Administrators of General and Special Education Perceptions of Leadership Practices for Supporting Inclusive Learning Environments for Students with Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to explore and analyze general education and special education administrators’ perceptions of leadership practices that support inclusivity of students with disabilities in local public school districts. This study compared inclusive leadership priorities between special education administration and elementary principals across a total of 11 districts. Utilizing Q-sort methodology, special education administrators and principals sorted 40 inclusive leadership statements. The research questions that guided this study were: 1) How are inclusive leadership practice statements ranked similarly and differently among participants? 2) How do participants describe rankings for most and least important inclusive leadership practice statements? 3) How are inclusive leadership practice statements ranked in relationship to participants roles? An analysis resulted in two factor groups who sorted their cards similarly. The responses from Factor A members suggest developing interpersonal relationships and trust are how they lead their schools and districts. The overall responses from Factor B members suggest that they strongly believe in a mission and vision, collaboratively developed, to support all students’ success. A framework based on the themes and categories emerged from the literature for building stronger, inclusive learning environments that support students with disabilities. This framework supports the research that suggests a component of each of the five themes; (a) inclusive collaboration; (b) shared vision, moral purpose and core values; (c) shared decision making, distributed leadership and teacher leadership; (d) meaningful professional development and; (e) data driven decision making and are needed to develop and sustain effective inclusive schools and districts. Within this study, the areas most important in administrator’s day to day work clearly fell into three areas of this model, indicating where existing strengths in the areas of (a) inclusive collaboration and (b) shared vision, moral purpose and core values and data driven decision making and may be contributing to inclusivity where the gaps in the importance of (c) shared decision making, distributed leadership and teacher leadership, and (d) meaningful professional development may be preventing it. As a result, an action model for effective, inclusive leadership suggests leadership is a dynamic process, where leaders incorporate all aspects of the model

C-NNAP - A parallel processing architecture for binary neural networks

This paper describes the CNNAP machine, a MIMD implementation of an array of ADAM binary neural networks, primarily designed for image processing. CNNAP comprises an array of VME cards each containing a DSP, SCSI controller, and a new design of the SAT peripheral processor. The SAT processor is a dedicated hardware implemention that performs binary neural network computations. The SAT processor yields a potential speed-up of between 108 times to 182 times that of the current DSP with its dedicated coprocessor. CNNAP in association with the SAT provides a fast, parallel environment for performing binary neural network operations

Plant disease - early blight or target spot of potatoes

Early blight or target spot caused by the fungus Alternaria solani is a widespread disease of potatoes which in Western Australia is most prevalent in crops dug in autumn and early summer. The disease may attack both foliage and tubers, but the tuber rot phase of the disease has hitherto caused most concern to local growers because it causes obvious losses in storage. The less obvious but more serious effects of the foliage blight have generally been overlooked, chiefly because the disease usually develops late in the season when the crops are approaching maturity. However recent spray trials with new fungicides have clearly demonstrated that the destructiveness of the foliage attack has been greatly underestimated, for it may cause considerable reduction in yield

Further experiements on the control of early blight or target spot of potatoes

The effective control of Potato Early Blight or Target Spot by the use of Zineb fungicide (used in the proprietary form Dithane Z.78) has previously been reported in this Journal. It was shown in preliminary spray trials that the foliage blight caused by this disease is very destructive, and by the application of four Dithane sprays yields were increased in the order of 30 per cent., equivalent to approximately four tons per acre. Further experiments have now been conducted and the results indicate that even two applications of Dithane spray may, under conditions of severe blight attack, promote worthwhile higher yields

A journey along the road to "Model 2" : an in-depth study of one practitioner's experience in learning the diagnostic skills of action science

This work is an in-depth case study of an action science teaching/learning project, and the focus is on one practitioner's experience in learning the diagnostic skills of action science. Using the theory-of-action approach developed by Argyris and Schon, the study examines a series of episodes, critical incidents, and issues that arose during a reflective practicum in which the learner participated over a year and one half period. The study is unique in that not only is the learning experience examined from the learner's perspective, but the practitioner under study is the researcher herself. In applying the particular approach and methodology to studying in-depth part of the complex process of learning to become an action scientist, the goal is to contribute to the current, rather limited bank of knowledge in this area, and build understanding about what kinds of learning environments and processes might better facilitate the learning of future action scientist trainees

Myoclonus in adult Huntington's disease

Two brothers with clinically definite adult Huntington's disease developed disabling myoclonus years after the first signs of the disease. Their electroencephalograms were consistent with a primary generalized epilipsy, although neither man had seizures. The myoclonus was controlled with valproic acid therapy.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50341/1/410290217_ftp.pd

A sprayed graphene transistor platform for rapid and low-cost chemical sensing

We demonstrate a novel and versatile sensing platform, based on electrolyte-gated graphene field-effect transistors, for easy, low-cost and scalable production of chemical sensor test strips. The Lab-on-PCB platform is enabled by low-boiling, low-surface-tension sprayable graphene ink deposited on a substrate manufactured using a commercial printed circuit board process. We demonstrate the versatility of the platform by sensing pH and Na+ concentrations in an aqueous solution, achieving a sensitivity of 143 ± 4 μA per pH and 131 ± 5 μA per log10Na+, respectively, in line with state-of-the-art graphene chemical sensing performance

Centre Vortices in SU(3)

Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.We investigate the effectiveness of using smearing as a means to generate a preconditioning transformation for gauge fields prior to fixing to Maximal Centre Gauge. This still leaves the gaugefixed field in the original gauge orbit. As expected, we find that this preconditioning leads to higher maxima of the gauge-fixing condition, resulting in lower numbers of P-vortices. We also find that removing vortices appears to give a loss of confinement for all cases but that the string tension as measured from vortex-only configurations drops from about 65% to as low as 26% when using the preconditioning method