The effect of a warming up to fluency intervention on second-grade students' reading

Advisors: Elizabeth Wilkins; Thomas Smith.Committee members: Laurie Elish-Piper.This research study investigated the effectiveness of a warming up to fluency intervention on the student reading outcomes of words per minute, errors, prosody, and overall reading level as measured by AIMSweb, the Multidimensional Fluency Rubric, and the Developmental Reading Assessment 2 (DRA2). A total of 34 second grade students participated: 17 in the intervention group and 16 in the comparison group. The students were one-to-one matched based on DRA2 reading scores. Students in the intervention group received the intervention Monday through Friday for 18 weeks.A repeated measures ANOVA was completed on all of the above outcomes with no significant group differences. Exploratory analyses of gender across time on all outcomes did produce significant differences for males in the opposite direction. Exploratory analyses using age as a covariate did not produce significant findings on any of the four outcomes. Implications include meaningful fluency intervention and progress monitoring. Recommendations include parental and involvement school team involvement, implementation of the intervention with integrity, and warming up of students prior to the AIMSweb assessment.Ed.D. (Doctor of Education

Charged bottomonium-like structures Zb(10610)Z_b(10610) and Zb(10650)Z_b(10650)

The observation of two charged bottomonium-like structures $Z_b(10610)$ and $Z_b(10650)$ has stimulated extensive studies of the properties of $Z_b(10610)$ and $Z_b(10650)$. In this talk, we briefly introduce the research status of $Z_b(10610)$ and $Z_b(10650)$ combined with our theoretical progress.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 5 figures. Plenary talk given at the international conference The Fifth Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Systems in Physics 2011 (APFB2011), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 22-26 August 201

Charm diffusion in a pion gas implementing unitarity, chiral and heavy quark symmetries

We compute the charm drag and diffusion coefficients in a hot pion gas, such as is formed in a Heavy Ion Collision after the system cools sufficiently to transit into the hadron phase. We fully exploit Heavy Quark Effective Theory (with both D and D* mesons as elementary degrees of freedom during the collision) and Chiral Perturbation Theory, and employ standard unitarization to reach higher temperatures. We find that a certain friction and shear diffusion coefficients are almost p-independent at fixed temperature which simplifies phenomenological analysis. At the higher end of reliability of our calculation, T about 150 MeV, we report a charm relaxation length of some 40 fm, in agreement with the model estimate of He, Fries and Rapp. The momentum of a 1-GeV charm quark decreases about 50 MeV per Fermi when crossing the hadron phase.Comment: 23 pages, 29 figure

Malignant Transformation of Giant Cell Tumor of Bone and the Association with Denosumab Treatment:A Radiology and Pathology Perspective

Objective. Malignancy in giant cell tumor of bone (mGCTB) is categorized as primary (concomitantly with conventional GCTB) or secondary (after radiotherapy or other treatment). Denosumab therapy has been suggested to play a role in the etiology of secondary mGCTB. In this case series from a tertiary referral sarcoma center, we aimed to find distinctive features for malignant transformation in GCTB on different imaging modalities. Furthermore, we assessed the duration of denosumab treatment and lag time to the development of malignancy. Methods. From a histopathology database search, 6 patients were pathologically confirmed as having initial conventional GCTB and subsequently with secondary mGCTB. Results. At the time of mGCTB diagnosis, 2 cases were treated with denosumab only, 2 with denosumab and surgery, 1 with multiple curettages and radiotherapy, and 1 with surgery only. In the 4 denosumab treated patients, the mean lag time to malignant transformation was 7 months (range 2-11 months). Imaging findings suspicious of malignant transformation related to denosumab therapy are the absence of fibro-osseous matrix formation and absent neocortex formation on CT, and stable or even increased size of the soft tissue component. Conclusion. In 4 patients treated with denosumab, secondary mGCTB occurred within the first year after initiation of treatment. Radiotherapy-associated mGCTB has a longer lag time than denosumab-associated mGCTB. Close clinical and imaging follow-up during the first months of denosumab therapy is key, as mGCTB tends to have rapid aggressive behavior, similar to other high-grade sarcomas. Nonresponders should be (re) evaluated for their primary diagnosis of conventional GCTB

