Becker College

Hans-Jürgen Goertz: Die Täufer. Geschichte und Deutung. München: Beck 1980. 237 S.

Pre-trained contextual embeddings like BERT have shown substantial improvement across a wide range of natural language processing tasks.We proposed Sliding-BERT, which incorporates BERT with state-of-the-art conversational machine comprehension (MC) model, 1325

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experiences of nurses working in a predominantly rural care setting. In order to meet the needs of an aging population with multiple comorbidities, it is essential for leaders to understand the strategies to recruit and retain highly qualified nurses in CAHs settings.
\n Sample: Nine registered nurses working both full and part time with one to 40 years of experience participated in the interview process that queried their attitudes regarding working in a rural setting.
\n Findings: Five major themes included self-reliance, social responsibility, empathy, isolation, and emergent leadership.
\n Conclusions: The findings from this study support the notion that there is not a universal response to the lived experience of nurses working in CAHs. The unique needs of each nurse should be considered to enhance the practice environment and diminish experiences that result in feelings of isolation. Isolation impacted the five themes; if nurses are not able to maintain current knowledge and skills in a supportive environment, their self-reliance is compromised.

It is common for freshmen students to enter Calculus I with a wide range of levels of preparation and mastery of background material. In addition, many of the students struggle with the adjustment from high school to college. In an effort to help the students to solidify their understanding of concepts as they progress through the course, as well as to start to think like test makers instead of simply test takers, we implemented the use of a structured and mandatory post-exam assignment. We present our approach that was designed to help the weaker students to solidify their knowledge of the course material while engaging the students who have a strong background in the development of their study skills.

Modern monetary business-cycle models rely heavily on price and wage rigidity. While there is substantial evidence that prices do not adjust frequently, there is much less evidence on whether wage rigidity is an important feature of real world labor markets. While real average hourly earnings are not particularly cyclical, and do not react significantly to monetary policy shocks, systematic changes in the composition of employed workers and implicit contracts within employment arrangements make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the importance of wage rigidity. We augment a workhorse monetary DSGE model by allowing for endogenous changes in the composition of workers and also by explicitly allowing for a difference between allocative wages and remitted wages. Using both individual-level and aggregate data, we study and extend the available evidence on the cyclicality of wages and we pay particular attention to the response of wages to identified monetary policy shocks. Our analysis suggests several broad conclusions: (i) in the data, composition bias plays a modest but noticeable role in cyclical compensation patterns; (ii) empirically, both the wages for newly hired workers and the "user cost of labor" respond strongly to identified monetary policy innovations; (iii) a model with implicit contracts between workers and firms and a flexible allocative wage replicates these patterns well. We conclude that price rigidity likely plays a substantially more important role than wage rigidity in governing economic fluctuations.

Surveys of college student mental health detail large numbers of students with significant mental health concerns and highlight the fact that students in distress turn most often to their friends for help. These student helpers often feel unequipped and overwhelmed by their friends’ requests for help and don't know where to turn. This article describes a program which seeks to identify, train, and support students within their natural helping roles. The Student Support Network (SSN) program identifies student helpers and offers them a 6-week training to improve their ability to recognize and respond to their peers’ distress.

Background: Ischemic white matter disease (IWMD) is associated with incident stroke. Similarly subclinical coronary artery disease is associated with incident coronary artery disease (CAD) events. Although, atherogenesis in both vascular beds likely shares common mechanisms, the extent to which subclinical CAD is associated with preclinical IWMD in a young to middle-aged healthy asymptomatic high risk population with a family history of premature CAD remains unknown. Methods: We screened 405 apparently healthy participants in Genetic Study of Atherosclerotic Risk (GeneSTAR) (mean age 51.6 ± 10.6 years, 60% female, 36% African American) for CAD risk factors, and for the presence of calcified and noncalcified coronary plaque using dual-source 256 multi-detector cardiac CT angiography. The presence of IWMD was assessed by 3 Tesla brain MRI and the ischemic white-matter volume to brain volume (WVBV) ratio was calculated using direct measurements. A multivariate linear regression analysis predicting WVBV was performed for the presence of CAD, adjusting for age, sex, race, traditional CAD risk factors, and intrafamilial correlations using a generalized estimating equation (GEE). Results: Subclinical CAD was highly prevalent (43.0%). Individuals with coronary plaque had a higher ratio of WVBV (median 0.11, interquartile range [0.04 to 0.33]) as compared to those without coronary plaque (median 0.05 [0.01 to 0.14], p<0.001). In the fully adjusted analysis, the presence of subclinical CAD was a significant predictor of WVBV (p=0.05), as was age (p<0.001). Conclusion: This is the first study to show a strong association of subclinical CAD and occult ischemic white mater disease in healthy high-risk young to middle aged individuals, independent of traditional CAD risk factors, including age. The findings support the premise of shared causal pathways in the two vascular beds in families at increased risk for both CAD and stroke.