A Narrative Inquiry Into Curriculum-Making Experiences With Games and Puzzles in a Mathematics Class

This thesis is a narrative inquiry into curriculum-making experiences with games and puzzles in a mathematics class. For sixteen weeks I lived alongside a teacher and children in a fifth-grade class exploring what curriculum unfolds when interactive games and puzzles are introduced into a mathematics class. When it came time to write research texts I expected to write about mathematics curriculum unfolding for children when they interact with games and puzzles as I had read about in my literature review. Instead I inquired into two resonating moments in my inquiry using field texts I wrote of my experiences, transcripts from research conversations with children, literature I read, and my own memory constructions. I came to see the decisions I made in my experiences surrounding these resonating moments had what Coles (1989) refers to as stories to tell about my “stories to live by” (Clandinin et al., 1999). I learned I live stories of labeling children and stories of teachers as those who plan and whose plans are followed and that the games and puzzles interrupted the ways I was living these stories in my inquiry. In coming to understand my stories to live by, I realized the children I teach more easily live and tell their stories to live by. I also gained insight into my teacher stories (Clandinin et al., 2006), helping me better understand my experiences in the fifth-grade classroom and myself as a curriculum maker. To continue to become what Greene (1978) refers to as wide-awake to my stories to live by, I learned I must incorporate new experiential contexts for me into my future classrooms and inquire into places of tension (Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Murray Orr, 2009) in any resonating moments. Overall my inquiry led me to learn something about each of Schwab’s (1973) commonplaces: teacher, learner, milieu, and subject matter. I came to understand curriculum as more than subject matter, but instead that curriculum involves all of Schwab’s commonplaces and the interactions between them. This insight into curriculum helped me think about my future practices as a teacher and a professional developer

Protecting Fair Use with Fogerty: Toward a New Dual Standard

Copyright law exists to promote the progress of art and science. It achieves this by balancing limited grants of rights to authors against public access to works. However, copyright holders have upset this balance and tilted the law in their favor One cause of this phenomenon is that the benefit of public access to works is diffused throughout the entire public while the benefit of rights in works is concentrated in the copyright holder. This problem is especially prevalent in the context of litigation where copyright holders (plaintiffs) often stand to gain more through victory than copyright users (defendants). As a result of imbalanced litigation incentives, the fair use doctrine, a doctrine meant to preserve the balance of copyright law that relies on litigation for its development and efficacy, is often rendered nugatory despite the merits of the defendant\u27s case. This Note contends that the current implementation of the Copyright Act\u27s version of attorney fee shifting does not solve this problem and, in many cases, actually compounds it. This Note also argues for a new interpretation of the Supreme Court\u27s mandate of evenhanded treatment of copyright plaintiffs\u27 and defendants\u27 fee petitions. Rebalancing litigation incentives would restore fair use and refocus copyright law on the promotion of progress

Magnetically-Assisted Statistical Assembly - a new heterogeneous integration technique

This paper presents a new technique for the monolithic heterogeneous integration of compound semiconductor devices with silicon integrated circuits, and establishes the theoretical foundation for a key element of the process, tailored magnetic attraction and retention. It is shown how a patterned thin film of hard magnetic material can be used to engineer the attraction between the film and nanopills covered with a soft magnetic material. With a suitable choice of pattern, it is anticipated that it will be possible to achieve complete filling of recesses in the surface of fully-processed integrated circuit wafers, preparatory to subsequent processing to fabricate the nanopills into heterostructure devices integrated monolithically with the pre-existing electronics.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

"I should not have come to this place" : complicating Ichabod's faith in reason in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow

Tim Burton’s films are largely thought to be exercises in style over content, and film adaptations in general are largely thought to be lesser than their source works. In this project, I argue that Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, an adaptation of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” expresses his artistic message, that imagination and the irrational are equally valuable lenses through which to view the world as scientific process and reason are, while simultaneously complicating the thematic concerns of the longstanding myth of the headless horseman, the supernatural versus the natural and the irrational versus the rational, and relating them to his personal anxieties about the parent child relationship. I do so by drawing parallels between the film and its immediate source as well as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, another chapter in the headless horseman myth, and two horror films from the 1960s. I compare the narrative structure, character relationships, thematic concerns, and cultural anxieties expressed in both the film and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to demonstrate that the film argues for a worldview allowing the natural and the supernatural and the rational and the irrational to coexist. I also point to the visual references Burton makes to scenes from Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum and Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio, illustrating the manner in which they complicate the myth’s thematic concerns. My argument adds to Hand and McRoy’s assertion that horror film adaptations are a form of myth-making and to the growing sense that there is more to Burton’s art than flashy visuals

