609 research outputs found
The Middle School Experience: A Latina Perspective
No full textMiddle School best practice recommendations are represented in the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Schools to Watch criteria. Middle School best practice appears to be informed by research including samples of policy makers, administrators, teachers and parents. It appears that the student voice may be missing. Extant research suggests that responding to students' perception is critical for learning to take place. This study focused on gathering students' descriptions of their school experiences in an inner city middle school for low income girls. After collecting and analyzing the students' perceptions, the study addressed whether a student sample adds to data gathered from education professionals. Student data was gathered through phenomenological interviews. The sample was selected because its students appear to be overcoming negative outcomes associated with at-risk Latina students
The missing link: Bringing institutions back into the debate on economic globalisation
No full textIn der Auseinandersetzung mit der Globalisierung von Wirtschaftsprozessen kann sich die sozialwissenschaftliche Institutionentheorie nicht mehr auf die Untersuchung nationaler Konfigurationen beschränken, sondern sollte der transnationalen Rekombination institutioneller Arrangements mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken. Für die Untersuchung solcher Prozesse sind veränderte analytische Werkzeuge erforderlich. Die Autorinnen dieses Beitrags schlagen eine Synthese von National Business Systems- und Varieties of Capitalism- Ansätzen mit kulturalistischen und phänomenologischen Varianten der Institutionentheorie vor. Es werden drei Aspekte der institutionellen Analyse vertieft, die zu einem besseren Verständnis des Verhältnisses von Globalisierung und Institutionen beitragen: Institutionalisierung als Prozeß, Rekombination als Mechanismus der Institutionengenese und des Institutionenwandels und eine Mehrebenenanalyse des Zusammenspiels von institutionellen Veränderungen auf nationaler und transnationaler Ebene. Die vorgeschlagene Synthese verschiedener institutionalistischer Ansätze bietet einerseits Ansatzpunkte für die Untersuchung der Rolle nationaler Akteure in der Genese und Entwicklung transnationaler Institutionen. Andererseits trägt sie zu einem besseren Verständnis der Rekombination von Elementen verschiedener institutioneller Arrangements sowie der Herausbildung neuer Institutionen auf transnationaler Ebene bei. Diese Entwicklungen im transnationalen Raum wirken wiederum auf Institutionen in nationalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsräumen ein. Die Autorinnen des vorliegenden Beitrages argumentieren, daß die Abfolge und Kombination einer Reihe gradueller und zunächst geringfügiger Veränderungen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg zu einem signifikanten Wandel von gesellschaftlichen Institutionen führen können. -- Faced with ongoing debates on globalisation, societal institutionalism in its traditional form is showing its limits. In this paper, we suggest that a serious sociologically grounded and institutional contribution to the ongoing debate on global governance calls for a shift in focus away from the preoccupation with national configurations and towards an attempt at understanding transnational recombinations. The investigation of transnational recombination calls for new analytical tools. Here we argue that the solution may come from an hybridisation of NBS and VOC approaches with other variants of the institutionalist argument in particular those we label cultural or phenomenological. We elaborate on three aspects of institutional analysis that we identify as key to getting a better understanding of the relationship between globalisation and institutions. Firstly, we propose an interpretation of institutionalisation as a process and not a state of things. Secondly, we reinterpret institutional genesis and institutional change as revealing recombination. Thirdly, we argue for a more systematic analysis of the interplay of such processes of recombination across different levels of analysis, particularly the national and the transnational. With a conceptual framework so reformulated, it is possible to take in the transnational reality in its full complexity. We show, on the one hand, how the NBS and VOC perspectives are an interesting starting base to look at the structuration and stabilisation of the transnational reality. On the other hand, we gain new insights in the ways in which institution building and recombination at the transnational level become reflected often progressively and somewhat incrementally at the national business system level. Our proposition is that the succession and combination, over a long period of time, of a series of incremental and sometimes minor transformations could lead in the end to consequential and significant change.
