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“We have been fighting that drug war forever,” Gress said.
Where there has been invention of crime, there has also been adaptation.
Back in 1983, Gress said marijuana was the major drug keeping deputies busy in the county.
Meth labs overtook the growth and harvesting of marijuana as the major concern and Gress said deputies spent many hours tracking down and disrupting the meth labs. Gress said battling meth labs involved securing anhydrous ammonia tanks and, with the help of state legislators, helping to limit the amount of over-the-counter medicine which makes the manufacture process possible.
Unfortunately, the criminals adjusted again by bringing meth into the community instead of manufacturing it here.
Back at the jail, both practices and facilities have changed quite a bit since 1983.
At the start of Gress’ tenure as sheriff, the jail was housed in the basement of the courthouse.
Gress said there were times that the jail sat empty with the doors open.
As crime escalated, those cells were filled and the staffing required to oversee them increased.
The current Otoe County jail was constructed by the county to assure that the county was detaining its inmates properly and it was mandated that the county staff the jail with a jailer on every shift and have a female jailer present whenever there were female inmates.
Possibly the most impressive change in law enforcement over the years has been the cultivation and growth of a cooperative spirit between the local, county and state law enforcement groups.
“When I became sheriff, I wanted a working relationship with all law enforcement officers,” Gress said.
The former sheriff said that cooperation was evidenced during the Nebraska City schools lock down of 2018.
Thanks to new radios, the agencies responding to the incident were communicating freely about position, location and strategy.
Gress said seeing that cooperation was very satisfying.
From battling crime to adjusting and adapting the agency and much more, Gress saw a lot as sheriff.
His decision to retire was one of timing. Gress told open house attendees that he felt the time was right to step away after lengthy service.
What’s he doing with his retirement? Although Gress has been asked to return to the sheriff’s department in a more limited role, for now, he says he’s happy staying at home and working on projects there.
Gress is living in one of four houses that he has constructed over the years. And he says he has some ideas for renovation of the house.
While Gress renovates, the new sheriff has the charge of maintaining and improving the department.
Sheriff Caudill expressed his appreciation for the team of law enforcement professionals which he inherited from the out-going sheriff.
“I like the department. I like the experience that we have,” Caudill said, adding that he feels Otoe County has some of the best sheriff deputies in the state of Nebraska.
Coming into the sheriff’s job has been made somewhat easier because of the long service of Gress.
Each sheriff has a specific way to do things and, had it not been for the former sheriff’s long service, deputies might be trying do adjust to new practices after having done that once or twice or more already in their career.
Working closely with Gress for over a decade helped Caudill to gain a better understanding of county business as well and that experience is helping the county going forward.
Performances begin tomorrow for Barrow Street Theatricals’ highly anticipated American premiere of the Nassim Soleimanpour and Bush Theatre production of NASSIM by celebrated Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour (White Rabbit Red Rabbit), featuring direction by Omar Elerian.
The first week’s rotating cast of guest actors includes Obie Award-winning actress Kate Arrington, two-time Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominated actor Corbin Bernsen, Obie Award-winning actor Michael Chernus, three-time Tony Award nominated actress Linda Emond, Tony Award-winning actor John Gallagher Jr., Lucille Lortel Award-winning actress Cush Jumbo, John-Michael Lyles, two-time Academy Award-nominated actor Michael Shannon, and Obie Award-winning actor Gary Wilmes.
As previously announced, Barrow Street Theatricals, formerly Barrow Street Theatre, moves uptown to New York City Center, Stage II (131 West 55th Street) just for this production, with performances scheduled to begin on Thursday, December 6, 2018, ahead of an official opening night on Wednesday, December 12, 2018. Additional details will be announced shortly.
No rehearsals. A different guest actor at every performance. A sealed envelope. And some surprises. In his latest work, Nassim explores the power of language to unite us in these uncertain times.
NASSIM was originally commissioned and produced by the Bush Theatre and received its world premiere at the Bush Theatre, London, July 25, 2017.
Nassim Soleimanpour’s first play, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, ran for more than nine months in New York, and was performed by Whoopi Goldberg, Bobby Cannavale, Nathan Lane, F. Murray Abraham, and other celebrated actors. It has been performed thousands of times in the United States and has been translated into more than 25 languages. NASSIM is his latest exploration into imaginative storytelling that also challenges traditional theatrical forms.
