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Context Awareness for Content Delivery over Mobile Networks
No full textThe last few years has seen an enormous growth in the usage of smart phones. This trend is expected to continue in the near future as well with the availability of more processing power and larger form factors. This explosive growth has contributed to an unprecedented adoption of mobile data services which results in severe network congestion during peak hours due to limited availability of cellular capacity and the prohibitive cost of installing new infrastructure. Even the recent adoption of Long Term Evolution (LTE) by carriers has not kept pace with increasing data needs and the networks continue to be under stress. However, it is of utmost importance for the provider to maintain superior Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) even under constrained network capacity. One possible approach for achieving high QoE is through the use of context information from smart phones that allow the network to take pro-active decisions for content delivery. Key players within the telecommunication industry seem to be unanimous in foreseeing, for the next few years that the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic trends will grow rapidly. The Applications on mobiles, serving content, can be considered the present manifestation of the growing trend. Understanding the potential impact of M2M traffic on current network dimensioning and architectures is of paramount importance for the success and sustainability of these novel services in future wireless mobile networks. This thesis presents a tool ""Melange"" which can be used to measure and demonstrate the benefits of using context awareness for content delivery. Using the tool, the user can remotely control a number of mobile handsets by deploying different types of synthetic and natural workloads, emulating the traffic, to evaluate the impact on battery consumption and user perception of context-aware content pre-fetching
The Relation between Blood Pressure and Depressive Symptoms in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging
No full textPrior studies have identified inconsistent cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between depressive symptoms and blood pressure (BP). The present study examined whether the coincident relation between BP and depressive symptoms is curvilinear, where depressive symptoms predict both higher and lower BP. A total of 2,087 participants from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (aged 19 to 97, 53% men, 74% white) underwent clinical BP measurement and completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale on up to 14 occasions (Mean=3.8, SD=2.6) over up to 29 years (Mean=7.8, SD=6.4) of follow-up. Both cross-sectional (linear regression) and longitudinal (mixed-effects regression) analyses were performed to identify whether depressive symptomatology significantly predicted coincident BP, following statistical adjustment for common risk factors for depression and cardiovascular disease. Also, exploratory analyses were conducted to whether the relation between depressive symptoms and BP was modified by age and/or sex. Data analyses revealed that the main hypothesis was not supported either cross-sectionally or longitudinally. Instead, there was evidence that greater depressive symptoms were associated with greater BP levels. Exploratory analyses revealed sex and age differences in the relation between depressive symptoms and BP, where greater levels of depressive symptoms may confer risk for increased BP levels particularly for women and older adults, even with very few depressive symptoms. These results point to the importance of preventing, detecting, and lowering depressive symptoms as a way to prevent hypertension and cardiovascular disease, particularly for women and older adults
Social Withdrawal during Middle Childhood in Turkey: The Role of Individual, Parenting, and Peer Factors
No full textThis dissertation project aimed to examine the meaning of social withdrawal in an inter-dependent cultural context (Turkey), its correlates, and the risk and protective factors for withdrawn children's adjustment across two consecutive studies. In Study 1, semi-structured interviews with Turkish children (n = 15), mothers (n = 13), and teachers (n = 13) were conducted to identify the behavioral and motivational descriptors of social withdrawal. Similar to Western conceptualizations of social withdrawal, the results confirmed the presence of shyness and unsociability. A new subtype, regulated withdrawal, was also revealed, which refers to such behaviors as adopting a passive role in social groups, overly regulating behaviors, and suppressing wishes and desires in social relationships, with the motivation of fitting into the group and maintaining harmonious relations with others. Study 2A examined the factor structure, measurement invariance across informants (children and mothers), reliability, and validity of the Child Social Preference Scale (CSPS), which was revised based on the findings from