My MLA at 20

Highlights of my 20th MLA conference - the 83rd Music Library Association meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia, Feb-Mar 2014. Sessions I attended included: Stanford University\u27s re-design of their music library website; representation of women scholars in musicological publications (Suzanne Moulton-Gertig); research into women collectors of Irish traditional music (Margaret Erickson); What NOT to Wear: MLA Interview Edition (Mistie Shaw, Susannah Cleveland, Mark Puente); RDA and Public Services (Elizabeth Hill Cribbs, Sonia Archer-Capuzzo, Patricia Falk) and Stop Reinventing the Wheel: An Online Repository for Music Information Literacy (Andi Beckendorf, Sara J. Beutter Manus, Clayton Crenshaw, Brian McMillan, Nancy Zavac

Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results: Three Lessons from California's Highest Achieving High Schools

Springboard Schools' New Report Reveals 3 Secrets that Help Low-Income, English-Learning, and Minority Students SucceedTen "challenged" high schools in California beat the oddsSpringboard Schools, a San Francisco-based nonprofit and non-partisan research organization focused on education reform, today released a new report identifying California's highest achieving, challenged high schools - those with large numbers of low-income students, English learners, and few resources. Most importantly, the report reveals the three secrets of their success.According to the report, Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results: Three Lessons from California's Highest Achieving High Schools, these schools, unlike average high schools with similar demographics, share three secrets of success: use of consistent curricula coupled with frequent diagnostic tests, adoption of best practices, and investment in teacher improvement. The three practices resulted in dramatic gains for these high schools serving large populations of low-income, minority, and English-language learners."These strategies sound simple, but they are challenging and even revolutionary, because they call into question many commonly held beliefs about teaching and about how high schools work," said Merrill Vargo, executive director of Springboard Schools.The report identifies 10 high-performing, challenged California high schools. They are located throughout the state, and all have recently made dramatic turnarounds in student achievement. At one, Bolsa Grande High School (Garden Grove USD), with high populations of English-language learners and low-income students, 57.4% of all students scored at the proficient or advanced-proficient level for English Language Arts and math this year -- more than 2-1/2 times better than the 2005 AYP target under NCLB.The report also reveals that the definition of "best practices" - which traditionally meant classroom-level practices or programs - needs to be dramatically expanded to include every aspect of administration, teaching, and testing, at every level.More information, and the 73-page report, Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results: Three Lessons from California's Highest Achieving High Schools, are available on Springboard Schools' website: www.SpringboardSchools.org

A new, more efficient waterwheel design for very-low-head hydropower schemes

Very-low-head hydropower constitutes a large untapped renewable energy source, estimated at 1 GW in the UK alone. A new type of low-impact waterwheel has been developed and tested at Abertay University in Scotland to improve the economic viability of such schemes. For example, on a 2·5 m high weir in the UK with 5 m3/s mean flow, one waterwheel could produce an annual investment return of 7·5% for over 100 years. This paper describes the evolution of the design and reports on scale-model tests. These show that the new design harnesses significant potential and kinetic energy to generate power and handles over four times as much water per metre width compared to traditional designs

Erlang Code Evolution Control

During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules, so it can be difficult to know whether the correct behaviour of the previous releases has been preserved in the new release. Most developers rely on a previously defined test suite to check this behaviour preservation. We propose here an alternative approach to automatically obtain a test suite that specifically focusses on comparing the old and new versions of the code. Our test case generation is directed by a sophisticated combination of several already existing tools such as TypEr, CutEr, and PropEr; and other ideas such as allowing the programmer to chose an expression of interest that must preserve the behaviour, or the recording of the sequences of values to which this expression is evaluated. All the presented work has been implemented in an open-source tool that is publicly available on GitHub.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854

Reinventing The WHEEL: How Securitization Can Bolster The Market For Residential Energy Efficiency Loans

Currently, one of society’s greatest goals is the reduction of greenhouse gases. This goal is generally accepted worldwide, as evidenced by the Paris Climate Agreement, the parties to which agreed to establish frameworks for adopting clean energy and reducing greenhouse gases. After the United States’ controversial decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the federal government’s future in reducing greenhouse gases remains uncertain. Despite this setback, there are existing programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gases in the United States that the government should ensure succeed. One such program is the Warehouse for Energy Efficiency Loans (“WHEEL”). WHEEL operates as a multistate public-private partnership, sharing resources to provide “unsecured loans to single-family homeowners with credit-score based underwriting and public credit enhancement.” WHEEL’s goal is to “increase the rate of retrofitting of the nation’s single family housing stock” in order to bolster home efficiency and thus reduce greenhouse gases. Such retrofitting includes the replacement and upgrade of energy-efficient heating and cooling systems. To achieve this, WHEEL relies on securitization, tapping into the secondary markets to bolster investments in residential energy efficiency loans. Despite the benefits of WHEEL, the program has been slow to launch. One major problem hindering WHEEL’s potential is the Credit Risk Retention Rule (the “Rule”) promulgated under Section 15G of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Rule requires WHEEL sponsors to maintain a 5% minimum credit risk interest in any asset they convey to a third party. As a result of this requirement, private WHEEL sponsors will stop providing capital, due to increased risk exposure, and public WHEEL sponsors will continually use their Program Income from WHEEL to ensure that they have adequate capital to meet the risk-retention requirement. This will hinder the growth of energy efficiency loans because WHEEL sponsors would otherwise be able to recycle program income back into WHEEL, ultimately growing the program. Loans secured under the WHEEL program should be exempted from recent Dodd-Frank Risk Retention requirements for three main reasons: (1) WHEEL does not require an additional monitoring incentive; (2) WHEEL meetsthe rationale for exemption under 15 U.S.C. § 78o-11(e)(2); and (3) advanced institutional investors do not require additional protection

