Building a learning community in first-year class

Those of us who enjoy the interactive lecture technique as well as class activities that do not involve chalk and talk from the professor face a challenge when we enter that first class of the first year introductory history course. Apart from the serried ranks of unknown faces, there is usually a deathly silence. Efforts to create a learning community where even the instructor can be accepted as a well-informed participant seem to require new approaches with every class and still work better in some years than in others. In the ideal learning community, every student, and the professor, would feel at ease and accepted within the class environment

More Than a Flag of Convenience: Acadian Attitudes to Britain and the British Around the Time of Queen Victoria's 1887 Jubilee

In the nineteenth century, the Deportation of 1755 was a vital part of the growing nationalism of francophones in the Canadian Maritimes. However, on 4 May 1887, the Acadian newspaper Moniteur Acadien claimed as an indisputable fact that Her Majesty has no more loyal subjects than the Acadians. Through analysis of newspaper coverage of British news and the Queen's Jubilee celebrations in two Acadian newspapers in New Brunswick, this paper explores aspects of the Acadian attitude to being British, as opposed to being American, Irish, Scottish, or English. It concludes that shared materialism and trade ties were important and a distant unintrusive monarchy was intriguing, but some Acadians also looked to Britain for an accommodation, so far elusive, between Catholic and Protestant and between francophone and anglophone communities in Canada

The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers

Dropping out of high school is correlated with lower employment prospects, teen and young adult pregnancy, and incarceration, according to this research paper's data analysis. Breaking down these outcomes by variables such as race, age, gender, and family income, it becomes clear that the problems are most severe among men and African-Americans. Lastly, the researchers present the economic costs to society of this phenomenon

Techniques for noise removal from EEG, EOG and air flow signals in sleep patients

Noise is present in the wide variety of signals obtained from sleep patients. This noise comes from a number of sources, from presence of extraneous signals to adjustments in signal amplification and shot noise in the circuits used for data collection. The noise needs to be removed in order to maximize the information gained about the patient using both manual and automatic analysis of the signals. Here we evaluate a number of new techniques for removal of that noise, and the associated problem of separating the original signal sources.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Extended Ultraviolet Disks and Ultraviolet-bright Disks in Low-mass E/S0 Galaxies

We have identified 15 extended ultraviolet (XUV) disks in a largely field sample of 38 E/S0 galaxies that have stellar masses primarily below ~4 × 10^(10) M_☉ and comparable numbers on the red and blue sequences. We use a new purely quantitative XUV-disk definition designed with reference to the "Type 1" XUV-disk definition found in the literature, requiring UV extension relative to a UV-defined star formation threshold radius. The 39% ± 9% XUV-disk frequency for these E/S0s is roughly twice the ~20% reported for late-type galaxies (although differences in XUV-disk criteria complicate the comparison), possibly indicating that XUV disks are preferentially associated with galaxies experiencing weak or inefficient star formation. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that the XUV disks in our sample do not correlate with enhanced outer-disk star formation as traced by blue optical outer-disk colors. However, UV-Bright (UV-B) disk galaxies with blue UV colors outside their optical 50% light radii do display enhanced optical outer-disk star formation as well as enhanced atomic gas content. UV-B disks occur in our E/S0s with a 42^(+9)_–8% frequency and need not coincide with XUV disks; thus their combined frequency is 61% ± 9%. For both XUV and UV-B disks, UV colors typically imply <1 Gyr ages, and most such disks extend beyond the optical R_(25) radius. XUV disks occur over the full sample mass range and on both the red and blue sequences, suggesting an association with galaxy interactions or another similarly general evolutionary process. In contrast, UV-B disks favor the blue sequence and may also prefer low masses, perhaps reflecting the onset of cold-mode gas accretion or another mass-dependent evolutionary process. Virtually all blue E/S0s in the gas-rich regime below stellar mass M_t ~ 5 × 10^9 M_☉ (the "gas-richness threshold mass") display UV-B disks, supporting the previously suggested association of this population with active disk growth