Study 1. Participants included 599 children aged 9-11 years and their mothers (n = 571), and teachers of a subset of the sample (n = 20). The results suggested that the CSPS-R had the same factor structure across the child- and mother-rated forms. However, the child-rated CSPS-R appeared to be a more valid measure of social withdrawal than the mother-rated form. Using the same sample as Study 2A, Study 2B examined the correlates and moderators of withdrawn behaviors on child adjustment. Shyness was found to be related with a wider range of child adjustment difficulties than unsociability and regulated withdrawal, although all forms of withdrawal were associated with child adjustment difficulties. Analyses of the risk and protective factors suggested that the moderating roles of individual, parenting, and peer level factors varied by the different forms of withdrawn behaviors. Overall, this dissertation research contributed to the development of a culturally based understanding of socially withdrawn behaviors in an interdependent cultural context. Universal and cultural-specific processes are discussed with regard to their theoretical and practical implications for socially withdrawn children's adjustment
Incorruptible (2012)
No full textPromotional materials produced for Incorruptible, performed by the UMBC Theatre Department in April 2012. Includes playbill, program, and ten publicity photographs.April 18-April 28, 201
Grrl Parts (2012)
No full textPromotional materials produced for Grrl Parts in March 2012, performed by the UMBC Theatre. Includes playbill, program, and ten publicity photographs.March 7-March 11, 201
Learning to Matter
No full textChildren, LiteratureLearning to Matter
Ellen Handler Spitz
Looking for Me ... In This Great Big Family
by Betsy R. Rosenthal
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 176 pp., $15.99
NEAR THE MIDPOINT of War and Peace, Tolstoy grapples with the reasons for Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia; he ruminates on the causes of war and, by extension, the factors that impact the course of history. In a celebrated passage, he posits the willingness or unwillingness of a minor French corporal to enlist for a second tour of duty. Juxtaposing this seemingly inconsequential choice on the part of an unknown soldier with the intrigues of the British and with Napoleon’s famous refusal to withdraw his army beyond the Vistula, Tolstoy makes his point: the smallest factor counts.
In this Tolstoyan mode, a slender new children’s book called Looking for Me might well be regarded as genuine history tempered with poetic license. It was written by Betsy R. Rosenthal, who is a former civil rights attorney. The story she tells is her mother’s. The book portrays the eleventh year of a little girl named Edith Paul, whose change of surname from Polansky pleases the child because, as she says, “Paul” rhymes with many words, but “Polansky” rhymes with none. Edith is “number four” in a family of twelve children in southeast Baltimore. Sifted from memories recounted by the author’s mother over a period of twenty years as well as recorded interviews with Maryland-based aunts and uncles, Looking for Me zeroes in on the year 1936. What was it like to be a child in the aftermath of the stock market crash? How did everyday life feel if you were poor, urban, Jewish, with immigrant grandparents—Bubby Etta from Russia and Bubby Anne—and a larger-than-life president (who makes a token appearance as a putative savior when an unpaid debt threatens to rob the family of its home)?
Children play stickball, dodgeball, marbles, jacks, watch Popeye cartoons and Buck Rogers flicks on weekends at the Roxy. They eat kosher hot dogs “lathered with mustard, like shaving cream on a man’s face” and caramel apples on a stick and slices of pie snitched from their father’s diner. On Rosh Hashanah, the girls wear white gloves and envy the too-expensive Mary Janes of visiting New York cousins. With only three records for their basement Victrola, they play “Some Day My Prince Will Come” until their overworked father descends in a fury and snaps the record in two because he cannot stand hearing it one more time.
Rosenthal braves the challenge of writing in a child’s voice, a move that often fails in children’s books because it so quickly rings false. Rarely can adults, even supremely gifted writers, cross the chronological divide, go back in time, and get it right. Yet Rosenthal tells Edith’s story in the first person, and in verse. She chooses verse because it conveys her most natural voice, she says, and because it seems to her more open, and informal. It also, I would add, feels closer to a young child’s own unadorned speech, which certainly can be oracular. Burrowing in with canny sensitivity, Rosenthal scoops up childhood truths with both hands and offers them in detail after detail: the miseries of wearing “hand-me-down down down down downs,” of waiting behind brothers and sisters to go to the toilet, of sharing a bed with two others so that the little girl finds feet in her face and no room to spread her arms “wide/ and lie/ at a slant.”
