Teacher Understanding of Curricular and Pedagogical Decision-Making Processes at an Urban Charter School

This qualitative study featured two research endeavors. The first was a narrative inquiry of six teachers at Weedpatch Charter School as they understood curricular and pedagogical decisionmaking. These teachers, along with the Weedpatch Charter School founder, participated in this study soon after the curriculum and instruction decision-making had undergone a democratization effort whereby a top-down administrative approach was replaced by a teacher-led effort. Ironically, WCS school leadership welcomed the latter effort, despite the antiteacher legacy of the charter movement, which has long featured “at will” employment and no collective bargaining. The second component of this study was critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the curricular and pedagogical manuals used at WCS before and after the democratization effort. The findings in this study point to a dialectical set of developments at WCS that made it possible for teachers to move from a period of disillusionment into a period of active teacher agency. Similarly, the document analysis findings point to the need for more nuanced understandings of the ideological underpinnings of charter schools. Discourse analysis determined that WCS did not necessarily present a classic example of neoliberalism. Given the latter nuance, the manual that the teachers created was counterhegemonic, liberatory, and ultimately contextual and contingent upon that very unique WCS dynamic. As such, the conclusion of this study was that charter leaders could learn from teacher understandings not by being prescriptive but by abiding by what the author has coined contingent collectivism

Global regularities in integrated galaxy spectra

We have investigated some statistical properties of integrated spectra of galaxies from Kennicutt (1992a) spectrophotometric atlas. The input for the analysis are galaxy spectra sampled in 1300 bins between 3750 \AA~ and 6500 \AA. We make use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyse the 1300-dimensional space spanned by the spectra. Their projection onto the plane defined by the first two principal components, the principal plane, shows that normal galaxies are in a quasi-linear sequence that we call spectral sequence. We show that the spectral sequence is closely related to the Hubble morphological sequence. These results are robust in the sense that the reality of the spectral sequence does not depend on data normalization. The existence of this sequence suggests that a single parameter may describe the spectrum of normal galaxies. We have investigated this hypothesis with Bruzual & Charlot (1995) models of spectral evolution. We show that, for single age models (15 Gyr), the spectral sequence can be parametrized by the characteristic star formation time-scales of the different morphological types. By examining the projection of evolutionary tracks of normal galaxies onto the principal plane, we verify that the spectral sequence is also an evolutive sequence, with galaxy spectra evolving from later to earlier spectral types. Considering the close correspondence between the spectral and morphological sequences, this lead us to speculate that galaxies may evolve morphologically along the Hubble sequence, from Sm/Im to E.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted for publ. in MNRA

The cluster of galaxies Abell 376

We present a dynamical analysis of the galaxy cluster Abell 376 based on a set of 73 velocities, most of them measured at Pic du Midi and Haute-Provence observatories and completed with data from the literature. Data on individual galaxies are presented and the accuracy of the determined velocities is discussed as well as some properties of the cluster. We obtained an improved mean redshift value z=0.0478^{+0.005}_{-0.006} and velocity dispersion sigma=852^{+120}_{-76}km/s. Our analysis indicates that inside a radius of 900h_{70}^{-1}kpc (15 arcmin) the cluster is well relaxed without any remarkable feature and the X-ray emission traces fairly well the galaxy distribution. A possible substructure is seen at 20 arcmin from the centre towards the Southwest direction, but is not confirmed by the velocity field. This SW clump is, however, kinematically bound to the main structure of Abell 376. A dense condensation of galaxies is detected at 46 arcmin (projected distance 2.6h_{70}^{-1}Mpc) from the centre towards the Northwest and analysis of the apparent luminosity distribution of its galaxies suggests that this clump is part of the large scale structure of Abell 376. X-ray spectroscopic analysis of ASCA data resulted in a temperature kT = 4.3+/-0.4 keV and metal abundance Z = 0.32+/-0.08 Z_solar. The velocity dispersion corresponding to this temperature using the T_X-sigma scaling relation is in agreement with the measured galaxies velocities.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Analysis of a marker for cancer of the thyroid with a limit of detection

Limit of detection (LoD) is a common problem in the analysis of data generated by instruments that cannot detect very small concentra- tions or other quantities, resulting in left-censored measurements. Methods intended for data that are not subject to this problem are often difficult to modify for censoring. We adapt the simulation- extrapolation method, devised originally for fitting models with measurement error, to dealing with LoD in conjunction with a mix- ture analysis. The application relates the levels of thyroglobulin in individuals with cancer of the thyroid before and after treatment with radioactive iodine I–131. We conclude that the fitted mixture components correspond to levels of effectiveness of the treatment

Development of the Appreciative Advising Success Inventory (AASI)

This article describes the process to develop and validate the Appreciative Advising Success Inventory (AASI). The AASI instrument is designed to measure the success of college students, as measured through correlations to student psychosocial factors (PSFs), who interact with academic advisors who are trained in applying the Appreciative Advising theory-to-practice framework. PSFs are attitudes and behaviors that influence how students think about and approach their college experience. Applying psychometric theory and instrument development methods that have been applied in similar projects, the AASI instrument can be used to improve advising practice and measure the impact of Appreciative Advising. The results from this preliminary study suggest that when academic advisors use the Appreciative Advising framework effectively, it directly influences key PSFs that then influence such student success outcomes as academic confidence, academic motivation, and intent to persist

Nature-inspired intelligence methods and applications

[Excerpt] Research in nature-inspired intelligence methods and applications has increased exponentially in the past decade. Inspired by a natural phenomenon from biology, physics, or sociology, population-based nature-inspired algorithms aim to achieve satisfactory results for many difficult optimization problems effectively. Compared with deterministic optimization methods, they have many advantages, such as scalability, adaptability, collective robustness, and individual simplicity. However, they still face many challenges that require further research. The target of this special issue was to provide a comprehensive and latest collection of research works on various aspects of population-based nature-inspired algorithms, as well as its potential application in various sciences and engineering domains. This special issue received 15 submissions in total. The authors were from 26 affiliations in 7 countries. Each submitted article was subject to assessment by at least two independent reviewers. After a fair and rigorous peer-review process, 6 of them are published in the special issue, with an acceptance rate of 40.0%. The research paper submitted by Cheng et al., entitled “A novel crow search algorithm based on improved flower pollination”, proposed a crow search algorithm based on an improved flower pollination algorithm (IFCSA) to prevent stagnation and convergence to local minima. In order to balance the global search and local search capabilities, an inverse incomplete gamma function was first introduced to make the awareness probability decrease nonlinearly. In addition, a cross-pollination strategy with Cauchy mutation was also introduced, to avoid the blindness of individual location update. Experimental results on benchmark problems show that this algorithm has better performance than the original crow search algorithm. [...]- (undefined