Monday, April 29, 2013

Kim Kardashian Sex Tape: The Quasi Music Video!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/kim-kardashian-sex-tape-the-quasi-music-video/

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Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA

NASA is exploring ways to send a flotilla of small satellites to a destination, rather than one large orbiter. In a first test, three tiny satellites are now on orbit and beeping back at Earth. Why the idea could be an aid to scientific research.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / April 24, 2013

NASA's Phonesat aims to demonstrate the ability to launch one of the lowest-cost, easiest-to-build satellites ever flown in space ? capabilities enabled by using off-the-shelf consumer smart phones.

Courtesy of NASA

Enlarge

That's no smart phone in your pocket or purse; that's the heart and soul of a satellite.

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Three satellites, to be exact, released into orbit on Sunday with the launch of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s new Antares rocket, the latest addition to NASA's stable of space-station resupply vehicles.

The tiny satellites, each occupying a cube four inches on a side, represent an experiment in using cheap but powerful off-the-shelf technology to run a new generation of small, affordable science satellites.

Two of these orbiters, which NASA has dubbed Phonesat 1.0, use the electronics and sensors packaged in a Google Nexus One smart phone to serve as on-board computers. Accelerometers that normally tell the phones which way you've oriented the screen now gather information on the satellites' orientation in space. And the cameras? Yep, snapshots of Earth from 156 miles up.

The third satellite, a prototype for Phonesat 2.0, uses a more powerful Nexus S, which also has a built-in gyroscope. Ultimately, engineers plan to use that extra capability to control solar panels and to control the spacecraft's orientation, instead of just recording it.

The notion of using a smart phone's innards to run a satellite grew out of informal hallway chatter, recalls James Cockrell, project manager for Phonesat at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The benchmark people often use as a point of comparison for the power of their favorite laptop or smart phone is the primitive computing power used in the Apollo program, which landed humans on the moon and brought them back safely in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Indeed, Mr. Cockrell describes a trip to the Internet that netted him the electronic-circuit diagram for the navigation and control computer used in Apollo's Lunar Excursion Module.

"Oh my goodness, you could build it in your basement" with a circuit board and a few transistors, he says.

A couple of years ago, he says, an engineer at NASA-Ames was drawing a similar comparison between his smart phone and today's satellites during an informal hallway chat. The engineer noted that a smart phone's processor is 10 to 15 times more powerful than the processors used in a conventional satellite's computer. A smart phone has much more memory. And it boasts a GPS receiver, gyroscopes, and accelerometers ? the sensors needed for navigation and to control a satellite's orientation.

"He said: 'I don't know why we couldn't make a satellite our of a smart phone,' " Cockrell recalls. Although it took a bit of additional salesmanship to convince folks higher up the organizational food chain, the Phonesat project was born.

The satellites cost about $3,500 each. The initial goals were modest: Survive the launch and beep at Earth.

So far, the satellites have successfully relayed their health ? operating temperatures, battery status, and other key indicators ? via small external transmitters.

"We call this our Sputnik moment," Cockrell says, referring to the simple "I'm alive" beeps that the world's first artificial satellite sent back to Earth in 1957.

As of Monday night, the two Phonesat 1 orbiters started taking pictures. Each satellite selected one image to beam back to Earth.

Before the beaming could begin, the image had to be cut into pieces. And yes, there's now an app for that.

And where NASA's flagship missions to the far reaches of the solar system use the agency's global Deep Space Network for communications, Phonesats are using what you could call NASA's cheap-and-not-so-deep space network ? ham-radio operators worldwide.

So far, some 100 hams have registered at www.phonesat.org, a site the program has set up to receive the packets. As of Tuesday evening, Cockrell estimated that the website had collected more than 300 packets, which computers on Earth must sort through to eliminate duplicates. Ultimately the mosaic will be assembled and displayed online.

The three Phonesats are expected to reenter the atmosphere and vaporize at the end of their 10- to 14-day romp on orbit.

The project already has Phonesats 3.0 and 4.0 on the drawing boards, an effort that eventually could pay dividends for space research, explains Bruce Yost, who heads the Edison Small Satellite Flight Demonstration Program at NASA-Ames.

