Multicultural Literature, Literally!

This article is titled multicultural literature literally because we wanted to focus on literature that reflects diversity in the pictures and story lines. We felt it was important to call librarians’ and teachers’ attention to some of these books because they reflect the natural interactions across race that occur with our children and adults. The books we refer to may have the ability to break down racial discrimination in their own subtle ways if we have them available in our libraries or classrooms and share them with our patrons

Multicultural Literature that Brings People Together

Over the past ten years we have been tracking a specific type of multicultural literature. We diligently look for literature for youth that reflects multiple cultures within the story line or images projected through illustrations. The books we focused on in this theme depict multiple characters reflecting a variety of ethnic backgrounds because this mosaic of characters is what we see to be more of a reflection of our changing world. The interaction of young people today across ethnic lines is more prevalent and we believe will continue to become common place as long as adults allow and encourage this interchange to happen. A good example is a book by Maya Ajmera, Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder and Cynthia Pon called Children of the U.S.A. It is filled with rich photos of children in 51 cities across the United States and celebrates their ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. Subtle and effective ways to project this natural occurrence is through literature. The dilemma we see is the lack of such multicultural literature, so we wrote this article with two goals in mind. One is teachers and librarians would be encouraged to use this literature in their classrooms and libraries. Second, we hope that more authors and illustrators are encouraged to write and illustrate stories that portray an interaction of characters from multiple ethnic backgrounds

Children\u27s Choices Through the Years: Some Surprising Results

It’s difficult to ignore all the recent teacher talk about the importance of helping our students become adept users of nonfiction texts. With this rising interest and attention being focused on nonfiction books, spurred by the adoption of Common Core Standards, we decided to look at the Children’s Choices finalists over the last ten years to determine if there was a connection to what children liked to read. We were especially curious about how many of the award winning books selected by children were actually nonfiction. Given our findings, we also decided to investigate further by analyzing all the publishers’ title submissions over the same ten years to determine the ratio of fiction to nonfiction titles. In this article, we begin by providing readers with an overview of IRA’s Children’s Choices Project and a review of studies focused on the use of nonfiction books in elementary school instruction and classroom libraries. We then will share with you what we consider to be very interesting and somewhat telling findings based on our investigation

Beginning Readers’ Interest in Animal Books: An Analysis of Data Collected from the Children’s Choices Project

This article describes a reading interest study, which analyzed 330 titles selected over a ten-year period by beginning readers (Grades K-2) across the United States (U.S). [sic] for ILA\u27s Children\u27s Choices project. Its aim was to determine if young children\u27s reading interests have changed since earlier studies were conducted in the US. Specifically, a team of four researchers analyzed Children\u27s Choices books selected by 5,000 beginning readers (K-2) every year, from 2005 to 2014. This article illuminates the study\u27s methodology, its findings, and implications for understanding the reading interests of contemporary young children. By examining and comparing the books that were selected by children as their favorites and looking for possible patterns and trends, the study found that animals (66%) was the prevailing feature. Researchers then examined and identified distinct ways in which animals are represented in the selected titles, creating a spectrum from totally human-like animal characters to animals that are true to their animal forms

Construction material processed using lunar simulant in various environments

The manufacture of construction materials from locally available resources in space is an important first step in the establishment of lunar and planetary bases. The objective of the CoMPULSIVE (Construction Material Processed Using Lunar Simulant In Various Environments) experiment is to develop a procedure to produce construction materials by sintering or melting Johnson Space Center Simulant 1 (JSC-1) lunar soil simulant in both earth-based (1-g) and microgravity (approximately 0-g) environments. The characteristics of the resultant materials will be tested to determine its physical and mechanical properties. The physical characteristics include: crystalline, thermal, and electrical properties. The mechanical properties include: compressive tensile, and flexural strengths. The simulant, placed in a sealed graphite crucible, will be heated using a high temperature furnace. The crucible will then be cooled by radiative and forced convective means. The core furnace element consists of space qualified quartz-halogen incandescent lamps with focusing mirrors. Sample temperatures of up to 2200 C are attainable using this heating method

Theoretical analysis of nucleation and growth of ZnO nanostructures in vapour phase transport growth

This paper discusses the growth atmosphere, condensing species and nucleation conditions relevant to vapour phase transport growth of ZnO nanostructures, including the molecular parameters and thermodynamics of the gas phase ZnO molecule and its importance compared to atomic Zn and molecular O2. The partial pressure of molecular ZnO in a Zn/O2 mix at normal ZnO growth temperatures is 6x10^-7 of the Zn partial pressures. In typical vapour phase transport growth conditions, using carbothermal reduction, the Zn vapour is always undersaturated while the ZnO vapour is always supersaturated. In the case of the ZnO vapour, our analysis suggests that the barrier to homogeneous nucleation (or heterogeneous nucleation at unseeded/uncatalysed areas of the substrates) is too large for nucleation of this species to take place, which is consistent with experimental evidence that nanostructures will not grow on unseeded areas of substrates. In the presence of suitable accommodation sites, due to ZnO seeds, growth can occur via Zn vapour condensation (followed by oxidation) and via direct condensation of molecular ZnO (whose flux at the surface, although less than that of Zn vapour, is still sufficient to yield an appreciable nanostructure deposit). The balance between these two condensing species is likely to be a sensitive function of growth parameters and could explain both the diversity of reported nanostructure morphologies and the challenges to be faced in developing reproducible and scalable growth systems for specific applicable morphologies

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements