Ask Dr. Free-Ride: how much help is too much help?

In the comments on the post about the younger Free-Ride offspring’s science fair project, Isabel asks:

I don’t remember if I’ve seen your response to this question before, but, if you don’t mind my asking, how much do you help your kids with their homework/science projects?

Actually, I’m pretty sure I haven’t explicitly answered this question on the blog before, partly because the answer is something that constantly feels like it’s being renegotiated. We’re constantly trying to find the right level of assistance/engagement/oversight that ensures that the kids are:

  1. really mastering the material they’re supposed to be learning,
  2. maybe seeing some of the stuff they’re learning has cool extensions or consequences (because this is where a lot of the fun in learning seems to be),
  3. showing their teachers what they know (so that there’s some chance of their grades reflecting that knowledge),
  4. doing their damned homework (please don’t get me started on this),
  5. finishing their damned homework before bedtime.

As you might imagine, these goals are sometimes in tension with each other. Also, it turns out that I and my better half often have a fair bit of work that we’re trying to accomplish at home (“homework”, if you will), and no one is stepping up to help us with that — the point being that we have to strive for some level of efficiency in supervising/helping the sprogs, else get our hands on a time machine.

I should share two nuggets of experience that I think inform my strategies on helping my kids with homework and projects. One is an interaction I had with a colleague maybe six years ago, when the elder Free-Ride offspring was in kindergarten. This colleague had a child in fifth grade and was bemoaning the fact that the school seemed to be assigning projects that it would be practically impossible for a fifth grader to do on his or her own. “So the parents end up doing much of the projects, because what choice do they have? If you resist it, it’s your kid who gets the bad grade.”

This state of affairs, dear readers, rather pissed me off. It helped me decide that, if my own clever kid’s best effort was not enough to satisfy the requirements of a given project or assignment, I should be conferring with my kid’s teacher about whether that project or assignment was actually appropriate.

The other experience that has informed my view here is what it was like to get help on schoolwork from my dad. His approach was, in a word, Socratic. I could approach him with what seemed like s straightforward question (e.g., how do I get started balancing this redox reaction) and he could be counted on to launch into no fewer than twenty minutes of questioning designed to help establish what I already understood and to help me figure out how to extend that knowledge to the problem at hand.

When I was a teenager, this bugged the heck out of me — sometimes enough to motivate me to engage in my own (more focused) Socratic inquiry. But darned if I didn’t develop some effective problem-solving strategies as a result of his questioning.

So, we pretty much went Socratic on the sprogs as soon as they gave any evidence of paying attention to what we were saying. (The Friday Sprog Blogging archives will attest to this.) And, this naturally carried over to homework once they started bringing it home. We routinely asked questions like:

  • What are you supposed to do here?
  • What can you tell me about how to do that?
  • How can you check whether doing it that way works, or whether your answer is a reasonable one?
  • Can you think of any other strategy for figuring this out?

Obviously this is not the most efficient way to get the homework done, at least in the short term. But it does seem to have helped the sprogs to get better at answering their own questions and developing their own problem-solving strategies, if only to get their Socratic parents to shut up.

For longer term projects, like science fair projects, we get a little more involved, not so much in directing the projects as in helping the kids assess whether the projects are plausibly doable in the time available and with the materials we have on hand or are willing to purchase. We help somewhat in developing the initial idea (I want to grow mold) to something like a testable hypothesis (although again, this help is Socratic in flavor). As well, as they’re coming up with their experimental design, we’ll ask more questions to help them think about whether their observations will really help answer the questions they’re trying to answer, what confounders might complicate things, and so on.

The execution of the experiment is then up to the sprog.

I will cop to beating the time-management drum loudly and regularly for this round of science fair projects. Both concerned biological systems and data that was either necessarily to be collected over time (mold growth) or of a sort that you couldn’t count on being able to collect all of the night before (because the rabbit gets bored hunting for treats after a while). Also, since the elder Free-Ride offspring’s project involved research with a USDA regulated vertebrate animal, I was a hardass about getting the kid to commit to an experimental protocol in time for a veterinarian to give feedback on it before signing the required forms (and before any data collection commenced).

I did not micromanage how the sprogs kept their project notebooks. This meant that the younger Free-Ride offspring had to reap what was sown (with data recorded on dated but not chronologically ordered pages) when it came time to collect and analyze the data. I have a feeling that’s a lesson that’s going to stick.

As far as data analysis and visual representation of the data, this is something I discussed with the sprogs (again, Socratically) as they were deciding on the approach that they thought made the most sense. Once they settled on an approach, it was up to them to execute it.

