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[EB 2011, Educational Research Platform Presentation Award]
No full text[Title supplied by cataloger]Educational Research Platform Presentation Award Recipients Andrew Jun and Allison Chatterjee, AAA Awards Banquet at the 2011 Experimental Biology conference
Pedagogy in Purgatory
No full textChildren, LiteraturePedagogy in Purgatory
Ellen Handler Spitz
Terezín: Voices from the Holocaust || by Ruth Thomson
Through a Narrow Window: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and her Terezín Students || by Linney Wix
INVITED TO THE Hebrew University in Jerusalem for spring term as a visiting professor of art history, an American scholar travels to Israel. She sends her ten-year-old daughter to a Hebrew day school in the neighborhood known as French Hill. She makes plans to visit Yad va’ Shem. But her husband vehemently opposes this: their little girl is too young, she must be protected a while longer. The parents debate, discuss, and, in an uneasy compromise, they go to the memorial but show her just the children’s drawings from the concentration camp of Terezín.
Those are images made under the tutelage of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944), a Bauhaus-trained artist and art teacher who was incarcerated there for two years before being murdered at Auschwitz on October 9, 1944, and who, knowing her end was near, packed nearly four thousand of her pupils’ pictures into two suitcases in the hopes of preserving them. Standing in the hushed gallery, the American child reads the names and numbers under the drawings. Subtracting each date from the one that follows it, she slowly realizes that the people who made these pictures must have died at just about her age. She turns questioningly to her mother and father, and they nod silently in shared acquiescence.
By now, hundreds of children’s books about the Holocaust have been published—fiction and non-fiction, as well as hybrids of varying quality: books about hiding, about substitute parents, about successful and failed escapes, attempted rescues, and resistance. We have allegorical books, books about daily life in the camps, books that treat the aftermath in postwar times, books featuring double time-frames, and recently ones dealing with the effect of the Holocaust on German as well as Jewish youth. Eminent children’s authors such as Eve Bunting, Lois Lowry, Claire Huchet Bishop, Michael Morpurgo, Anita Lobel, and Roberto Innocenti have contributed to the genre.
Moving, informative, well intentioned, and often artful (some adorned with beautiful illustrations, itself a kind of problem), there remains something awry in each of them. The Jewish protagonist may seem unrealistically virtuous, or merely a cipher; the plot, overly predictable or trite; the tone heavy-handed or saccharine; the truth subtly distorted (as in Carmen Agra Deedy’s touching story, The Yellow Star, which alleges—despite a lack of historical corroboration—that King Christian X of Denmark wore a yellow star to show solidarity with the Jews of his country and asked his countrymen to do the same); or just an overload of data crammed between the covers of a book, so that readers feel bombarded and overwhelmed. Parents struggle year after year: when to bring this history to their children, and how?
Two recent non-fiction books, one for children and the other only indirectly so (I recommend it highly to parents), reveal that the choice of any particular book—and, similarly, the decision to visit a memorial or a museum—may be less important than what surrounds the experience whenever it does occur. Ruth Thomson’s Terezín: Voices from the Holocaust and Linney Wix’s Through a Narrow Window eschew commentary. These books, principally factual, quietly ask their readers to perform their own private acts of imagination and empathy. They teach by implication that what matters is the commitment of parents and children to the supremely uncomfortable task of finding their own unique paths, emotional and cognitive, into this terrible history. For the purpose of understanding the Holocaust, no single cultural object will suffice, a point that was made eloquently by Ruth Franklin in her splendid book A Thousand Darknesses.
Terezín was a small fortress built by the Hapsburgs in the eighteenth century. Designated in 1941 as a detention camp for Jews, the Nazis re-named it Theresienstadt. Evacuating its indigenous population of five thousand Czechs, they crammed into the same space over fifty thousand Jews—men and women of all ages, and children. Evicted from their homes and transported to Terezín with luggage weighing not more than fifty kilos per person and only enough food for a fortnight, none of them knew what was to come. Of the fifteen thousand children who passed through Terezín between 1941 and 1945, less than one hundred survived. As for the elderly population, large numbers died of neglect, starvation, and untreated illness even before the deportations to the gas chambers were underway.
