School Finance Toolkit: How to Create a Community Guide to Your School District's Budget

If your community-based organization would like to launch a school finance initiative in your community, you can use this toolkit as a starting point. The toolkit walks through the major steps organizations have gone through in their own initiatives, offering advice and examples of tools you can adapt for your own use. The toolkit explores the major challenges organizations have faced in this work, and how they have addressed those challenges. And the toolkit points you toward other resources that can help you find and analyze information about school finance. This toolkit is not itself a primer on school finance. Except in passing, it does not explain how school funding works in school districts. You will have to obtain this kind of background information from other resources (some listed in this toolkit) and as you go along.The toolkit contains five major sections:Get Started. This section helps you set a mission for your school finance initiative, organize your people to get the job done, and find the resources to get the job done.Engage the Public. This section discusses strategies for engaging the public up-front, finding out what citizens want to know about school finance -- and why.Crunch the Numbers. This section addresses the nitty-gritty work of creating a community guide to the school budget, offering helpful tips on finding, analyzing, and presenting information effectively.Put the Numbers to Work. This section talks about ways you can use the information you have gathered as a catalyst for community-wide discussions of school finance and its impact on school quality.Resources. This section contains a variety of tools used by community-based organizations in their school finance initiatives, everything from town meeting agendas to focus group questions to budget analysis spreadsheets. This section also contains references to many sources of data about school finance, many of them just a mouse-click or toll-free call away

What’s a Federalist to Do? The Impending Clash Between Textualism and Federalism in State Congressional Redistricting Suits Under Article 1, Section 4

Nanofluids (NFs) are nanotechnology-based colloidal dispersion prepared by dispersing nanoparticles (NPs) in conventional liquids, as the base liquid. These advanced fluids have displayed potential to enhance the performance of conventional heat transfer fluids. This work aims at providing an insight to the field of NFs by investigating in detail the fabrication and evaluation of physico-chemical, thermo-physical and heat transfer characteristics of NFs for practical heat transfer applications. However, in order to utilize NFs as heat transfer fluids in real applications there are some challenges to overcome. Therefore, our goal is not only to optimize the thermo-physical properties of NFs with the highest thermal conductivity (TC) and minimal impact of NPs on viscosity, but also on preparing NFs with good stability and the best heat transfer performance. In the first stage, detailed studies were carried out to engineer NFs with good stability and optimal thermo-physical properties. In this work we investigated the most important factors, and the dependence of thermo-physical properties of NFs, including NP composition and concentration, NF stability, surface modifiers, particle size (NP size and particle with micron size), NF preparation method (two-step vs one-step method) and base liquid was studied. We also demonstrated, for the first time, the role of crystal structure, exemplified by alpha- and beta- SiC particles, on thermo-physical properties of NFs. For these purposes several NFs were fabricated using different nanostructured materials and various base liquids by one-step and two-step methods. An optimization procedure was designed to keep a suitable control in order to reach the ultimate aim where several stages were involved to check the desired characteristics of each NF system. Among several NFs systems studied in the first stage evaluation, a particular NF system with 9 wt% concentration, engineered by dispersing SiC NPs with alpha- crystal structure in water/ethylene glycol as based liquid exhibited the optimal thermo-physical properties. This NF was the only case which could pass the all criteria involved in the optimization procedure by exhibiting good stability, TC enhancements of ~20% with only 14% increase in viscosity at 20 oC. Therefore, this engineered NF was considered for next phase evaluation, where heat transfer coefficient (HTC) tests were designed and carried out to evaluate the thermal transport property of the selected alpha- SiC NF. A HTC enhancement of 5.5% at equal pumping power, as realistic comparison criteria, was obtained indicating the capability of this kind of NFs to be used in industrial heat transfer applications. These findings are among the few studies in the literature where the heat transfer characteristics of the NFs were noticeable, reproducible and based on a realistic situation with capability of commercializing as effective heat transfer fluid.  QC 20140416Nanohe

Autonomous rendezvous and capture development infrastructure

In the development of the technology for autonomous rendezvous and docking, key infrastructure capabilities must be used for effective and economical development. This need involves facility capabilities, both equipment and personnel, to devise, develop, qualify, and integrate ARD elements and subsystems into flight programs. One effective way of reducing technical risks in developing ARD technology is the use of the Low Earth Orbit test facility. Using a reusable free-flying testbed carried in the Shuttle, as a technology demonstration test flight, can be structured to include a variety of sensors, control schemes, and operational approaches. This testbed and flight demonstration concept will be used to illustrate how technologies and facilities at MSFC can be used to develop and prove an ARD system

Teaching and learning in live online classrooms

Online presence of information and services is pervasive. Teaching and learning are no exception. Courseware management systems play an important role in enhancing instructional delivery for either traditional day, full-time students or non-traditional evening, party-time adult learners enrolled in online programs. While online course management tools are with no doubt practical, they limit, however, live or synchronous communication to chat rooms, whose discourse has little in common with face-to-face class communication. A more recent trend in online teaching and learning is the adoption and integration of web conferencing tools to enable live online classrooms and recreate the ethos of traditional face-to-face sessions. In this paper we present the experience we have had with the adoption of the LearnLinc® web conferencing tool, an iLinc Communications, Inc. product. We have coupled LearnLinc with Blackboard®, for the online and hybrid computer science courses we offered in the past academic year in the evening undergraduate and graduate computer science programs at Rivier College. Twelve courses, enrolling over 150 students, have used the synchronous online teaching capabilities of LearnLinc. Students who took courses in the online or hybrid format could experience a comparable level of interaction, participation, and collaboration as in traditional classes. We solicited student feedback by administering a student survey to over 100 students. The 55% response rate produced the data for this paper\u27s study. We report on the study\u27s findings and show students\u27 rankings of evaluation criteria applied to hybrid and online instructional formats, with or without a web conferencing tool. Our analysis shows that students ranked favorably LearnLinc live sessions added to Blackboard-only online classes. In addition, how they learned in live online classrooms was found to be the closest to the hybrid class experience with regard to teaching practices they perceived as most important to them, such as seeking instructor\u27s assistance, managing time on task, and exercising problem solving skills