They wrote up (and typed out) their own narratives for their project boards. They also decided how to organize text blocks, photographs, tables, and graphs on the project board. I, however, wielded the can of spray adhesive, on the theory that the sprogs would get into more trouble with sticky hands than I would.

Our approach to helping here is not always successful from the point of view of getting the sprogs to do their best work (or to actually turn it in). But, I think it has been a reasonable strategy in terms of ensuring that the sprogs know how to do that work, even the more challenging long-term projects. Also, they bring home grades that reflect their work, not their parents’.

Can nothing be done about the exam-talkers?

That isn’t a typo — the issue is students who talk to each other while taking exams.

I received the following via email from a reader (lightly edited to remove identifying details):

I’m wondering if you and your readers can help me analyze this situation.

I caught two students talking during an exam.

This is not the first time for this pair. The first time this happened, I explicitly communicated my expectations about conduct during an exam to all of my students, specifically stating that talking during an exam will be taken as cheating. The academic integrity section of the undergraduate bulletin also states that conversation during an exam is not allowed.

After the second incident, I wanted to penalize both students with a zero for said exam and forfeiture of the dropped-lowest-exam-score policy. The students immediately said they will appeal to the dean and their parents have been hounding the chair as well as the administration.

The message I’m getting now is that I cannot prove the talking during the exam actually took place (although I saw it). Not only that, I’m basically being bullied to drop it for fear that the parents will file a law suit, maybe because the administration has decided the university cannot deal with another scandal after a recent one fueled by alcohol.

My question is, when did talking during exams become acceptable? (That it’s acceptable is the message I’m getting regardless of what’s written in the academic bulletin). I have not been teaching long but have read about faculty being fearful of repercussions when reporting cheating students. I don’t want to end up like that, compromising my principles for fear of repercussions such as loss of job (I’m not protected by tenure). Unfortunately, this is where I am headed. This whole incident is very demoralizing. Is it too much to expect students to abide by a shared code of conduct during exams? Is this response by chair and administration common?

I’m going to give my advice on this situation, but since my correspondent specifically requested help from you, the commentariat, please post your advice in the comments, making sure to point out ways you think my advice goes wrong.

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Friday Sprog Blogging: How Well Does Mold Form in Different Conditions? (A science fair project)

The science fair happened, and the younger Free-Ride offspring’s project board is now home. (The teachers are still judging and grading the sixth grade projects, which means that the elder Free-Ride offspring’s project board is still at school.)

Here, in pictures, are the highlights of the younger Free-Ride offspring’s project:

A straightforward descriptive title. (The kid may have a future writing scientific journal articles.)

Gotta have hypotheses to test.

The equipment was not terribly fancy. Then again, except for the bread, it was stuff we already had on hand, which is a plus.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always like it when science fair results depart from initial expectations. It makes it feel more like real science, I guess.

The science fair instructions from the school were emphatic that kids should not bring in potentially biohazardous specimens with their projects (and mold was among the things specifically mentioned in the “NO!” list), so the younger Free-Ride offspring took pictures. It may have been smelly, but the range of colors of mold that grew is actually kind of impressive.

My favorite part of the younger Free-Ride offspring’s project is the data visualization. For each of the specimens that grew mold in each set of experimental conditions, the kid measured the mold spots (in square centimeters) and added up the total molded area on each data-collection day. Data was collected until each bread sample was totally molded over.

To generate these graphs, the younger Free-Ride offspring calculated the mean mold area for each given type of bread in a particular set of conditions on a particular day. Since each of the bread samples was 4 x 5 centimeters, the younger Free-Ride offspring drew a 4 x 5 rectangle to represent the bread sample and then plotted the average mold growth by filling in the appropriate number of squares. You can see as you go across the plots from left to right that ady by more and more squares get filled in until all 20 are filled, representing complete mold coverage.

A parent’s least favorite part of the science fair.

At least at Casa Free-Ride: the day before the project board is due.

That day (or, to be more precise, this day) is the day that reminds everyone of just how laborious a process it is to:

  • create visually attractive (or logical and legible) representations of the data
  • locate and organize all the raw data if you have kept your project notebook in the same fashion in which you keep your notebooks for sketching and stories (which is to say, not necessarily on sequential pages — but at least dated)
  • type up descriptions of your experiment if you are not a frequent typist (neither of the Free-Ride offspring is)
  • draw actual conclusions from your data
  • work out how to fit everything you want to show and say on the three-panel project board without making that project board look too busy or too sparse, and without inducing eye-strain

Also, we’re hoping to hit the trifecta of functioning erasers, functioning printer, and functioning can of spray adhesive to get all the pieces properly assembled. (Thank goodness that data collection wrapped up yesterday.)

