Building the System: Follow-up, monitoring & adaptive management

Does impact assessment (IA) end when the license has been granted? While societal resources tend to focus on rigorous project approvals, what happens to the project, to the public and to the environment once approval is granted? Follow up and monitoring are often an afterthought for legislators, public servants and proponents. But they are critical to public confidence and to ensuring that proponents live up to their commitments in a rapidly changing world."This report draws from research funded by the Impact Assessment Agency as part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Knowledge Mobilization Grant on Informing Best Practice in Environmental and Impact Assessment.

Change decision support:extraction and analysis of late architecture changes using change characterization and software metrics

Software maintenance is one of the most crucial aspects of software development. Software engineering researchers must develop practical solutions to handle the challenges presented in maintaining mature software systems. Research that addresses practical means of mitigating the risks involved when changing software, reducing the complexity of mature software systems, and eliminating the introduction of preventable bugs is paramount to today’s software engineering discipline. Giving software developers the information that they need to make quality decisions about changes that will negatively affect their software systems is a key aspect to mitigating those risks. This dissertation presents work performed to assist developers to collect and process data that plays a role in change decision-making during the maintenance phase. To address these problems, developers need a way to better understand the effects of a change prior to making the change. This research addresses the problems associated with increasing architectural complexity caused by software change using a twoold approach. The first approach is to characterize software changes to assess their architectural impact prior to their implementation. The second approach is to identify a set of architecture metrics that correlate to system quality and maintainability and to use these metrics to determine the level of difficulty involved in making a change. The two approaches have been combined and the results presented provide developers with a beneficial analysis framework that offers insight into the change process

Unfair competition governs the interaction of pCPI-17 with myosin phosphatase (PP1-MYPT1).

The small phosphoprotein pCPI-17 inhibits myosin light-chain phosphatase (MLCP). Current models postulate that during muscle relaxation, phosphatases other than MLCP dephosphorylate and inactivate pCPI-17 to restore MLCP activity. We show here that such hypotheses are insufficient to account for the observed rapidity of pCPI-17 inactivation in mammalian smooth muscles. Instead, MLCP itself is the critical enzyme for pCPI-17 dephosphorylation. We call the mutual sequestration mechanism through which pCPI-17 and MLCP interact inhibition by unfair competition: MLCP protects pCPI-17 from other phosphatases, while pCPI-17 blocks other substrates from MLCP\u27s active site. MLCP dephosphorylates pCPI-17 at a slow rate that is, nonetheless, both sufficient and necessary to explain the speed of pCPI-17 dephosphorylation and the consequent MLCP activation during muscle relaxation

On the propagation of acoustic–gravity waves due to a slender rupture in an elastic seabed

The propagation of waves from a vertical uplift of a slender rectangular fault in a sea of constant depth is discussed, accounting for water compressibility, gravity and seabed elasticity. The compressed water column results in the generation of acoustic–gravity waves that travel at the speed of sound in water. Acoustic–gravity waves are found to terminate after a finite time, with the decay time most influenced by seabed rigidity, which is in contrast to the rigid stationary-phase model where signals persist indefinitely. At certain frequencies acoustic–gravity waves couple with the elastic seabed and travel at the shear velocity (speed of sound in an elastic solid). Improved estimates of the critical frequencies are derived. Moreover, besides the usual tsunami, a second – very small amplitude – surface wave mode travelling at the speed of sound arises under certain frequencies. We derive the cut-off frequency for this mode. The acoustic modes possess a frequency spectrum which depends on the time evolution and spatial properties of the rupture. We find that appropriate filtering of the acoustic–gravity wave signal can reveal characteristic peaks that encode information on the fault's geometry and dynamics

Measuring the Impact of the Document-Based Lesson Cycle on Eighth Graders' Ability to Analyze Historical Documents

As a discipline, history sometimes gets a bad reputation because many students believe that it is all about memorizing long lists of dates, disputes, and dead people’s names. Too often history teachers reinforce this belief by emphasizing historical content over the reasoning skills and disciplinary practices that historians engage in daily and that are transferrable from one social studies class or text to another. When students have opportunities to practice historical thinking in class, instead of just memorization, they encounter a variety of perspectives in different sources and learn to appreciate some of the nuance, complexity, and ambiguity in historical texts. In this study, two 8th grade history teachers at an independent school integrated the Document-Based Lesson Cycle into half of their classes during a six-week intervention to determine if students in the experimental group would outperform students in the control group on assessments of content knowledge and historical reasoning skills. Most of the Document-Based Lessons were developed by the Stanford History Education Group and are available on its website. Modeling of historical thinking by the teacher, analysis of multiple sources in each class period, and discussions about procedural knowledge are key components of every Document-Based Lesson. The control group had lessons that covered similar content, but the teacher-led discussions focused on content rather than on skills and most of the sources were secondary instead of primary. Students took a four-part pretest and a four-part posttest that assessed both their content knowledge and skills proficiency. By the end of the intervention, there was no statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of their content knowledge. The three skills assessments also revealed no statistically significant difference between the groups. However, the experimental group did demonstrate a greater ability to generate plausible historical claims that are supported by multiple historical documents. There were also some qualitative differences between the two groups in their discussions and on their writing assessments

NACA Research Memorandums

Report presenting an investigation in the stability tunnel to determine the low-speed yawing derivatives of a 0.085-scale model of the Chance Vought XF8U-1 airplane and to determine the static longitudinal and static lateral stability characteristics in order to provide a basis for comparison with other data sources