348 research outputs found
Teachersâ Views of their Preparation for Inclusive Education and Collaboration
There is a need to advance inclusive education for students with significant disabilities, and one
way to support this effort is to ensure educators have expertise in, and are prepared to implement,
inclusive practices. We surveyed and interviewed general and special education teachers to
understand their experiences and preparation to demonstrate skills associated with inclusive
education and collaboration and identify the factors that may contribute to their preparation.
There was a relationship between educatorsâ preparedness for inclusive education and whether
they have taken university courses or had special training on inclusive education. Analysis of
interviews with a subset of participants supported this finding and provided a deeper
understanding of the educatorsâ preparation and experiences in implementing inclusive practices
for students with significant disabilities
Peculiar Velocities of Galaxy Clusters
We investigate the peculiar velocities predicted for galaxy clusters by
theories in the cold dark matter family. A widely used hypothesis identifies
rich clusters with high peaks of a suitably smoothed version of the linear
density fluctuation field. Their peculiar velocities are then obtained by
extrapolating the similarly smoothed linear peculiar velocities at the
positions of these peaks. We test these ideas using large high resolution
N-body simulations carried out within the Virgo supercomputing consortium. We
find that at early times the barycentre of the material which ends up in a rich
cluster is generally very close to a high peak of the initial density field.
Furthermore the mean peculiar velocity of this material agrees well with the
linear value at the peak. The late-time growth of peculiar velocities is,
however, systematically underestimated by linear theory. At the time clusters
are identified we find their rms peculiar velocity to be about 40% larger than
predicted. Nonlinear effects are particularly important in superclusters. These
systematics must be borne in mind when using cluster peculiar velocities to
estimate the parameter combination .Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; submitted to MNRA
CANNABIS USE AMONG A SAMPLE OF 16 TO 18 YEAR-OLD STUDENTS IN SWITZERLAND
Background: The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of cannabis use among Swiss students and to assess their
attitudes regarding health and safety issues associated with drug use.
Subjects and methods: After a workshop, 173 students (23.1% male, 75.7% female; 44.4% age 16, 43.8% age 17 and 11.8% age
18) from a Swiss school were surveyed by questionnaire.
Results: 59.3% (n=103) of all participants had tried cannabis, and 30.1% of those who reported cannabis use had consumed
more than 100 joints. Of those 103 students with cannabis experience, 6.8% rated the risk of cannabis-related psychic effects as low,
and 9.8% were not concerned about driving under the influence of cannabis. In cases of heavy cannabis use, the chance of increased
tobacco, alcohol or other drug use is higher than for those with less or no cannabis use at all (odds ratios of 4.33-10.86).
Conclusions: This paper deals primarily with cannabis prevalence data in adolescents from previous studies and sources, and
shows that our findings deviate significantly - and surprisingly - from past research. Our data from a school survey indicates higher
cannabis use than data from official drug policy studies. Additionally, our data shows that the studentsâ self-reported attitudes
towards health and safety issues were mostly realistic. The examination of methodological issues that might impact prevalence
estimates should be added to the cannabis literature
The Debye-Waller Factor in solid 3He and 4He
The Debye-Waller factor and the mean-squared displacement from lattice sites
for solid 3He and 4He were calculated with Path Integral Monte Carlo at
temperatures between 5 K and 35 K, and densities between 38 nm^(-3) and 67
nm^(-3). It was found that the mean-squared displacement exhibits finite-size
scaling consistent with a crossover between the quantum and classical limits of
N^(-2/3) and N^(-1/3), respectively. The temperature dependence appears to be
T^3, different than expected from harmonic theory. An anisotropic k^4 term was
also observed in the Debye-Waller factor, indicating the presence of
non-Gaussian corrections to the density distribution around lattice sites. Our
results, extrapolated to the thermodynamic limit, agree well with recent values
from scattering experiments.Comment: 5 figure
Short time evolved wave functions for solving quantum many-body problems
The exact ground state of a strongly interacting quantum many-body system can
be obtained by evolving a trial state with finite overlap with the ground state
to infinite imaginary time. In this work, we use a newly discovered fourth
order positive factorization scheme which requires knowing both the potential
and its gradients. We show that the resultaing fourth order wave function
alone, without further iterations, gives an excellent description of strongly
interacting quantum systems such as liquid 4He, comparable to the best
variational results in the literature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
Effects of Pore Walls and Randomness on Phase Transitions in Porous Media
We study spin models within the mean field approximation to elucidate the
topology of the phase diagrams of systems modeling the liquid-vapor transition
and the separation of He--He mixtures in periodic porous media. These
topologies are found to be identical to those of the corresponding random field
and random anisotropy spin systems with a bimodal distribution of the
randomness. Our results suggest that the presence of walls (periodic or
otherwise) are a key factor determining the nature of the phase diagram in
porous media.Comment: REVTeX, 11 eps figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
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