Transport and fate of nitrogen from earthen manure storage effluent seepage

The primary focus of this project was determination of the potential for nitrogen transport and mobility from earthen manure storage (EMS) facilities - the key issue in regulations, guidelines, and management practices. Specific objectives, addressed through an integrated set of laboratory, column and batch test experiments and detailed field monitoring, were to: 1. Measure effluent source chemistry within EMS used in pork production operations and interpret this chemistry in light of the potential for contaminant transport and groundwater contamination; 2. Characterize geochemical conditions within an EMS effluent plume and summarize factors controlling mobility of species of concern; and 3. Develop a method of establishing nitrogen mobility based on effluent and/or soil characteristics. EMS solutions contained, on a molar basis, 36% ammonium, 36% bicarbonate, 8% potassium, 6% chloride, 5% sodium plus sulphate, calcium, magnesium and other nutrients. Additionally, the solution contained ~6,000 and 9,000 mg/L organic and inorganic carbon, respectively, and had a near neutral pH. The high biological demand results in a solution with a low Eh causing nitrogen to remain in the ammonium form. Conditions within the effluent plume were slightly reducing due to naturally low oxygen concentrations and the chemistry of the EMS effluent. Ammonium and potassium transport in the effluent plume was attenuated by ion exchange; the release of magnesium and calcium from the soil exchange complex produced concentrations in excess of 29 and 7 times their concentration respectively in the background groundwater. This hard water front or "hardness halo" offers a method to provide early indications of EMS plume advance. Organic carbon transport was similar to chloride (assumed to be non reactive) and further promoted reducing conditions. Nitrogen remained as ammonium with the exception of the leading edge and upper fringe of the plume where both oxidation and reduction of nitrogen occurred depending on chemical conditions and time of year. The variability of the retardation of cations during contaminant transport may be caused by variations in ion adsorption due to variability in their selectivity by the soil exchange complex. Preliminary modeling of EMS effluent transport using varying selectivity coefficients illustrates the potential for enhancement of current models by incorporation of subroutines to accommodate variable selectivity. Selectivity coefficients for ammonium, as referenced to sodium, varied from 0.23 to 2.2 and distribution coefficients for ammonium varied from 0.03 to 0.8L/kg. The ability of ammonium to replace ions on the exchange sites was a function of the ratio of monovalent to divalent cations in solution rather than the concentration of only the ammonium in solution. The ability of ammonium to replace ions on the exchange sites increased with an increasing ratio of monovalent to divalent cations in solution, and became significant above a ratio of 0.9. The retardation factor for ammonium was determined to be less than 3, an order of magnitude less than assumed in previous studies; nitrogen transport in EMS effluent plumes may therefore be much greater than originally assumed by some regulators, developers and engineers. Furthermore, sorbed ammonium will likely release into solution once the source is removed and natural waters begins to leach the contaminated soil

New PbSnTe heterojunction laser diode structures with improved performance

Several recent advances in the state-of-the-art of lead tin telluride double heterojunction laser diodes are summarized. Continuous Wave operation to 120 K and pulsed operation to 166 K with single, lowest order transverse mode emission to in excess of four times threshold at 80 K were achieved in buried stripe lasers fabricated by liquid phase epitaxy in the lattice-matched system, lead-tin telluride-lead telluride selenide. At the same time, liquid phase epitaxy was used to produce PbSnTe distributed feedback lasers with much broader continuous single mode tuning ranges than are available from Fabry-Perot lasers. The physics and philosophy behind these advances is as important as the structures and performance of the specific devices embodying the advances, particularly since structures are continually being evolved and the performance continues to be improved

Digital Transformation of a Manufacturing Company in Light of the Digital Innovation Theory

Many product manufacturing companies are investing in innovative uses of digital technologies to improve the value they offer their customers and users of their products. Transforming themselves from a product innovator into a digital innovator is a challenge with multiple interconnected ramifications for the entire company. Analysis of what a heavy-machinery manufacturer learned on its digital transformation journey shed light on how the organization, its approach to customers, and its culture had to change to enable the move from products to digital solutions. This paper examines these changes in light of digital innovation theory, to assess how the executive management team carried the current themes of the theory into practice. It enriches that theory by bringing customer value into the core of the framework and demonstrating how digital innovation theory supports digitality-oriented transformation of a manufacturing company. This paper also provides business executives practical guidance for managing the transformation process

Rapid formation of a modern bedrock canyon by a single flood event

Deep river canyons are thought to form slowly over geological time (see, for example, ref. 1), cut by moderate flows that reoccur every few years. In contrast, some of the most spectacular canyons on Earth and Mars were probably carved rapidly during ancient megaflood events. Quantification of the flood discharge, duration and erosion mechanics that operated during such events is hampered because we lack modern analogues. Canyon Lake Gorge, Texas, was carved in 2002 during a single catastrophic flood. The event offers a rare opportunity to analyse canyon formation and test palaeo-hydraulic-reconstruction techniques under known topographic and hydraulic conditions. Here we use digital topographic models and visible/near-infrared aerial images from before and after the flood, discharge measured during the event, field measurements and sediment-transport modelling to show that the flood moved metre-sized boulders, excavated ~7 m of limestone and transformed a soil-mantled valley into a bedrock canyon in just ~3 days. We find that canyon morphology is strongly dependent on rock type: plucking of limestone blocks produced waterfalls, inner channels and bedrock strath terraces, whereas abrasion of cemented alluvium sculpted walls, plunge pools and streamlined islands. Canyon formation was so rapid that erosion might have been limited by the ability of the flow to transport sediment. We suggest that our results might improve hydraulic reconstructions of similar megafloods on Earth and Mars

Water balance of a prairie cattle feedlot pen

Non-Peer ReviewedThe overall purpose of this study is to define the water balance of feedlot pens in a Saskatchewan cattle feeding operation. Although the initial intention of the study was focused upon an active feedlot circumstances resulted in our year of analysis being on an recently abandoned feedlot. During the study year (Sept 2003 to Aug 2004) there was very little precipitation until May 2004. Weirs in operation for only part of the summer recorded no runoff. Winter precipitation was very low (34 mm) and there was no observed runoff from it. Runoff models, using lab and field parameters found that at the most there might have been runoff from only one event, that of 26 mm 24 hr rainfall, and this would have only occurred on a pen scraped of manure. Drainage beneath 60 cm soil depth was zero mm. Of the 339 mm of precipitation that fell during the study year, some of it was stored within the manure pack and the rest lost as evaporation