Upset at first by the starkness of Terezín: Voices from the Holocaust, and by what I initially took to be an abdication of responsibility for explanation and reflection on the part of its author, I eventually came to appreciate that, by forbearing to interpret, Thomson bravely and wisely shifts the task of commentary onto the young reader and her family. On page after page, the reader is confronted with selected facts—brutal facts—in the form of documents, photographs, quotations, and drawings made by artists and children who lived in the camp. Formatted in an elaborately designed manner, with colored inserts, captions, varied fonts, and text blocks, there is no pretense at providing a continuous narrative. No significant character appears to follow from start to finish. Topics surface in no apparent order.
Disease and death, for instance, take up two consecutive pages in the middle. Sick children lie in rows of hospital beds in a picture painted by an inmate; a small sketch on the same page portrays a mumps victim with his distorted face tied up in a scarf. A quotation from an inmate tells us that the dead people were taken out into the streets every day and covered so that you could see only their feet. A text bar reminds us of overcrowding in the camp, its unsanitary facilities, contaminated water, vermin, and the perpetual lack of food. In this piecemeal way, Thomson replicates (but only superficially, of course) some of the chaotic, fragmented existence that her book describes. Her book does not dictate how to think or what to feel. It trusts its reader. In this way it is itself a small blow against the authoritarian temper.
Through a Narrow Window is distinctly not a children’s book. It was written to accompany an exhibition featuring the art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and drawings made by children she taught in Terezín, and it offers rich background material that parents can draw on. Friedl taught art at a time when the Nazi authorities had proscribed all academic subjects. But by means of art and craft and music, which the Nazis must have considered insignificant enough to permit, the illegal teaching of other subjects surreptitiously continued. One Terezín survivor reports that children took turns alerting their teachers to the approach of guards or SS men. This practice reminds me of a midrash pertaining to Lag b’Omer, in which Rabbi Akiba, at the time of the Bar Kochba rebellion (132-135 C.E.), went into the wilderness with his students and taught them Torah while pretending to play games and hunt, lest the Roman soldiers apprehend them.
Scrounging and hoarding materials as soon as she was brought to Terezín with her husband Pavel, Friedl began at once to gather the children and give them lessons in drawing, painting, and collage. Undeterred by the conditions, she engaged them individually and in groups, in classes and exercises consonant with her Bauhaus training. Seamlessly blending the roles of artist and teacher, Friedl enabled the vulnerable children of Terezín, at least momentarily, to evade their anxiety and dodge their terror. Friedl was a taciturn teacher who made demands, set limits, and passed judgments, but all the while nourished children’s inner worlds. While maintaining order and discipline, and thus providing, by means of structure, a safety net, she at the same time elicited the maximum freedom of expression from her children. By these means, she created conditions under which children felt free even as they were prisoners.