Tickets can be purchased by visiting www.NYCityCenter.org; on the phone by calling CityTix at 212-581-1212; or in person at New York City Center box office, open Monday-Saturday, noon-8pm, and Sunday, noon-7:30pm.
Barrow Street Theatricals was founded by Scott Morfee and Tom Wirtshafter in 2003 at its home in New York’s historic Greenwich House, where they operated the 200-seat Barrow Street Theatre until September 2018. They have produced and presented numerous award-winning shows, including the Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe (with Paines Plough); Tracy Letts’ BUG; Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Tribes by Nina Raine (both directed by David Cromer); Josh Schmidt’s Adding Machine: a musical, and many more.
DENVER – Monday is one of the biggest days in recent memory for Denver sports teams and their fans, as the Rockies have a chance to win their first-ever NL West championship and the Broncos host the Chiefs on Monday Night Football.
After the Rockies' 12-0 drubbing of the Washington Nationals Sunday, they have a one-game playoff in Los Angeles with the Dodgers Monday to see who will win the division and who will go play a Wild Card game in the Midwest on Tuesday.
The Rockies and Dodgers are tied atop the NL West with identical 91-71 records and will win the division with a victory Monday.
Outfielder David Dahl was named the National League Player of the Week on Monday after hitting .333 with six home runs, 15 RBI and eight runs scored over seven games last week. His performance kept the Rockies in the chase for a playoff berth.
The first pitch Monday is slated for 2 p.m. MT. The game will be broadcast on ESPN. The Rockies will start German Marquez (14-10, 3.76 ERA) and the Dodgers plan to start Walker Buehler (7-5, 2.76 ERA) on the mound for the final regular-season game for the two teams.
The loser of the game will play the loser of the Milwaukee Brewers – Chicago Cubs game, which is being played in Chicago ahead of the Rockies game, in a Tuesday Wild Card game.
If the Rockies win Monday, they would host games 1 and 2 of the NLDS starting Thursday.
The Broncos, meanwhile, face an important early-season matchup with the red-hot Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football at Broncos Stadium at Mile High.
The Chiefs and undefeated and quarterback Patrick Mahomes set a new NFL record for the number of touchdown passes thrown in the first three games of a season.
A Broncos win would keep the team into a first-place division tie with the Chiefs heading into the second quarter of the season, though a loss could spell trouble for the Broncos, who would sit at 2-2 if they lose.
The Broncos game will be televised on ESPN and locally on Channel 20. Kickoff is scheduled for 6:15 p.m. MT.
Krista Vince Garland teaches a science lesson to the virtual students in the TeachME Lab at the University of Central Florida.
The student-teacher faces a rowdy class.
The students don’t pay much attention. A boy in the back row, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, slumps his shoulders. Another student waves his hand aimlessly.
“Nah, just stretching,” he replies, when the teacher asks if he needs something.
Scenes such as that aren’t uncommon in urban classrooms, but in this case there is one critical difference: These students are avatars—computer-generated characters whose movements and speech are controlled by a professional actor.
Each of the five characters—all with distinct abilities, personalities, and psychological profiles, and even names like “Maria” and “Marcus”—were created as part of the TeachME initiative at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. There, teacher-candidates can practice in a virtual classroom before ever entering a real one.
Real-time classroom simulations like TeachME, supporters say, offer promise for a host of teacher-training applications. Through them, candidates could gain hands-on practice with urban students, or practice a discrete skill such as classroom management.
Most of all, such simulations give teachers in training the ability to experiment—and make mistakes—without the worry of doing harm to an actual child’s learning.
The Florida project is among the most sophisticated experiments with classroom simulations to date, but other projects offer similar benefits. The computer program simSchool, which mimics a classroom setting, can be populated with up to 18 students with different features and emotional characteristics—all of whom will respond differently to stimulus from a teacher-candidate in charge of the virtual classroom.
Though not yet widespread in teacher education, the idea of classroom simulations could receive more attention in coming years, especially with the student-teaching aspect of teacher preparation now receiving scrutiny. Groups such as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE, are pushing for teacher education programs to step up the variety, length, and quality of their field-based experiences.
“There’s a realization that we have to be able to ensure that we can prepare teachers well for the demands of practice,” said Pamela L. Grossman, a professor of education at Stanford University who has written about the place of simulations, among other methods, for practicing teaching skills.
Both TeachME and simSchool are the product of unusual partnerships linking teacher-educators, researchers, and experts in simulations or immersive media.
Though widely used to train professionals in medicine, nursing, and aviation, simulations are uncommon in the preparation of teachers. Many aspiring educators get about 10 to 14 weeks of student-teaching in local schools.
The idea behind the simulations isn’t to replace traditional face-to-face student-teaching, but to give teacher-candidates the ability to experience specific skill-building lessons, explains David C. Gibson, an associate research professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University in Tempe.
The principal designer of simSchool, Mr. Gibson was inspired to undertake the project by the work of researchers at Western Oregon University. There, researchers created a computer program allowing teachers to examine student profiles, come up with a preassessment for a lesson, administer it, view student-achievement results, and reflect on them.
Like a board game, it was “turn-based,” contingent on teachers’ inputting an action before generating information. But Mr. Gibson wanted to pursue a program that got deeper into classroom practice—how teachers respond minute by minute in a dynamic environment.
The simSchool program essentially puts the Oregon project into real time. While a teacher-candidate uses the system, it tracks how student performance rises and falls. Such variation depends on the complexity of the tasks the user has assigned, the personalities and abilities of the students, and students’ engagement with each activity.
As in a real classroom, these children don’t sit statically in place. Depending on how engaged they are by the teacher’s actions, students will pay close attention—or distract their peers. That aspect, Mr. Gibson says, gives teacher-candidates insights into features like differentiation. A task that one student masters may be too complicated or frustrating for another, and teachers must analyze student data to respond appropriately.
A complex emotional, perceptive, and cognitive profile determines how each child responds to an assigned task. Emotional factors include openness to learning new things, conscientiousness, degrees of extroversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity. The perception variables include visual, auditory, and kinesthetic abilities. Finally, the cognitive dimension represents the student’s general capacity to learn.
Thanks to the research and development efforts of a team housed at the University of North Texas, in Denton, the program has expanded to allow users to customize individual simulated students, with 2 million discrete combinations possible.
At the University of Central Florida, the TeachME program expands upon the artificial-intelligence programming often used in simulations. It draws on a professional actor to represent all five characters created for the project.
The characters are based on a psychological framework different from simSchool’s, but are no less diverse in their attributes. Each avatar has a individual profile, and every actor who participates in the program is trained on all five students’ personalities and profile. Many of the actors, in fact, hail from a fine-arts program at UCF combining aspects of psychology, improvisation, performance, and philosophy.
To use TeachME, a teacher-candidate stands in front of a large screen depicting the five students at their desks and begins to teach. In a separate lab across campus connected by camera and microphone, the actor—who’s already received a copy of the lesson a teacher-candidate will be using that day—responds to the teacher’s direction, operating each character in turn. Motion-capture instruments replicate the actor’s gestures for each character on the screen.
Jacqueline A. Rodriguez, now the program director of TeachME and a doctoral student at the Florida university, was among those initially skeptical that the student-avatars could resemble students in an urban classroom. It took just minutes in the simulation to change her mind, she said.
A project like simSchool lacks live actors, but the basic program could be expanded to include more-complex emotional profiles for the characters, Mr. Gibson said. He would also like to see the cognitive variables in the program multiply to allow for more-nuanced achievement patterns among the virtual students.
The projects are limited in the number of teacher-candidates that experience them as part of their initial preparation, but both are starting to receive recognition.
During its last accreditation review at the University of North Texas, NCATE approved use of simSchool for up to 10 of the 40-plus required hours teacher-candidates must spend observing classrooms before they begin formal student-teaching.
TeachMe is available for all teacher education instructors at the University of Central Florida, though it’s not a mandatory part of the teacher education curriculum.
There is still much to learn about the ideal uses for the systems. Ms. Grossman of Stanford Unversity would like to see additional attention paid to a framework for breaking down and analyzing specific teaching skills—getting the proper grain size of the individual practices that novice teachers need to master in the simulated setting.
