A multidimensional adapted process model of teaching

In the present study, we aimed to specify the key competence domains perceived to be critical for the teaching profession and depict them as a comprehensive teacher competence model. An expert panel that included representatives from seven units providing university-based initial teacher education in Finland carried out this process. To produce an active construction of a shared understanding and an interpretation of the discourse in the field, the experts reviewed literature on teaching. The resulting teacher competence model, the multidimensional adapted process model of teaching (MAP), represents a collective conception of the relevant empirical literature and prevailing discourses on teaching. The MAP is based on Blömeke et al.’s, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223, 3–13, (2015) model which distinguishes among teacher competences (referring to effective performance of teachers’ work), competencies (knowledge, skills, and other individual competencies underlying and enabling effective teaching), and situation-specific skills of perceiving, interpreting, and making decisions in situations involving teaching and learning. The implications of the MAP for teacher education and student selection for initial teacher education are discussed.

An Adapted Process and Organ Procurement Perspective on Heart Retransplantation for a Healthy Heart’s Third Life

As organ procurement organizations nationwide see an increased opportunity to retransplant already transplanted hearts, we would like to share the overview and process of our 2 successful cases. Heart retransplantation increased our cardiac placement rates by 2.64% and 2% in 2015 and 2019, respectively. Spread across a nation that sees over 3500 heart placements annually, a 2% increase would be substantial. Since 2009, our cases stand as the only documented heart retransplantations in the United States. However, United Network for Organ Sharing data shows that potential exists. From a facilitation perspective, we have developed a protocol to ease the matching process. From a surgical perspective, these cases had no complications and saved 2 lives, with each heart now beating in a third person. We hope that by sharing our process and success, we can familiarize fellow organ procurement organizations and transplant communities with this viable opportunity.

On Decoupling in Banach Spaces

We consider decoupling inequalities for random variables taking values in a Banach space X. We restrict the class of distributions that appear as conditional distributions while decoupling and show that each adapted process can be approximated by a Haar-type expansion in which only the pre-specified conditional distributions appear. Moreover, we show that in our framework a progressive enlargement of the underlying filtration does not affect the decoupling properties (in particular, it does not affect the constants involved). As a special case, we deal with one-sided moment inequalities for decoupled dyadic (i.e., Paley–Walsh) martingales and show that Burkholder–Davis–Gundy-type inequalities for stochastic integrals of X-valued processes can be obtained from decoupling inequalities for X-valued dyadic martingales.

Possibilities for Optimization of Industrial Alkaline Steeping of Wood-Based Cellulose Fibers

Steeping of cellulosic materials in aqueous solution of NaOH is a common pre-treatment in several industrial processes for production of cellulose-based products, including viscose fibers. This study investigated whether the span of commonly applied process settings has the potential for process optimization regarding purity, yield, and degree of transformation to alkali cellulose. A hardwood kraft dissolving pulp was extracted with 17–20 wt% aq. NaOH at 40−50 °C. The regenerated residue of the pulp was characterized regarding its chemical composition, molecular structure, and cellulose conformation. Yield was shown to be favored primarily by low temperature and secondly by high alkali concentration. Purity of xylan developed inversely. Both purity of xylan and yield varied over the applied span of settings to an extent which makes case-adapted process optimization meaningful. Decreasing the steeping temperature by 2 °C increased xylan content in the residue with 0.13%-units over the whole span of applied alkali concentrations, while yield increased by 0.15%-units when extracting with 17 wt% aq. NaOH, and by 0.20%-units when extracting with 20 wt%. Moreover, the yield-favoring conditions resulted in a narrower molecular weight distribution. The degree of transformation via alkali cellulose to cellulose II, as determined with Raman spectroscopy, was found to be high at all extraction settings applied.

Existence of densities for stochastic evolution equations driven by fractional Brownian motion

In this work, we prove a version of Hörmander’s theorem for a stochastic evolution equation driven by a trace-class fractional Brownian motion with Hurst exponent [Formula: see text] and an analytic semigroup on a given separable Hilbert space. In contrast to the classical finite-dimensional case, the Jacobian operator in typical solutions of parabolic stochastic PDEs is not invertible which causes a severe difficulty in expressing the Malliavin matrix in terms of an adapted process. Under a Hörmander’s bracket condition and some algebraic constraints on the vector fields combined with the range of the semigroup, we prove that the law of finite-dimensional projections of such solutions has a density with respect to Lebesgue measure. The argument is based on rough path techniques and a suitable analysis on the Gaussian space of the fractional Brownian motion.

DETERMINISTIC INVESTMENT STRATEGY IN A DC PENSION PLAN WITH INFLATION RISK UNDER MEAN-VARIANCE CRITERION

This paper studies an optimal deterministic investment problem for a DC pension plan member with inflation risk. We describe the price processes of the inflation-indexed bond and the stock by a continuous diffusion process and a jump diffusion process with random parameters, respectively. The contribution rate linked to the income of the DC plan member is assumed to be a non-Markovian adapted process. Under the mean-variance criterion, we use Malliavin calculus to derive a characterization for the optimal deterministic investment strategy. In some special cases, we obtain the explicit expressions for the optimal deterministic strategies.

Conceptual Framework of Teaching Quality: A Multidimensional Adapted Process Model of Teaching

A universal challenge in the field of teacher education is generating a shared vision of the key knowledge and skills needed for the teaching profession. Prior research has pinpointed a range of critical qualities necessary for teaching and other facets of a teacher’s work. However, a research-based conceptual model relevant to understanding the key competencies of the teaching profession has not yet been presented. To address this need, this paper presents a multidimensional process model of key knowledge and skills for teaching. It is adapted from the competence model of Blömeke et al. (2015), and it specifies the core professional practices, situation-specific skills, and cognitive and non-cognitive competencies that constitute high-quality teaching. The adapted model has been developed in the context of Finnish university-based teacher education and in comprehensive national cooperation among all teacher education units.

A characterization of the set of local martingale measures

We generalize the results of [1] to continuous time case by stating necessary and sufficient conditions on a set of probability measures to be the set of local martingale measures for a vector valued, locally bounded and adapted process.