Friedl’s passionate conviction about the value of art offered the children of Terezín weekly experiments with choice—an element banished by the Nazis from their lives. As we contemplate the delicate, crude, wistful, sometimes frightening drawings that remain, we expose ourselves to the untapped potentialities of the victims: a little blond girl in a field of drooping flowers with a sparkler and rows of stars overhead; a large family gathered around the fondly remembered Pesach table set with a candelabrum and a segmented seder plate, its mustachioed leader under a brimmed hat, his haggadah wide open; a camp matron seated at the feet of several bunk beds where children climb and one boy reads under a blanket. In these images we can find not only a struggle between tyranny and a blossoming human spirit: we find joy.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book, Illuminating Childhood, was published in early 2011. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
A NEW COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN AND SIMULATION SYSTEM FOR PLANAR LINKAGES
No full textThis thesis presents a new computer-aided linkage design and simulation system for task driven path generation problem. Mechanism design is considered a mixture of science and art. The former is about utilizing computers to rigorously sizing a mechanism in meeting a set of design requirements. And the latter is about taking advantage of designers' experience to narrow down design domain and speed up the design process. The ultimate goal of the presented design system is to incorporate both science and art into the linkage design process by (1) developing an automatic design framework based on library searching and optimization techniques and (2) developing an interactive design framework based on advanced human-computer interfaces. To enable the design automation framework, we first built a library of open and closed planar curves generated by commonly used planar linkages. We then turned the classical linkage path generation problem into a library searching problem together with a local optimization problem. To enable the interactive design framework, we developed a set of design interfaces that facilitate designers intervene and steer the design process. This hybrid design system was developed based on our existing VRMDS (Virtual Reality Mechanism Design Studio) framework. The result is a versatile mechanism design tool that is beneficial to the early stages of the mechanism design process
Analyzing the Growth of Hoeffding Trees
No full textMining high speed data streams has become a necessity because of the enormous growth in the volume of electronic data. In the past decade, researchers have suggested various models for learning both stationary and concept drifting data streams. Hoeffding Trees (Domingos & Hulten 2000) are one such model for mining stationary data streams. Several modifications of the naive Hoeffding Tree algorithm have been proposed to study data streams. Our work analyzes the behavior of Hoeffding Trees when they are trained on infinite and non-drifting data streams. Through a series of experiments, we show that the Hoeffd-ing bound suffers from an inherent shortcoming of unbounded growth. Even after reaching a stage where accuracy asymptotes, Hoeffding Trees continue to grow. We examine this behavior in streams having both nominal and numeric attributes. We also study enhance-ments made to the naive Hoeffding Tree algorithm and also evaluate different discretization methods. We use the Massive Online Analysis framework for our experiments. In our work, we analyze how the Hoeffding bound relates to the information gain when splits are made and also when we send a random distribution as a data stream. We conclude that this behavior is a result of decisions made for the early growth of Hoeffding Trees and the randomness induced by discretization of attributes in an online setting. We also argue that presence of this behavior will impact the use of Hoeffding tree-based algorithms in real world online applications
Nation Building and Insurgency in Southeast Asia
No full textThis study discusses the insurgency in Malaya from 1948 to 1989. During this period, Malaya was an ethnically divided country. The Malays sought to maintain their traditional position of power while the ethnic Chinese strove for equality. The Malayan Communist Party (M.C.P.), whose members were mostly ethnic Chinese, led the insurgency. The traditional account of the insurgency in Malaya began with the First Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960. Historians and other authors have argued that the British military defeated the insurgents in 1960. A second period of insurgency followed. The Second Malayan Emergency began in 1969 and ended in 1989 with the signing of a truce. This study shows that the insurgency did not end in 1960 and instead continued for 41 years from 1948 to 1989. The argument in this study outlines the continuation of the insurgency through the political arm of the struggle. In addition, this study examines the type of government in Malaya installed by the British government and the repressive legislation's that the Malayan government passed. Some of the reasons for the repression by the British and Malayan governments were Orientalist attitudes, racism, and the misperception of Communism. The British placed the Malays, in the form of the Sultans, in a position of power that allowed them to engage in repressive acts against the ethnic Chinese, which contributed to the start and continuation of the insurgency in Malay
Target-Based Maintenance of Privacy-Preserving Association Rules
