Structure Speaks: User-Centered Design and Professional Development

This reflective essay situates a yearlong professional development endeavor led by a site of the National Writing Project within the language of technical communication. Developing rural writing teachers through four distinct design features—needs assessment, frequent contact, website redesign, collaborative planning through Google Docs—this work sought to put participants and providers on equal levels, sharing control of programming when possible. Professional development providers and teacher educators ultimately must model practices they desire to impacting students in the classroom

“We Were the Teachers, not the Observers”: Transforming Teacher Preparation through Placements in a Creative, After-School Program

Teacher preparation at one university shifts pre-service observation to hands-on integration of the arts in an after-school program called Razorback Writers

Buddhism in Post-Soviet Russia: The Geographic Contexts of ‘Revival’

This dissertation is about religious practice and belief among Buddhists in the Russian Federation. Using the case studies of Kalmykia and Buryatia, two of Russia’s 21 ethnic republics, I explore contemporary opinion about the relevance of Buddhism through a multiple methods approach. In Kalmykia, I use elite interviews, focus groups, and a small-scale (N=300) survey as the primary methodologies. While religious elites generally view the region’s religious revival as broad but not deep, there is a genuine sentiment that religion is an important component of post-Soviet national identity as expressed by interlocutors in focus groups and in survey responses. These competing discourses around revival complicate a straightforward reading of the role of Buddhism in the republic. To frame this discussion, I also compare responses on the question of attendance at religious services to a 2005 sample conducted in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan; I find that ethnic pride is an important predictor of frequent attendance at religious services among ethnic Kalmyks, while gender is the key independent variable in explaining higher levels of attendance in the Muslim republic. In Buryatia, I rely primarily on a cross-national survey (N=143) to compare religious practice and belief among the titular Buryats and ethnic Russians (as well as members of other groups) who live in the republic. The key finding in this chapter is that Buddhism has consolidated its position as a key element of national identity—as measured through self-reported religiosity and attendance—among Buryats in the past two decades; this is specifically true in comparison to ethnic Russians. Theoretically, the contribution of the dissertation is to explore new paths of research in the discipline of geography along two lines: a quantitative geography of religion that does more than map spatial patterns in religious practice but rather is attendant to the variation in that practice within countries and considers this diversity at the sub-national scale through survey work; and a formalized methodological approach to the geographical idea of context, one which draws on and advocates for the use of multiple methods, specifically surveys, interviews, and focus groups

Phase Structure of Z(3)-Polyakov-Loop Models

We study effective lattice actions describing the Polyakov loop dynamics originating from finite-temperature Yang-Mills theory. Starting with a strong-coupling expansion the effective action is obtained as a series of Z(3)-invariant operators involving higher and higher powers of the Polyakov loop, each with its own coupling. Truncating to a subclass with two couplings we perform a detailed analysis of the statistical mechanics involved. To this end we employ a modified mean field approximation and Monte Carlo simulations based on a novel cluster algorithm. We find excellent agreement of both approaches concerning the phase structure of the theories. The phase diagram exhibits both first and second order transitions between symmetric, ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic phases with phase boundaries merging at three tricritical points. The critical exponents nu and gamma at the continuous transition between symmetric and anti-ferromagnetic phases are the same as for the 3-state Potts model.Comment: 20 pages, 22 figure

TCU: Honors Research Across the Disciplines

Panel Chair: Wendy Williams, TC

Nongaussian fluctuations arising from finite populations: Exact results for the evolutionary Moran process

The appropriate description of fluctuations within the framework of evolutionary game theory is a fundamental unsolved problem in the case of finite populations. The Moran process recently introduced into this context [Nowak et al., Nature (London) 428, 646 (2004)] defines a promising standard model of evolutionary game theory in finite populations for which analytical results are accessible. In this paper, we derive the stationary distribution of the Moran process population dynamics for arbitrary $2\times{}2$ games for the finite size case. We show that a nonvanishing background fitness can be transformed to the vanishing case by rescaling the payoff matrix. In contrast to the common approach to mimic finite-size fluctuations by Gaussian distributed noise, the finite size fluctuations can deviate significantly from a Gaussian distribution.Comment: 4 pages (2 figs). Published in Physical Review E (Rapid Communications

Rotation of the Milky Way and the formation of the Magellanic Stream

We studied the impact of the revisited values for the LSR circular velocity of the Milky Way (Reid et al. 2004) on the formation of the Magellanic Stream. The LSR circular velocity was varied within its observational uncertainties as a free parameter of the interaction between the Large (LMC) and the Small (SMC) Magellanic Clouds and the Galaxy. We have shown that the large-scale morphology and kinematics of the Magellanic Stream may be reproduced as tidal features, assuming the recent values of the proper motions of the Magellanic Clouds (Kallivayalil et al. 2006). Automated exploration of the entire parameter space for the interaction was performed to identify all parameter combinations that allow for modeling the Magellanic Stream. Satisfactory models exist for the dynamical mass of the Milky Way within a wide range of 0.6*10^12Msun to 3.0*10^12Msun and over the entire 1-sigma errors of the proper motions of the Clouds. However, the successful models share a common interaction scenario. The Magellanic Clouds are satellites of the Milky Way, and in all cases two close LMC-SMC encounters occurred within the last 4Gyr at t<-2.5Gyr and t approx. -150Myr, triggering the formation of the Stream and of the Magellanic Bridge, respectively. The latter encounter is encoded in the observed proper motions and inevitable in any model of the interaction. We conclude that the tidal origin of the Magellanic Stream implies the previously introduced LMC/SMC orbital history, unless the parameters of the interaction are revised substantially.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ, minor corrections, 3 figures replace