Paper Session I-C - Career Outcomes Assessment and Human Resource Policy in Science and Engineering

Based upon our experience with programs targeted to increase participation in careers in science and engineering (S/E), this paper discusses career outcomes assessment as an approach that enables policy makers and program administrators to identify and interpret indicators of participant-related outcomes, such as changes in career-related behavior and performance

Estimating Color-Concept Associations from Image Statistics

To interpret the meanings of colors in visualizations of categorical information, people must determine how distinct colors correspond to different concepts. This process is easier when assignments between colors and concepts in visualizations match people's expectations, making color palettes semantically interpretable. Efforts have been underway to optimize color palette design for semantic interpretablity, but this requires having good estimates of human color-concept associations. Obtaining these data from humans is costly, which motivates the need for automated methods. We developed and evaluated a new method for automatically estimating color-concept associations in a way that strongly correlates with human ratings. Building on prior studies using Google Images, our approach operates directly on Google Image search results without the need for humans in the loop. Specifically, we evaluated several methods for extracting raw pixel content of the images in order to best estimate color-concept associations obtained from human ratings. The most effective method extracted colors using a combination of cylindrical sectors and color categories in color space. We demonstrate that our approach can accurately estimate average human color-concept associations for different fruits using only a small set of images. The approach also generalizes moderately well to more complicated recycling-related concepts of objects that can appear in any color.Comment: IEEE VIS InfoVis 2019 ACM 2012 CSS: 1) Human-centered computing, Human computer interaction (HCI), Empirical studies in HCI 2) Human-centered computing, Human computer interaction (HCI), HCI design and evaluation methods, Laboratory experiments 3) Human-centered computing, Visualization, Empirical studies in visualizatio

Defining quality from within: the development of a handbook for early childhood professionals to support high quality child care

High quality of childcare is important to a child's well-being just as much as poor quality of childcare can put a child's development at risk. There are several factors involved in what is termed "quality childcare. One of these factors is the importance of clearly defined standards and expectations of quality practices for its teachers. Yet, often, professional standards and expectations for workers in the field of early childhood education remain unmet. The purpose of this thesis is to bring awareness to the importance of quality childcare, beginning with ensuring the competency of personnel interacting and teaching our young children. This can be accomplished by establishing a professional preparation system (a handbook) and raising the required minimum standards to explicit expectations for all new, continuing and mature teachers in the field of early childhood education to meet.California State University, Northridge. Department of Education.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-32