Generating families of surface triangulations. The case of punctured surfaces with inner degree at least 4

We present two versions of a method for generating all triangulations of any punctured surface in each of these two families: (1) triangulations with inner vertices of degree at least 4 and boundary vertices of degree at least 3 and (2) triangulations with all vertices of degree at least 4. The method is based on a series of reversible operations, termed reductions, which lead to a minimal set of triangulations in each family. Throughout the process the triangulations remain within the corresponding family. Moreover, for the family (1) these operations reduce to the well-known edge contractions and removals of octahedra. The main results are proved by an exhaustive analysis of all possible local configurations which admit a reduction.Comment: This work has been partially supported by PAI FQM-164; PAI FQM-189; MTM 2010-2044

Ready, Set, Involved: The Power of Parents

Parental involvement can be highly beneficial to students’ educational success. However, involvement is an issue for English Language Learning (ELL) students, as well as for their parents. Many of these parents want to be involved, but there are many factors that get in the way. School faculty need to be more proactive on informing parents about resources available to them and other ways they can become more involved in their child’s education. The purpose of this research is to understand what schools are doing today to involve parents and how they are reaching out to them. After interviewing teachers and parents at Seashore Middle School, three action options emerged as ways to help increase parental involvement. Based on these results action was taken to inform school administration on ways to more effectively reach out to parents

Music Therapy: Effects on Children\u27s Academic Work and On Task Performance

This study observed the academic engaged time of seven students in a self contained classroom. The service that this study concentrated on was music therapy. The study attempted to answer the following question Does music therapy affect the academic achievement of children with disabilities by improving their on-task behaviors in the classroom? Undercoffer (1997) states that music can enhance student motivation, increase attendance and improve social skills. Data collection was done specifically through the use of an observational instrument, using a five point Likert scale. The instrument measured on-task performance before and after the already scheduled music therapy sessions for three weeks. As a whole group, no significant differences were found among total on-task behaviors prior to or after music therapy. Two themes emerged from the written comments of the Likert scale the first was the focus of the adult on the negative behaviors of the child. The second was teacher cuing, reminders or redirecting verbally of the child. The results of this study were extremely close to displaying significant differences among total on-task behavior prior to or after music therapy. Several students showed improvement on the post music therapy session by a difference of at least five points on their post observational scores

Ethnic Identity Development

Ethnic identity, or the set of self-ideas one has about one’s own ethnic group membership, is not seen as an area of development in K-12 classrooms, therefore, the researcher set to uncover benefits of aiding this development. Participants for the Capstone Project included 25 fifth-grade students in a public elementary classroom located on California’s Central Coast. The researcher found evidence suggesting students’ self-esteem is related to one’s ethnic backgrounds, as well as finding that students really enjoy learning about their own cultures and identities. The researcher believes this research is imperative in relation to her own personal career goals as a future educator in the United States public education system. As a future educator, the researcher understands the need for a higher understanding of ethnic identity, most importantly because diversity is a growing facet in this country that can be embraced rather than rejected

Understanding and Improving the Performance of Read Operations Across the Storage Stack

We live in a data-driven era, large amounts of data are generated and collected every day. Storage systems are the backbone of this era, as they store and retrieve data. To cope with increasing data demands (e.g., diversity, scalability), storage systems are experiencing changes across the stack. As other computer systems, storage systems rely on layering and modularity, to allow rapid development. Unfortunately, this can hinder performance clarity and introduce degradations (e.g., tail latency), due to unexpected interactions between components of the stack. In this thesis, we first perform a study to understand the behavior across different layers of the storage stack. We focus on sequential read workloads, a common I/O pattern in distributed le systems (e.g., HDFS, GFS). We analyze the interaction between read workloads, local le systems (i.e., ext4), and storage media (i.e., SSDs). We perform the same experiment over different periods of time (e.g., le lifetime). We uncover 3 slowdowns, all of which occur in the lower layers. When combined, these slowdowns can degrade throughput by 30%. We find that increased parallelism on the local le system mitigates these slowdowns, showing the need for adaptability in storage stacks. Given the fact that performance instabilities can occur at any layer of the stack, it is important that upper-layer systems are able to react. We propose smart hedging, a novel technique to manage high-percentile (tail) latency variations in read operations. Smart hedging considers production challenges, such as massive scalability, heterogeneity, and ease of deployment and maintainability. Our technique establishes a dynamic threshold by tracking latencies on the client-side. If a read operation exceeds the threshold, a new hedged request is issued, in an exponential back-off manner. We implement our technique in HDFS and evaluate it on 70k servers in 3 datacenters. Our technique reduces average tail latency, without generating excessive system load

