Navigating the Turbulent Waters of School Reform Guided by Complexity Theory

The goal of this research study has been to develop, implement, and evaluate a school reform design experiment at a continuation high school with low-income, low-performing underrepresented minority students. The complexity sciences served as a theoretical framework for this design experiment. Treating an innovative college preparatory program as a nested complex adaptive system within a larger complex adaptive system, the school, we used features of complex adaptive systems (equilibrium, emergence, self-organization, and feedback loops) as a framework to design a strategy for school reform. The goal was to create an environment for change by pulling the school far from equilibrium using a strategy we call “purposeful perturbations” to disrupt the stable state of the school in a purposeful way. Over the four years of the study, several tipping points were reached, and we developed agent-based simulation models that capture important dynamic properties of the reform at these points. The study draws upon complexity theory in multiple ways that have supported improved education for low-achieving students

A Footnote for Jack Dawson

In the jointly-authored section below, I refers to Professor James J. White and we refers to White and co-author David A. Peters. Jack Dawson, known to many at Michigan as Black Jack, taught at the Law School from 1927 to 1958. Much of his work was published in the Michigan Law Review, where he served as a student editor during the 1923-24 academic year. We revisit his work and provide a footnote to his elegant writing on mistake and supervening events. In Part 1, we talk a little about Jack the man. In Part II, we recite the nature and significance of his scholarly work. Part III deals briefly with the cases decided in the last 20 years by American courts on impracticability, impossibility, mistake, and frustration of purpose. We focus particularly on the afterlife of the notorious Alcoa case that was the subject of Jack\u27s last articles. Part IV concludes with some speculation on the reasons for the different responses of German and American courts to claims of mistake or superveneing events

A Footnote for Jack Dawson

Jack Dawson, known to many at Michigan as Black Jack, taught at the Law School from 1927 to 1958. Much of his work was published in the Michigan Law Review, where he served as a student editor during the 1923-24 academic year. We revisit his work and provide a footnote to his elegant writing on mistake and supervening events. In Part I, we talk a little about Jack the man. In Part II, we recite the nature and significance of his scholarly work. Part III deals briefly with the cases decided in the last twenty years by American courts on impracticability, impossibility, mistake and frustration of purpose. We focus particularly on the afterlife of the notorious Alcoa case that was the subject of Jack\u27s last articles. Part IV concludes with some speculation on the reasons for the different responses of German and American courts to claims of mistake or supervening events

Wind-tunnel interference with particular reference to off-center positions of the wing and to the downwash at the tail

The theory of wind tunnel boundary influence on the downwash from a wing has been extended to provide more complete corrections for application to airplane test data. The first section of the report gives the corrections of the lifting line for wing positions above or below the tunnel center line; the second section shows the manner in which the induced boundary influence changes with distance aft of the lifting line. Values of the boundary corrections are given for off-center positions of the wing in circular, square, 2:1 rectangular, and 2:1 elliptical tunnels. Aft of the wing the corrections are presented for only the square and the 2:1 rectangular tunnels, but it is believed that these may be applied to jets of circular and 2:1 elliptical cross sections. In all cases results are included for both open and closed tunnels

Input states for quantum gates

We examine three possible implementations of non-deterministic linear optical cnot gates with a view to an in-principle demonstration in the near future. To this end we consider demonstrating the gates using currently available sources such as spontaneous parametric down conversion and coherent states, and current detectors only able to distinguish between zero or many photons. The demonstration is possible in the co-incidence basis and the errors introduced by the non-optimal input states and detectors are analysed

All Perspectives Matter: A Co-orientational Analysis of Problem-based Law Enforcement and Community Relationships

The relationships between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve has been the focus of accelerating national scrutiny in light of numerous contentious and widely publicized incidents involving alleged protected police misconduct, or alternatively, citizen and government overreach.https://fuse.franklin.edu/ss2016/1015/thumbnail.jp

Effect of ambient temperature during acute aerobic exercise on short-term appetite, energy intake, and plasma acylated ghrelin in recreationally active males

Ambient temperature during exercise may affect energy intake regulation. Compared with a temperate (20 °C) environment, 1 h of running followed by 6 h of rest tended to decrease energy intake from 2 ad libitum meals in a hot (30 °C) environment but increase energy intake in a cool (10 °C) environment (p = 0.08). Core temperature changes did not appear to mediate this trend; whether acylated ghrelin is involved is unclear. Further research is warranted to clarify these findings

Spin dynamics of the quasi two dimensional spin-1/2 quantum magnet Cs_2CuCl_4

We study dynamical properties of the anisotropic triangular quantum antiferromagnet Cs_2CuCl_4. Inelastic neutron scattering measurements have established that the dynamical spin correlations cannot be understood within a linear spin wave analysis. We go beyond linear spin wave theory by taking interactions between magnons into account in a 1/S expansion. We determine the dynamical structure factor and carry out extensive comparisons with experimental data. We find that compared to linear spin wave theory a significant fraction of the scattering intensity is shifted to higher energies and strong scattering continua are present. However, the 1/S expansion fails to account for the experimentally observed large quantum renormalization of the exchange energies.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, higher quality figures can be obtained from the author