Empowering infants through responsive and intentional play activities

This qualitative case study explored how an infant teacher provided meaningful learning experiences for infants through play and the teacher’s educational rationale behind these experiences. Findings were based on multiple sources of data, including classroom observations (natural observation and videotaped observation) for approximately 12 weeks and a teacher interview. The findings confirmed that infant play is critical for infant learning and development and portrayed the process through which the infant teacher created play spaces for infants and supported infants’ play through both pre-planned, teacher-directed, intentional activities, and child-initiated, emerging play activities. Our study highlighted that the designing of infant play and the learning process needs to be flexible and based on careful observation and reflection in order to meet the rapidly changing needs and interests of a group of infants as well as individual infants.     

Success at Scale: Outcomes of Community-Based Neurodevelopment Intervention (CASITA) for Children Ages 6–20 months With Risk of Delay in Lima,Peru

This study is a randomized controlled trial of a 12-week community-based group parenting intervention (“CASITA”) in Lima, Peru. CASITA improved neurodevelopment in a pilot study of 60 Peruvian children and subsequently scaled to 3,000 households throughout the district. The objective of this study was to assess intervention effectiveness when implemented at scale. A total of 347 children ages 6–20 months (52.7% male, 100% identified as “mestizo”) at risk for developmental difficulties were randomized to immediate or delayed CASITA. At 3 months after enrollment, the immediate arm showed significantly higher overall development, based on the Extended Ages and Stages Questionnaire and Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment scores (Cohen’s ds = .36 and .31, respectively). Programs demonstrably effective at scale could help address children’s development risks worldwide.     

Urban commoning for Jarip (self-standing) and survival: subcultural activism in “Seoul Inferno”*

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the spatial practice of a subcultural activism of the “young radicals” in Seoul, South Korea through the lens of urban commoning. As a cohort of people born after the 1980s, these young musicians, artists, and cultural activists have endeavored to create, produce, and transform urban spaces through involvement in a series of anti-eviction protests. In particular, this study investigates how and why radical musicians, artists, and their associates have negotiated the chasms among their personal lifestyle, collective subculture, and political activism by pursuing their spatial practices for self-standing and survival over the past 10 years. Although not necessarily place specific, several cases are drawn from a group that relocated to the central area of Seoul since the mid-2010s, making its urban activism a subcultural (and transcultural) formation.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

Attention-based long short-term memory network using sentiment lexicon embedding for aspect-level sentiment analysis in Korean

Although deep learning breakthroughs in NLP are based on learning distributed word representations by neural language models, these methods suffer from a classic drawback of unsupervised learning techniques. Furthermore, the performance of general-word embedding has been shown to be heavily task-dependent. To tackle this issue, recent researches have been proposed to learn the sentiment-enhanced word vectors for sentiment analysis. However, the common limitation of these approaches is that they require external sentiment lexicon sources and the construction and maintenance of these resources involve a set of complexing, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. In this regard, this paper proposes a method of sentiment lexicon embedding that better represents sentiment word's semantic relationships than existing word embedding techniques without manually-annotated sentiment corpus. The major distinguishing factor of the proposed framework was that joint encoding morphemes and their POS tags, and training only important lexical morphemes in the embedding space. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments comparing with two baseline models. As a result, the revised embedding approach mitigated the problem of conventional context-based word embedding method and, in turn, improved the performance of sentiment classification.     

Expectation and degrees of freedom for sample variance

Computer simulation can be used to demonstrate why the unbiased sample variance uses degrees of freedom (n−1). This is first demonstrated for sampling from a normal random variable, and in additional simulations for some selected non-normal random variables, namely, chi-square and binomial.     

DEVELOPING STUDENT FIELD EXPERIENCES THROUGH UNIVERSITY‐COMMUNITY COLLABORATIONS

The political, economic, social, equity, and historical influences on the status of kindergarten education and early childhood teacher education in the United States are discussed. There are many sources of data that create a picture of the diverse programs, resources, and opportunities that kindergarten children experience, including the preparation of kindergarten teachers. This article addresses the questions: What does kindergarten curriculum look like today compared with other times? What is the status of full-day kindergarten? What are the influences of the high-stakes testing movement, school budgets, and economic status across communities? How has early childhood state teacher certification changed during the past two decades? What is worthwhile learning? This article takes an editorial position that supports an intellectually significant curriculum in which specially prepared early childhood teachers match teaching with the ways in which kindergarten children learn, and might want to learn more.