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Post examination self-assessment surveys were utilized to explore student performance on examinations in organic chemistry courses. This study of student self-perception looked at the application of the Kruger-Dunning effect in organic chemistry courses. The results include a comparison of student performance to expectations and the amount of time spent preparing. Results for poorer performing students indicate a lack of connectivity between perception and actual results. © 2014 American Chemical Society.

The colonization of the Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean by food-producing communities in prehistory has rarely been considered in an explicitly comparative perspective. This article suggests that, despite evident human and environmental diversity, these insular colonization episodes have certain formal and processual similarities, especially in terms of the rate and dynamics of the colonization episodes. Specifically, in all three cases, colonizing populations seem to have rapidly crossed very great distances to find new niches, only for these events to be followed by generations of colonizing inactivity. It is proposed that such patterning may be a feature which is somehow common to episodes of coastal and insular colonization by food-producing, pre-state communities. Reasons as to why this might be-including ecological and demographic factors-are considered. This study indicates the utility of a comparative approach, and contributes to the ongoing debate centered on the extent to which insularity conditions human behavior. © 2014 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The mention of an Antiochos in an Athenian inscription, I 7453, which dates to 178/7 b.c., has led scholars to accept that the future Antiochos IV lived in Athens from 178 to 175, and was not just present in the city in 175, as a statement by Appian seems to indicate. A reevaluation of the evidence calls into question both this extended sojourn and the identification of the Antiochos in the inscription, inviting us to reconsider the circumstances and the chronology of events surrounding the accession of Antiochos IV. © The American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Several years ago, when the senior author of this chapter taught in a resource room for learning-disabled children, she made a disturbing discovery. This discovery involved the reading-disabled youngsters, who comprised the majority of the children in the program. All these youngsters entered the program with poor decoding skills, but once exposed to the intensive phonic program used in the resource room, they generally learned to decode individual words with alacrity; that is, they could grasp phonic rules, memorize sounds for various letters and letter combinations, and apply the rules and sounds when reading individual words. The disturbing thing, particularly to someone who had had excessive faith in the curative powers of a phonic approach to teaching reading, was that the children continued to be poor readers. Now, however, their difficulties involved higher level aspects of reading. Their oral reading was discontinuous, effortful, and sometimes painfully slow; their reading comprehension was frequently poor; and the older children lacked the study strategies so important for success in content area subjects such as social studies and science. © 2014, Stephen J. Ceci. All rights reserved.

A curriculum is not known to improve academic achievements. This book offers case studies of three Connecticut districts of high, medium and low socio-economic status, three districts from a national sample that won the prestigious Booker prize mainly representing low SES districts, and 10 districts that have implemented a Balanced Curriculum with a sample of various SES districts from high to low. All of them have used their curriculum as the vehicle toward improved achievements. The districts studied have four common themes, represented by the acronym "ASIA", for Alignment, Structure and Stability, Implementation and Infrastructure, and Assessment. All districts aligned their curriculum to state standards and assessments. They had a structure for the curriculum and had stability at the superintendent's position. The districts applied a lot of effort and attained results from implementing the curriculum and developing the infrastructure to support implementation, and they finally incorporated frequent district-wide assessments into their design. The book documents the subsets of these four areas that were present in most districts that might help other districts to replicate the findings. Research in the four areas is also documented. This book demonstrates through the case studies that it is possible to use curriculum as a framework for raising test scores. This is not normally thought of as a path to improved achievements. The fact that districts from a wide range of socio-economic statuses have used their curriculum to improve achievements demonstrates that a wider application of this direction could yield positive results for other districts. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

In reading through the district stories about using curriculum as a framework for improvement, many innovations were interwoven into ancillary efforts for curriculum development. As these are part of the stories of district curriculum development, we thought that discussions of these "ancillary efforts" were important. The innovations considered in this chapter are: Power standards, Professional learning communities, Common assessments, Data-driven decision making, and Walk-through's. We will consider these as if they were being implemented alone, and assess their power to produce student achievement gains using the ASIA framework. References to the district stories will be given. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Working with districts over the past 15 years to write and implement a balanced curriculum has been a wonderful experience; especially as so many of the districts that I worked with saw their student achievement improve (Squires, 2013). Now, thousands of students are getting better results because the curriculum was developed and well implemented using the Balanced Curriculum model. As is evident by the chapters about other school districts, the balanced curriculum is not the only way to get improvement, as the districts highlighted in this book also used curriculum as a framework for improving achievement. In this chapter I will highlight lessons learned along the way about developing and implementing curriculum. Using ideas described in chapter 6, we will highlight what major roles need to know and be able to do in planning, developing and implementing curriculum. For those with experience of working within a district, this will give one model to compare your district's curriculum writing and implementation efforts. We begin by dividing the effort into three areas: planning, writing, and implementing curriculum. To plan, we create a planning team to guide the process of writing and implementing curriculum. We don't separate curriculum writing from curriculum implementation because how the curriculum is implemented will, in part, depend on how the curriculum was written. We believe that such curriculum development and implementation has the potential to last over several years, and we believe that such an effort needs people who can stay the course over those years, so the effort is not wasted. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012 – achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also present experiments that provide insight into what the network learns, revealing a rich hierarchy of image features. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/ rbg/rcnn.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between self-transcendence and medication adherence among older adults prescribed antihypertensive medication., Design: Descriptive, correlational research design., Method: Forty-six older adults who were prescribed antihypertensive medications from an independent living facility participated in this study. Participants were given a survey that included a demographic questionnaire, the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale, and Reed's Self-Transcendence Scale., Findings: No significant relationship was found between medication adherence and self-transcendence (r = -.20, p = .18). Ninety percent of the participants however, admitted to cutting back or stopping their medication without notifying their providers., Conclusion: Continued investigation is needed to identify reasons why older adults fail to adhere to taking prescribed hypertension medications in order to improve health outcomes in this population., (C)2014Sage Publications

We extrapolate to the perturbative triples (T)/complete basis set (CBS) limit using double zeta basis sets without polarization functions (Wesleyan-1-Triples-2zeta or "Wes1T-2Z") and triple zeta basis sets with a single level of polarization functions (Wesleyan-1-Triples-3zeta or "Wes1T-3Z"). These basis sets were optimized for 102 species representing the first two rows of the Periodic Table. The species include the entire set of neutral atoms, positive and negative atomic ions, as well as several homonuclear diatomic molecules, hydrides, rare gas dimers, polar molecules, such as oxides and fluorides, and a few transition states. The extrapolated Wes1T-(2,3)Z triples energies agree with (T)/CBS benchmarks to within +/-0.65 mEh, while the rms deviations of comparable model chemistries W1, CBS-APNO, and CBS-QB3 for the same test set are +/-0.23 mEh, +/-2.37 mEh, and +/-5.80 mEh, respectively. The Wes1T-(2,3)Z triples calculation time for the largest hydrocarbon in the G2/97 test set, C6H5Me(+), is reduced by a factor of 25 when compared to W1. The cost-effectiveness of the Wes1T-(2,3)Z extrapolation validates the usefulness of the Wes1T-2Z and Wes1T-3Z basis sets which are now available for a more efficient extrapolation of the (T) component of any composite model chemistry.