Electric vehicle drive-by-wire solution for distributed steering, braking and throttle control

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.In this paper, we propose CityCarControl, a system to manage the steering, braking, and throttle of a new class of intra-city electric vehicles. These vehicles have a focus on extreme light-weight and a small parking footprint. In order to maximize maneuverability within a city environment, we show the feasibility of omnidirectional steering, and the integration of a folding chassis. Furthermore, we apply traditionally programming best-practice techniques to simplify the design of the control system. Specifically, we present the concept of a modular, fail-silent wheel-robot with a standardized API responsible for controlling steering, braking and throttle within the vehicle.by Thomas B. Brown.M.Eng

‘Public bodies climate change duties’ pre‐consultation workshops report

The final report produced after the consultation is entitled 'Public bodies climate change duties : putting them into practice'.The Climate Change (Scotland) Act requires that Scottish Ministers provide guidance to relevant public bodies in relation to their climate change duties and that those bodies must have regard to such guidance. A public consultation on draft Scottish Government guidance will take place in summer 2010. In advance of that a series of pre-consultation workshops were held across Scotland.Publisher PD

Insights from College Algebra Students' Reinvention of Limit at Infinity

The limit concept in calculus has received a lot of attention from mathematics education researchers, partly due to its position in mathematics curricula as an entry point to calculus and partly due to its complexities that students often struggle to understand. Most of this research focuses on students who had previously studied calculus or were enrolled in a calculus course at the time of the study. In this study, I aimed to gain insights into how students with no prior experience with precalculus or calculus might think about limits via the concept of limit at infinity, with the goal of designing instructional tasks based on these students’ intuitive strategies and ways of reasoning. In particular, I designed a sequence of instructional tasks that starts with an experientially realistic starting point that involves describing the behavior of changing quantities in real-world physical situations. From there, the instructional tasks build on the students’ ways of reasoning through tasks involving making predictions about the values of the quantity and identifying characteristics associated with making good predictions. These instructional tasks were developed through three iterations of design research experimentation. Each iteration included a teaching experiment in which a pair of students engaged in the instructional tasks under my guidance. Through ongoing and reflective analysis, the instructional tasks were refined to evoke the students’ intuitive strategies and ways of thinking and to leverage these toward developing a definition for the concept of limit at infinity. The final, refined sequence of instructional tasks together with my rationale for each task and expected student responses provides insights into how students can come to understand the concept of limit at infinity in a way that is consistent with the formal definition prior to receiving formal instruction on limits. The results presented in this dissertation come from the third and final teaching experiment, in which Jon and Lexi engaged in the sequence of instructional tasks. Although Jon and Lexi did not construct a definition of limit at infinity consistent with a formal definition, they demonstrated many strategies and ways of reasoning that anticipate the formal definition of limit at infinity. These include identifying a limit candidate, defining the notion of closeness, describing the notion of sufficiently large, and coordinating the notion of closeness in the range with the notion of sufficiently large in the domain. On the other hand, Jon and Lexi demonstrated some strategies and ways of reasoning that potentially inhibited their development of a definition consistent with the formal definition. Pedagogical implications on instruction in calculus and its prerequisites are discussed as well as contributions to the field and potential directions for future research

Modes of Listening and their Implications to Audience Experience of Orchestral Concerts, with a Case Study of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra

Although listeners adopt similar behaviours according to sociocultural norms in the concert hall, they do not all experience an orchestral performance in the same way. Stockfelts theory of Adequate Modes of Listening provides the framework necessary to examine contemporary listening practices in the modern orchestral context, and provides an alternative to the dominant marketing paradigm. Using a representative case study of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the current research performs interviews, document survey and analysis, and concert observation to answer questions such as; do facilitators, orchestra, and audience members agree on a single (or related group) of genre-normative modes of listening? What happens when there is a breakdown in the assumed sociocultural conventions? How can the orchestra facilitate its listeners? By examining the way in which a listener experiences orchestral music, we can strengthen our understanding of contemporary listening practices and develop nuanced approaches to promoting sustainable audiences

The State of Science-and-Religion Scholarship At The Turn of the Century

In this keynote address to the 2000 Science and Religion Colloquium, the author not only describes and assesses the state of religion-and-science scholarship at the turn of the century hut also proposes a new approach for guiding it into the new century. After surveying the multifaceted terrain of recent research and identifying significant areas of current activity, Dr. Wildman forwards three theses regarding the future of religion-and-science scholarship. Such scholarship should make itself intelligible to the general public by avoiding methodological debates, employ multi-disciplinary resources in approaching research questions, and adopt a problem-oriented framework in handling complex, contemporary problems