Book Reviews

Book Reviews of: Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (Simon & Schuster, 1982) John Fowles, A Maggot (Little-Brown, 1985) James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (Simon & Schuster, 1985

Spirituality And Student Engagement At A Small, Church-Related Private College

ABSTRACT The undergraduate collegiate years are filled with growth and development for students. As students experience and progress through their collegiate years, they are often confronted with difficult life questions, such as what is the meaning of life or why am I here? Oftentimes, the question is why do bad things happen? The purpose of this study is to better understand relationship between student engagement and spirituality. Undergraduate students at a small, church-related private college in the Upper Midwest were surveyed in the Spring 2015 semester using the College Students’ Beliefs and Values Survey (CSBVS). Alexander Astin’s I-E-O model was utilized as a conceptual framework for better understanding the relationships of inputs, environments, and outputs while testing the variables selected for the purposes of this research from the CSBVS, specifically the five constructs of spiritual quest, ethic of caring, ecumenical worldview, equanimity, and charitable involvement. In-class experiences appear to be the strongest as it relates to the five spirituality constructs. There is a statistically significant relationship between out-of-class experiences and spirituality. There is less evidence that there is a relationship between spirituality and faculty interactions. It is important to remember the institution surveyed. Midwest Church College (MCC) is a small, church-related private college. What the research with this project also showed is strong support of the findings of the Astin, Astin, and Lindholm research of 2011 in that there is a strong relationship between engagement and the five spirituality constructs of equanimity, ecumenical worldview, charitable involvement, ethic of caring, and spiritual quest for students at MCC. Such information helps to confirm that students at MCC find that spirituality is a significant part of their daily lives and thus must be considered as a strong piece for better understanding how to best respond to the difficult questions they often pose: Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Why do bad things happen

Planning, implementation, and first results of the Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling Experiment (TC4)

The Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling Experiment (TC4), was based in Costa Rica and Panama during July and August 2007. The NASA ER-2, DC-8, and WB-57F aircraft flew 26 science flights during TC4. The ER-2 employed 11 instruments as a remote sampling platform and satellite surrogate. The WB-57F used 25 instruments for in situ chemical and microphysical sampling in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL). The DC-8 used 25 instruments to sample boundary layer properties, as well as the radiation, chemistry, and microphysics of the TTL. TC4 also had numerous sonde launches, two ground-based radars, and a ground-based chemical and microphysical sampling site. The major goal of TC4 was to better understand the role that the TTL plays in the Earth's climate and atmospheric chemistry by combining in situ and remotely sensed data from the ground, balloons, and aircraft with data from NASA satellites. Significant progress was made in understanding the microphysical and radiative properties of anvils and thin cirrus. Numerous measurements were made of the humidity and chemistry of the tropical atmosphere from the boundary layer to the lower stratosphere. Insight was also gained into convective transport between the ground and the TTL, and into transport mechanisms across the TTL. New methods were refined and extended to all the NASA aircraft for real-time location relative to meteorological features. The ability to change flight patterns in response to aircraft observations relayed to the ground allowed the three aircraft to target phenomena of interest in an efficient, well-coordinated manner

Comparing High School Students\u27 and Adults\u27 Perceptions of Technology

This study compared high school student’s perceptions of technology and technological literacy to those perceptions of the general public. Additionally, individual student groups were compared statistically to determine significant differences between the groups. The ITEA/Gallup Poll instrument was used to survey high school student’s perceptions of technology in the study. The student population in question consisted of three subgroups: students enrolled in a standards-based technology education courses, students enrolled in a Project Lead the Way (PLTW) Principles of Engineering pre-engineering course, and students enrolled in a general education course (language arts, mathematics, or science). In addition, each student group’s perceptions of technology were compared to one another to determine differences within each group. Responses from 4 items in the ITEA/Gallup Poll showed descriptive differences between students and adults, and responses from 13 items showed a significant difference between the three student groups. Of those 13 items showing a significant difference between all three groups, 7 of the 13 items showed a significant difference between technology education and PLTW respondents, 6 of the 13 items showed a significant difference between PLTW and general education respondents, and 8 of the 13 items showed a significant difference between technology education and general education group respondents