Hold a good thought for us.

Things that are not entirely interchangeable.

In heavy throughput grading mode, you sometimes notice interesting confusions or conflations. Among those I’ve noticed the past week:

  • “The chemical” for “the bacterium”. (Sure, a bacterium is composed of chemicals, but it’s got something extra, that spark of life, right? Or am I being a silly vitalist here?)
  • IUPAC” for “IACUC“. I reckon you probably do want to use the correct nomenclature when describing the compounds you use in any research (including research with animals), but IUPAC has no special powers to approve or oversee your research protocols.

Friday Sprog Blogging: science fair research in progress.

We’re less than two weeks out from our elementary school science fair, which means that both Free-Ride offspring are in serious data collection mode. As they look ahead to having enough data to present and “analyze” (you lose points if there’s not some kind of computing of a mean, preferably accompanied by bar graphs — heaven help the child exploring a question which yields qualitative results), I figured we should check in with some notes from the experimental trenches.

The younger Free-Ride offspring has been studying mold-growth on a selection of breads under various conditions (including exposure to light, air flow, moisture, and temperature).

Mold has grown (and on some but not all of the samples — so there will be differences to explain). Quantifying the amount of mold that has grown on a sample (either by counting wee spots or by using a ruler to measure moldy regions) and recording those data in the lab notebook takes rather longer than the younger Free-Ride offspring had anticipated. Also, while the younger Free-Ride offspring digs wearing the powdered latex gloves to handle the bread samples, the fact that the moldy bread has a distinctive (and unpleasant) odor was a complete surprise.

Dr. Free-Ride’s better half is concerned that this is evidence that we have sheltered our kids from the normal operations of the natural world.

The elder Free-Ride offspring’s study of whether a rabbit (this rabbit) relies more on sight or smell to locate treats hit a little bit of a snag. The original experiment involved putting treats (or non-treats) in hard plastic vessels –some of them clear, others not, some with slots in them (making it possible to smell what’s inside the container), others completely sealed up — and to observe and record Snowflake’s reaction.

From those early trials, we learned that Snowflake was pretty quick in her assessment that she couldn’t get inside those containers herself. Secure in that knowledge, she would give up and start munching the timothy hay in her run. Moreover, she discovered that within about 15 minutes of her giving up, the elder Free-Ride offspring would also give up and remove those annoyingly impossible containers from the run — often giving the rabbit one of the treats when the containers were extracted.

Clearly, the rabbit was too smart for the original experimental design.

However, within the last week the elder Free-Ride offspring has been constructing mini bales of timothy hay, some with treats in them and some not, and has observed Snowflake’s differential reaction to them. Ultimately, the data analysis here may require coming up with a scale of smelliness (i.e., of how easy or hard particular treats are to smell). We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, I’m making sure both Free-Ride offspring consult literature relevant to the systems they are studying. And I’m getting a new can of spray adhesive so that the display-board assembly proceed without incident.

On the targeting of undergraduates by animal rights extremists (and the dangers of victim-blaming).

This morning, the Speaking of Research blog brings news of an undergraduate science major targeted for daring to give voice to her commitments:

Earlier this week, the animal rights extremist group at NegotiationisOver.com posted an email they received from Alena – an undergraduate student at Florida Atlantic University – in response to their attempts to solicit local activists to attend an animal rights event:

Actually, I’m an undergrad researcher aiming to work at Scripps [Research Institute]! I currently test on animals and think that it is perfectly fine. In fact, it is the one of the only ways that we, scientists, can test drugs in order to treat human diseases. I’m sure someone in your family or even a friend you know has suffered from a disease or pathology that was treated (or cured) by medicines THAT ONLY CAME INTO EXISTENCE BECAUSE OF ANIMAL TESTING.

First off, we applaud Alena for standing up for what she believes in and for expressing support for the humane use of animals in research aimed at addressing the health and welfare of humans and animals alike. Not surprisingly, however, NIO launched an offensive of degrading and hateful emotional abuse that caused Alena to plead for them to:

…please stop saying such horrible, untrue things about me. It’s hurtful.

In response, they no doubt ratcheted up the threats, causing Alena to:

…denounc[e] animal testing and my involvement in it…. I will be looking for other career choices.

Not unlike perpetrators of child and spouse abuse who use fear of further attacks to ensure silence in their victims, NIO hopes that flooding the email boxes of young people with obscenities and rabid missives will ensure that the voices of scientists of tomorrow are suppressed. Even for NIO, this is a new low, and Speaking of Research sharply condemns those who chose to act like shameless bullies when harassing, threatening and intimidating any student, researcher or faculty member.

