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For Discrete-Time Linear Dynamical Systems under Interval Uncertainty, Predicting Two Moments Ahead Is NP-Hard
Get PDFIn the first approximation, when changes are small, most real-world systems are described by linear dynamical equations. If we know the initial state of the system, and we know its dynamics, then we can, in principle, predict the system\u27s state many moments ahead. In practice, however, we usually know both the initial state and the coefficients of the system\u27s dynamics with some uncertainty. Frequently, we encounter interval uncertainty, when for each parameter, we only know its range, but we have no information about the probability of different values from this range. In such situations, we want to know the range of possible values of the following states. It turns out that we can feasible predict the future state one moment ahead, but predicting two moments ahead is already NP-hard -- meaning that (unless P = NP), no feasible algorithm can preform these predictions for all possible linear dynamical systems under interval uncertainty
Why Empirical Membership Functions Are Well-Approximated by Piecewise Quadratic Functions: Theoretical Explanation for Empirical Formulas of Novak\u27s Fuzzy Natural Logic
Get PDFEmpirical analysis shows that membership functions describing expert opinions have a shape that is well described by a smooth combination of two quadratic segments. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical phenomenon
Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Resilience Intervention on College Students’ Mental Illness and Subsequent Alcohol Use
No full textMental illness and stigma surrounding mental illness are common among college-aged individuals. Alcohol use is also common among college-aged individuals, and often coexists with increased symptoms of mental illness, leading to unhealthy perpetual coping mechanisms. However, increased resilience and adaptive coping strategies may suppress the need to use alcohol as a coping mechanism when experiencing symptoms of mental illness and the stigma associated with it. The present study sought to utilize a resilience intervention to increase resilience and adaptive coping strategies among Hispanic college students to reduce their alcohol use and experiences of depression and/or anxiety. Additionally, the present study sought to establish the moderating effects that perceived and internalized stigma associated with mental illness has on the relationship between a resilience intervention and severity of alcohol use as well as symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. Lastly, the current study sought to evaluate the effect of the number of intervention sessions attended on the primary outcomes of interest (i.e., symptoms of mental illness and alcohol use). Participants (n=88; Mage= 21.86, SD = 6.08; 64.8% female; 78.9% Hispanic) completed a series of questionnaires at three different time points (baseline (Fall 2023), immediately post-intervention (Fall 2023), and 1-month post-intervention (Fall 2023 – Spring 2024)), that assessed their symptoms of mental illness, resilience, stigma towards mental illness, alcohol use, and alcohol use severity. Additionally, participants completed the Transforming Lives Through Resilience Education intervention. Results from the independent samples-tests suggested that there were no differences between participants who had completed the one-month follow-up and those who did not in sociodemographics. Additionally, most participants rated the resilience intervention as acceptable and feasible (M = 23.88, SD = 5.25 and M = 18.13, SD = 3.57, respectively). The results of the repeated measures MANOVA suggested that the resilience intervention was effective at reducing anxiety symptoms, but not depression symptoms, alcohol use severity, or alcohol consumption. The mediation analyses showed that resilience mediated the relationship between a 4-module intervention and depression as well as anxiety. Additionally, maladaptive coping strategies mediated the relationship between a 2-module intervention and depression symptoms. Lastly, a 2-module intervention increased protective behavioral strategies, but not alcohol abstinence self-efficacy. Overall, the current study provides a foundation for future research and intervention efforts aimed at addressing health disparities experienced by underrepresented populations, such as Hispanic college students. The current research lays the groundwork for developing targeted interventions aimed at promoting resilience and adaptive coping strategies
Teacher Language Ideologies Concerning the Reclassification of Emergent Bilingual Students in Dual Language Bilingual Education: Navigating the Levels of Power in Reclassification
No full textReclassification is a crucial educational student outcome when a school system determines that a student is English proficient and ready for mainstream instruction without language support services (Umansky et al., 2020). This study examined the relationship between crucial and complex language ideologies of dual language teachers and the reclassification of emergent bilingual students. Language ideologies were the theoretical framework for the study through which the voices of dual language teachers were captured. The analysis of data sources, including teacher interviews, classroom observations and evidence of biliteracy development, helped to understand and reveal how dual language teachers navigate the dynamics of reclassification and possible influences on reclassification. Five key themes emerged: (a) personal experiences and linguistic trauma on the border, (b) transformational ideologies and pedagogies, (c) tensions and contradictions caused by the goals of dual language programs and reclassification, (d) inconsistencies and lack of training in district reclassification policies, and(e) traumatic healing. The data demonstrated that all participants adhered to state, district, and campus requirements. However, they expressed a need for support, guidance, and a better understanding of the reclassification process. While they acknowledge the importance of emergent bilingual students demonstrating English language proficiency, their voices, thoughts, and feelings emerged regarding teaching and evaluating emergent bilingual students for English language proficiency in DLBE during the reclassification process
