Integrating Literacy and Science in an Elementary School Classroom

This study explored how the integration of science and literacy in an elementary school classroom impacted the conceptual learning and understanding of first grade students. This study was explored around two research questions 1) How do students respond to the weather activities after being exposed to scientific read-alouds? 2) How will the impact of center based science inquiry on students reading comprehension and conceptual understanding of science knowledge change when the teacher engages students in scientific inquiry through the use of centers? Data was collected over a three-day period when the teacher was conducting a weather unit. It was found that through the literacy integration process and use of centers, the students were able to gain a deeper conceptual understanding and procedural fluency of the science topic

What are the prospects for seasonal prediction of the marine environment of the North-west European Shelf?

Sustainable management and utilisation of the North-west European Shelf (NWS) seas could benefit from reliable forecasts of the marine environment on monthly to seasonal timescales. Recent advances in global seasonal forecast systems and regional marine reanalyses for the NWS allow us to investigate the potential for seasonal forecasts of the state of the NWS. We identify three possible approaches to address this issue: (A) basing NWS seasonal forecasts directly on output from the Met Office's GloSea5 global seasonal forecast system; (B) developing empirical downscaling relationships between large-scale climate drivers predicted by GloSea5 and the state of the NWS; and (C) dynamically downscaling GloSea5 using a regional model. We show that the GloSea5 system can be inadequate for simulating the NWS directly (approach A). We explore empirical relationships between the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and NWS variables estimated using a regional reanalysis (approach B). We find some statistically significant relationships and present a skillful prototype seasonal forecast for English Channel sea surface temperature. We find large-scale relationships between inter-annual variability in the boundary conditions and inter-annual variability modelled on the shelf, suggesting that dynamic downscaling may be possible (approach C). We also show that for some variables there are opposing mechanisms correlated with the NAO, for which dynamic downscaling may improve on the skill possible with empirical forecasts. We conclude that there is potential for the development of reliable seasonal forecasts for the NWS and consider the research priorities for their development

Coalescing at 8 GeV in the Fermilab Main Injector

For Project X, it is planned to inject a beam of 3 10**11 particles per bunch into the Main Injector. To prepare for this by studying the effects of higher intensity bunches in the Main Injector it is necessary to perform coalescing at 8 GeV. The results of a series of experiments and simulations of 8 GeV coalescing are presented. To increase the coalescing efficiency adiabatic reduction of the 53 MHz RF is required, resulting in ~70% coalescing efficiency of 5 initial bunches. Data using wall current monitors has been taken to compare previous work and new simulations for 53 MHz RF reduction, bunch rotations and coalescing, good agreement between experiment and simulation was found. Possible schemes to increase the coalescing efficiency and generate even higher intensity bunches are discussed. These require improving the timing resolution of the low level RF and/or tuning the adiabatic voltage reduction of the 53 MHz.Comment: 3 pp. 3rd International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC 2012) 20-25 May 2012, New Orleans, Louisian

Gravitational lens magnification by Abell 1689: Distortion of the background galaxy luminosity function

Gravitational lensing magnifies the luminosity of galaxies behind the lens. We use this effect to constrain the total mass in the cluster Abell 1689 by comparing the lensed luminosities of background galaxies with the luminosity function of an undistorted field. Since galaxies are assumed to be a random sampling of luminosity space, this method is not limited by clustering noise. We use photometric redshift information to estimate galaxy distance and intrinsic luminosity. Knowing the redshift distribution of the background population allows us to lift the mass/background degeneracy common to lensing analysis. In this paper we use 9 filters observed over 12 hours with the Calar Alto 3.5m telescope to determine the redshifts of 1000 galaxies in the field of Abell 1689. Using a complete sample of 151 background galaxies we measure the cluster mass profile. We find that the total projected mass interior to 0.25h^(-1)Mpc is (0.48 +/- 0.16) * 10^(15)h^(-1) solar masses, where our error budget includes uncertainties from the photometric redshift determination, the uncertainty in the off-set calibration and finite sampling. This result is in good agreement with that found by number count and shear-based methods and provides a new and independent method to determine cluster masses.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to MNRAS (10/99); Replacement with 1 page extra text inc. new section, accepted by MNRA

Orbit equivalence rigidity for ergodic actions of the mapping class group

We establish orbit equivalence rigidity for any ergodic, essentially free and measure-preserving action on a standard Borel space with a finite positive measure of the mapping class group for a compact orientable surface with higher complexity. We prove similar rigidity results for a finite direct product of mapping class groups as well.Comment: 11 pages, title changed, a part of contents remove

Evaluating Tuberculosis Case Detection in Eritrea

We used results from a national tuberculosis prevalence survey in Eritrea to calculate case detection rate (CDR) and compared it with the published CDR. The CDR obtained from the survey was ≈40%, whereas the CDR published by the World Health Organization was 3× lower (14%)