PA Announces .5 Million in Grants to Attract more Special Education Teachers

PA Announces $1.5 Million in Grants to Attract more Special Education Teachers

The Pennsylvania Department of Education announced that $1.5 million in grant funding is available to institutions of higher education (IHE) that partner with school districts to expedite the process to become a special education teacher.

“As we work to create a pipeline of high-quality educators in the Commonwealth, it is critical that we create partnerships to support schools and today’s learners,” said Acting Secretary of Education Dr. Khalid N. Mumin. “This grant funding will enable schools to meet their unique staffing needs and provide more opportunities for flexible, accelerated certification for prospective educators.”

Pennsylvania is facing a major shortage of educators across the state. A decade ago, roughly 20,000 teacher certifications were issued each year, while in 2021 only about 6,000 were issued.

Through the Accelerated Program for PK-12 Special Education Teacher Certification, grants are available to colleges and universities with approved PK-12 special education certification programs to partner with

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Bay Area businesses still in survival mode

Bay Area businesses still in survival mode

Before the pandemic, Papenhausen Hardware in San Francisco could make about $10 in profit selling a garbage disposal for $129. It wasn’t a king’s ransom, but it was the kind of transaction that has kept the place afloat and serving the West Portal neighborhood for almost 90 years — through earthquakes and multiple fires.

But with COVID-19 concerns increasingly in the rearview for many people, small businesses like Papenhausen are still locked in a struggle for survival, battling the immutable laws of economics and the permanent changes brought on by the pandemic.

That garbage disposal nowadays? Papenhausen owner Karl Aguilar said they don’t even sell it anymore. With inflation-pumped prices it would cost the store $150 just to get it on the shelves, let alone what it would cost a customer including a markup. And it’s unlikely anyone would buy it when the same item could be purchased online or

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GPT-4 is here: what scientists think

GPT-4 is here: what scientists think

GPT-4 is here: what scientists think

The GPT-4 artificial-intelligence model is not yet widely available.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI this week unveiled GPT-4, the latest incarnation of the large language model that powers its popular chat bot ChatGPT. The company says GPT-4 contains big improvements — it has already stunned people with its ability to create human-like text and generate images and computer code from almost any a prompt. Researchers say these abilities have the potential to transform science — but some are frustrated that they cannot yet access the technology, its underlying code or information on how it was trained. That raises concern about the technology’s safety and makes it less useful for research, say scientists.

One upgrade to GPT-4, released on 14 March, is that it can now handle images as well as text. And as a demonstration of its language prowess, Open AI, which is based in

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New Research Casts Fundamental Doubt on Long-Established Standard Model of Electroporation

New Research Casts Fundamental Doubt on Long-Established Standard Model of Electroporation

French German Team Refutes Standard Model of Electroporation

Black cones show water molecules being oriented in the electric field at the interface with the lipid. Credit: Carlos Marques, ENS Lyon

Powerful electric fields have the ability to generate pores in biological membranes through a process called electroporation. Deliberately inducing these imperfections in membranes is a crucial technique not only in medicine and biotechnology but also in the treatment of food items.

A Franco-German research team, headed by Dr. Carlos Marques from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and Prof. Dr. Jan Behrends from the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, has recently collected data that casts fundamental doubt on what has been accepted for decades as the standard model of this mechanism.

“This is a challenge for theory building and numerical simulations in this field,” says Marques. The results have now been published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the United States

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