Federal Policies and Local Realities: The Case of Appalachian Senior Programs

ABSTRACT

National senior service programs have had a long and relatively successful history. Emerging at the intersection of federal aging and poverty policy initiatives in the early 1960s, projects such as the Foster Grandparent Program (FGP) and the Senior Companion Program (SCP) have expanded in size and scope over the last several decades. These two programs were first introduced into northwestern North Carolina in the 1980s. While the experiences of FGP and SCP in the region have broadly mirrored the successes of programs located elsewhere, they have also confronted difficulties unique to their local realities that federal policy guidelines are often not sensitive to.     

Middle school students’ learning of mechanics concepts through engagement in different sequences of physical and virtual experiments

ABSTRACT

Physical and virtual experimentation are thought to have different affordances for supporting students’ learning. Research investigating the use of physical and virtual experiments to support students’ learning has identified a variety of, sometimes conflicting, outcomes. Unanswered questions remain about how physical and virtual experiments may impact students’ learning and for which contexts and content areas they may be most effective. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined eighth grade students’ (N?=?100) learning of physics concepts related to pulleys depending on the sequence of physical and virtual labs they engaged in. Five classes of students were assigned to either the: physical first condition (PF) (n?=?55), where students performed a physical pulley experiment and then performed the same experiment virtually, or virtual first condition (VF) (n?=?45), with the opposite sequence. Repeated measures ANOVA’s were conducted to examine how physical and virtual labs impacted students’ learning of specific physics concepts. While we did not find clear-cut support that one sequence was better, we did find evidence that participating in virtual experiments may be more beneficial for learning certain physics concepts, such as work and mechanical advantage. Our findings support the idea that if time or physical materials are limited, using virtual experiments may help students understand work and mechanical advantage.     

“To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the U.S. war on terrorism

This article explores the role of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001–2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan. Emphasizing images of women, I argue that these representations participate in the more general category of “the clash of civilizations,” which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the “white man's burden.” Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for the war. These contradictions have a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime.     

The Effect of the “No Pass,No Play” Provision on Girls' Volleyball and Basketball Eligibility

Abstract

We examined relationships between skinfold (SKF) and optical density (ΔOD) measurements across age and levels of body fatness (%BF) for 151 women, 20 to 72 years. There were significant (p < .05) relationships between ΔODs and SKFs at all sites, except the thigh. The interaction (SKF × Age) was significant (p < .05) for pectoral and biceps ΔODs. Slope comparisons indicated the relationships for younger (29 years) and older (59 years) women differed significantly from zero and each other (p < .05). Analysis of SKF × %BF interactions revealed that relationships between SKFs and ΔODs at the pectoral and biceps sites for leaner (22% BF) women differed significantly from zero (p < .05) and were larger than those for obese (39% BF) women (p ≤ .05). Thus, the relationship between SKFs and ΔODs is stronger for younger and leaner women compared to older and fatter women. These findings may reflect differences in fat layering due to age or body fatness and provide insight as to why the manufacturer's near-infrared (NIR) equation significantly underestimates the %BF of obese women.     

Revisiting a year in the sand: An HPT‐style after‐action review

This is a retrospective analysis of the performance of a large training program in a combat environment looked at through the lens of human performance technology. Van Tiem, Moseley, and Dessinger's performance improvement/HPT model and strategic, operational, and tactical levels are used to describe effective and ineffective applications of human performance technology in a complex, multinational operation. While some interventions or projects at the training center showed marked improvements in targeted areas, there were numerous opportunities to do even better work, and the ultimate analysis of the effectiveness of the training center remains to be determined.     

Bidirectional delta files

A bidirectional delta file is a novel concept, introduced in this paper, for a two way delta file. Previous work focuses on single way differential compression called forwards and backwards delta files. Here we suggest to efficiently combine them into a single file so that the combined file is smaller than the combination of the two individual ones. Given the bidirectional delta file of two files S and T and the original file S, one can decode it in order to produce T. The same bidirectional delta file is used together with the file T in order to reconstruct S. This paper presents two main strategies for producing an efficient bidirectional delta file in terms of the memory storage it requires; a quadratic time, optimal, dynamic programming algorithm, and a linear time, greedy algorithm. Although the dynamic programming algorithm often produces better results than the greedy algorithm, it is impractical for large files, and it is only used for theoretical comparisons. Experiments between the implemented algorithms and the traditional way of using both forwards and backwards delta files are presented, comparing their processing time and their compression performance. These experiments show memory storage savings of about 25% using this bidirectional delta approach as compared to the compressed delta file constructed using the traditional way, while preserving approximately the same processing time for decoding.