NASA is exploring concepts for sending a flotilla of small satellites to a destination, rather than one large orbiter. The arrangement would allow sensors from several satellites to take measurements simultaneously around an entire planet to unravel the processes at work on the surface or in an atmosphere.

"If each one of those little pieces of the puzzle costs millions of dollars, then you're not really making any headway" toward getting such a mission approved, Mr. Yost explains. Given the private sector's heavy investment in phone R&D and the capabilities that have emerged, the argument goes, why keep satellite-control technology development in-house and reinvent the wheel?

Earth is likely to be an early target for such "swarm" exploration, Yost says. Scientists studying and forecasting space weather are interested in lofting a flotilla of satellites that could make simultaneous measurements of the solar wind or solar storms and their influence on various parts of the Earth's magnetic field.

Cockrell and his team also are working on an eight-spacecraft flotilla to test the feasibility of this idea of satellite swarms, Yost says.

Perhaps it's fitting that the first smart phones in space run on the Android operating system. There's no word on when or if iPhones will get a crack at serving as the seed around which a satellite grows. ?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/-gOZelEbRBk/Tiny-satellites-cellphones-cheaper-eyes-in-the-sky-for-NASA

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Thursday, April 25, 2013

"Senna" director to make Amy Winehouse documentary

LONDON (AP) ? The director of award-winning film "Senna" is making a documentary about the late soul singer Amy Winehouse.

Focus Features International says the movie will feature unseen archive footage to tell the story of the art and life of the musician, who died at age 27 in London in 2011 from accidental alcohol poisoning.

The Winehouse family said in a statement Thursday that it had been approached with many documentary proposals, but "Senna" director Asif Kapadia and producer James Gay-Rees presented a vision that would "look at Amy's story sensitively, honestly and without sensationalizing her."

"Senna," the acclaimed 2010 film, focused on the life of Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna. The champion racer was killed in an accident in 1994.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senna-director-amy-winehouse-documentary-115803856.html

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Israeli military shoots down drone

JERUSALEM (AP) ? Israel shot down a drone Thursday as it approached the country's northern coast, the military said. Suspicion immediately fell on the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon.

The incident was likely to raise already heightened tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, a bitter enemy that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in northern Israel at the time of the incident, said he viewed the infiltration attempt with "utmost gravity."

"We will continue to do everything necessary in order to protect the security of the citizens of Israel," he said.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said the unmanned aircraft was detected as it was flying over Lebanon and tracked as it approached Israeli airspace.

Lerner said the military waited for the aircraft to enter Israeli airspace, confirmed it was "enemy," and then an F-16 warplane shot it down.

The drone was flying at an altitude of about 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) and was downed roughly five miles (eight kilometers) off the Israeli coast near the northern city of Haifa. Lerner said Israeli naval forces were searching for the remains of the aircraft.

He declined to say who sent the drone. But other military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to talk to the media, said they believed it was an Iranian-manufactured aircraft sent by Hezbollah. Hezbollah sent a drone into Israeli airspace last October that Israel also shot down.

Netanyahu was informed of the unfolding incident as he was flying north for a cultural event with members of the country's Druse minority. Officials said his helicopter briefly landed while the drone was intercepted before Netanyahu continued on his way.

Netanyahu repeatedly has warned that Hezbollah might try to take advantage of the instability in neighboring Syria, a key Hezbollah ally, to obtain what he calls game-changing weapons.

Israel has all but confirmed that it carried out an airstrike in Syria early this year that destroyed a shipment of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles bound for Hezbollah.

A senior Lebanese security official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said Lebanon had no information on Thursday's incident.

Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi also said he had no information, adding the group would put out a statement if it had something to say on the issue.

When Israeli military shot down a Hezbollah drone on Oct. 6, it took days for Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to confirm it in a speech. He warned at the time that it would not be the last such operation by the group. He said the sophisticated aircraft was made in Iran and assembled by Hezbollah.

