UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

Historically, scholars have researched and discussed Central Americans in fields such as sociology, migration studies, and anthropology. However, there is a limited amount of literature in the field of education and more so in higher education, that addresses the unique experiences of Central Americans in the U.S. educational system (Torres, 2004). As an part of a larger study, this paper documents and analyzes the testimonios of thirty-five first and second generation Central American youth who have attended high school and college in the U.S. By applying a Critical Race Theory (CRT) analysis (in conjunction with other frameworks) to the testimonios of the thirty-five youth, we find that amidst severe class, race, and gender discrimination in schools, the youth are able to be extremely resilient. Through their testimonios, we also argue that it is important for education systems to pay closer to attention to the heterogeneity of the Latinx population in the U.S. to not further marginalization already marginalized communities.

Guided by a phenomenological approach, this qualitative study examines the resilience and cultural wealth of Latino men as they navigate the transfer process at a two-year community college. This study conducted four semi-structured interviews to highlight how, despite facing difficult circumstances, individual factors along with their aspirational and navigational capital positively impact Latino men in higher education. Ultimately, this study aims for four things (a) to add to the limited amount of research of Latino men in community college (b) to display the success of Latino men in higher education (c) to challenge deficit notions of Latino men in higher education and (d) to provide findings that will inform the community college sector of the Latino men transfer experience.

U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance is a critical anthology focusing on the narratives, experiences, and complexities of the Central American diaspora. Historically, scholarly work has addressed Central Americans through the eyes of “outsiders”, trauma, war, and violence; while this anthology highlights those very real and traumatic histories, it also centralizes the histories of Central American resilience and resistance. At a time when Central American youth are migrating to the U.S. alone and the presidential administration sees Central American youth and their families as bargaining chips in immigration policy, this anthology presents us with a critical examination of the U.S. interventions that have propelled migration to the U.S. Within a U.S. context, the contributing authors examine questions of identity, cultural production, gendered experiences, and transnationalism. Although the anthology is not grounded in the field of education, it is a valuable contribution to any scholar who is invested in Latinx student success and equity by providing the language and analysis necessary to understand the complexities and heterogeneity of Latinxs in the U.S.

EDUCACIÓN is a piece that brings my work as an artist, educator, activist, and scholar together. It is a re-interpretation of the original border crossing sign displayed on the Interstate 5 near the San Diego-Tijuana border.

Through in-depth archival research, David G. García offers a historical narrative on the educational inequalities in Oxnard, CA in between 1903 and 1974.

The need for large-scale production of highly accurate simulated event samples for the extensive physics programme of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider motivates the development of new simulation techniques. Building on the recent success of deep learning algorithms, variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks are investigated for modelling the response of the central region of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter to photons of various energies. The properties of synthesised showers are compared with showers from a full detector simulation using geant4. Both variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks are capable of quickly simulating electromagnetic showers with correct total energies and stochasticity, though the modelling of some shower shape distributions requires more refinement. This feasibility study demonstrates the potential of using such algorithms for ATLAS fast calorimeter simulation in the future and shows a possible way to complement current simulation techniques.

Charged particle reconstruction in the presence of many simultaneous proton–proton (pp) collisions in the LHC is a challenging task for the ATLAS experiment’s reconstruction software due to the combinatorial complexity. This paper describes the major changes made to adapt the software to reconstruct high-activity collisions with an average of 50 or more simultaneous pp interactions per bunch crossing (pile-up) promptly using the available computing resources. The performance of the key components of the track reconstruction chain and its dependence on pile-up are evaluated, and the improvement achieved compared to the previous software version is quantified. For events with an average of 60pp collisions per bunch crossing, the updated track reconstruction is twice as fast as the previous version, without significant reduction in reconstruction efficiency and while reducing the rate of combinatorial fake tracks by more than a factor two.

Prior literature has debated whether syntax is separable from semantics in the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and multi-voxel pattern analysis, our previous studies investigated brain activity during morpho-syntactic versus semantic processing. These studies only detected semantic specialization in activation patterns and no syntactic specialization in 5- to 6-year-old and 7- to 8-year-old children. To examine if older children who have mastered morpho-syntactic skills would show specialization for syntax, the current study examined 64 9- to 10-year-old children using the same design and analyses. We observed that only the left IFG pars opercularis was sensitive to syntactic but not semantic information, supporting the hypothesis that this region serves as a core region for syntax. In addition, the left STG which has been implicated in the integration of semantics and syntax, as well as the left MTG and IFG pars triangularis which have been implicated in semantics, were sensitive to both semantic and syntactic information with no evidence of specialization. These findings suggest a lexicalized view of syntax, which argues that semantically sensitive regions are also critical regions for syntactic processing during language comprehension.