James Chamberlain
Jul 1, 2013; 31:106-109
Feature Articles

Daren Anderson
Jan 1, 2008; 26:22-27
Bridges to Excellence

Frank DeAngelis, who was the principal of Columbine High School from 1996-2014, talks about the steps he took to heal students and staff in the wake of the school shooting.

State education officials are responding to a state law passed last year requiring them to solicit feedback from the community on the impact of implementing later school start times for middle and high school students.

Utah Valley University offers career and technical education, associate degrees, bachelor's degrees, and master's degrees under one roof, all for the average out-of-pocket tuition of $1,700.

Three Oregon school employees sued their union in federal court last week, arguing it's unfair that the teachers' union only lets members drop out and stop paying dues during the month of September.

In 2017 the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Australian Defence Force (Australian Army) undertook a joint review of the Army Aboriginal Community Assistance Programme (AACAP) to assess its efficiency and effectiveness. The review found AACAP is a highly regarded and effective means of achieving positive environmental and primary health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities while providing valuable training outcomes for Army. AACAP's objectives align with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) 'Closing the Gap' targets in Indigenous disadvantage and with the Australian Government's Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS). The report identified areas for potential improvement, recommending greater support for the sustainability of infrastructure and project investment, enhanced employment and training opportunities and strengthening of project governance.

Germans -- Victoria -- History.

Primary season is now upon us. Here are three ideas for teaching in the wake of the Iowa caucus fallout.

Controversy over an intiative aimed a reducing inequities in Lee's Summit, Mo., schools led the police department to provide security protection for the district's first African-American superintendent. Now the school board has reversed course.

Rockville, Maryland : National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1984.

Zhixin Zhou, Ping Li.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1302--1347.

Abstract:
The Chernoff coefficient is known to be an upper bound of Bayes error probability in classification problem. In this paper, we will develop a rate optimal Chernoff bound on the Bayes error probability. The new bound is not only an upper bound but also a lower bound of Bayes error probability up to a constant factor. Moreover, we will apply this result to community detection in the stochastic block models. As a clustering problem, the optimal misclassification rate of community detection problem can be characterized by our rate optimal Chernoff bound. This can be formalized by deriving a minimax error rate over certain parameter space of stochastic block models, then achieving such an error rate by a feasible algorithm employing multiple steps of EM type updates.

A new strategy for probabilistic graphical modeling is developed that draws parallels to community detection analysis. The method jointly estimates an undirected graph and homogeneous communities of nodes. The structure of the communities is taken into account when estimating the graph and at the same time, the structure of the graph is accounted for when estimating communities of nodes. The procedure uses a joint group graphical lasso approach with community detection-based grouping, such that some groups of edges co-occur in the estimated graph. The grouping structure is unknown and is estimated based on community detection algorithms. Theoretical derivations regarding graph convergence and sparsistency, as well as accuracy of community recovery are included, while the method's empirical performance is illustrated in an fMRI context, as well as with simulated examples.

Subhadeep Paul, Yuguo Chen.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 48, Number 1, 230--250.

Abstract:
We consider the problem of estimating a consensus community structure by combining information from multiple layers of a multi-layer network using methods based on the spectral clustering or a low-rank matrix factorization. As a general theme, these “intermediate fusion” methods involve obtaining a low column rank matrix by optimizing an objective function and then using the columns of the matrix for clustering. However, the theoretical properties of these methods remain largely unexplored. In the absence of statistical guarantees on the objective functions, it is difficult to determine if the algorithms optimizing the objectives will return good community structures. We investigate the consistency properties of the global optimizer of some of these objective functions under the multi-layer stochastic blockmodel. For this purpose, we derive several new asymptotic results showing consistency of the intermediate fusion techniques along with the spectral clustering of mean adjacency matrix under a high dimensional setup, where the number of nodes, the number of layers and the number of communities of the multi-layer graph grow. Our numerical study shows that the intermediate fusion techniques outperform late fusion methods, namely spectral clustering on aggregate spectral kernel and module allegiance matrix in sparse networks, while they outperform the spectral clustering of mean adjacency matrix in multi-layer networks that contain layers with both homophilic and heterophilic communities.