___

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in Beirut and Diaa Hadid in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-military-shoots-down-drone-142037543.html

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House GOP report: Hillary Clinton lied under oath about additional Benghazi security request (Michellemalkin)

Share With Friends: Share on FacebookTweet ThisPost to Google-BuzzSend on GmailPost to Linked-InSubscribe to This Feed | Rss To Twitter | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/301305642?client_source=feed&format=rss

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AAPL: sweeter dividend, sour outlook

Apple (AAPL) will give shareholders $100 billion over the next two years by boosting its dividend 15 percent. Although AAPL beat earnings and revenue estimates for the quarter, it says revenue could fall this quarter.?

By Peter Svensson,?AP Technology Writer / April 24, 2013

A man leaves an Apple store with an iPhone and an iPad in his hands in central Beijing earlier this month. AAPL stock initially rose after the electronics manufacturer announced a higher dividend and a stock buyback program. But it pulled back after Apple suggested its revenue could fall this quarter, which would be the first time in many years.

Alexander F. Yuan/AP/File

Enlarge

Apple?is opening the doors to its bank vault, saying it will distribute $100 billion in cash to its shareholders by the end of 2015. At the same time, the company said revenue for the current quarter could fall from the year before, which would be the first decline in many years.

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Apple?CEO Tim Cook also suggested that the company won't release any new products until the fall, contrary to expectations that there would be a new iPhone and iPads out this summer.

Apple?Inc. on Tuesday said it will expand its share buyback program to $60 billion ? the largest buyback authorization in history. It is also raising its dividend by 15 percent from $2.65 to $3.05 per share. That equates to a dividend yield of 3 percent at current stock prices. The average yield for the 20 largest dividend-paying companies in the U.S. is 3.1 percent, according to Standard & Poor's.

Investors have been clamoring for?Apple?to give them access to its cash hoard, which ended March at an unprecedented $145 billion.?Apple's?tight grip on its cash, along with the lack of ground-breaking new products has been blamed for the steep decline in its stock price over the winter.

News of the cash bonanza coincided with the company's release of a poor quarterly outlook for the three-month period that ends in June.

Apple?released its fiscal second quarter earnings after the stock market closed Tuesday. The company's stock initially rose 5 percent to $425 in extended trading, then retreated $2.63, or 0.7 percent, to $403.50 as the CEO talked about new products arriving in the fall.

The shares are still down 40 percent from a peak of $705.07 hit on Sept. 21, when the iPhone 5 went on sale.

"The decline in?Apple's?stock price over the last couple of quarters has been very frustrating for all of us ... but we'll continue to do what we do best," CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call with analysts after the release of the results. But he reinforced that the company's job is not to boost its stock price in the short term.

"The most important objective for?Apple?will always be creating innovative products," he added.

Apple's?results beat the consensus estimate of analysts who follow the company, though it posted its first profit decline in ten years.

Net income was $9.5 billion, or $10.09 per share, down 18 percent from $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per share, in the same period a year ago.

Revenue was $43.6 billion, up 11 percent from last year's $39.2 billion.

Analysts were expecting earnings of $9.97 per share on revenue of $42.3 billion, according to FactSet.

For the quarter that just started,?Apple?said it expects sales of $33.5 billion to $35.5 billion. In the same quarter last year, sales were $35 billion. Wall Street was expecting sales of $38 billion.

The June quarter is generally a weak one for?Apple, since consumers tend to wait for the next iPhone, which the company usually releases in the fall. But a year-over-year decline is a signal that?Apple?is failing to capitalize on the continued growth of smartphone sales. Sales are tapering off in U.S. and other mature markets, and not many consumers in India and China can afford iPhones.

"Our fiscal 2012 results were incredibly strong and that's making comparisons very difficult this year," said Cook.

Apple?shipped 37.4 million iPhones in the latest quarter, up 7 percent from a year ago. That confounded expectations that shipments might fall, but it was still a weak number compared to many previous quarters, when shipments doubled year over year. The average wholesale price of an iPhone also fell to $613 as?Apple?cut the price of its oldest model, the iPhone 4, to appeal to buyers in developing countries.

Apple?started paying a dividend last summer and has been buying back a modest number of shares, enough to balance the dilution created by its employee stock option program but not to make a dent in its cash pile. The company says it's now expanding the buybacks, which started in October and are set to run till the end of 2015, from $10 billion to $60 billion. It's raising the quarterly dividend starting with the payment due May 16.