No full textIn the context of association rule mining, the state-of-the-art in privacy preserving data mining provides solutions for categorical and Boolean association rules but not for quantitative association rules. This research fills this gap by describing a method based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to protect input data privacy while preserving association rules in static and dynamic environments. The key idea is to sort the data on each attribute, perform one-level Haar transform on each sorted attribute, retain approximation coefficients and copy them to two consecutive rows. In the static case, the strategy is simple since changes to the collection of data are ignored. In the case where data is dynamic, updates must be captured incrementally to save computational and I/O resources. Preserving association rules and the privacy of data in a dynamic environment is a three-step process. In step one, an approach to synchronize a source location with a target location is proposed. Known as Target-Based Database Synchronization (TBDS), this approach is aimed at solving a variation of the synchronization problem. The approach relies on comparing hash values for corresponding partitions of the source and the target databases so that if these values differ, the tuples in the target partition can be dropped and reloaded from the source. A table of partition information guides this process. In step two, the target-based database synchronization approach is used in conjunction with the discrete wavelet transform approach to incrementally update transformed data. Finally in step three, deleted and inserted transformed deltas retrieved from the data owner's database transaction logs are passed to the data miner who combines them with his previous set of frequent itemsets to efficiently compute the new set of frequent itemsets and rules. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to existing approaches such as kd-tree and random projection, the proposed approach renders higher accuracy and privacy for small to moderate size of database updates when updates lie within attribute domains, preserves 90% -100% of the original rules regardless of whether the size of database updates is small or moderate and executes efficiently when the percentage of database changes are small
Stiatistical Issues in Meta-Analysis
No full textIn statistical meta-analysis paradigm dealing with the techniques of pooling of evidence across several studies, the notion of effect size is fundamental and it is necessary to perform appropriate tests for the equality of population effect sizes arising out of these studies before performing any meta-analysis. A well known test for homogeneity in this context is based on Cochran's chi-square statistic. However Cochran's test might be inaccurate in testing homogeneity for some effect sizes in the sense of not maintaining the stipulated Type I errors. In this dissertation, three such scenarios are identified: 1) testing homogeneity of standardized mean difference, 2) testing homogeneity of correlations and correlation matrices, and 3) testing homogeneity of proportions with low event rates, and in each case the severe inadequacy of Cochran's homogeneity test is demonstrated. Apppropriate bootstrap procedures for testing homogeneity hypotheses are suggested, and applications in each problem are indicated. Two additional problems are also dealt with in the dissertation: Mantel-Haenszel and Peto weights in random effects meta-analysis, and extraction methods in statistical meta-analysis
Functional Assessment for Human-Computer Interaction: A Method for Quantifying Physical Functional Capabilities for Information Technology Users
No full textThe use of information technology is a vital part of everyday life, but for a person with functional impairments, technology interaction may be difficult at best. Information technology is commonly designed to meet the needs of a theoretical normal user. However, there is no such thing as a normal user. A user's capabilities will vary over time for a variety of reasons such as disease, developmental problems, age, injury, surgery, environmental conditions or cognitive status. Human computer interaction designers and researchers are attempting to integrate accessibility into the design of new technologies. A fundamental challenge exists for this endeavor: assessing and describing varying levels of user capabilities to predict how effectively a person can interact with a particular type of information technology. Current practice is to use medical diagnoses or physical limitations as descriptors of functional capabilities. This approach is too imprecise and does not provide enough details about user abilities to be helpful. An alternative is user self-reporting or observation by another person, but these solutions rely on individual interpretations of capabilities and may introduce unwanted bias. This dissertation proposes a new objective, quantifiable, repeatable, and efficient methodology for assessing an individual's physical capabilities to use information technologies. Two functional assessment tools were developed based on a set of information technology oriented functional capabilities: a self-assessment survey and a computer administered performance-based functional assessment tool. In a proof-of-concept study, thirty-one users with a range of physical capabilities were evaluated using the proposed survey and performance-based techniques. Independent assessments served as the gold standard for comparison. Metrics identified through the performance-based assessment were compared to the gold standard and predictive models were generated via regression and correlation analysis. Initial models explained up to 92% of the variance in user capabilities. Through an iterative refinement process, observer focus and the resulting performance-based models were adjusted to produce a hybrid combined model. Of all the predictive models, the hybrid model explained the greatest amount of variance in user capabilities with the lowest error rate