Students\u27 Reflection on Community Service Learning

Internships are a rapidly expanding educational technique to enhance students\u27 ability to learn. Internships permit and encourage students to experience the real world while receiving academic credit. Seekonk High School in Seekonk, Massachusetts, has an internship program for high school seniors called Independent Study. It allows students to leave school one day a week for the school year and volunteer within the community. Students receive academic credit for their participation in community service learning

Development and Evaluation of a Mentoring Framework for Technology & Engineering Teachers in Alpine School District

It’s the beginning of a new school year. Administrators are preparing teacher trainings and best procedures and policies for their students. Thoughtful counselors methodically plan the right schedule so students can have the most success. The group with the most excitement might just be the students. Who will be in your class? Who will be your new teacher? What will your classroom be decorated like? Do you have all of the needed supplies? Then we come to the last group: the teachers. For the teachers, there is also a lot of excitement within this group accompanied by some worry and apprehension. For the veteran teachers, there is excitement, to start over with new kids and the new opportunities to learn and teach. New teachers finally get to do what they have been studying and preparing for the past few years. Their name is on the door. The new teachers are responsible for these kids. Are they ready for this? Do these new teachers have the right lesson plans? Do they have enough teaching skills to pull this off? This scenario illustrates the need for and benefit of new teacher mentoring programs. Mentoring programs are designed to help reassure and enable new teachers that they can be successful. Mentors visit new teachers, giving help and aid wherever possible. Often this aid comes in the form of collaboration and the sharing of experience. Mentors share ideas on classroom organization, classroom management, lesson delivery method, interaction with parents, and what lessons to teach. Beyond collaboration, mentors observe how new teachers’ lessons are taught to provide positive feedback and constructive criticism

Leave School and Learn : Seekonk High School\u27s Independent Study Program

Change comes slowly to education. Schools are bound by tradition and a high school curriculum often remains constant. There are many reasons for a curriculun1 not changing, including meeting the course pre-requisites for college admission. Often, however, there is a resistance to change. As a result, many students take the same courses as their parents took when in school

Mineralogy and composition of the upper mantle

Seismic velocities are calculated for two petrological models of the upper mantle, an olivine-rich assemblage, pyrolite, and a garnet-clinopyroxene rich, olivine bearing, assemblage, piclogite. These are compared with recent seismic profiles for various tectonic provinces. The shield data is most consistent with a cold olivine and orthopyroxene-rich LID (the seismic lithosphere) extending to 150 km followed by a high temperature gradient and/or a change in mineralogy that serves to decrease the velocity. From 200 to 400 km the velocities follow a 1400°C adiabat. The rise-tectonic mantle is much slower, presumably hotter and is likely to be above the solidus to depths of at least 300 km. The high V_p/V_s ratio of the lower oceanic lithosphere in the western Pacific is most consistent with eclogite

Composition of the upper mantle: Geophysical tests of two petrological models

The elastic properties of candidate mantle phases are used to test the viability of olivine-rich (pyrolitic) and CaO + Al_2O_3-rich (eclogitic) assemblages for the mantle. High temperature adiabats for each phase of interest are constructed and compared to mantle seismic properties. Both pyrolitic and eclogitic assemblages satisfy the seismic properties between ∼ 200 and 400 km. Between 400 and 670 km depth an eclogitic assemblage yields a superior match to velocities and velocity gradients. The 400 km seismic discontinuity may represent a chemical boundary between pyrolite and picritic eclogite (“piclogite”) or phase transformations in the olivine + orthopyroxene components of a piclogitic assemblage containing about 16% olivine. High velocity gradients in the transition zone may be explained by the transformation of Ca-rich cpx to majorite garnet. Seismic properties at the top of the lower mantle are consistent with pyrolite, piclogite or perovskite, implying that the 670 km discontinuity may be a chemical boundary

Cardiac Resuscitation: Examining rural heartland development through an ecological lens

Throughout southwest Iowa, prime farm land is being sold and then purchased by local real estate developers. These developers are creating housing clusters throughout the countryside, especially in the rural Loess Hills area. These housing clusters have similar covenant restrictions imposed by the developers, but few if any address larger and more critical architectural, social, environmental and ecological issues. Recently one of these developers purchased some land from my family for this very reason. Knowing what will happen to this land, I chose to devote my efforts in order to provide a better, more eco-friendly solution to the inevitable consequences which will transform this land

