Effectiveness of Two Keyboarding Instructional Approaches on the Keyboarding Speed, Accuracy, and Technique of Elementary Students

Background: Keyboarding skill development is important for elementary students. Limited research exists to inform practice on effective keyboarding instruction methods. Method: Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined the effectiveness of Keyboarding Without Tears® (n = 786) in the experimental schools compared to the control schools who used the district standard instructional approach of free web-based activities (n = 953) on improving keyboarding skills (speed, accuracy, and technique) in elementary students. Results: The results showed significant improvements in keyboarding speed and accuracy in all schools for all grades favoring the experimental schools compared to the control schools. Significant differences in improvements in keyboarding technique were found with large effect sizes favoring the experimental schools for kindergarten to the second grade and small effect sizes favoring the control schools for the third to fifth grade. Conclusion: Professionals involved in assisting with keyboarding skill development in children are recommended to begin training in these skills in early elementary grades, especially to assist in proper keyboarding technique development. While using free web-based activities are beneficial to improving keyboarding speed and accuracy, as well as keyboarding technique, using a developmentally-based curriculum, such as Keyboarding Without Tears®, may further enhance improvements in the keyboarding skills of elementary students

Weak and strong fillability of higher dimensional contact manifolds

For contact manifolds in dimension three, the notions of weak and strong symplectic fillability and tightness are all known to be inequivalent. We extend these facts to higher dimensions: in particular, we define a natural generalization of weak fillings and prove that it is indeed weaker (at least in dimension five),while also being obstructed by all known manifestations of "overtwistedness". We also find the first examples of contact manifolds in all dimensions that are not symplectically fillable but also cannot be called overtwisted in any reasonable sense. These depend on a higher-dimensional analogue of Giroux torsion, which we define via the existence in all dimensions of exact symplectic manifolds with disconnected contact boundary.Comment: 68 pages, 5 figures. v2: Some attributions clarified, and other minor edits. v3: exposition improved using referee's comments. Published by Invent. Mat

Public geographies II: being organic

This second report on ‘public geographies' considers the diverse, emergent and shifting spaces of engaging with and in public/s. Taking as its focus the more ‘organic’ rather than ‘traditional’ approach to doing public geography, as discussed in the first report, it explores the multiple and unorthodox ways in which engagements across academic-public spheres play out, and what such engagements may mean for geography/ers. The report first explores the role of the internet in ‘enabling conversations', generating a range of opportunities for public geography through websites, wikis, blogs, file-sharing sites, discussion forums and more, thinking critically about how technologies may enable/disable certain kinds of publically engaged activities. It then considers issues of process and praxis: how collaborations with groups/communities/organizations beyond academia are often unplanned, serendipitous encounters that evolve organically into research/learning/teaching endeavours; but also that personal politics/positionality bring an agency to bear upon whether we, as academics, follow the leads we may stumble upon. The report concludes with a provocative question – given that many non-academics appear to be doing some amazing and inspiring projects and activities, thoughtful, critical and (arguably) examples of organic public geographies, what then is academia’s role

Tight Beltrami fields with symmetry

Let $M$ be a compact orientable Seifered fibered 3-manifold without a boundary, and $\alpha$ an $S^1$-invariant contact form on $M$. In a suitable adapted Riemannian metric to $\alpha$, we provide a bound for the volume $\text{Vol}(M)$ and the curvature, which implies the universal tightness of the contact structure $\xi=\ker\alpha$.Comment: 26 page

Sex and the Cinema: What American Pie Teaches the Young

This paper focuses upon the wildly successful blockbuster American Pie teenpics, especially American Pie 3 – the Wedding. I argue that these films, which are sited so securely within the visual and pedagogical machinery of Hollywood culture, are specifically designed to appeal to teenage male audiences, and to provide lessons in sex and romance. Movies like this are especially important as they are experienced by far more teenagers than, for example, instructional films or other classroom materials; indeed, as Henry Giroux has observed, "teens and youth learn how to define themselves outside of the traditional sites of instruction, such as the home and the school… Learning in the postmodern age is located elsewhere – in popular spheres that shape their identities, through forms of knowledge and desires that appear absent from what is taught in schools" (Giroux, 1997, p.49). In this paper I discuss whether the American Pie series is actually a "new age" effort which, via insubordinate performances of gender, contests the hegemonic field of signification which regulates the production of sex, gender and desire, or whether it is more accurately described as a retrogressive hetero-conservative opus with a veneer of sexual radicalism. In short, I intend to probe whether this filmic vector for sex education is all about the shaping of responsible, caring, vulnerable men, or is it guiding them to become just like their heterosexual, middle-class fathers? And whether, despite its riotous and raunchy advertising, American Pie really dishes up something spicy or something terribly wholesome instead