Min Xu, Varun Jog, Po-Ling Loh.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 48, Number 1, 183--204.

Abstract:
Community identification in a network is an important problem in fields such as social science, neuroscience and genetics. Over the past decade, stochastic block models (SBMs) have emerged as a popular statistical framework for this problem. However, SBMs have an important limitation in that they are suited only for networks with unweighted edges; in various scientific applications, disregarding the edge weights may result in a loss of valuable information. We study a weighted generalization of the SBM, in which observations are collected in the form of a weighted adjacency matrix and the weight of each edge is generated independently from an unknown probability density determined by the community membership of its endpoints. We characterize the optimal rate of misclustering error of the weighted SBM in terms of the Renyi divergence of order 1/2 between the weight distributions of within-community and between-community edges, substantially generalizing existing results for unweighted SBMs. Furthermore, we present a computationally tractable algorithm based on discretization that achieves the optimal error rate. Our method is adaptive in the sense that the algorithm, without assuming knowledge of the weight densities, performs as well as the best algorithm that knows the weight densities.

To view more press releases, please visit http://www.snl.com/irweblinkx/news.aspx?iid=1024452.

To view more press releases, please visit http://www.snl.com/irweblinkx/news.aspx?iid=1024452.

To view more press releases, please visit http://www.snl.com/irweblinkx/news.aspx?iid=1024452.

Imagine living in one of the driest areas on the planet. What little rain there is falls over the space of a few months, yielding around 700 mm in total each year. A population of 1.2 million has to survive on 65 percent less water than the rest of their compatriots, on a traditional staple diet of corn and beans. [...]

A recent excavation located the first physical evidence of the capital of the Maya kingdom of Sak Tz'i', founded in 750 B.C.

Participants promote a family-oriented fellowship of friends who like to beat each other up while wearing skates

A new housing community in Northern California. Aerial image (photographed from a plane at sunset).

The tourism and hospitality industries, which play a large role in the economy of almost every community in northwestern Ontario, are taking a beating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the manager of Tourism Thunder Bay is figuring out how “dire” the situation is, and what could be done to help.

The new service will join others at the existing 811 HealthLine, helping connect people with their local food services and offering answers for those without access to online services.

Buenos Aires, Argentina :: Maintenance crew share Christ's love with local welders helping repair Logos Hope.

People and businesses are rallying to support the Muslim community in Fort McMurray recover after widespread flooding that damaged many neighbourhoods.

Making Tierra Mía, says the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, proved transformative in giving voice to the people

The soil is ready to be tilled and seeds wait to be planted at community gardens across Ottawa after the province reversed a decision declaring them off limits during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seventy-three homeless shelters and other community organizations are getting extra funding to help pay for basics like extra food, cleaning and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the NBA can't salvage the remainder of the season, Terence Davis said he won't be sad for the illustrious complete rookie year that could have been. But he would rue a missed post-season run.

A woman found not criminally responsible for fatally stabbing a stranger in the heart at the makeup counter of a Toronto drugstore five years ago could ultimately be allowed to live in the community if the mental health facility where she is staying decides she can, the Ontario Review Board says.

After several days in which fewer than 400 cases of COVID-19 were added to the provincial tally, Friday's report was up again, with 477 new cases reported.

Rosario, Argentina :: Crewmembers with experience working with least-reached people share a message of unity between churches.

Buenos Aires, Argentina :: Maintenance crew share Christ's love with local welders helping repair Logos Hope.

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As college campuses closed and the COVID-19 virus began casting a larger shadow in south central Pennsylvania, members of the nursing and physical therapist assistant programs at Penn State Mont Alto took stock of all the medical personal protection equipment (PPE) items in their labs. The two programs were supplied with hundreds of gloves and dozens of medical gowns and masks, plus other items such as disposable stethoscopes, shoe covers and safety glasses — items no longer needed as the campus transitioned to remote instruction.

Can young people be united in faith, irrespective of their ethnic background? The answer is yes!

OMers work with a Hungarian church to invest in relationships through every season.

Hungarian students learn about dating, sex and marriage during a Bus4Life visit.