Integration of Technology in Math and Science Education – A Model for Teaching Elementary and Middle School Pre-Service Teachers

This paper describes the development and implementation of a course, Integration of Technology in Math and Science Education, to introduce elementary and middle school pre-service teachers to real technology skills that they can use in their future classrooms. Activities allowed the students to learn technology skills while using the Internet to enrich their content skills and share information with their fellow students. The course was designed to allow students to master a variety of technology skills, and see how these skills can be used appropriately in their future classrooms, while also increasing their comfort level to use the technology and reduce their resistance and anxiety to use it later in their real-time classrooms. During the class hands-on activities, the students became fluent at using the Internet for enrichment and communication, and at developing strategies for using their new skills to present SOL-relevant lesson plans. Students enter this course with very little in the way of educational technology skills, but leave with a teaching toolbox filled with new skills

Anchor Collaboratives: Building Bridges with Place-Based Partnerships and Anchor Institutions

In January 2019, the Anchor Collaborative Network (ACN) was initiated to build a shared movement of anchor institution collaboralions that are working to accelerate equitable, inclusive strategies that respond to local needs and challenges. This report presents information and examples to show the current slate of the field. ACN Working Groups plan to produce case studies, toolkits and other educational information to further assist other cities, anchor institutions, and partner organizations lo learn about and advance anchor mission work

Casimir Dispersion Forces and Orientational Pairwise Additivity

A path integral formulation is used to study the fluctuation-induced interactions between manifolds of arbitrary shape at large separations. It is shown that the form of the interactions crucially depends on the choice of the boundary condition. In particular, whether or not the Casimir interaction is pairwise additive is shown to depend on whether the ``metallic'' boundary condition corresponds to a ``grounded'' or an ``isolated'' manifold.Comment: 6 pages, RevTe

The politics of numbers and additionality governing the national Payment for Forest Environmental Services scheme in Vietnam: A case study from Son La province

Payments for forest environmental services (PFES) is a major breakthrough policy in the Vietnamese forestry sector because it contributes 25% of the total investments in the forestry sector and serves as the first market-based instrument employed to protect forests. However, there is little empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Is the policy meeting the core objectives of improving forest cover and forest quality and is it also achieving its claims of supporting local livelihoods? This paper analyses the environmental, social, and economic impacts of PFES in Son La province, the longest standing implementation of a PFES scheme in Vietnam. Our study uses a sampling method that incorporates pre-matching and a before-after-control-intervention approach. Data was collected from government statistics, remote sensing analysis, focus group discussions involving 236 people, surveys with a total of 240 households, and key informant interviews with 45 people. Our findings show that additionality of PFES in Son La is controversial and depends on who collects the data and what data is used to evaluate the impacts of PFES. Data collection is also politicized to serve central, provincial and district government interests. Evidence shows that PFES has provided little additional income to individual villagers to protect forests in Son La. However, total PFES revenue paid to communities generates significant income for village communities. Moreover, not all villagers can receive continuous payments from PFES, meaning that PFES has not become a stable source of income, rendering the permanence of PFES limited. Improving monitoring and evaluation policies coupled with transparent, inclusive, independent mechanisms are essential to providing a more accurate reflection of impacts from PFES in Vietnam

Monotonicity of Fitness Landscapes and Mutation Rate Control

A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the performance of evolutionary algorithms. Much biological theory in this area is based on Ronald Fisher's work, who used Euclidean geometry to study the relation between mutation size and expected fitness of the offspring in infinite phenotypic spaces. Here we reconsider this theory based on the alternative geometry of discrete and finite spaces of DNA sequences. First, we consider the geometric case of fitness being isomorphic to distance from an optimum, and show how problems of optimal mutation rate control can be solved exactly or approximately depending on additional constraints of the problem. Then we consider the general case of fitness communicating only partial information about the distance. We define weak monotonicity of fitness landscapes and prove that this property holds in all landscapes that are continuous and open at the optimum. This theoretical result motivates our hypothesis that optimal mutation rate functions in such landscapes will increase when fitness decreases in some neighbourhood of an optimum, resembling the control functions derived in the geometric case. We test this hypothesis experimentally by analysing approximately optimal mutation rate control functions in 115 complete landscapes of binding scores between DNA sequences and transcription factors. Our findings support the hypothesis and find that the increase of mutation rate is more rapid in landscapes that are less monotonic (more rugged). We discuss the relevance of these findings to living organisms

Growth in solvable subgroups of GL_r(Z/pZ)

Let $K=Z/pZ$ and let $A$ be a subset of \GL_r(K) such that is solvable. We reduce the study of the growth of $A$ under the group operation to the nilpotent setting. Specifically we prove that either $A$ grows rapidly (meaning $|A\cdot A\cdot A|\gg |A|^{1+\delta}$), or else there are groups $U_R$ and $S$, with $S/U_R$ nilpotent such that $A_k\cap S$ is large and $U_R\subseteq A_k$, where $k$ is a bounded integer and $A_k = \{x_1 x_2...b x_k : x_i \in A \cup A^{-1} \cup {1}}$. The implied constants depend only on the rank $r$ of $\GL_r(K)$. When combined with recent work by Pyber and Szab\'o, the main result of this paper implies that it is possible to draw the same conclusions without supposing that is solvable.Comment: 46 pages. This version includes revisions recommended by an anonymous referee including, in particular, the statement of a new theorem, Theorem

When Do Like Charges Attract?