New HST Observations of the Halo Gas of NGC 3067: Limits on the Extragalactic Ionizing Background at Low Redshift and the Lyman Continuum Escape Fraction

We present UV spectroscopy from HST/GHRS and reanalyze existing H_alpha images of the quasar/galaxy pair 3C 232/NGC 3067 and of the halo gas associated with NGC 3067. The spectra permit measurement of, or limits on, the column densities of Fe I, Fe II, Mg I, and Mg II in the absorbing cloud. Two distinct models of the extragalactic radiation field are considered: (1) the ionizing spectrum is dominated by a power-law extragalactic continuum, and (2) the power-law spectrum contains a Lyman break, implying enhanced flux longward of 912 A relative to the hydrogen-ionizing flux. The H_alpha images constrain the escape fraction of Lyman continuum photons from the galaxy to f_esc <= 0.02. With the assumption that the cloud is shielded from all galactic contributions, we can constrain the intensity and shape of the extragalactic continuum. For an AGN-dominated power-law extragalactic spectrum, we derive a limit on the extragalactic ionizing flux Phi_ion >= 2600 photons cm^-2 s^-1, or I_0 >= 10^-23 erg cm^-2 s^-1 Hz^-1 sr^-1 for an ionizing spectrum with power-law index of 1.8 and a cloud of constant density. When combined with previous upper limits from the absence of H_alpha recombination emission from intergalactic clouds, our observations require 2600 <= Phi_ion <= 10000 photons cm^-2 s^-1. We show that if galactic contributions to the incident radiation are important, it is difficult to constrain Phi_ion. These results demonstrate that galactic halo opacities and their wavelength dependence are crucial to understanding the abundance of low-ionization metals in the IGM.Comment: 25 Pages LaTex, 8 PostScript Figures, accepted for publication in AJ, Nov. 99 issu

Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

Increasingly countries around the world are promoting forms of "critical" citizenship in the planned curricula of schools. However, the intended meaning behind this term varies markedly and can range from a set of creative and technical skills under the label "critical thinking" to a desire to encourage engagement, action and political emancipation, often labelled "critical pedagogy". This paper distinguishes these manifestations of the "critical" and, based on an analysis of the prevailing models of critical pedagogy and citizenship education, develops a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the nature of critical citizenship

Evaluation of daily precipitation from the era5 global reanalysis against ghcn observations in the northeastern united states

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Precipitation is a primary input for hydrologic, agricultural, and engineering models, so making accurate estimates of it across the landscape is critically important. While the distribution of in-situ measurements of precipitation can lead to challenges in spatial interpolation, gridded precipitation information is designed to produce a full coverage product. In this study, we compare daily precipitation accumulations from the ERA5 Global Reanalysis (hereafter ERA5) and the US Global Historical Climate Network (hereafter GHCN) across the northeastern United States. We find that both the distance from the Atlantic Coast and elevation difference between ERA5 estimates and GHCN observations affect precipitation relationships between the two datasets. ERA5 has less precipitation along the coast than GHCN observations but more precipitation inland. Elevation differences between ERA5 and GHCN observations are positively correlated with precipitation differences. Isolated GHCN stations on mountain peaks, with elevations well above the ERA5 model grid elevation, have much higher precipitation. Summer months (June, July, and August) have slightly less precipitation in ERA5 than GHCN observations, perhaps due to the ERA5 convective parameterization scheme. The heavy precipitation accumulation above the 90th, 95th, and 99th percentile thresholds are very similar for ERA5 and the GHCN. We find that daily precipitation in the ERA5 dataset is comparable to GHCN observations in the northeastern United States and its gridded spatial continuity has advantages over in-situ point precipitation measurements for regional modeling applications

Contact orderability up to conjugation

We study in this paper the remnants of the contact partial order on the orbits of the adjoint action of contactomorphism groups on their Lie algebras. Our main interest is a class of non-compact contact manifolds, called convex at infinity.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figur