I’m guessing at least some readers, reading this, are thinking to themselves (or hollering at the computer screen), “Well, what did she expect? You can’t engage rationally with animal rights extremists! Sending that email to the extremist website was a rookie mistake, and now she’ll know better.”

Undergraduates may well be “rookies” in certain respects, but damned if I’m going to encourage my undergraduate students to give up hopes of rational engagement with the other people with whom they have to share a world. Giving up on rational engagement is how you end up with the current state of politics and “governance” in the United States. We can do better.

Anyway, I hope that a moment’s reflection will persuade you that blaming the victim of the harassment here is just as inappropriate as blaming victims of bullying or rape. “If she had just done X, Y, or Z differently, this wouldn’t have happened to her!” Coming at it this way may convince you that you are safe from such harassment because of how you are doing X, Y, and Z. You aren’t. The extremists can decide to target you regardless of what you do or don’t do.

Really.

The undergraduate targeted here by extremists was involved in research with fruit flies. And extremists have targeted scientists who no longer perform animal research (and their children). Indeed, they have targeted people who don’t do scientific research at all (like me) who have dared to express the view that animal research might be the most ethical of our options.

The extremists are not choosing targets because of what they do or how they do it. Rather, just existing in the public square with a view different from theirs seems to be enough.

Indeed, the extremist website Negotiation is Over offers its readers step by step advice on how to target undergraduate students in the life sciences:

How to Shut Down Vivisectors-In-Training in Three Easy Steps

  1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.
  2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.
  3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

We need to begin to actively identify those enrolled in scientific disciplines and isolate the students preparing for or involved in biological research. We need to get into the universities and speak to classes. This poses a minor, but not insurmountable, obstacle for many activists that have been trespassed, banned, or TROed. We need to team up with other aggressive campaigners who excel at engaging and educating. We need to implement a “good cop, bad cop” approach to keep our targets off balance and maximize our effectiveness.

Let’s take this point by point.

1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.

We start with a recognition that the undergraduates being targeted want to help people. But in the very next sentence, we get a picture of the established researchers deliberately indoctrinating these young do-gooders to transform them into gleeful animal torturers. (There’s no explanation here of how the grown-up researchers — themselves presumably once dewy-eyed undergraduates who wanted to save humanity — became evil.)

For the good of these young people, the extremists must intervene and “educate these young scientists with truth”.

It would be one thing if this were just a matter of dueling fact-sheets. Of course, one of the things we hope we’re teaching our undergraduates is how to be critical consumers of information. Among other things, we want them to recognize that the facts are not determined by who shouts the loudest.* So whatever claims the extremists — or their professors — make about animal research are only as good as the evidence that backs them up, and finding that evidence may require the student to do some legwork.

I’m OK with that. Moreover, I trust my students to reflect on the best information they can find, to reflect on their own values, and to make the best choices they can.

The extremists, though, want to influence those choices with more than just “the facts” as they see them:

2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.

Please note that these threats are not tied to any particular kind of animal research — to research that causes especially high pain and distress, or to research with nonhuman primates, or to research that violates the prevailing regulations. Rather, the bombs, home demonstrations, and targeting of family members are being threatened for any involvement in animal research at all.

The extremists do not have a nuanced view. Merely existing with a view of animal research that differs from theirs is provocation enough for them.

And, they are happy to make their case with threats and intimidation — which suggests that maybe they can’t make that case on the basis of the fact.

3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

Who needs facts when you have cyber-bullying?

Indeed, the extremists are pretty clear in advocating “smear campaigns” that they are happy to lie to get their way, and that “abusers-to-be” (that is, anyone who doesn’t already agree with the extremist position, or who hasn’t decided to totally disengage) have no right to privacy or peace of mind.

Again, I suspect a reader or two in my age group may be thinking, “Well, if those whippersnappers didn’t post so much information about themselves on the Facebooks and the MySpaces and the Tumblrs, they wouldn’t get into this trouble, dagnabit!” But note again the willingness of the extremists to engage in smear campaigns. They don’t need to find embarrassing pictures, videos, or posts, because they can make stuff up about you.

And, regardless of how much online time undergraduates spend in what I (or you) would judge “overshare” mode, I am not willing to tell them that the best way to deal with extremists is to go into actual or virtual hiding. I am not prepared to cede the public square, the marketplace of ideas, or the classroom discussion to the extremists.

Disagreement is not a crime, nor a sin.

