A Future Teachers Conference – A Vehicle to Retain, Inform, and Inspire New and Prospective Teachers

The Los Angeles Collaborative for Teacher Excellence (LACTE) Future Teachers Conference is a day-long learning event for beginning and pre-service K-12 math and science teachers. The Conference provides information, resources and connections tailored to the needs of prospective and new teachers. A unique aspect of the conference is that a group of new and future teachers serve as partners with college faculty on the planning committee. Thus the Conference not only serves to educate new and future teachers, but also provides leadership training for the planning team members; and, the presence of prospective and new teachers on the planning team ensures that the conference sessions effectively target the intended audience\u27s interests. This conference is the most popular activity for new and prospective teachers in the Collaborative. Over the five years the conference has been held, its attendance has grown to 120-150 participants annually. A planning handbook is available to assist anyone interested in organizing a similar event

MHD Memes

The celebration of Allan Kaufman's 80th birthday was an occasion to reflect on a career that has stimulated the mutual exchange of ideas (or memes in the terminology of Richard Dawkins) between many researchers. This paper will revisit a meme Allan encountered in his early career in magnetohydrodynamics, the continuation of a magnetohydrodynamic mode through a singularity, and will also mention other problems where Allan's work has had a powerful cross-fertilizing effect in plasma physics and other areas of physics and mathematics.Comment: Submitted for publication in IOP Journal of Physics: Conference Series for publication in "Plasma Theory, Wave Kinetics, and Nonlinear Dynamics", Proceedings of KaufmanFest, 5-7 October 2007, University of California, Berkeley, US

Nonaxisymmetric, multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium solutions

We describe a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) constrained energy functional for equilibrium calculations that combines the topological constraints of ideal MHD with elements of Taylor relaxation. Extremizing states allow for partially chaotic magnetic fields and non-trivial pressure profiles supported by a discrete set of ideal interfaces with irrational rotational transforms. Numerical solutions are computed using the Stepped Pressure Equilibrium Code, SPEC, and benchmarks and convergence calculations are presented.Comment: Submitted to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion for publication with a cluster of papers associated with workshop: Stability and Nonlinear Dynamics of Plasmas, October 31, 2009 Atlanta, GA on occasion of 65th birthday of R.L. Dewar. V2 is revised for referee

Opportunities for weed manipulation using GMHT row crops

The herbicides and cultivation systems available in most non-GM crops allow farmers little flexibility as to when they control weeds. However, glyphosate and glufosinate-ammonium, as used in GM herbicide tolerant crops, offer the opportunity to control large weeds and weed control can be timed according to the agronomic and environmental aims of the user. This paper will use sugar beet as a model crop and report results where different approaches to weed control have been used and discuss their relevance in the wider agricultural and environmental contextNon peer reviewe

A SCF MO Treatment of Some Tropone Derivatives

Recent work in these laboratories has led to the development of a semiempirical SCF MO treatm ent which seems to give extremely good results for ground States of conjugated molecules of ali kinds composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. We have now applied this treatm ent to a problem of current interest, namely the structures of tropolone and tropone deri­ vatives. The calculations lead to the conclusion that neither of these ring systems is in itself aromatic, while tropone is now re- cognized to be polyenoid, tropolone still seems to be generally regarded as aromatic. This belief, however, arose from the behavior of tropolone derivatives in strong acid solution, where they exist as hydroxy tropylium derivatives, or in alkali where they form mesomeric anions. Calculated heats of formation, resonance ener- gies, and bond lengths are reporte