We study the interaction potential between two polyions inside a colloidal suspension. It is shown that at large separation the interaction potential is purely repulsive, with the induced attractive interactions being doubly screened. For short separations the condensed counterions become correlated, what leads to an effective attraction between the two macromolecules.Comment: 4 pages, 1 Postscript figure, uses multicol.sty, axodraw.sty, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Transcriptome sequencing reveals altered long intergenic non-coding RNAs in lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) represent an emerging and under-studied class of transcripts that play a significant role in human cancers. Due to the tissue- and cancer-specific expression patterns observed for many lncRNAs it is believed that they could serve as ideal diagnostic biomarkers. However, until each tumor type is examined more closely, many of these lncRNAs will remain elusive. RESULTS: Here we characterize the lncRNA landscape in lung cancer using publicly available transcriptome sequencing data from a cohort of 567 adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma tumors. Through this compendium we identify over 3,000 unannotated intergenic transcripts representing novel lncRNAs. Through comparison of both adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinomas with matched controls we discover 111 differentially expressed lncRNAs, which we term lung cancer-associated lncRNAs (LCALs). A pan-cancer analysis of 324 additional tumor and adjacent normal pairs enable us to identify a subset of lncRNAs that display enriched expression specific to lung cancer as well as a subset that appear to be broadly deregulated across human cancers. Integration of exome sequencing data reveals that expression levels of many LCALs have significant associations with the mutational status of key oncogenes in lung cancer. Functional validation, using both knockdown and overexpression, shows that the most differentially expressed lncRNA, LCAL1, plays a role in cellular proliferation. CONCLUSIONS: Our systematic characterization of publicly available transcriptome data provides the foundation for future efforts to understand the role of LCALs, develop novel biomarkers, and improve knowledge of lung tumor biology. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0429-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Translation, cultural adaptation and field-testing of the Thinking Healthy Program for Vietnam

Background: Depression and anxiety are prevalent among women in low- and lower-middle income countries who are pregnant or have recently given birth. There is promising evidence that culturally-adapted, evidence-informed, perinatal psycho-educational programs implemented in local communities are effective in reducing mental health problems. The Thinking Healthy Program (THP) has proved effective in Pakistan. The aims were to adapt the THP for rural Vietnam; establish the program’s comprehensibility, acceptability and salience for universal use, and investigate whether administration to small groups of women might be of equivalent effectiveness to administration in home visits to individual women. Methods: The THP Handbook and Calendar were made available in English by the program developers and translated into Vietnamese. Cultural adaptation and field-testing were undertaken using WHO guidance. Field-testing of the four sessions of THP Module One was undertaken in weekly sessions with a small group in a rural commune and evaluated using baseline, process and endline surveys. Results: The adapted Vietnamese version of the Thinking Healthy Program (THP-V) was found to be understandable, meaningful and relevant to pregnant women, and commune health centre and Women’s Union representatives in a rural district. It was delivered effectively by trained local facilitators. Role-play, brainstorming and small-group discussions to find shared solutions to common problems were appraised as helpful learning opportunities. Conclusions: The THP-V is safe and comprehensible, acceptable and salient to pregnant women without mental health problems in rural Vietnam. Delivery in facilitated small groups provided valued opportunities for role-play rehearsal and shared problem solving. Local observers found the content and approach highly relevant to local needs and endorsed the approach as a mental health promotion strategy with potential for integration into local universal maternal and child health services. These preliminary data indicate that the impact of the THP-V should be tested in its complete form in a large scale trial

Protocol for a process evaluation of a cluster randomized controlled trial of the Learning Club intervention for women\u27s health, and infant\u27s health and development in rural Vietnam

Background: Learning Clubs is a multi-component intervention to address the eight common risk factors for women’s health, and infant’s health and development in resource-constrained settings. We are testing in a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural Vietnam whether this intervention improves cognitive development in children when they are aged two. There are few comprehensive process evaluations of complex interventions to optimise early childhood development. The aim is to conduct a planned process evaluation of the Learning Clubs intervention in Vietnam. Methods: The evaluation will be conducted alongside the Learning Clubs trial using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Four domains will be included in the evaluation: [1] Context – how contextual factors affect the implementation and outcomes; [2] Implementation – what aspects of the Learning Clubs intervention are actually delivered and how well the intervention is delivered; [3] Mechanism of impact – how the intervention produces changes in the primary and secondary outcomes; and [4] National integration – how the intervention can be scaled up for application nationally. Purposive sampling will be used to recruit project stakeholders from commune, provincial and national levels. Results of the process evaluation will be integrated with those of the outcome and economic evaluations to provide a comprehensive picture of the effectiveness of the Learning Clubs intervention for early childhood development in rural Vietnam. Discussion: Results of the evaluation will provide evidence about the implementation of the intervention and explanations for any differences in the outcomes between participants in intervention and control conditions. The evaluation will be integrated into each stage of the outcome assessments, but will be implemented by a bilingual team independent of the team implementing the intervention. It will therefore provide evidence which will not be influenced by or influence the intervention and will inform both generalisation to other settings and scalability in Vietnam