult. The day school was mostly the children or refugees or survivors of the Holocaust, so her American-born parents made her different. Several describes it as a wonderful education, modern orthodox with religious studies in the morning and secular studies in the afternoon. Going to Music and Art widened her network, introducing her to Black and Hispanic classmates.
Several’s family kept kosher, with four sets of dishes, and were ahead of their time because her father, after beating cancer, insisted they eat healthy and little red meat. Growing up around strong women, her expectations were always high and she attended Barnard college and would go on to work as opposed to stay home. She remembers the protests and white flight of the late 1960s. While many families from the Concourse moved to Co-op City, her mother moved to Riverdale. She would move to LA in the 1970s, calling the period an out of control time for New York. Several describes the Bronx of her youth as culturally diverse, with many resources and places to go, but not racially diverse. Several sees it as unfortunate it has gotten a bad name.
Keywords:
Grand Concourse, Riverdale, Co-op City, Jewish Day School, High School of Music and Art, music, orthodox, feminism, 1960s, 1970s, Vietnam War, 1967/1968 Teachers Strike, rac
Research on the Influence of Management Practices on Hospital Performance: An Empirical Study Based on Hospitals in Eastern China
No full textSince the beginning of the 21st century, a series of challenges have been confronting global health development, including significant factors affecting human health such as population aging, severe infectious diseases, and climate change. In particular, the COVID-19 that swept the globe in the past three years has posed a major comprehensive test to the global health governance system. As both the last line of defense for human health and the largest consumer of health resources, how the hospital can improve quality and promote efficiency based on limited resources is the core of the first priority. Previous studies have proven that improvement of management practice is an effective lever to enhance hospital performance outcomes, however, quantitative analytic methods are rarely employed to examine the management score. One of the main reasons is the difficulty of measuring organizational management score, which results in very few studies that focused on hospital management practice in China.
In addition, the influence of hospital management change on its performance and management has always been an important topic in the management research community. However, it remains unclear how management change influences management practice and performance output and its influencing mechanism. There are few existing studies on hospital CEO turnover which, as an important management context, is rarely studied in terms of its influencing mechanism on management practice and performance.
This dissertation applies both the World Management Survey (WMS), a cross-national and cross-industry quantitative research method derived from McKinsey\u27s experience accumulated in its years of management practice, and the scientific double-blind interview method to quantitatively evaluate the management score of Chinese hospitals in a systematical, practical and effective manner. It not only serves as a useful supplement to the assessment of Chinese hospitals, but also leads to the analysis of the influence of management practice on hospital performance, so it can promote hospitals to develop in a high-quality way.
To this end, this dissertation is completed based on the localized and modified WMS-CHMS and MOPS-CHMS questionnaire data collected by the research team of the China Health Economics Research Center between 2014-2021 and by referring to hospitals’ multi-dimensional four comprehensive performance indicators and integrating them with the performance data from government authorities. In this dissertation, firstly, the influence of management practice on hospital performance is empirically investigated using cluster analysis, OLS regression, and mediation effect model, using hospital management score as the core variable. It is found that management practice positively influences hospital performance output. In addition, this dissertation further explores the influencing mechanism of management practice on hospital performance under the special context of CEO turnover. The results show the partial mediating effect of management practice in the influence of CEO turnover on performance. These findings provide scientific and systematic first-hand materials and methodical management practice solutions for the betterment of the modern hospital management system