Race-related service and faculty of color: Conceptualizing critical agency in academe

Based on a qualitative study of sixteen faculty of color at aprivate research university, this article argues that service,though significantly presenting obstacles to the promotion andretention of faculty of color, actually may set the stage fora critical agency that resists and redefines academic structuresthat hinder faculty success. The construct of `service,' therefore,presents the opportunity for theorizing the interplay of humanagency and social structures. The article suggests that facultymay seek to redefine oppressive structures through service, thus,exercising an agency that emerges from the very structures thatconstrain it. Faculty of color, in particular, may engage inservice to promote the success of racial minorities in the academyand elsewhere. Thus, service, especially that which seeks tofurther social justice, contributes to the redefinition of theacademy and society at large.     

Reconstruction and virtual model of the Schickard calculator

Exhibition of objects such as paintings or historical artefacts often involves a common problem: the objects presented are unique, delicate and, therefore, very valuable. On the other hand, these objects should be made accessible to scholars and educators. We present an application of modern 3D computer graphics in the field of reconstructing ancient scientific instruments. The first-four-species calculator of Wilhelm Schickard is made accessible to the public in the World Wide Web using Java 3D.     

Putting Students at the Centre in Education Reform

Education reform cannot succeed and should not proceedwithout much more direct involvement of students inall its aspects. This paper develops a set ofarguments for a sustained and meaningful role forstudents in defining, shaping, managing andimplementing reform, and outlines some ways in whichsuch involvement might occur. The arguments are bothorganizational and educational in nature, as are theproposed strategies for increasing the student role inthe reform and improvement process.     

Integrated dynamic wet spinning of core-sheath hydrogel fibers for optical-to-brain/tissue communications

Hydrogel optical light-guides have received substantial interest for applications such as deep-tissue biosensors, optogenetic stimulation and photomedicine due to their biocompatibility, (micro)structure control and tissue-like Young''s modulus. However, despite recent developments, large-scale fabrication with a continuous synthetic methodology, which could produce core-sheath hydrogel fibers with the desired optical and mechanical properties suitable for deep-tissue applications, has yet to be achieved. In this study, we report a versatile concept of integrated light-triggered dynamic wet spinning capable of continuously producing core-sheath hydrogel optical fibers with tunable fiber diameters, and mechanical and optical propagation properties. Furthermore, this concept also exhibited versatility for various kinds of core-sheath functional fibers. The wet spinning synthetic procedure and fabrication process were optimized with the rational design of the core/sheath material interface compatibility [core = poly(ethylene glycol diacrylate-co-acrylamide); sheath = Ca-alginate], optical transparency, refractive index and spinning solution viscosity. The resulting hydrogel optical fibers exhibited desirable low optical attenuation (0.18 ± 0.01 dB cm⁻¹ with 650 nm laser light), excellent biocompatibility and tissue-like Young''s modulus (<2.60 MPa). The optical waveguide hydrogel fibers were successfully employed for deep-tissue cancer therapy and brain optogenetic stimulation, confirming that they could serve as an efficient versatile tool for diverse deep-tissue therapy and brain optogenetic applications.     

How French counsellors treat school violence: An adult-centered approach

This article explores characteristics of school violence inFrance and the privileged means by which school counsellors can address this increasinglywidespread problem. In the first section, the status of counsellors in theFrench schools is outlined, and it is shown that counselling activities are reallyonly undertaken for students in junior high or high school. Two importantcharacteristics of the French view of school violence are: The experts in psychology takelittle interest in problems of school violence; and adults, rather than students,are seen as the primary victims. In this context, counsellors try to reduceschool violence primarily through training and reflecting with school staff. Severalempirical arguments suggest, in effect, that the adults' perceptions of the students is adetermining factor in the social regulation of school violence. This violence consistsmostly of incivilities that are only slightly reprehensible but oftenunbearable for certain teachers. Depending on whether the school staff try to understandthe incivilities or can only see them as pure savagery, they either try to controlthem through education or they lose confidence in their professional mission.The goal of counsellors is both to help the personnel develop theircapacities and motivate them to analyze the students' behavior, and to engender a senseof team spirit.     

A Bayesian Framework for XML Information Retrieval: Searching and Learning with the INEX Collection

Most recent document standards like XML rely on structured representations. On the other hand, current information retrieval systems have been developed for flat document representations and cannot be easily extended to cope with more complex document types. The design of such systems is still an open problem. We present a new model for structured document retrieval which allows computing scores of document parts. This model is based on Bayesian networks whose conditional probabilities are learnt from a labelled collection of structured documents—which is composed of documents, queries and their associated assessments. Training these models is a complex machine learning task and is not standard. This is the focus of the paper: we propose here to train the structured Bayesian Network model using a cross-entropy training criterion. Results are presented on the INEX corpus of XML documents.     

Support services to relocated families increase employee job performance

Conclusion When the stress level is lowered, the relocated employee can turn attention away from the urgency and upset of resettling the family and concentrate fully on the new position thus becoming productive more quickly. With careful planning among the family, relocation counselor and real estate agent/broker, the move can be made much more effectively and happily.Janice Y. Benjamin is President of the Career Management Center in Kansas City, Missouri and author of the career series,How to Be Happily Employed.Lorrie Eigles is a career consultant at the Center Management Center specializing in spousal relocation.