My Little Poetic/Prose Book of Words, Sayings, and Stories in Broken Spanish and a Little Bit of German
No full textAbstract Not Available
Deal with a Dead Man
No full textOften, a story is sparked because of asking the question, “what if?” which is what happened to create the hydra that is Deal with a Dead Man. Two percolating ideas happened to coincide, and eventually crashed together. Early on, it began when I was introduced to the Russian fairytale of Koschei the Deathless and his fear of death, but inability to enjoy life. Over the past year, my family experienced several deaths, one tragically early, and another of ripe old age. My fascination with the fairytale grew as I watched myself and family members react in different, even opposite, ways to death. A little later, while working with my teenage creative writing students a very specific character emerged; a boy named Curi who could see everyone’s moment of death and found himself employed by a man who was already dead. Looking back, I was projecting my own conflicting attitudes about death into Curi’s creation, and I never intended him to be anything else except a teaching demonstration. However, my students wanted to know more, wanted to know where the boy’s story would go. It was then a new question emerged: what if Koschei, the deathless sorcerer, originally had help to become deathless? In the fairytale he’s obviously not very good at being a loner, as he continually steals princesses and fair maids to keep him company. This new character, Curi, seemed to know the answers, not only to the sorcerer’s dilemma, but my own morbid questions. The two morphed, Curi’s employer taking on a role similar to that of the fairytale sorcerer, searching for a way to never taste of death for a second time, and young Curi discovering exactly what his own relationship to death and life meant. Deal with a Dead Man is a fantasy novel in the tradition of exploring fairytales from a different perspective, the interplay between opposites such as death and life, and the hero’s universal struggles in choosing a correct path.First and foremost, the question arises, why write a fantasy? I have often been told it is not a serious genre, that it is something to be read when you don’t want to think. I speculate that this attitude became ingrained during the 1960s and 1970s when works such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, as well as others, made their way into popular culture. The rise of movies and animation, Disney being the reigning champion, reinvented traditional fairytales and marketed them for all audiences, especially children, thereby helping to entrench the attitude that myths, fairytales, and fantasy, were less than serious. Now, are these stories entertaining? Yes. Did their authors and creators set out to do more than tell a compelling story? Not necessarily. However, there is something to be said for providing an escapist space for a reader to explore life’s difficulties divorced from an accurate similitude of reality.Not long ago, the British Library hosted a conversation between Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney entitled, “Why We Need Fantasy: Neil Gaiman in Conversation.” Kaveney expresses that “fantasy is a way of making things more real than the real,” while Gaiman explains that he enjoys making metaphors concrete. They discuss how fantasy is a “reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous” (“Why We Need Fantasy”). Peter Beagle provides an excellent example of this as he frequently addresses the subject of regret and mortality; two very real things that are made more real through the lens of a fantasy. The character of the unicorn states, “’I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die…I regret’” (Beagle 289). The reader is asked not only to examine their own regrets and desires, but what it would be like not to have them. Through the use of a mythical, immortal unicorn, Beagle is able to express something very basically human in a manner that speaks to our imagination, and even to a level of spirituality. This is what a fantasy can do.In my own life, fantasy has always made it simpler to examine reality as a whole; the known and the unknown, tangible and intangible, all at once. Faced with my speculations on one of the world’s greatest unknowns, death, I have needed to employ imagination. As Einstein once said, “’Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world’” (Lachman 127). To be fair, Einstein is referring more to imagination as an essential of scientific discovery. However, fantasy allows me to imagine a reality in which death, and life, can be treated more tangibly, where I can make “metaphor[s] concrete” (“Why We Need Fantasy”).The characters of Curi and Lord Vasilik provide two opposing perspectives on the theme of death. On the one hand, Curi accepts that death is inevitable. Lord Vasilik rejects such inevitability, having already died, and come back. He continues