Standards-Based Leadership Preparation Program Involvement Through the Use of Portfolio Assessments

The school principal’s role has changed dramatically in the past few decades, moving away from management issues and into responsibilities related to leading school reform and facilitating student learning

The transmembrane protein Off-track 2 is implicated in the guidance of embryonic motor neurons

An essential component of nervous system development entails the projection of axons from neuronal cell bodies to other cells, including other neurons and muscles, resulting in functional circuitry. Drosophila have been indispensible in identifying the proteins underlying axon guidance, which depends on receptors on the surface of growth cones detecting attractive and repulsive ligands. A substantial proportion of this research has utilized embryonic motor neurons, which, in numbering just ~40 per hemisegment, constitute a particularly intelligible system. Bioinformatic analyses of the Drosophila proteome have revealed uncharacterized proteins that might be implicated in axon guidance. These possess the same domains as established molecules and are localized to the cell surface. Proteins meeting these criteria that are also paralogous to established axon guidance molecules and that are expressed in similar spatiotemporal patterns are especially promising candidates. Off-track 2, the focus of the current study, is one such candidate, which has recently been shown to co-precipitate with the putative axon guidance molecule, Off-track. The excision of a P-element located 28 bp upstream of the 5’ UTR of off-track 2 resulted in the appearance of several nucleotides within the promoter region that differ from those of the parent or wild type sequences. Immunohistochemistry revealed that embryos of this line exhibit highly penetrant phenotypes within a number of motor neuron branches; most notably, the ISNb fails to defasciculate from the ISN in ~75% of hemisegments, though several other branches, including the FB and SB, are absent almost to the same extent. The phenotypes of this line mirror those of embryos with a deficiency spanning the gene, suggesting the altered nucleotides resulted in a loss-of-function, presumably by disrupting transcription. Driving Off-track 2 in somatic musculature caused stalling of the ISNb at various choice points, resulting in reduced innervation of the ventral lateral muscles. While these findings suggest Off-track 2 contributes to the pathfinding behavior of embryonic motor neurons, ongoing work is focused on determining the precise role of Off-track 2 in axon guidance

Using Spatial Analyses to Examine Student Proficiency: Guiding District Consolidation and Reform Policy Decisions

Nationally, all districts, regardless of their size, face the challenge to ensure that all students have access to a quality education. However, some characterize the alternatives for rural families as being between schools that are too small or too far away, and for urban families as being between schools that are too large or too far away. State policies to equalize educational spending, cap bond and levy rates, require common teacher salary schedules, and consolidate school districts are geared toward improving quality and attempting to resolve problems of inefficiency. However, despite the use of the state policy to equalize educational quality, educational gaps persist. The most identifiable achievement differences between and among school districts are well documented and result from variations in (a) teacher quality; (b) teacher mobility; (c) student characteristics, like poverty, ethnicity, gender, and mobility; and (d) community wealth (Goldhaber & Anthony, 2004; Haselton, 2004; Parcel & Dufur, 2004; Uribe, 2003, 2004)

District Strategic Teaming: Leadership for Systemic and Sustainable Reform

Reform efforts in schools have become increasingly focused on the nature and direction of teamwork in efforts to achieve sustained and systemic districtwide capacity for innovation and needed change. The six-year study reported in this article involved development, implementation, and assessment of a unique collaborative process for districtwide reform in some of the most challenging and fluid educational settings in the United States of America. This reform process, called District Strategic Teaming, involved a representative vertical cross-section of members from the district office to school-based support staff. Participating schools are located in isolated, rural communities in the south-eastern region of the United States of America that experience high rates of teacher turnover and serve student populations living in abject poverty. Despite these challenges, the longitudinal study revealed substantive improvement in organizational culture and reduction of systemic barriers for innovation through the process described in this article

ConSpec: honing in on critical steps for rapid learning and generalization in RL

In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. These critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods that rely on the Bellman equation for credit assignment. Here, we present a new RL algorithm that uses offline contrastive learning to hone in on critical steps. This algorithm, which we call contrastive introspection (ConSpec), can be added to any existing RL algorithm. ConSpec learns a set of prototypes for the critical steps in a task by a novel contrastive loss and delivers an intrinsic reward when the current state matches one of these prototypes. The prototypes in ConSpec provide two key benefits for credit assignment: (1) They enable rapid identification of all the critical steps. (2) They do so in a readily interpretable manner, enabling out-of-distribution generalization when sensory features are altered. Distinct from other contemporary RL approaches to credit assignment, ConSpec takes advantage of the fact that it is easier to retrospectively identify the small set of steps that success is contingent upon than it is to prospectively predict reward at every step taken in the environment. Altogether, ConSpec improves learning in a diverse set of RL tasks, including both those with explicit, discrete critical steps and those with complex, continuous critical steps

The extracellular Leucine-Rich Repeat superfamily; a comparative survey and analysis of evolutionary relationships and expression patterns

Correction to Dolan J, Walshe K, Alsbury S, Hokamp K, O'Keeffe S, Okafuji T, Miller SF, Tear G, Mitchell KJ: The extracellular leucine-rich repeat superfamily; a comparative survey and analysis of evolutionary relationships and expression patterns. BMC Genomics 2007, 8:320

Food Pirates: An exploration of food, technology and the future through sequential art

This document serves as accompaniment and commentary for the exhibition, “Food Pirates. Food, Technology, Pirates and the Future” which was shown March 29th through April 9th, 2017 at Design on Main in Ames, Iowa. The work comprised of the first issue of the comic book series, Food Pirates. This document serves as a supplement to the exhibit, examining background material used to build the world the comic is set in, current and historical practices in the comics industry, influences, and processes used to create the finished work. This body of work is an exploration of what happens when I attempt to blend my need to build systems and organize chaos, with my love of technology, and the satisfaction I find in working with both words and images. It starts with a bunch of questions about food, the future, and pirates.</p

The implementation of the EC directive on environmental assessment in England and Wales With particular reference to the bulk minerals industry

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX191947 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Letter to Sam Houston to intercede in matters with Andrew Jackson

[ SAM HOUSTON] Letter written to Sam Houston, signed by Thomas J. Alsbury, dated June 25, 1843, Big Creek. Time dealt with here is the latter part of 1839. Alsbury drew Jackson at this time and owes him 1000 dollars; Ahbury doesn't have the money, and offers to give Jackson land in payment of this debt. Alsbury asks Houston to intercede in matter, since he is a citizen of Texas. 3 pp

Top Five Issues in District Governance Influencing Sustainable Success

2012/04/30. School of Education Spring Forum. Professor of Education Leadership