Hiding in Plain Sight: Identifying Computational Thinking in the Ontario Elementary School Curriculum

Given a growing digital economy with complex problems, demands are being made for education to address computational thinking (CT) – an approach to problem solving that draws on the tenets of computer science. We conducted a comprehensive content analysis of the Ontario elementary school curriculum documents for 44 CT-related terms to examine the extent to which CT may already be considered within the curriculum. The quantitative analysis strategy provided frequencies of terms, and a qualitative analysis provided information about how and where terms were being used. As predicted, results showed that while CT terms appeared mostly in Mathematics, and concepts and perspectives were more frequently cited than practices, related terms appeared across almost all disciplines and grades. Findings suggest that CT is already a relevant consideration for educators in terms of concepts and perspectives; however, CT practices should be more widely incorporated to promote 21st century skills across disciplines. Future research would benefit from continued examination of the implementation and assessment of CT and its related concepts, practices, and perspectives

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

Birds (Aves), Serrania Sadiri, Parque Nacional Madidi, Depto. La Paz, Bolivia

We surveyed the Serrania Sadiri for birds at elevations between 500-950m for a combined total of 15 days in three different months. The area surveyed was along the Tumupasa/San Jose de Uchupiamones trail at the edge of Parque Nacional Madidi in Depto. La Paz, Bolivia. We report observations of 231 species of birds detected by sight and sound, including many outlying ridge specialists. We report and present photographs of a new species for Depto. La Paz (Caprimulgis nigrescens), the second Bolivian localities for Porphyrolaema prophyrolae ereicapillus, and Basileuterus chrysogaster, and five new species records for Parque Nacional Madidi

Hardware as a service - enabling dynamic, user-level bare metal provisioning of pools of data center resources.

We describe a “Hardware as a Service (HaaS)” tool for isolating pools of compute, storage and networking resources. The goal of HaaS is to enable dynamic and flexible, user-level provisioning of pools of resources at the so-called “bare-metal” layer. It allows experimental or untrusted services to co-exist alongside trusted services. By functioning only as a resource isolation system, users are free to choose between different system scheduling and provisioning systems and to manage isolated resources as they see fit. We describe key HaaS use cases and features. We show how HaaS can provide a valuable, and somehwat overlooked, layer in the software architecture of modern data center management. Documentation and source code for HaaS software are available at: https://github.com/CCI-MOC/haasPartial support for this work was provided by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, National Science Foundation award #1347525 and several commercial partners of the Mass Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.org.http://www.ieee-hpec.org/2014/CD/index_htm_files/FinalPapers/116.pd

An Experiment on Bare-Metal BigData Provisioning

Many BigData customers use on-demand platforms in the cloud, where they can get a dedicated virtual cluster in a couple of minutes and pay only for the time they use. Increasingly, there is a demand for bare-metal bigdata solutions for applications that cannot tolerate the unpredictability and performance degradation of virtualized systems. Existing bare-metal solutions can introduce delays of 10s of minutes to provision a cluster by installing operating systems and applications on the local disks of servers. This has motivated recent research developing sophisticated mechanisms to optimize this installation. These approaches assume that using network mounted boot disks incur unacceptable run-time overhead. Our analysis suggest that while this assumption is true for application data, it is incorrect for operating systems and applications, and network mounting the boot disk and applications result in negligible run-time impact while leading to faster provisioning time.This research was supported in part by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, NSF awards 1347525 and 1414119 and several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Speech-bundles in the 19th-century English novel

We propose a lexico-grammatical approach to speech in fiction based on the centrality of ‘fictional speech-bundles’ as the key element of fictional talk. To identify fictional speech-bundles, we use three corpora of 19th-century fiction that are available through the corpus stylistic web application CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context). We focus on the ‘quotes’ subsets of the corpora, i.e. text within quotation marks, which is mostly equivalent to direct speech. These quotes subsets are compared across the fiction corpora and with the spoken component of the British National Corpus 1994. The comparisons illustrate how fictional speech-bundles can be described on a continuum from lexical bundles in real spoken language to repeated sequences of words that are specific to individual fictional characters. Typical functions of fictional speech-bundles are the description of interactions and interpersonal relationships of fictional characters. While our approach crucially depends on an innovative corpus linguistic methodology, it also draws on theoretical insights into spoken grammar and characterisation in fiction in order to question traditional notions of realism and authenticity in fictional speech

Puget Sound Federal Task Force: Coordinating, leveraging and prioritizing diverse federal programs toward a healthy and sustainable Puget Sound

The Puget Sound Federal Task Force (PSFTF) panel at the 2022 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference will include presentations and an opportunity for discussion on current priority U.S. federal actions to protect and restore Puget Sound. PSFTF Co-chairs will provide an overview, including the role and relationship to treaty protected rights and resources. PSFTF Subteam Leads will highlight federal work on cross-cutting actions; fish passage; nearshore and shorelines; floodplains, riparian habitat, and estuaries; shellfish; stormwater; and science and monitoring. As background, with the Puget Sound Congressional delegation, Puget Sound Partnership, tribes and others recognizing that formal program and budget coordination at the federal level was needed to effectively protect and restore Puget Sound and Treaty protected resources, the White House Council on the Environmental Quality led nine federal Cabinet Secretaries and agency directors to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) forming the PSFTF. The MOU, signed in November 2016, outlines the structure of the PSFTF and the charge to PSFTF agencies to develop Action Plans on a rolling 5-year basis. The PSFTF is comprised of 13 federal agencies and co-chaired by EPA and NOAA. The PSFTF MOU, Action Plans and Progress Reports are available online at: https://www.epa.gov/puget-sound/puget-sound-federal-task-forc

High-resolution, large-scale laboratory measurements of a sandy beach and dynamic cobble berm revetment

High quality laboratory measurements of nearshore waves and morphology change at, or near prototype-scale are essential to support new understanding of coastal processes and enable the development and validation of predictive models. The DynaRev experiment was completed at the GWK large wave flume over 8 weeks during 2017 to investigate the response of a sandy beach to water level rise and varying wave conditions with and without a dynamic cobble berm revetment, as well as the resilience of the revetment itself. A large array of instrumentation was used throughout the experiment to capture: (1) wave transformation from intermediate water depths to the runup limit at high spatio-temporal resolution, (2) beach profile change including wave-by-wave changes in the swash zone, (3) detailed hydro and morphodynamic measurements around a developing and a translating sandbar.</p