The company has faced continued pressure from Wall Street over the use of its cash, which earns less than 1 percent in interest. Investors reason that if the company has no better use for the money, it should be handing it over to shareholders. The company had said it was considering ways to use the money, and this year engaged in a public debate with a hedge fund manager who wanted it to institute a new class of shares to attract dividend-loving investors.

Paradoxically, cash-flush?Apple?will be borrowing money to support the buybacks and dividends. That's because two-thirds of its cash resides in overseas accounts. It doesn't bring the money into the U.S. because it prefers not to pay U.S. corporate income taxes on it. Instead, it will be using cash from U.S.-derived revenue and U.S. accounts, plus borrowed money.

Apple?is effectively betting that the U.S. federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent ? one of the highest in the world ? will come down in the future, or that there will be a tax repatriation amnesty period, as there was in 2004.

When a company starts doling out its cash to shareholders, it's usually a sign that its growth is stalling and it's finding it hard to identify good ways to invest in its own business. But?Apple?is still growing fast by the standards of large companies, and its cash pile-up is a reflection of the extraordinary success of the iPhone.

Compared to its earnings,?Apple's?stock price is low. In buying?Apple?stock, investors are paying $9.20 for every dollar of?Apple's?annual net income. By comparison, they're willing to pay $24 for every dollar of Google's profit.

That suggests investors have concluded?Apple?will never again launch a revolutionary product like the iPhone or iPad. The commitment to bigger buybacks may reinforce that impression, said David Tan, a Georgetown University assistant professor of strategy who focuses on technology.

"How are we going to read into what this move says about?Apple's?long-term prospects?" Tan said. "Does this mean this is all that?Apple?has left to offer or is this just something temporary while we wait for the next big thing from the company?"

Investors have grown increasingly frustrated with?Apple. The company has only been releasing updates to its existing line of mobile devices and?computers?since Cook became CEO 20 months ago instead of blazing technological trails as it did with the iPod's 2001 unveiling, the iPhone's 2007 debut and the iPad's introduction in 2010, said Lauren Balter, an analyst for Oracle Investment Research. At the same time, Samsung Electronics has been gaining market share with larger smartphone screens and other features while Google Inc. is creating a buzz with its own Nexus tablets. Google is also expanding into "wearable?computing" with Internet-connected glasses that are expected to go on sale late this year or early next year.

"The market is tired of the same old thing at?Apple," Balter said. "Investors are looking for innovation. The reality is that people are looking at other products now and they are looking at other cool features from competitors."

Apple?is rumored to be working on a "smart" watch and a revolutionary TV set, but it hasn't confirmed that. On Tuesday's call, Cook sounded slightly more open to making an iPhone with a larger screen, saying merely that Apple?would not ship a phone with a larger screen as long as that meant tradeoffs in other measures of screen quality, like brightness.

Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross said now that?Apple?has laid out plans for its cash hoard, investor focus will shift back to?Apple's?upcoming products.

"What I am hoping is now that we have gotten through this, people will start focusing a little bit more on the fundamentals," Cross said. "And I think the fundamentals this quarter showed that demand remains strong for their products. I don't think the?Apple?brand has been diminished at all, based on the numbers we have seen."

AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this report from San Francisco.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/qLIdCSG3ou0/AAPL-sweeter-dividend-sour-outlook

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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Pitt education professor awarded year's exclusive access to unique dataset on teacher evaluation

Pitt education professor awarded year's exclusive access to unique dataset on teacher evaluation [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 22-Apr-2013
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Contact: Adam Reger
reger@pitt.edu
412-624-4238
University of Pittsburgh

Dataset was derived from the largest single effort to date dedicated to evaluating teacher effectiveness

PITTSBURGHA professor in the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education has been chosen to lead a team of researchers that is one of only 10 teams nationally to be granted one-year exclusive access to an unparalleled set of teacher-evaluation data that was collected during a three-year research project sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tanner LeBaron Wallace, assistant professor of applied developmental psychology at Pitt, was recently awarded a Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Early Career Research Grant, awarded by the National Academy of Education and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Wallace and her Youth Development Lab research team of Pitt graduate and undergraduate students will use the grantwhich includes an award of $25,000 funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundationto undertake a research project that is novel in its collaboration between adolescents and adults.

The grant provides early-career educational researchers with a year's "head start" access to the MET Longitudinal Database, a massive and rich source of data for those seeking to measure teaching effectiveness and to design fairer and more reliable methods of measuring instructor performance.

The database stems from the Gates Foundation-sponsored three-year research partnership project, which involved 2,500 fourth-through-ninth-grade teachers, working in 317 schools located in seven large school districts, and dozens of independent research teams. This project, which cost an estimated $50 million, was the largest single effort to date dedicated to evaluating teaching effectiveness. Data collected during two school years beginning in fall 2009 included student outcomes, student-completed surveys, video-recorded lessons, assessments of teachers' pedagogical and content knowledge, and teacher surveys. The seven school districts from which data were collected were the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Schools, the Dallas Independent Schools, the Denver Public Schools, the Hillsborough County (Fla.) Public Schools, the Memphis City Schools, New York City's system of public schools, and the Pittsburgh Public Schools. The Pittsburgh Public Schools district was included in the project as a pilot district, and data from that preliminary phase of the project are not included in the MET Database to be used by Wallace and the other grant awardees.

Wallace was awarded the grant for her proposal "Employing Urban Adolescent Interpretations of Instructional Practice to Distinguish Teacher Proficiency From Ceiling Effect in the Classroom Organizational Domain." The Pitt project will involve recruiting students from local public schools to view some of the video footage taken during the MET research phase.

The students will be shown classroom situations where the interpretations of adolescents and adult evaluators differed, with student survey responses indicating that a teacher had poor control over the classroom, but adult evaluators considering the teacher to have adequate control. By discussing the videos with the students in small groups, Wallace and her team hope to identify the factors that caused adolescents to view each situation as they did.

Wallace believes that her project's inclusion of adolescents' responses to video recordings of teachers' lessons is unprecedented.

"The hope is that from the results of this study we'll be able to refine our existing view of classroom management in ways that are more sensitive to what matters to adolescents and their willingness to engage in classroom learning activities," said Wallace. A common, and valid, critique of much work evaluating teacher effectiveness, she said, is that these studies are "adult-centric," and they fail to prioritize students' voices in the process.

"We want to integrate the perceptions of adolescents but really link these perceptions to instructional practice," she added. "I think it's a promising new direction in evaluating teachers."

The research project fits in with Wallace's broader research. She studies high schools as developmental spaces, analyzing the ways that adolescents and teachers build connections through classroom interactions as they grow and develop together.

A side benefit of the project that Wallace has noted is the building of community among the 10 teams of researchers that have received the MET Early Career Research Grant. Several "virtual" meetings of the research teams will be held throughout the year, with some in-person meetings scheduled as well. "The goal of these grants is to build a cohort of young scholars who are advancing our ability to accurately measure effective teaching, and I am thrilled to be part of the group," Wallace said.

The other teams that have received the grant are based at Boston University, Brigham Young University, Michigan State University, New York University, the Rockville Institute for the Advancement of Social Science, the University of Connecticut, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Wayne State University.

Wallace and her team members underwent multiple rounds of security clearance before gaining access to the data via a virtual data enclave system that prevents them from downloading the data to computers. The team's access began on March 1, 2013, and will expire on March 1, 2014.

###

The MET Longitudinal Database research collection is stored at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research in the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Visit http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/METLDB to learn more about the MET Longitudinal Database.

