The Effect of Handwriting Without Tears on Montessori Four-year-olds\u27 Handwriting Ability

The action research question for this study was, “What effect would the addition of a program by Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) called, Transition to Kindergarten, in a block everyday have on the development of handwriting skills of my four-year-old students?” Beyond utilizing the HWT program, the reviewed literature on handwriting instruction expounded on six major themes: brain benefits of handwriting, blocks of handwriting instruction (speed and legibility), name writing (gross & fine motor skills), the connection between writing and reading, and phonological awareness. This project was conducted in a private Montessori school in South Florida, where six preschool participants (age four) were studied and evaluated for six weeks. Data was compiled by using a presentation log, attitude scale, and a self-generated rubric to track the following: pencil firmness on paper, directionality, letter formation, spacing, line usage, circle closure, name writing, and copying a sentence to a line. The researcher\u27s overall results were positive when assessing handwriting attributes of formation, size, neatness, speed, posture, pencil grip and helping hand position. Future implementation of the action research project will be introduced to the entire preschool as a new addition to the handwriting curriculum

Poiesis: Bringing Our Stories Into Being Through Poetry

This unit was designed to be taught at the beginning of the year on a project-based learning campus. The objectives of this unit are to a) review elements of poetry and figurative language, b) resume discussions of emotions as part of a social-emotional learning curriculum, c) allow students to introduce themselves to their new classmates in a creative way, and d) get students accustomed to both presenting to and teaching others. This unit culminates in a two-part performance task that includes performing an original poem (accompanied by music or rhythm) and teaching a poetry workshop. Because this unit was designed with some very specific parameters, it will require some adaptations in order to be taught in your classroom. However, we have tried to annotate and make suggestions on how to best adapt the unit to meet your classroom needs. This unit does contain links to outside documents and programs that are not owned by the authors, but most, if not all of the materials required to run this unit (or comparable ones) are available online at no cost

Mitochondrial metabolic states and membrane potential modulate mtNOS activity

AbstractThe mitochondrial metabolic state regulates the rate of NO release from coupled mitochondria: NO release by heart, liver and kidney mitochondria was about 40–45% lower in state 3 (1.2, 0.7 and 0.4 nmol/min mg protein) than in state 4 (2.2, 1.3 and 0.7 nmol/min mg protein). The activity of mtNOS, responsible for NO release, appears driven by the membrane potential component and not by intramitochondrial pH of the proton motive force. The intramitochondrial concentrations of the NOS substrates, l-arginine (about 310 μM) and NADPH (1.04–1.78 mM) are 60–1000 times higher than their KM values. Moreover, the changes in their concentrations in the state 4–state 3 transition are not enough to explain the changes in NO release. Nitric oxide release was exponentially dependent on membrane potential as reported for mitochondrial H2O2 production [S.S. Korshunov, V.P. Skulachev, A.A. Satarkov, High protonic potential actuates a mechanism of production of reactive oxygen species in mitochondria. FEBS Lett. 416 (1997) 15–18.]. Agents that decrease or abolish membrane potential minimize NO release while the addition of oligomycin that produces mitochondrial hyperpolarization generates the maximal NO release. The regulation of mtNOS activity, an apparently voltage-dependent enzyme, by membrane potential is marked at the physiological range of membrane potentials

An Online Learning Approach to Community Building among Asian Journalists

This chapter describes a master\u27s program in journalism designed for professional Asian journalists which has drawn students from 13 Asian countries and is run by faculty members from five countries. The program uses blended learning methods combining synchronous, asynchronous, and classroom-based approaches. An exploratory study was conducted to describe the strategies used by the students and teachers to build a community of learners (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) and hence achieve the program\u27s learning goals. The study took into consideration cultural differences, in particular, those referring to educational experiences. Results show that the respondents tended to use the strategies of social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence that were appropriate to their respective class roles and that these strategies tended to reflect dominant cultural traits in Asia

