Berkeley City College

During the past forty years, worldwide economies and organizations are much focusing on maximize the level of happiness or well-being of their citizens. UN agenda of sustainable development (SD) for 2030 This paper has discussed the psychological, social, cognitive, and pedagogical implication of artificial intelligence (AI) on student learning in higher education. The sample size of 120 students with the simple random sampling method was used to gather the data using a descriptive research design. A questionnaire was designed that would help to get data about the courses of students using AI-based learning tools, their impacts on motivation, engagement, self-regulated learning, social interaction, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. The correlation, descriptive statistics, and ANOVA were used to analyze the data to examine the correlations between AI use and student learning outcomes. According to the findings, AI had a positive impact on students and boosted their psychological aspects such as motivation, engagement, and self-regulation and had beneficial effects on the social and cognitive elements, such as collaborative learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. Also, the study indicated a variation in the perceptions of the AI as a pedagogical tool depending on the academic level of students, as postgraduate students notified about the increased perceived benefit. The research concludes that AI is an assistive technology to enhance the learning results of students when implemented creatively, and it is necessary to rely on balanced utilization as well as human-centered pedagogy. These conclusions can be applied to educators, policymakers, and institutions that need to maximize the use of AI in education.

This volume showcases the research, teaching, and community engagement of fellows from the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship program, which from 2018 to 2025 supported 110 faculty across 61 institutions. Edited by Carmen Carrasquillo (San Diego Miramar College) and Brian Stipelman (Frederick Community College), the collection highlights the challenges and opportunities faced by two-year-college scholars, documenting how they integrate research into the classroom and serve diverse student communities. More than a record of individual projects, the publication celebrates the vital role of community college faculty as teacher-scholars whose contributions enrich the humanities and higher education at large.

BackgroundSupportive male involvement is strongly correlated with contraceptive use. In Rwanda, where the contraceptive prevalence rate among married women increased from 17 to 52% from 2005 to 2010, and stagnated at 53% in 2015, understanding the role of male partners in collaborative couple contraceptive use can help inform programs designed to further increase the use of contraception in Rwanda.MethodsThis study utilized qualitative methods in 2018, specifically 32 in-depth interviewers with mostly current users of modern contraceptive methods and eight focus group discussions with family planning providers—both family planning nurses and community health workers (CHWs). Respondents were from Musanze and Nyamasheke Districts, the districts with the highest and lowest modern contraceptive use, respectively, to explore the role of couple collaboration in family planning use in Rwanda. Data were analyzed using the thematic content approach in Atlas.ti (8).ResultsFindings demonstrate that some men are opposed to use of male methods of contraception, and some are opposed to any contraceptive use, which can lead to covert use. Women and providers prefer collaborative couple contraceptive use—as a result, providers advocate for and encourage male partner participation in contraceptive use. Women are most often burdened with seeking out information, initiating discussions, and sharing information discovered about contraceptive use with partners. Decision-making about contraceptive use, once discussed, can be collaborative and motivated by financial considerations. When couple contraceptive use is collaborative, benefits range from marital harmony to husband’s support of sustained use through reminders about appointments, joint counseling, and support in managing side effects.ConclusionFamily planning providers at the community and clinic levels encourage collaborative contraceptive use among couples and some Rwandan couples communicate well about family planning use. Despite the positives, women are expected to source family planning information, share that information with their male partners, seek out family planning services, and use family planning. If more Rwandan male partners accepted use, used male methods of contraception, and participated even more in the work it takes to use family planning, the potential for sustained, and even enhanced, contraceptive use in Rwanda could be realized.

Abstract Background High fertility rates pose health risks to both mothers and children and impede economic growth; therefore, family planning use is vital to achieving sustainable population growth and to help build thriving communities. Contraceptive use in Rwanda has tripled since 2005. This study aims to understand the role of coordinated and integrated family planning service delivery in achieving this unparalleled success in Rwanda. Methods This qualitative study in 2018 included eight focus group discussions with family planning providers and 32 in-depth interviews with experienced family planning users. Results Results indicate a well-coordinated family planning service delivery system with community health workers and nurses filling different and complementary roles in meeting family planning client needs at the local level. In addition, integration of family planning into other maternal and child health services is the norm. Conclusions The coordination and integration of family planning across both providers and services may help explain the extraordinary increase in Rwanda’s contraceptive usage, and has potential applications for enhancing family planning service delivery in other settings as well.

Banana flowers form deep within the stem of the banana plant, long before they appear to us. The flowers occur in groups called hands, and the hands are arranged into larger clusters of flowers. Both the number of flowers in a hand and their pattern of development are different between cultivated (supermarket) and wild species of bananas. In supermarket bananas, each hand has many flowers, and the flowers develop in a regular pattern from right to left. In the wild species called the hairy banana, there is no regular pattern of flower formation. Flowers of the hairy banana are never formed in the regular right-to-left manner as found in the supermarket species. This is surprising and illustrates an important point about science: we do not always get the answers we expect. When they are first formed, banana flowers have no parts. They go through a process to form the flower parts that we see. After we describe how this takes place, we give you a project, so you can see how this happens on your own. You will work as a scientist to discover the pattern of development in banana flowers.

A complex-valued convolutional network (convnet) implements the repeated application of the following composition of three operations, recursively applying the composition to an input vector of nonnegative real numbers: (1) convolution with complex-valued vectors, followed by (2) taking the absolute value of every entry of the resulting vectors, followed by (3) local averaging. For processing real-valued random vectors, complex-valued convnets can be viewed as data-driven multiscale windowed power spectra, data-driven multiscale windowed absolute spectra, data-driven multiwavelet absolute values, or (in their most general configuration) data-driven nonlinear multiwavelet packets. Indeed, complex-valued convnets can calculate multiscale windowed spectra when the convnet filters are windowed complex-valued exponentials. Standard real-valued convnets, using rectified linear units (ReLUs), sigmoidal (e.g., logistic or tanh) nonlinearities, or max pooling, for example, do not obviously exhibit the same exact correspondence with data-driven wavelets (whereas for complex-valued convnets, the correspondence is much more than just a vague analogy). Courtesy of the exact correspondence, the remarkably rich and rigorous body of mathematical analysis for wavelets applies directly to (complex-valued) convnets.

Gay male stewards performing drag shows on large passenger ships in the 1930s. Male hustlers selling sex to men for money and then going home to their girlfriends in the 1950s. Lesbian bus drivers organizing in the 1970s to include “sexual orientation” in their union contract's antidiscrimination clause. Gay male flight attendants fired from their jobs for being HIV-positive in the 1980s. These are some of the stories told in the four books under review, each about the queer labor history of the United States.

Nonequilibrium physics encompasses a broad range of natural and synthetic small-scale systems. Optimizing transitions of such systems will be crucial for the development of nanoscale technologies and may reveal the physical principles underlying biological processes at the molecular level. Recent work has demonstrated that when a thermodynamic system is driven away from equilibrium then the space of controllable parameters has a Riemannian geometry induced by a generalized inverse diffusion tensor. We derive a simple, compact expression for the inverse diffusion tensor that depends solely on equilibrium information for a broad class of potentials. We use this formula to compute the minimal dissipation for two model systems relevant to small-scale information processing and biological molecular motors. In the first model, we optimally erase a single classical bit of information modeled by an overdamped particle in a smooth double-well potential. In the second model, we find the minimal dissipation of a simple molecular motor model coupled to an optical trap. In both models, we find that the minimal dissipation for the optimal protocol of duration τ is proportional to 1/τ, as expected, though the dissipation for the erasure model takes a different form than what we found previously for a similar system.