Threatening and harassing people because they disagree with you, on the other hand, is a pretty lousy way to be part of the human community. Calling this behavior out when we see it is part of what we grown-ups ought to be doing, not just to set an example for the grown-ups-in-training, but also to do our part in creating the world those grown-ups-in-training deserve.

——
* The one obvious exception here: the fact of which side is shouting the loudest is determined by which side is shouting the loudest.

 

Midweek self-criticism: what about that logic and critical reasoning course?

Back in mid-December, a reader emailed:

If I remember right, you were at one point talking about teaching a course on logic, scientific method[s], etc. If so, and if it happened this semester, is it possible to get a copy of the syllabus? It sounded interesting, and I once taught such a course and might in the future.

On the other hand, maybe I remember wrong, and you’re wondering WTF I’m talking about. In that case, uh… um… Happy Holidays!! that’s the ticket.

My correspondent did, in fact, remember correctly that I was discussing the planning of this course, although that discussion here pretty much stopped when my semester commenced kicking my butt.

In any event, given that I taught the course fall semester, it was planned at least enough that I was able to deliver it to the enrolled students. How did that go?

I would not describe it as an unqualified success.

One issue was that it was really hard to fully integrate the two distinct threads of the course (distinct threads which, as I noted, flowed from the laundry list of learning objectives for the course’s general education area). On the one hand, we were concerned with critical reasoning, grappling with actual “arguments in the wild”, recognizing strengths and weaknesses of such arguments (including many flavors of informal fallacies), and having the students develop their own skills in framing arguments of their own, often in response to the arguments put forward by others. On the other hand, we were tackling the formal properties of arguments — which meant mucking around with symbolic logic, truth-tables, truth-trees, methods of proof, and the like.

I’m sure there exist approaches to weave these two threads together, if not seamlessly, then with more success than I had.

However, a pretty serious stumbling block for me was the fact that maybe half of the students had a fairly easy time with the symbolic logic, while the other half struggled with it. And, it’s hard to find the time to illuminate the connections when you’re working on getting the basic idea across (and when it’s taking at least three times longer than you had hoped it would take).

If I had to do it again (and I might!), I’d be tempted to split up the semester into two distinct blocks, the first focused entirely on the formal properties of arguments, and the second on “arguments in the wild”. Getting what seems to be the harder material out of the way might open up some space to then see how it connects to the natural language argumentation with which the students are more at home.

It might also result in a lot of the students who are most freaked out by the symbolic logic dropping the course within the first couple weeks, but I had a bunch of people hoping spaces would open up so they could add the course. Front-loading the difficult material might actually be a kindness to the students who recognize their inability or unwillingness to deal with it, so they could drop the course before drop day.

I was pleasantly surprised at the students’ ability to engage with arguments in English (as opposed to Ps and Qs). Both in class discussions and in their essays, they did quite well at identifying the premises that were being put forward to support a conclusion, at zeroing in on implicit premises, at finding places where the link between premises and conclusions was not as strong as the person making the argument would have you believe, and at mounting persuasive counterarguments of their own. In other words, they demonstrated their ability to bring critical thinking to their reading of the op-ed page. This is a very good thing indeed.

On the other hand, some of the students hadn’t figured out how to ask good questions (or in some cases, any questions) about material they were having trouble understanding (again, mostly the symbolic logic stuff). This became painful in the class meetings and review sessions devoted to helping them get clear on the concepts and skills on which they were unclear. If you can’t even tell me which problems from the homework you want to see worked on the board, or whether, once you see they worked on the board, they make more sense to you, then I need telepathic powers to figure out how to help you learn this stuff.

Sadly, I do not have telepathic powers.

As it shook out, I don’t think I’d use my own syllabus again. Still, I will probably come up with a couple drafts of syllabi for the next iteration of the course. One will try to address the issues I discovered with the particular student population I had. The other, to satisfy my hunger for Platonic ideal forms (one of which must exist for a logic and critical reasoning course), will propose the mix of topics and activities I’d want to teach with no regard for externally imposed learning objectives or for the existence of students who might actually be resistant to spending more than the minimum time and effort on learning the material (and maybe even caring about it).

I reckon that drafting those syllabi would be a nice diversion from the mountains of grading. When it happens, I’ll post them here.

Tuesday headdesk.

Did you ever go to your class and give what feels like a really good lecture on the reading (because the students look engaged, and they’re asking really good questions about both the specifics and the big picture) …

And, it feels like it’s connecting in a really effective way to issues discussed in the last class meeting (simultaneously reinforcing some of those points and challenging them) …

And, you didn’t even really have to dip into your list of half a dozen current situations that raise similar kinds of questions, because the students are all over it and have raised half a dozen such current situations of their own …

Only to discover
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