How scholarship programs facilitate first-generation college students’ involvement

As a first-generation college student, I am interested in the on-campus involvement and experiences of other first-generation college students. First-generation college students are those whose parents did not receive a university degree and tend to come from low-income families. This project explores programs designed to support and enrich the experiences of such students. The Centennial Scholars Program at James Madison University and the Presidential Scholarship Initiative at Virginia Tech aim to increase the socio-economic diversity on each campus. These programs provide students with full funding for four years, mentorship, professional development and social benefits, among others. In turn, students become involved with the campus and outside communities. I argue that these programs provide more than financial support; they are vehicles for further community involvement and allow students to leave their mark

Mood, emotion, and affect in group performance: an experiential exercise

One path to the successful transference of knowledge is through linking concepts to students’ experience. To provide this connection, we used an experiential methodology to design an exercise called mood, emotion, and affect in group performance. This exercise provides learners with an opportunity to experience, in addition to hearing and reading about, the effects of positive and negative dispositions on a group task. We describe the design and mechanics of the exercise with practical reflections from the use of the exercise in many different environments. The paper ends with end-of-the semester student comments and instructor reflections

El efecto del grado de relacion semantica en el recuerdo de la informacion desde la memoria episodica en ninos escolares con retraso en el desarrollo del lenguaje

62 p.Los niños con trastorno específico del lenguaje (TEL) presentan dificultades en aspectos de la memoria, como lo es en la memoria de trabajo fonológica. Uno de los aspectos de la memoria poco estudiados en niños con TEL es la memoria episódica. Por ello el propósito de este trabajo es estudiar el efecto del grado de la relación semántica en la recuperación de la información episódica desde la memoria en niños con retraso en el desarrollo del lenguaje. Se comparó el desempeño intragrupal en el grupo estudio (con retraso en el desarrollo del lenguaje). Los resultados demuestran que la recuperación de la información episódica desde la memoria en niños con retraso en el desarrollo del lenguaje se ve afectada por el grado de relación semántica. Esto significaría que los niños con TEL procesan información contextual, pero en menor cantidad en relación a los niños con un desarrollo típico del lenguaje. Se discuten las implicancias de los resultados

Combined use of two rapid tests for the conclusive diagnosis of Chagas disease: a systematic scoping review

Objective: The goal of this systematic scoping review is to collect and summarise scientific evidence regarding the validity of two simultaneous immunochromatographic tests for the conclusive diagnosis of Chagas disease. The research was informed by the following review questions: Will the use of two rapid tests be a valid method for the definitive diagnosis of Chagas disease when compared with conventional serological tests? In what type of population has the operation of two rapid tests been tried for the diagnosis of Chagas disease? What are the biomedical and public health advantages of the diagnostic method resulting from the combination of two rapid tests over the conventional serological method? Will it be a cost-benefit strategy for the diagnosis of Chagas with respect to conventional serological tests? Design: Systematic scoping review. Setting: A search of the published and unpublished literature in five databases was carried out, in order to identify, screen and select the studies included in this review. Results: 468 studies were identified, of which 46 were screened with a full-text reading, and finally, three articles were included in the review. All studies were in endemic countries with adult and paediatric populations (n=1133) and, together, they evaluated four different rapid tests. The rapid tests showed good sensitivity (97.4%-100%) and specificity (96.1%-100%) for the diagnosis of Chagas when used in combination and compared with the reference tests. Conclusions: The simultaneous use of at least two immunochromatographic rapid tests is a valid option for the definitive diagnosis of chronic Chagas in endemic rural areas, as long as there are studies that previously evaluate their performance on the areas of implementation. Therefore, this could be an alternative to the current diagnostic standard. However, additional studies are still needed in more countries in order to provide further evidence and to investigate the cost-benefit.S