Light meson mass dependence of the positive parity heavy-strange mesons

We calculate the masses of the resonances D_{s0}^*(2317) and D_{s1}(2460) as well as their bottom partners as bound states of a kaon and a D^*- and B^*-meson, respectively, in unitarized chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order. After fixing the parameters in the D_{s0}^*(2317) channel, the calculated mass for the D_{s1}(2460) is found in excellent agreement with experiment. The masses for the analogous states with a bottom quark are predicted to be M_{B^*_{s0}}=(5696\pm 40) MeV and M_{B_{s1}}=(5742\pm 40) MeV in reasonable agreement with previous analyses. In particular, we predict M_{B_{s1}}-M_{B_{s0}^*}=46\pm 1 MeV. We also explore the dependence of the states on the pion and kaon masses. We argue that the kaon mass dependence of a kaonic bound state should be almost linear with slope about unity. Such a dependence is specific to the assumed molecular nature of the states. We suggest to extract the kaon mass dependence of these states from lattice QCD calculations.Comment: 10 page

Application of COMPOCHIP Microarray to Investigate the Bacterial Communities of Different Composts

A microarray spotted with 369 different 16S rRNA gene probes specific to microorganisms involved in the degradation process of organic waste during composting was developed. The microarray was tested with pure cultures, and of the 30,258 individual probe-target hybridization reactions performed, there were only 188 false positive (0.62%) and 22 false negative signals (0.07%). Labeled target DNA was prepared by polymerase chain reaction amplification of 16S rRNA genes using a Cy5-labeled universal bacterial forward primer and a universal reverse primer. The COMPOCHIP microarray was applied to three different compost types (green compost, manure mix compost, and anaerobic digestate compost) of different maturity (2, 8, and 16 weeks), and differences in the microorganisms in the three compost types and maturity stages were observed. Multivariate analysis showed that the bacterial composition of the three composts was different at the beginning of the composting process and became more similar upon maturation. Certain probes (targeting Sphingobacterium, Actinomyces, Xylella/Xanthomonas/ Stenotrophomonas, Microbacterium, Verrucomicrobia, Planctomycetes, Low G + C and Alphaproteobacteria) were more influential in discriminating between different composts. Results from denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis supported those of microarray analysis. This study showed that the COMPOCHIP array is a suitable tool to study bacterial communities in composts

Beam Energy and Centrality Dependence of Direct-Photon Emission from Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions.

The PHENIX collaboration presents first measurements of low-momentum (0.41  GeV/c) direct-photon yield dN_{γ}^{dir}/dη is a smooth function of dN_{ch}/dη and can be well described as proportional to (dN_{ch}/dη)^{α} with α≈1.25. This scaling behavior holds for a wide range of beam energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider, for centrality selected samples, as well as for different A+A collision systems. At a given beam energy, the scaling also holds for high p_{T} (>5  GeV/c), but when results from different collision energies are compared, an additional sqrt[s_{NN}]-dependent multiplicative factor is needed to describe the integrated-direct-photon yield

Conventional chondrosarcoma with focal clear cell change:a clinicopathological and molecular analysis

Aims Clear cell chondrosarcomas are known to occasionally contain areas of low-grade conventional chondrosarcoma; however, the opposite phenomenon has not yet been described. We identified five cases of conventional chondrosarcoma alongside clear cell chondrosarcoma. Here, we report on their clinicopathological and molecular characteristics, and investigate whether these hybrid lesions should be considered to be a collision tumour, conventional chondrosarcoma with clear cell change, or clear cell chondrosarcoma with extensive areas of conventional chondrosarcoma, as this has clinical implications. Methods and results Clinicohistopathological features were characterised, immunohistochemistry was performed for H3 histone family member 3B (H3F3B), histone H3 trimethylated on lysine 27 (H3K27me3), and p53, and genetic alterations of IDH1 (encoding isocitrate dehydrogenase 1), IDH2 (encoding isocitrate dehydrogenase 2), TP53 and H3F3B were evaluated. All five chondrosarcomas consisted predominantly of areas with conventional chondrosarcoma. Different grades were found [grade I (n = 1), grade II (n = 2), and grade III (n = 2)]. Up to 20% of the tumour consisted of classic features of clear cell chondrosarcoma. Gradual merging between both components was observed. Molecular analysis of conventional chondrosarcoma components revealed an IDH1 c.395G>T, p.(Arg132Leu) mutation in two cases, and an IDH1 c.394C>T, p.(Arg132Cys) mutation in one case, with identical IDH mutations in the clear cell chondrosarcoma counterpart (100%). Two cases were IDH wild-type. In all cases, none of the components harboured H3F3B mutations. High-grade tumours had an aggressive course, as three patients died of the disease. Conclusion On the basis of clinicopathological characterisation and genetic alterations, it is suggested that these lesions should be considered to be conventional chondrosarcoma, with clear cell change. Pathologists should be aware of their existence to avoid confusion with clear cell chondrosarcoma, dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma, or chondroblastic osteosarcoma