Reaching the End of the White Dwarf Cooling Sequence in NGC 6791

We present new observations of the white dwarf sequence of the old open cluster NGC 6791. The brighter peak previously observed in the white dwarf luminosity function (WDLF) is now better delineated, and the second, fainter peak that we suggested earlier is now confirmed. A careful study suggests that we have reached the end of the white dwarf sequence. The WDs that create the two peaks in the WDLF show a significant turn to the blue in the color-magnitude diagram. The discrepancy between the age from the WDs and that from the main sequence turnoff remains, and we have an additional puzzle in the second peak in the WDLF. Canonical WD models seem to fail --at least at ~25%-level-- in reproducing the age of clusters of this metallicity. We discuss briefly possible ways of arriving at a theoretical understanding of the WDLF.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures (4 in low resolution), 1 table. Accepted (2007 December 19) on Ap

“Your Picture Looks the Same as My Picture”: An Examination of Passing in Transgender Communities

Transgender people remain one of the groups most susceptible to discrimination in the U.S. Previous studies have examined the discrimination and stress transgender people face, but few studies have examined trans identities using existing sociological theories of marginalized groups and identity formation. Using the theories of Dubois and Cooley, this study explores identity formation in conjunction with the phenomenon of passing among transgender people residing in Nebraska. Results suggest that while trans people do pass as a mechanism for subverting discrimination, there are other factors that influence an individual’s choice and strategy to pass or not. The current investigation lends a sociological perspective on the social aspect of gender presentation and gender visibility for trans individuals in a largely conservative Midwestern state

Quantum rotor theory of spinor condensates in tight traps

In this work, we theoretically construct exact mappings of many-particle bosonic systems onto quantum rotor models. In particular, we analyze the rotor representation of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. In a previous work it was shown that there is an exact mapping of a spin-one condensate of fixed particle number with quadratic Zeeman interaction onto a quantum rotor model. Since the rotor model has an unbounded spectrum from above, it has many more eigenstates than the original bosonic model. Here we show that for each subset of states with fixed spin F_z, the physical rotor eigenstates are always those with lowest energy. We classify three distinct physical limits of the rotor model: the Rabi, Josephson, and Fock regimes. The last regime corresponds to a fragmented condensate and is thus not captured by the Bogoliubov theory. We next consider the semiclassical limit of the rotor problem and make connections with the quantum wave functions through use of the Husimi distribution function. Finally, we describe how to extend the analysis to higher-spin systems and derive a rotor model for the spin-two condensate. Theoretical details of the rotor mapping are also provided here.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Differential gene expression in Varroa jacobsoni mites following a host shift to European honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Background: Varroa mites are widely considered the biggest honey bee health problem worldwide. Until recently, Varroa jacobsoni has been found to live and reproduce only in Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) colonies, while V. destructor successfully reproduces in both A. cerana and A. mellifera colonies. However, we have identified an island population of V. jacobsoni that is highly destructive to A. mellifera, the primary species used for pollination and honey production. The ability of these populations of mites to cross the host species boundary potentially represents an enormous threat to apiculture, and is presumably due to genetic variation that exists among populations of V. jacobsoni that influences gene expression and reproductive status. In this work, we investigate differences in gene expression between populations of V. jacobsoni reproducing on A. cerana and those either reproducing or not capable of reproducing on A. mellifera, in order to gain insight into differences that allow V. jacobsoni to overcome its normal species tropism. Results: We sequenced and assembled a de novo transcriptome of V. jacobsoni. We also performed a differential gene expression analysis contrasting biological replicates of V. jacobsoni populations that differ in their ability to reproduce on A. mellifera. Using the edgeR, EBSeq and DESeq R packages for differential gene expression analysis, we found 287 differentially expressed genes (FDR ≤ 0.05), of which 91% were up regulated in mites reproducing on A. mellifera. In addition, mites found reproducing on A. mellifera showed substantially more variation in expression among replicates. We searched for orthologous genes in public databases and were able to associate 100 of these 287 differentially expressed genes with a functional description. Conclusions: There is differential gene expression between the two mite groups, with more variation in gene expression among mites that were able to reproduce on A. mellifera. A small set of genes showed reduced expression in mites on the A. mellifera host, including putative transcription factors and digestive tract developmental genes. The vast majority of differentially expressed genes were up-regulated in this host. This gene set showed enrichment for genes associated with mitochondrial respiratory function and apoptosis, suggesting that mites on this host may be experiencing higher stress, and may be less optimally adapted to parasitize it. Some genes involved in reproduction and oogenesis were also overexpressed, which should be further studied in regards to this host shift. © 2016 The Author(s)