to “live,” seemingly without consequence, although upon first meeting him, Curi says there is “a palpable wrongness to him that grated and crashed against my every nerve” (Reed 24). He cannot deny that Lord Vasilik has turned what he knows to be impossible on its head. He is left to question, what does death mean, what really happens after that initial moment of dying, and are there consequences of avoiding death. The hope is that Curi’s opinions of death gradually shift from an indifference to a more active understanding, and in contrast, Curi must begin to consider what he wants in life. While delving more deeply into the theme of death, and Curi’s journey with it, I realized that the story was full of polar opposites that emphasize the immediate conflict of life and death. In his book, The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler discusses how both in life and in a story, “Unity begets duality; the existence of one implies the possibility of two” (385). Vogler goes on to describe the polarized system, positive and negative, as two ends of a single line. “These polarities create potential for contrast, challenge, conflict, and learning. As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy, polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience” (386). How do these opposites present within Deal with a Dead Man, and how do they also work in shaping the characters and story? One of the main ways life and death come to be highlighted throughout the story is constant references to the forces of day and night, light and darkness. Most of the story takes place at night, which in turn forces the characters to constantly make use of candles and fires to see, or wait for daylight. For example, as the story begins, Curi wakes from a nightmare and cannot get rid of it until dawn.The sky was lightening, the tree trunks beginning to change from dead black to frosted, ash-browns. I picked a fallen log and sat down, drawing my feet up out of the snow, and watched the eastern sky fade white with dawn. The heavy stillness of the night vanished with the shadows the moment the sun slivered over the horizon, allowing me to let go of the last vestiges of the dream.I needed to head back. Like most towns, the majority of Avishki’s population were up with the sun, and I had a job to do. I slid off the log, crouched and drew a sunflower in the snow with my finger, acknowledging the Bright gods influence in another day (Reed 4).Curi is inundated with juxtaposing symbolism, constantly using language to emphasize what he knows to be the natural order. Even the deities are categorized into bright or dark, supposedly making the world easy to understand. But again, the entrance of Lord Vasilik, his request, and duality of both death and life, blur the dual extremes, forcing Curi to reconsider what he knows and figure out where on the spectrum he is.As a compliment to the themes and dualities, consideration must be..
Local Map of the Interstellar FUV Field
No full textThe strength of the far-ultraviolet field is an important parameter in determining the chemistry that takes place in star-forming regions. FUV radiation is produced by bright stars in the galaxy and absorbed by interstellar dust. By using newly available maps of the dust distribution, in conjunction with catalogs of stellar positions and spectra, we created a local map of the FUV field ranging from 6-13.6 eV. We find a value of 6.57*10-14 erg/cm3 at the location of the Sun. This value, alongside its spectra, follow previous measurements and estimates of the FUV field at the Sun. We further study the relationship between dust density and energy density
Examination of Goal Orientation Theory Key Measures Related to High School Students’ Disruptive Behaviors
No full textIt\u27s well-known that motivation is essential for learning and how well students do in school. Research also suggests that a student\u27s motivation is likely connected to their behavior in the classroom. This study was particularly interested in understanding how different types of student motivation (e.g., wanting to learn vs. wanting to look good) are connected to disruptive behavior in the classroom setting. In particular, the study will analyze whether the achievement goal theory can provide an improved and advanced explanation for students\u27 disruptive behaviors in the classroom. A further aim of the study is to examine how different features of classrooms and schools might influence how motivated students are and how they behave. A quantitative methods design was utilized for the research questions. The sample of 608 students from secondary school completed a survey containing questions related to their perceptions of their classroom goal structures, sense of belongingness, personal goal orientations, individual learning goals, and perceptions of teaching. The survey also included questions about student behavior in the classroom, asking them to report on how often they engaged in disruptive actions. This research identified achievement goal theory as the strongest predictor of students\u27 disruptive behaviors in the classroom. Students\u27 perception of cheating was the most significant predictor of disruptive behavior, along with the subsets of gender and minority. Implementing classroom practices that draw on elements of theories to boost student motivation and encourage positive behavior. School policies should emphasize the importance of motivating students. By examining these areas through the lens of the research findings, educational leaders and staff can gain valuable insights into creating a more motivating and positive learning environment for all students to eliminate disruptive behaviors