Disciplining the Spectator: Subjectivity, the Body and Contemporary Spectatorship
No full textIn this thesis the author argues that although questions of the spectator’s corporeal engagement with film are much neglected by film theory, the body is nevertheless a central term within contemporary cinema, in its mode of address, as a locus of anxiety in media effects debate, and as site of disciplinary practices. And while the thesis begins by demonstrating both the socially and historically constructed nature of spectatorship, and the specific practices that work to create contemporary cinema’s corporeal address, the latter half of the dissertation devotes itself to revealing the regulatory implications of this physical address. That is, the author shows that cinema’s perceived capacity of affect the body of the spectator is a profound source of cultural anxiety. But more importantly, through an analysis of the films Funny Games, Irréversible, Wolf Creek, and the genre of ‘torture porn’ more generally, what is revealed in these final chapters is that the regulation of cinema in the contemporary era is less a question of the institutionalised censorship of texts, and more a question of regulating the ‘self’. In this respect, the author demonstrates the specific disciplinary practices that attempt to present the problem of violent, and sexually violent, imagery not as a textual issue per se, but a question of the formation of appropriate spectatorial relations. Moreover, this study begins the process of teasing out the ways in which the contemporary spectator is induced to see the problem of media violence as one that can be resolved through what
Foucault would term, techniques of the self
Inflation and Inflation Uncertainty in the Euro Area
No full textThis paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in 1999. The main findings are as follows. Steady-state inflation and inflation uncertainty have declined steadily since the inception of EMU, whilst short-run uncertainty has increased, mainly owing to exogenous shocks. A sequential dummy procedure provides further evidence of a structural break coinciding with the introduction of the euro and resulting in lower long-run uncertainty. It also appears that the direction of causality has been reversed, and that in the euro period the Friedman-Ball link is empirically supported, implying that the ECB can achieve lower inflation uncertainty by lowering the inflation rate.inflation, inflation uncertainty, time-varying parameters, GARCH models, ECB, EMU
Contingent Protection Measures and the Management of the Softwood Lumber Trade in North America
No full textThis article examines CanadaÂ’s softwood lumber dispute with the United States in the context of new juridical models of international dispute settlement and an evolving trade policy environment in North America. Two questions are of central importance to this study. First, what does the rise of contingent protection measures mean for CanadaÂ’s regulatory model? Strong antidumping legislation has created a new order of trade conflict at a time when intrasectoral competition has increased state support in a number of sectors. Second, how do American antidumping trade remedy measures come to bear in this dispute? In the softwood case, dispute settlement has been less effective because Canada, as the smaller economy, faces the challenge of enforcing panel decisions when the respondent has the power to avoid compliance.Antidumping, countervailing duties, dispute settlement, softwood, trade policy, WTO, International Relations/Trade,
Frammenti semantici. Riflessioni su descrizioni archivistiche e web semantico: Il caso dell’archivio Giovanni Testori
No full textThis doctoral thesis is about the possibility to put archival data (for example archival descriptions, authority records and so on) directly into semantic web, particularly using a technology called “Topic Maps”.
Topic Maps are an ISO standard quite similar to RDF.
To show that it's possible to express archival data directly into semantic web, I translated all archival standards (such ISAD, ISAAR, ISDIAH, ISDF) into Topic Maps Constraint Language schemas. TMCL is a standard of the Topic Maps family. What it's important is that you can declare constraints and inference rules to ensure that a topic map holding archival data is compliant to archival standards.
So, once shown that is possible expressing archival data into semantic web, which is the main advantage?
I think that we can find three advantages in this approach:
you can build flexible and extensible information systems
you can create import and export as linked data
you can merge data of different areas (for example you can merge archival authority records and librarian authority records)
For that aim I also created crosswalks between different standards. For example I mapped FRAD with ISAAR.
For import and export I created some XSL-T stylesheets to convert EAC and EAD to Topic Maps and I released them as opensource on google code.
Lastly I proposed a strong idea to develop flexible information systems (for example a software to manage a digital library or an archival information system such the archival system for national archives). In those systems data wouldn't be stored in a database, but directly in RDF triples or, why not, in a topic map.