4/22/13/mab/cjhm

Editors: An image of Tanner LeBaron Wallace is available at http://www.news.pitt.edu/gatesteacherevaluation

Contact:

Adam Reger
412-802-5908 (cell)


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Pitt education professor awarded year's exclusive access to unique dataset on teacher evaluation [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 22-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Adam Reger
reger@pitt.edu
412-624-4238
University of Pittsburgh

Dataset was derived from the largest single effort to date dedicated to evaluating teacher effectiveness

PITTSBURGHA professor in the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education has been chosen to lead a team of researchers that is one of only 10 teams nationally to be granted one-year exclusive access to an unparalleled set of teacher-evaluation data that was collected during a three-year research project sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tanner LeBaron Wallace, assistant professor of applied developmental psychology at Pitt, was recently awarded a Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Early Career Research Grant, awarded by the National Academy of Education and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Wallace and her Youth Development Lab research team of Pitt graduate and undergraduate students will use the grantwhich includes an award of $25,000 funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundationto undertake a research project that is novel in its collaboration between adolescents and adults.

The grant provides early-career educational researchers with a year's "head start" access to the MET Longitudinal Database, a massive and rich source of data for those seeking to measure teaching effectiveness and to design fairer and more reliable methods of measuring instructor performance.

The database stems from the Gates Foundation-sponsored three-year research partnership project, which involved 2,500 fourth-through-ninth-grade teachers, working in 317 schools located in seven large school districts, and dozens of independent research teams. This project, which cost an estimated $50 million, was the largest single effort to date dedicated to evaluating teaching effectiveness. Data collected during two school years beginning in fall 2009 included student outcomes, student-completed surveys, video-recorded lessons, assessments of teachers' pedagogical and content knowledge, and teacher surveys. The seven school districts from which data were collected were the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Schools, the Dallas Independent Schools, the Denver Public Schools, the Hillsborough County (Fla.) Public Schools, the Memphis City Schools, New York City's system of public schools, and the Pittsburgh Public Schools. The Pittsburgh Public Schools district was included in the project as a pilot district, and data from that preliminary phase of the project are not included in the MET Database to be used by Wallace and the other grant awardees.

Wallace was awarded the grant for her proposal "Employing Urban Adolescent Interpretations of Instructional Practice to Distinguish Teacher Proficiency From Ceiling Effect in the Classroom Organizational Domain." The Pitt project will involve recruiting students from local public schools to view some of the video footage taken during the MET research phase.

The students will be shown classroom situations where the interpretations of adolescents and adult evaluators differed, with student survey responses indicating that a teacher had poor control over the classroom, but adult evaluators considering the teacher to have adequate control. By discussing the videos with the students in small groups, Wallace and her team hope to identify the factors that caused adolescents to view each situation as they did.

Wallace believes that her project's inclusion of adolescents' responses to video recordings of teachers' lessons is unprecedented.

"The hope is that from the results of this study we'll be able to refine our existing view of classroom management in ways that are more sensitive to what matters to adolescents and their willingness to engage in classroom learning activities," said Wallace. A common, and valid, critique of much work evaluating teacher effectiveness, she said, is that these studies are "adult-centric," and they fail to prioritize students' voices in the process.

"We want to integrate the perceptions of adolescents but really link these perceptions to instructional practice," she added. "I think it's a promising new direction in evaluating teachers."

The research project fits in with Wallace's broader research. She studies high schools as developmental spaces, analyzing the ways that adolescents and teachers build connections through classroom interactions as they grow and develop together.

A side benefit of the project that Wallace has noted is the building of community among the 10 teams of researchers that have received the MET Early Career Research Grant. Several "virtual" meetings of the research teams will be held throughout the year, with some in-person meetings scheduled as well. "The goal of these grants is to build a cohort of young scholars who are advancing our ability to accurately measure effective teaching, and I am thrilled to be part of the group," Wallace said.

The other teams that have received the grant are based at Boston University, Brigham Young University, Michigan State University, New York University, the Rockville Institute for the Advancement of Social Science, the University of Connecticut, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Wayne State University.

Wallace and her team members underwent multiple rounds of security clearance before gaining access to the data via a virtual data enclave system that prevents them from downloading the data to computers. The team's access began on March 1, 2013, and will expire on March 1, 2014.

###

The MET Longitudinal Database research collection is stored at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research in the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Visit http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/METLDB to learn more about the MET Longitudinal Database.

4/22/13/mab/cjhm

Editors: An image of Tanner LeBaron Wallace is available at http://www.news.pitt.edu/gatesteacherevaluation

Contact:

Adam Reger
412-802-5908 (cell)


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/uop-pep042213.php

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