Compressive Sensing with Wigner DD-functions on Subsets of the Sphere

In this paper, we prove a compressive sensing guarantee for restricted measurement domains on the rotation group, $\mathrm{SO}(3)$. We do so by first defining Slepian functions on a measurement sub-domain $R$ of the rotation group $\mathrm{SO}(3)$. Then, we transform the inverse problem from the measurement basis, the bounded orthonormal system of band-limited Wigner $D$-functions on $\mathrm{SO}(3)$, to the Slepian functions in a way that limits increases to signal sparsity. Contrasting methods using Wigner $D$-functions that require measurements on all of $\mathrm{SO}(3)$, we show that the orthogonality structure of the Slepian functions only requires measurements on the sub-domain $R$, which is select-able. Due to the particulars of this approach and the inherent presence of Slepian functions with low concentrations on $R$, our approach gives the highest accuracy when the signal under study is well concentrated on $R$. We provide numerical examples of our method in comparison with other classical and compressive sensing approaches. In terms of reconstruction quality, we find that our method outperforms the other compressive sensing approaches we test and is at least as good as classical approaches but with a significant reduction in the number of measurements

Single-Particle Density of States of a Superconductor with a Spatially Varying Gap and Phase Fluctuations

Recent experiments have shown that the superconducting energy gap in some cuprates is spatially inhomogeneous. Motivated by these experiments, and using exact diagonalization of a model d-wave Hamiltonian, combined with Monte Carlo simulations of a Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, we have calculated the single-particle density of states LDOS$(\omega,r)$ of a model high-T$_c$ superconductor as a function of temperature. Our calculations include both quenched disorder in the pairing potential and thermal fluctuations in both phase and amplitude of the superconducting gap. Most of our calculations assume two types of superconducting regions: $\alpha$, with a small gap and large superfluid density, and $\beta$, with the opposite. If the $\beta$ regions are randomly embedded in an $\alpha$ host, the LDOS on the $\alpha$ sites still has a sharp coherence peak at $T = 0$, but the $\beta$ component does not, in agreement with experiment. An ordered arrangement of $\beta$ regions leads to oscillations in the LDOS as a function of energy. The model leads to a superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ well below the pseudogap temperature $T_{c0}$, and has a spatially varying gap at very low $T$, both consistent with experiments in underdoped Bi2212. Our calculated LDOS$(\omega,r)$ shows coherence peaks for $T T_c$, in agreement with previous work considering phase but not amplitude fluctuations in a homogeneous superconductor. Well above $T_c$, the gap in the LDOS disappears.Comment: 37 pages, 12 figures. Accepted by Phys. Rev. B. Scheduled Issue: 01 Nov 200

On Grid Compressive Sampling for Spherical Field Measurements in Acoustics

We derive a compressive sampling method for acoustic field reconstruction using field measurements on a predefined spherical grid that has theoretically guaranteed relations between signal sparsity, measurement number, and reconstruction accuracy. This method can be used to reconstruct band-limited spherical harmonic or Wigner $D$-function series (spherical harmonic series are a special case) with sparse coefficients. Contrasting typical compressive sampling methods for Wigner $D$-function series that use arbitrary random measurements, the new method samples randomly on an equiangular grid, a practical and commonly used sampling pattern. Using its periodic extension, we transform the reconstruction of a Wigner $D$-function series into a multi-dimensional Fourier domain reconstruction problem. We establish that this transformation has a bounded effect on sparsity level and provide numerical studies of this effect. We also compare the reconstruction performance of the new approach to classical Nyquist sampling and existing compressive sampling methods. In our tests, the new compressive sampling approach performs comparably to other guaranteed compressive sampling approaches and needs a fraction of the measurements dictated by the Nyquist sampling theorem. Moreover, using one-third of the measurements or less, the new compressive sampling method can provide over 20 dB better denoising capability than oversampling with classical Fourier theory.Comment: 19 pages 14 figure

Practical Ethics for the Professional Prosecutor.

In Brady v. Maryland, the United States Supreme Court held that the prosecution\u27s withholding of material exculpatory evidence violated the defendant\u27s due process rights regardless of the absence of bad faith. The implications of this duty can be seen in the case of John Thompson, a man who was convicted of murder in Louisiana in 1985 after the prosecution failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. Thompson was able to get his conviction reversed and subsequently sued the district attorney\u27s office. This Article analyzes Brady and the decisions that followed it to outline the obligations of prosecutors who are in possession of Brady evidence. This Article then suggests several steps that district attorneys\u27 offices can take to ensure that employees are properly trained and that Brady evidence is disclosed when required by law