Buried in pages of this book, a nine-year-old of my acquaintance is uncharacteristically ignoring his plate of warm spaghetti. He refuses to stop reading. He wants to remain in Edith’s life where, far more quickly than she herself does, he hones in on her honesty and courage. Ordinarily he doesn’t like books in verse, he says, because their authors seem more interested in poetry than stories, “but this one is different.” He likes the way Edith finds out who she is in her “way-too-big” family. This is well put, for with Rosenthal’s verse, we enter and occupy Edith’s resilient mind and sturdy body and we learn from each human being in her entourage and from every encounter, whether comic or tragic.
In early spring, just before Passover, Edith’s little brother Melvin dies of acute bronchitis, sweet Melvin, who held her hand with his sticky fingers and called her “Eeediff.” The children are playing marbles on the sidewalk; an ambulance arrives; Melvin is gone. Edith’s father hunches over, her mother leaves a trail of tissues, gives each child a penny, and sends them outside. Until now Edith has thought her family way too big, but she tells her teacher Miss Connelly that from now on it is “one too small.” Her hand feels empty. She watches tears fall on a shirt as her mother irons late into the night, and Edith longs for words “to help her iron/ her sadness away.”
Assigned at the start of the school year to write a poem about her family, Edith pens a terse stanza about everyone, including her parents, but she forgets herself. Readers may remember Christopher Robin, who also forgets himself, after dutifully blessing all the others at his bedtime prayers, in A.A. Milne’s poem, “Vespers.” But Miss Connelly points out the omission, and she tells Edith to go home and think about who she is. Gradually throughout the year, in the midst of her hectic, overcrowded, overworked household, supported by a father who toils long hours at a diner and does not know how old she is, and a mother who helps him and, exhausted after over a dozen pregnancies, has difficulty remembering Edith’s name, Edith struggles to find out who she is beyond “number four.”
In the largely Polish Catholic neighborhood near Baltimore’s Patterson Park, a fellow called Jimmy Lenchowski chases her each day after school and calls her a “Jew bagel.” He yells that she “killed Jesus Christ.” Terrorized, she finally stands up to him after her Bubby Etta, swaying with eyes closed (“to see the past better”), recounts in detail the persecutions of the old country and informs her that here, in America, she is no longer afraid. With these words to brace her, Edith informs Jimmy Lenchowski, when he next appears, that she couldn’t have killed Jesus because she “wasn’t even born then,” and adds for good measure that if he doesn’t leave her alone her brothers will come for him. “I have a lot of them.” Today this accusation of Christ-killing reads perhaps as a placeholder for racism, gender bias, homophobia, and bullying behavior of every kind.
After Melvin’s death, her mother stays home, and Edith must work in the diner each day after school and sometimes even after dark to close up. Miss Connelly begins to worry and asks her to stay after school one day for a talk. Edith unlooses the floodgates to her kindly teacher and explains about her little brother’s death. Miss Connelly tells her that she is a smart and observant girl who should go to college one day, and Edith, to whom no one has ever spoken such words, becomes “a bubble blown full with Miss Connelly’s words.” Returning home, she floats into the parlor until her father tells her sourly that girls don’t need college and she’ll work at the diner until she gets married. “His words pierce me, and I burst,” Rosenthal writes.
But her Bubby and her Mom pledge to help her, and in the end she wins an award at school, the first child in her family to do so. Sitting onstage at graduation, she envies the other winners whose families have come to celebrate them. Her father doesn’t even know what grade she’s in, she thinks, and her Mom is too sad over Melvin. When the principal calls her name “in a deep serious voice,” she suddenly hears “an ocean of wild clapping.” There, at the back, “like a mirage,” she sees her whole family, her Mom and Dad, all her sisters and brothers, and both of her bubbies. Edith learns that, like Tolstoy’s thousandth corporal, she matters.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book is Illuminating Childhood. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #1
No full textEnglish Grammar, VerbsThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #1
Simple Grammar Terms: How They Can Help
The purpose of this lesson is to present the justification for using simple, self-describing terms for grammatical features of English in place of traditional grammatical terminology.