This allows to extend or change the system without a database change (so you can add or change a descriptive field without touch the database)
Safe Policies for Factored Partially Observable Stochastic Games
No full textWe study planning problems where a controllable agent operates under partial observability and interacts with an uncontrollable opponent, also referred to as the adversary. The agent has two distinct objectives: To maximize an expectedvalue and to adhere to a safety specification. Multi-objective partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) formally model such problems. Yet, even for a single objective, the task of computing suitable policies for POSGs is theoretically hard and computationally intractable in practice. Using a factored state-space representation, we define a decoupling scheme for the POSG state space that—under certain assumptions on the observability and the reward structure—separates the state components relevant for the reward from those relevant for safety. This decoupling affects the possibility to compute provably safe and reward-optimal policies in a tractable two-stage approach. In particular, on the fully observable components related to safety, we exactly compute the set of policies that captures all possible safe choices against the opponent. We restrict the agent’s behavior to these safe policies and project the POSG to a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Anyreward-maximal policy for the POMDP is then guaranteed to be safe and reward-maximal for the POSG. We showcase our approach’s feasibility using high-fidelity simulations of two case studies that concern UAV path planning and autonomous driving. Moreover, to demonstrate the practical applicability, we design a physical experiment involving a robot decision making problemunder energy constraints that is motivated by a paired helicopter with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.Algorithmic
Variational Germano Optimization of Arbitrary Unresolved-Scale Models
No full textThis thesis demonstrated how the Newton and BFGS algorithm could be used to solve the standard VGM relations and least-squares formulation respectively, for arbitrary forms of the _ parameter, including nonlinear _ s, appearing in the VMM. The proposed procedure were also shown to be able to handle arbitrary projectors that are compatible with the VGM. When applied to the advection-di_usion equation, Burgers' equation and Stokes equations the algorithms always reached the speci_ed stopping criteria and did not exceed the maximum alloted iterations. Additionally the increase in computational e_ort required was shown to be limited. However, it was shown that the Newton procedure for the VGM could not be used in cases where the local VGM residuals had varying signs. In that case the BFGS and least-squares VGM were successful. Application of the proposed procedures to di_erent SGS models showed that nonlinear models tended to outperform linear models in terms of the L2 and projected error. It was also shown that the parametrization of an SGS model can greatly inuence how well the VGM will be able to optimize its coe_cients.Aerospace Engineering | Aerodynamics and Wind Energ
Using game-based learning to foster critical thinking in student discourse
No full textIn spite of a global shift that emphasizes the importance of critical thinking skills, America’s schools are not yet equipped with a sufficient repertoire of pedagogical strategies necessary to foster these skills. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the effectiveness of game-based learning (GBL) as a strategy for fostering higher-level critical-thinking skills so that it may potentially be appropriated for popular use in traditional school environments. I examined student discourse throughout a GBL intervention designed to promote content knowledge and critical thinking in an eighth grade social studies classroom. A total of three 8th grade social studies classes engaged in the intervention. Post-tests and delayed post-tests were conducted for the entire 8th grade (ten social studies classes across two instructors). Five groups of students that engaged in the GBL intervention were videotaped and analyzed. Data analysis showed that features of the GBL intervention and particular cycles of gameplay were effective in promoting higher levels of critical thinking, including the development of independent beliefs prior to engaging in collaborative discourse and providing opportunities for guided reflection. The portfolio that follows seeks to make the findings of my research on GBL practical via three major components: (1) an article written for publication in a scholarly journal; (2) curriculum for a fifteen-hour professional development course designed to share my learnings with fellow practitioners; and (3) a presentation to be delivered to school administrators with the purpose of sharing my findings, fostering discussion, and exploring potential avenues for effecting change in schools.Ed. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Marc I. Cicchin
Domestic anarchy among the suburbanites of postwar American literature
No full textThe sociological phenomenon of the post-World War II suburban boom launched suburbia as an essential fact of the modern American landscape. In my thesis, I explore the works of Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and Jhumpa Lahiri, which portray the dystopic aspects of suburbia. Each author emphasizes a distinct vision of the suburban experience, reflecting how suburbia has evolved in the last half century- from a newly encroaching, prefabricated terrain to a homogenized backdrop that has spread through most of the country. Yates's Revolutionary Road depicts the illusory suburban dream in its heyday, the 1950s, portraying suburbia as a place of entrapment and confonnity. Carver's fiction reassesses the suburban dream in the context of the blue-collar suburbs of the 1970s and 80s, with its characters still struggling with the dark side of 50s suburbia, mainly with the effects of suburban isolation and the domestication of the sexes. Finally, Lahiri 's sh01i stories re-envision suburbia from the immigrant perspective of Indian Americans who also have been seduced by the suburban promise. Drawing from political, spatial, and cultural theories of such writers as Jacques Ellul, I argue that part of suburbia's dystopia is shaped by the manipulative forces of government and media, the homogenous features of suburban architecture, and the totalizing effects of technology. Despite often feeling overwhelmed by societal forces, these suburban characters attempt to subvert these forces through their own domestic anarchy- including d1inking, affairs, and avoidance- only to find that, in the end, their resistance is ineffective, if not self-destructive. Hoping to add to the tradition of suburban literature, I also hope to give readers a fresh perspective on the suburban lives that most Americans live today.California State University, Northridge. Department of English.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-102
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