Science and Ideology in Economic, Political, and Social Thought

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, then by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences. The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing

Don\u27t Be Too Sure / music by Henry R. Cohen; words by Hal Billings

Cover: Couple strolling arm in arm past a cupid figure sitting on a sign reading stop look listen; Publisher: Ell and Ell Publishing Co. (Los Angeles)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/sharris_f/1011/thumbnail.jp

Microstructural Evolution in Thin Films of Electronic Materials

Contains reports on eight research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant ECS 85-06565)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract AFOSR 85-0154)National Science Foundation-Materials Research Laboratory(Grant DMR 81-19285)National Science Foundation (Grant DMR 85-06030)International Business Machines, Inc. Faculty Development AwardMitsui Career Development AwardInternational Business Machines, Inc.Semiconductor Research Corporation (Contract 86-05-080)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAG-29-83-K-0003)Charles Stark Draper LaboratoryDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Inc

Biometric Performance as a Function of Gallery Size

Many developers of biometric systems start with modest samples before general deployment. They are interested in how their systems will work with much larger samples. We evaluated the effect of gallery size on biometric performance. Identification rates describe the performance of biometric identification, whereas ROC-based measures describe the performance of biometric authentication (verification). Therefore, we examined how increases in gallery size affected identification rates (i.e., Rank-1 Identification Rate, or Rank-1 IR) and ROC-based measures such as equal error rate (EER). We studied these phenomena with synthetic data as well as real data from a face recognition study. It is well known that the Rank-1 IR declines with increasing gallery size. We have provided further insight into this decline. We have shown that this relationship is linear in log(Gallery Size). We have also shown that this decline can be counteracted with the inclusion of additional information (features) for larger gallery sizes. We have also described the curves which can be used to predict how much additional information is required to stabilize the Rank-1 IR as a function of gallery size. These equations are also linear in log(gallery size). We have also shown that the entire ROC curve is not systematically affected by gallery size, and so ROC-based scalar performance metrics such as EER are also stable across gallery size.Comment: 19 pages, 9 Figures, 0 Table

‘Caution! The Bread is Poisoned’: The Hong Kong Mass Poisoning of January 1857

This article examines the Hong Kong mass poisoning of 15 January 1857, in which bread from a Chinese bakery that supplied the colonial community was adulterated with arsenic. Even though there is a wealth of printed and manuscript documentation available many vital aspects of the poisoning remain unclear. What kind of incident was it: an act of terrorism and attempted mass murder, a war crime, a criminal conspiracy, an act of commercial sabotage, an accident or even an imagined or imaginary event? Throughout, our focus remains firmly fixed on the central act of the poisoning itself and on what it reveals about the precarious nature of early colonial Hong Kong. Interpretations have swarmed over the available ‘facts'. Equally ironic is what happened to the afterlife of how the event was understood. This article seeks to rescue the Hong Kong poisoning from being a freakish and isolated footnote of only local interest. Accepting this historical verdict would be a mistake as it is of significance not only at a local level, but geopolitically in Britain and across the empire

Search for CP violation in the phase space of D0 → π+π−π+π−decays

A search for time-integrated CP violation in the Cabibbo-suppressed decay D 0 → π + π − π + π − is performed using an unbinned, model-independent technique known as the energy test. This is the first application of the energy test in four-body decays. The search is performed for P-even CP asymmetries and, for the first time, is extended to probe the P-odd case. Using proton–proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.0 fb-1 collected by the LHCb detector at centre-of-mass energies of √S = 7 TeV and 8 TeV, the world's best sensitivity to CP violation in this decay is obtained. The data are found to be consistent with the hypothesis of CP symmetry with a p-value of 4.6 +-0.5 % in the P-even case, and marginally consistent with a p-value of 0.6+-0.2 % in the P-odd case, corresponding to a significance for CP non-conservation of 2.7 standard deviations