Traditional English grammatical terminology has evolved essentially from the analysis of Latin in Roman times and the Middle Ages. It has been given status and authenticity by linguists and grammarians, experts who are already proficient in English. However, this terminology was not developed for the purpose of helping ELLs learn English. Examples of this terminology are terms such as ‘conjugation’, ‘perfect tenses’, ‘participles’, ‘gerunds’ and ‘auxiliaries’. These terms are useful for grammarians, but they are not helpful for language learners.
The first problem with this terminology is that it consists of words that are inherently difficult to learn and internalize. For beginning ELLs, who are learning basic English vocabulary and structures, most traditional grammatical terms are beyond their proficiency level.
Second, the terms are based on the Latin language and analyses of Romance languages. They only have limited applicability to describing English. Take the word ‘conjugation’ for example. It is a useful word for languages whose verbs have different endings for different persons. Typically, conjugations are used for 6 persons: first singular and plural, second singular and plural, and third singular and plural. Additional forms are sometimes made for familiar-formal distinctions. Except for the verb ‘be’, English verbs only have two forms per tense, one of which is used for 5 out of the 6 persons in typical conjugations. English does not apply familiar-formal distinctions to its verbs. Therefore, conjugating English verbs does not help the English language learner. Learning a second verb form for singular third person subjects is much more direct.
Third, the terms do not suggest by their nomenclature what they actually mean. Perfect tenses refer to tenses which use the verb ‘have’ as a helping verb. However, nothing about these tenses means that they are ‘free from error’ which is what the word ‘perfect’ usually means.
Terms used to describe grammatical features and structures can be more descriptive of what they actually do, and they can be more readily learned and applied by ELLs of all proficiency levels. Examples of two such terms are ‘control verbs’ and ‘connectors’. In English there are many verbs which in context are often followed by a second verb: verbs such as ‘like’ and ‘enjoy’. These verbs control the form of the verbs that follow them, ‘like to study’ and ‘enjoy studying’. Therefore, these first verbs are called ‘control verbs’. English speakers use word groups such as clauses and phrases. When these word groups are expressed, they are usually connected to other parts of sentences with connecting words. Examples of these connecting words are ‘that’, ‘when’, ‘but’, etc. In traditional grammar, these words are given various names, but in all
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
situations, their function is to connect their word groups with the rest of the sentences. They are more easily learned and remembered when they simply are called ‘connectors’.
Another illustration of using simplified, self-describing grammatical terms is with regard to the various Verb Forms of English. Most English verbs have only 5 forms, and these forms are often given traditional grammatical names. Verb Forms Chart presents samples of verbs in their 5 forms with traditional names in the top row, and more self-describing names in the bottom row.
Verb Forms Chart
Base
Form
Present
Participle
3rd person
Singular
Form
Past
Participle
Infinitive
attend
like
walk
attending
liking
walking
attends
likes
walks
attended
liked
walked
to attend
to like
to walk
SIMPLE Form
ING
Form
S
Form
ED
Form
TO
Form
Notice the complexity and lack of consistency among the traditional terms versus the simplicity and uniformity of the self-describing terms. Notice also that two of the traditional terms are misleading. The Present Participle does not necessarily refer to present actions and the Past Participle does not necessarily refer to past actions.
A counter argument to using simplified, self-describing terms for grammatical features is that traditional grammatical terminology is more widely known, and ELLs have frequently already been made aware of the terms. Therefore, won’t the ELLs be confused more than helped by these new terms?
There are two responses to this question. First, for the learners that have not yet been exposed to traditional terminology, the simple terminology will help them really master the features and structures they refer to, and once learned they can apply the traditional terms as they are exposed to them. For ELLs who have already been exposed to the traditional terminology, their mastery of the features is often incomplete. Using the self-describing terms will better serve these ELLs to really master the target features and structures. Once they reach this point, their understanding of the traditional terms will be that much more complete