Early years education in Qatar: The good practice guide in theory and practice

Qatar’s massive education reform, Education for a New Era has dramatically shaped the educational landscape by implementing professional and curriculum standards and introducing best pedagogical practices at all levels. The current concern with Qatar’s educational reform is not so much the adopted policies but rather the implementation of these policies into classroom practices. This study examines several kindergartens in Qatar to explore the issues and concerns regarding the implementation of the Supreme Education Counsel’s The Early Years Education Good Practice Guide (GPG); a policy document providing evidence-based, needs based, culturally responsive appropriate early childhood teaching methods and materials. This research study includes focus groups with 22 kindergarten teachers/academic coordinators and classroom observations. By providing what Fullan (2000) terms an “inside, inside out and outside story”, we examine both the practices being utilized in kindergartens and obstacles that prevent teachers from implementing the GPG from the perspective of teachers and other early childhood school personnel. Finally, we provide possible recommendations regarding the implementation of the GPG

Information Display System for Atypical Flight Phase

Method and system for displaying information on one or more aircraft flights, where at least one flight is determined to have at least one atypical flight phase according to specified criteria. A flight parameter trace for an atypical phase is displayed and compared graphically with a group of traces, for the corresponding flight phase and corresponding flight parameter, for flights that do not manifest atypicality in that phase

Statistical Detection of Atypical Aircraft Flights

A computational method and software to implement the method have been developed to sift through vast quantities of digital flight data to alert human analysts to aircraft flights that are statistically atypical in ways that signify that safety may be adversely affected. On a typical day, there are tens of thousands of flights in the United States and several times that number throughout the world. Depending on the specific aircraft design, the volume of data collected by sensors and flight recorders can range from a few dozen to several thousand parameters per second during a flight. Whereas these data have long been utilized in investigating crashes, the present method is oriented toward helping to prevent crashes by enabling routine monitoring of flight operations to identify portions of flights that may be of interest with respect to safety issues

A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin similar to 100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants

Multiple Human Papillomavirus Infections and Type Competition in Men

Background. There is little information on multiple human papillomavirus (HPV) infections and the potential for type competition in men, yet competition may impact the type-specific efficacy of HPV vaccination