Crisis communication in racial issues

On November 17, 1998, three individuals were detained by local police in Lubbock, Texas for attempting a pigeon drop scam in a Wal Mart parking lot. The three suspects were the head coach, an assistant coach, and the husband of the head coach from the visiting Hampton University women's basketball team. The three were eventually proven innocent and released, but not before a crisis involving racial overtones had been initiated. The case study explores the crisis management responses of Texas Tech University and Lubbock, Texas and the implications for the study of crises involving race.     

A collaborative network for first responders: Lessons from the CapWIN case

It is increasingly important for government agencies to collaborate across jurisdictional and functional boundaries. Interorganizational systems supporting interagency collaboration must accommodate a wide range of factors from the external environment and participating organizations as part of their design and operation. This paper presents the findings from a case study of CapWIN, a collaborative network created to enable first responders to share information across jurisdictional and functional boundaries as they work together during emergencies and other critical events. The study examines how aspects of the external environment and the agency context impeded or facilitated the CapWIN collaborative network and the interorganizational system (IOS) that supports it. We identify factors affecting information sharing and collaborative processes, and describe how these factors interact to enable and constrain an IOS. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research on the interplay of environmental, organizational, and technical aspects of interagency collaboration networks as they evolve over time.     

Preschoolers modulate contrastive inferences during online language comprehension

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., “Look at the big duck”). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4-year-olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.     

Partial reinforcement effects on discrimination learning

Rats were trained on a series of reversals of a successive discrimination in which the percentage of S+ trials ending in food was varied. Changes in the discrimination index occurred more slowly with 50% reinforcement than with 100% reinforcement when the number of training trials was equated across conditions, but were approximately invariant when the conditions were equated with respect to the number of obtained reinforcements. Presentation of free reinforcement during the intertrial intervals reduced the overall rate of discrimination acquisition, but left this invariance unaffected. Invariance in reinforcements necessary to attain acquisition also occurred when different discriminations correlated with different percentages of reinforcement were intermixed within experimental sessions. The failure of the invariance effect to be disrupted by either manipulation suggests that previous accounts of the invariance effect in terms of “comparator” models of conditioning (e.g., Gibbon & Balsam, 1981) are inadequate.     

Instructional design and project management: complementary or divergent?

This paper reports the results of a study to identify the extent to which organizations that develop educational/training products are committed to project management, as measured by their project management implementation maturity, as a methodology that is separate and distinct from the processes of instructional design. A Web survey was conducted among 103 public and private sector organizations worldwide that develop educational/training products. Results show no significant difference by project management maturity level in the roles of instructional designer and project manager, although there is some relationship between maturity level and how organizations perceive the skills/competencies of project managers versus those of instructional designers. Further, organizational decision-makers have very specific expectations about the formal education and training of educational/training product development project leaders. The findings should be of value to institutions of higher education in evaluating programs that prepare students for careers in instructional design.     

网格技术:改进数据访问的性能

<正>谈起网格,肯定要涉及数据、信息以及如何在分布式的基础设施上对二者进行智能化处理。而这个时候似乎更让大家着迷的是网格的计算能力,而数据在以计算为重点的网格中仅能占据次席。这是为什么呢?通常,我们从媒体对网格计算方面的报道就可以看出。例     

Leadership and inclusion: a special school perspective

In July 2002, the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) held a 'Leading Edge' seminar focused on the contribution that leaders in special schools can make to the development of Inclusive policies and practices. The day gave colleagues working in specialist contexts an opportunity to share examples and experiences of current initiatives and to speculate about future trends and developments in inclusive education. In this article, Robin Attfield and Chris Williams, Assistant Directors in Programmes and Research respectively at the NCSL, explore the context in which the seminar took place and some of the themes and issues that emerged from discussion on the day. At the end of their paper, they summarise the key messages that the special school leaders who attended the seminar wished to communicate to a wider audience and articulate a further role for leaders in special schools in the development of inclusion.