Such frameworks for underpinning the simulations are more advanced in medicine and nursing, she said. But a school classroom requires more-complex interactions than the comparatively easier-to-simulate, one-on-one doctor-patient relationship.
Research on both systems is ongoing, and partner universities are extending the projects in new directions.
Old Dominion University, in Virginia, Utah State University, and West Virginia University, among others, are in various phases of incorporating TeachME into their own programming; the Utah university has developed two new student-avatars.
Cost is potentially an issue for wide-scale use of the TeachME system. It costs university partners about $6,000 for equipment, plus $120 per hour of use.
The research base for simSchool is gradually expanding as well. In spring 2007, researchers at the University of North Texas conducted a small study on two classes of preservice candidates; those who used the system reported, on average, higher levels of “instructional self-efficacy.” In lay terms, they felt more resilient in the face of instructional setbacks and more confident in trying alternative approaches.
Tandra L. Tyler-Wood, an associate professor of learning technology at UNT who has conducted much of the research on the simSchool program, says the finding indicates that the system could help improve retention rates among newly minted teachers. On-the-job-frustrations are particularly likely to cause novice teachers to change schools or leave the profession.
Ms. Tyler-Wood is now using the programmable aspects of simSchool’s students to approximate the features of students with disabilities—reducing auditory perception approximates deafness, for instance.
Whether the appetite for simulation in the field of teacher education will match the growing sophistication of the systems remains to be seen.
The appeal of TeachME might be less immediate for today’s teacher-educators, who grew up without much computer technology, than for a group of budding Gen Y teachers who grew up playing World of Warcraft and tinkering with electronic gadgets, Ms. Rodriguez postulated.
Still, as more teacher-educators experience simulations, Ms. Dieker expects the new tools to gain legitimacy. Among her triumphs was the discovery that a group of middle school students themselves found the student-avatars to be lifelike approximations of their peers.
Before using the system, during a field trip to the TeachME lab, many of the middle schoolers expected to easily play the boss of their own classrooms. Ten minutes with Maria, Marcus, and their virtual peers changed their minds, Ms. Dieker says.
“New Vigor Propelling Training,” December 1, 2010.
“Teachers Make the Move to the Virtual World,” September 22, 2010.
Richard Thaler was awarded the 9 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Stockholm: US academic Richard Thaler, who helped popularise the idea of "nudging" people towards doing what was best for them, won the 2017 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for his work on how human nature affects supposedly rational markets.
Influential in the field of behavioural economics, his research showed how traits such as lack of self-control and fear of losing what you already have prompt decisions that may not have the best outcome in the longer term.
"I think the most important impact (of my research) is the recognition that economic agents are human and economic models have to incorporate that," Thaler, a professor at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said in call broadcast at the Nobel news conference.
Awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: "Richard Thaler's contributions have built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making."
"His empirical findings and theoretical insights have been instrumental in creating the new and rapidly expanding field of behavioural economics, which has had a profound impact on many areas of economic research and policy."
Thaler brought to prominence the idea of "nudge" economics, where individuals are subtly guided toward beneficial behaviours without heavy-handed compulsion, the theme of a 2008 book he co-wrote which caught the eye of policymakers around the world.
In researching how self-control - or the lack of it - Thaler touched on an age-old problem: why New Year's resolutions to change aspects of your life are notoriously hard to keep.
The issue has relevance for economics as individuals' tendency to fall prey to temptations often negatively affects plans to, for instance, save for retirement.
Together with Professor Cass Sunstein, he argued that society - while maintaining freedom of choice - should actively try to guide individuals in the right direction.
Their book, titled 'Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness' became popular with some western politicians seeking ways to encourage their citizens to save and live healthily, without incurring voters' wrath for raising taxes or banning behaviour outright.
"This has also been used in public pension systems in the United States and the general idea of 'nudging' ... has made a breakthrough in public policy making," Torsten Persson, economics prize committee member, told Reuters.
"Not only in the United States - there's also a nudging unit for the UK government, there's one for the Australian government, it even affects the Swedish government when they think about these things."
The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel's 1895 will.