Loss factor and resonant frequency of viscoelastic shear-damped structural composites

Loss factor and resonant frequency of viscoelastic shear damped structural composite

Achievement and Selected Demographic Variables in Relation to Participation in the Early Childhood Education Program on the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation

The 1969 Kennedy Report revealed that one of the primary reasons for low achievement among Indian children was the negative self-image that they had of themselves. As a primary result of this study, Congress passed the Indian Education Act of 1972, which attempts to address the educational needs and concerns of Indian people, both young and old alike. The Devils Lake Sioux Early Childhood Education program has been in existence since the mid 1960s and provides three- and four-year-old children with a preschool program in the areas of cognitive thinking, social development, and improving psychomotor skills. The purpose of this program is to develop these children in a positive direction, contributing to their educational performance when entering the elementary school and beyond. The basic question to be answered was, Does the Devils Lake Sioux Early Childhood Education program positively influence academic achievement in the elementary grades? Review of Related Literature: A review of related literature revealed that few studies of this type had been done on the Indian reservations across the country. The results of previous studies in the dominant society were mixed in the 1960s; and as these preschool programs continued into the 1970s, the results appeared to show more concrete findings in academic achievement in the elementary grades in favor of pupil participation in preschool programs over pupils without preschool participation. Design of the Study: Three standardized achievement tests were used in this study to draw comparisons between pupil participation and nonparticipation in the Early Childhood Education program on the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation. In addition, selected demographic variables including sex, grade level, age, socioeconomic status, parental employment status, degree of Indian blood, tribal affiliation, parental education, and school attendance were collected for both pupil groups during the 1977-78 school year. Analysis of variance,, correlation coefficients, and chi square techniques were employed in order to determine significance at the .05 level. Conclusions: Three major conclusions were reached as follows:1. The findings revealed significant differences between these two pupil groups on the Science Research Associates Assessment Survey instrument; and no significant differences were found on either the Metropolitan Readiness Test or the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts instruments. However, it was further concluded that the statistical methods employed did not take into account the per-grade-level factor on the Science Research Associates Assessment Survey instrument where there were more non-early childhood education pupils than early childhood education pupils at the sixth grade level, thus skewing the results in favor of the non-early childhood education pupils. 2. Significant relationships were found on the Metropolitan Readiness Test instrument on the variables home stability, degree of Indian blood, tribal affiliation, and parental education of the mother. Significant relationships were found on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts instrument on the variable tribal affiliation. Significant relationships were found on the Science Research Associates Assessment Survey instrument on the variables achievement, sex, grade level, age, socioeconomic status, home stability, parental employment status, tribal affiliation, and parental education of the mother. 3. No significant relationships were found on the Metropolitan Readiness Test instrument on the variables achievement, sex, grade level, age, socioeconomic status, parental education of the father, and school attendance. No significant relationships were found on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts instrument on the variables achievement, sex, grade level, age, socioeconomic status, home stability, degree of Indian blood, parental education of the father, parental education of the mother, and school attendance. No significant relationships were found on the Science Research Associates Assessment Survey instrument on the variables degree of Indian blood, parental education of the father, and school attendance

The development of thirty self-administering and self-scoring elaborative thinking exercises

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

WHOOPING CRANE AND SANDHILL CRANE MONITORING AT FIVE WIND ENERGY FACILITIES

Biologists have expressed concern that individuals of the Aransas-Wood Buffalo Population of the federally endangered whooping crane (Grus americana), numbering about 300, may be injured or killed by wind turbines during migration. To help address this concern and curtail (stop) turbine operations when whooping cranes approached turbines, we monitored the area around 5 wind energy facilities in North and South Dakota during spring and fall migration for whooping cranes and sandhill cranes (G. canadensis). Observers monitored cranes for 3 years at each facility from 2009 to 2013 (1,305 total days of monitoring), recording 14 unique observations for a total of 45 whooping cranes for which curtailment occurred during portions of 9 days. Observers also searched for dead cranes at the base of every turbine each day of monitoring. This resulted in approximately 92,022 cumulative individual inspections, during which no dead or injured cranes were detected. Based on our results and monitoring efforts at other wind energy facilities in the migration corridor, no whooping crane fatalities have been documented. Although migrating cranes use areas near turbines, they do not appear to be overly susceptible to collisions with wind turbines

Integrating cell sheets for kidney-on-a-chip applications

A drug being developed undergoes many stages of development to get to market. Information of the drugs absorption, distribution, excretion, metabolism, and systemic toxicology both short and long term are mandatory by regulatory agencies during clinical trials [1]. Drug-induced organ toxicity leads to 30% of all drugs failing to reach the market. Specifically, nephrotoxicity leads to 19% of all failures during phase III trials but only 2% during preclinical development stages. Current early stage tests for toxicity are widely perceived to be inadequate. 2D cell culture models can produce valuable data for drug discovery but do not accurately predict toxicity. A typical animal study to assess nephrotoxicity uses \u3e 26 rodents, with substantially more animals if both sexes are required. An in vitro model that replaces or reduces animal use in toxicity testing is required for ethical reasons and to reduce species-specific effects. A drug can take 8-12 years and 0.8-1.2 billion US$ to get to market, hence there is a need for a more complex, human cell derived, in vitro model to accurately predict drug toxicity and reduce failure rates during the pre-clinical to clinical transition in drug development. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.Comment: In IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW'20

Cylindrical Magnets and Ideal Solenoids

Both wire-wound solenoids and cylindrical magnets can be approximately modeled as ideal, azimuthally symmetric solenoids. We present here an exact solution for the magnetic field of an ideal solenoid in an especially easy to use form. The field is expressed in terms of a single function that can be rapidly computed by means of a compact, highly efficient algorithm, which can be coded as an add-in function to a spreadsheet, making field calculations accessible even to introductory students. In computational work these expressions are not only accurate but also just as fast as most approximate expressions. We demonstrate their utility by numerically simulating the experiment of dropping a cylindrical magnet through a nonmagnetic conducting tube and then comparing the calculation with data obtained from experiments suitable for an undergraduate laboratory.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, revTe

The speaking vocabulary of grade two

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit