The Power, Structure, and Practice of Gratitude in Education: A Demonstration of Epistemology and Empirical Research Working Together

A growing body of philosophical, psychological, and educational research shows that gratitude has positive effects on mood, relationships, and learning. This paper explores the power of gratitude, investigates how the ontological (inward), teleological (forward), and metaphysical (upward) structure of gratitude can enhance learning, and then highlights a research study revealing teachers’ perspectives on the impact of practicing gratitude in the classroom environment. Four themes emerged from the empirical study that support the gratitude structure: two themes relate to the impact on teachers (enhanced well-being and calm amidst stress), and two themes relate to the impact on students (enhanced classroom environment and strengthened learning). Together, the epistemological framework and the empirical evidence demonstrate that using the structure and the practice of gratitude together in the context of the classroom environment bolsters educational pursuits

Mobile Water Payment Innovations in Urban Africa

This study assess mobile payment options for water service bills in four urban African contexts. Systems are evaluated to identify differences in adoption levels and motivations and barriers to uptake; how costs are distributed among water service providers, mobile network operators, and customers; and mobile payment applications and designs. Data was collected through interviews with water service providers, mobile network operators and service regulators, as well as a household survey in one of the study regions and the aid of World Bank and national water regulator data. Mobile water payment adoption rates were low, but there was also evidence that key barriers such as limited awareness, lack of physical proof of payment, and high transaction tariffs, could be overcome. Increased mobile water payment is found to result in considerable savings in time and money for consumers, revenue for mobile network operators, and perhaps most importantly, strengthened finances for water service providers to improve their ability to provide sustainable service

Economic Values of Saginaw Bay Coastal Marshes

We estimate the economic values of Saginaw Bay coastal marshes with multiple methods. First we estimate the value of coastal marsh recreation with two variations of the travel cost method: the single-site recreation demand model and the recreation site selection or random utility model. Using the single site model the current level of day trip recreation in the Saginaw Bay coastal marsh area is valued at almost $16 million each year. The present value is$239 million. Using the site selection travel cost model, an increase in 1125 acres of coastal marsh is valued at about $94,000 annually. The present value is$1.83 million. Willingness to pay for recreation and other values of coastal marsh protection is estimated using the contingent valuation method. The annual value of protection of 1125 acres of coastal marsh is $113,000. The present value is$2.2 million.

Frenetic: A High-Level Language for OpenFlow Networks

Network administrators must configure network devices to simultaneously provide several interrelated services such as routing, load balancing, traffic monitoring, and access control. Unfortunately, most interfaces for programming networks are defined at the low level of abstraction supported by the underlying hardware, leading to complicated programs with subtle bugs. We present Frenetic, a high-level language for OpenFlow networks that enables writing programs in a declarative and compositional style, with a simple "program like you see every packet" abstraction. Building on ideas from functional programming, Frenetic offers a rich pattern algebra for classifying packets into traffic streams and a suite of operators for transforming streams. The run-time system efficiently manages the low-level details of (un)installing packet-processing rules in the switches. We describe the design of Frenetic, an implementation on top of OpenFlow, and experiments and example programs that validate our design choices.Office of Naval Research grant N00014-09-1-0770 "Networks Opposing Botnets

Integrative Genomics Reveals the Genetics and Evolution of the Honey Bee’s Social Immune System

Social organisms combat pathogens through individual innate immune responses or through social immunity—behaviors among individuals that limit pathogen transmission within groups. Although we have a relatively detailed understanding of the genetics and evolution of the innate immune system of animals, we know little about social immunity. Addressing this knowledge gap is crucial for understanding how life-history traits influence immunity, and identifying if trade-offs exist between innate and social immunity. Hygienic behavior in the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, provides an excellent model for investigating the genetics and evolution of social immunity in animals. This heritable, colony-level behavior is performed by nurse bees when they detect and remove infected or dead brood from the colony. We sequenced 125 haploid genomes from two artificially selected highly hygienic populations and a baseline unselected population. Genomic contrasts allowed us to identify a minimum of 73 genes tentatively associated with hygienic behavior. Many genes were within previously discovered QTLs associated with hygienic behavior and were predictive of hygienic behavior within the unselected population. These genes were often involved in neuronal development and sensory perception in solitary insects. We found that genes associated with hygienic behavior have evidence of positive selection within honey bees (Apis), supporting the hypothesis that social immunity contributes to fitness. Our results indicate that genes influencing developmental neurobiology and behavior in solitary insects may have been co-opted to give rise to a novel and adaptive social immune phenotype in honey bees.York University Librarie

Toxic Jazz Narratives - Dispelling the Illusory Relationship Between Suffering and Creativity

The trope of the suffering artist is a persistent theme in discussions about jazz, often overshadowing the music itself. The focus on the negative aspects of an artist\u27s biography can inadvertently shape students\u27 perceptions, leading them to associate artistic greatness with personal turmoil rather than with the technical and expressive aspects of the music. The emphasis on tragic life stories in introductory jazz courses can detract from a holistic understanding of the genre. Jazz should be explored as a rich tapestry of musical innovation, cultural expression, and collaborative effort, rather than through the lens of individual suffering. Highlighting the achievements of jazz musicians, their stylistic developments, and the historical context of the music allows students to engage with jazz more meaningfully

How can we make the psychiatric workforce more family focused?

[Extract] Initially, the chapter outlines what we mean by family approaches and then overviews our conception of a continuum of family-focused care and expectations for psychiatric agencies and workers. A brief theoretical review of family-focused care is then outlined followed by information about barriers and enablers to family-focused practice. The chapter ends with reflections from multiple countries regarding the current state of family-focused practice and potential ways forward in each country

Annotating patient clinical records with syntactic chunks and named entities: the Harvey corpus

The free text notes typed by physicians during patient consultations contain valuable information for the study of disease and treatment. These notes are difficult to process by existing natural language analysis tools since they are highly telegraphic (omitting many words), and contain many spelling mistakes, inconsistencies in punctuation, and non-standard word order. To support information extraction and classification tasks over such text, we describe a de-identified corpus of free text notes, a shallow syntactic and named entity annotation scheme for this kind of text, and an approach to training domain specialists with no linguistic background to annotate the text. Finally, we present a statistical chunking system for such clinical text with a stable learning rate and good accuracy, indicating that the manual annotation is consistent and that the annotation scheme is tractable for machine learning