High-stakes Testing and Special Populations

This opinion paper critically examines the use of high-stakes testing on special populations. Without appropriate accommodations, standardized exams are not valid for some students with special needs. Unfortunately, many classroom teachers who must initiate testing accommodations lack knowledge of appropriate accommodations and regularly fail to provide the necessary testing accommodations. The deficit understanding of testing accommodations makes comparisons between classrooms, schools, and districts invalid since some scores loose validity. Solutions specific to standardized testing and students with special needs are offered and a more encompassing solution to the problems incurred from these tests when used for high-stakes is suggested

Domestic violence and football in Glasgow : are reference points relevant?

A growing body of evidence suggests that people exhibit loss aversion – the displeasure from suffering a loss is larger than the pleasure enjoyed from an equivalent-sized gain – and that expectations are important in determining what is perceived as a loss. Recent research suggests that disappointing results in sporting fixtures relative to prematch expectations play an important role in triggering domestic violence (Card and Dahl, 2011), consistent with the idea of loss aversion around expectations-based reference points. This paper seeks to investigate whether such behaviour is exhibited by football fans in Glasgow by looking at the relationship between match outcomes relative to expectations and levels of domestic violence using a data set that contains every domestic violence incident in Glasgow over a period of more than eight years. Whilst we find that when the ‘Old-Firm’ Glasgow rivals Celtic and Rangers play there are large increases in domestic violence (regardless of the outcome of the match), in other matches disappointing results relative to expectations are not linked to increased domestic violence, except when those matches occur at the very end of the season where the title is still being contended

Implementing Collective Bargaining Enabling Legislation : Washington Universities Join the Party

In 2002, Washington passed enabling legislation that, for the first time, expressly granted to the faculty at the state’s public four-year colleges and universities the right to bargain regarding their terms and conditions of employment. To date, faculty at four of the state’s six four-year public institutions of higher education have formed unions, and two of those unions have negotiated first contracts. This paper describes the history of that process, the legal framework in which it took place, and the issues of greatest importance at the bargaining table

Effects of stream flow regulation on the alluvial aquifer near Muskogee Oklahoma and the suitability of the ground water for irrigation

Environmental Scienc

An Aglorithm for Two Phase Rating of Dynamically Composed Services

Many computer science researchers are pursuing the vision of service-oriented software architectures through which end-users can seamlessly access customised, potentially disposable services to aid them carry out a myriad of everyday tasks. Full realisation of this vision requires deployment of facilities for the dynamic discovery, composition, interoperation and execution monitoring of preexisting networked software services, possibly administered by different organisations or originated by multiple developers. Significant research efforts are addressing the development of frameworks and process-oriented techniques for service composition, much of it focussing on specification of services in terms of formal process semantics. Although increasingly powerful methodologies, languages and algorithms supporting the construction, execution and adaptation of dynamically composed services have emerged, little attention has been paid to the supporting infrastructure necessary for their widespread deployment. In particular, accounting systems target charging of services on a one-by-one basis; they do not consider the possibility that services can be collectively orchestrated in an arbitrary manner to fulfil changing requirements. Existing accounting systems, including their rating engines, typically are manually configured to account for specific services at the time those services are initially deployed. However, in environments where services can be dynamically composed this approach is no longer possible: service compositions are created and executed within a short time span, so there is no time for manual configuration of appropriate accounting operations. Accounting operations must be automatically configured when service compositions are initially constructed, or subsequently modified. In this paper we present a two-phase rating process incorporating an algorithm that generation of charge for dynamically composed services. The algorithm treats composed services as a tree structure in which groups of services comprise a composed service which can itself be part of a group of services comprising a composed service at the next level upwards of the tree. The tree is traversed in a depth first fashion, in order to attribute charges to all composed services. To do so the algorithm calculates changes in charges for those services based on the presence or lack of presence of named services in the group of service comprising that composed service. Application of this algorithm enables the rating engine to generate charges for services that are dynamically composed and for which the rating engine can have no prior knowledge. This method also provides a means to closely map real-world business relationships between service providers to the charges applied when their services are used together

Cosmology without cosmic variance

We examine the improvements in constraints on the linear growth factor G and its derivative f=d ln G / dln a that are available from the combination of a large-scale galaxy redshift survey with a weak gravitational lensing survey of background sources. In the linear perturbation theory limit, the bias-modulation method of McDonald & Seljak allows one to distinguish the real-space galaxy clustering from the peculiar velocity signal in each Fourier mode. The ratio of lensing signal to galaxy clustering in transverse modes yields the bias factor b of each galaxy subset (as per Pen 2004), hence calibrating the conversion from galaxy real-space density to matter density in every mode. In combination these techniques permit measure of the growth rate f in each Fourier mode. This yields a measure of the growth rate free of sample variance, i.e. the uncertainty in f can be reduced without bound by increasing the number of redshifts within a finite volume. In practice, the gain from the absence of sample variance is bounded by the limited range of bias modulation among dark-matter halos. Nonetheless, the addition of background weak lensing data to a redshift survey increases information on G and f by an amount equivalent to a 10-fold increase in the volume of a standard redshift-space distortion measurement---if the lensing signal can be measured to sub-percent accuracy. This argues that a combined lensing and redshift survey over a common low-redshift volume is a more powerful test of general relativity than an isolated redshift survey over larger volume at high redshift. An example case is that a survey of ~10^6 redshifts over half the sky in the redshift range $z=0.5\pm 0.05$ can determine the growth exponent \gamma for the model $f=\Omega_m^\gamma$ to an accuracy of $\pm 0.015$, using only modes with k<0.1h/Mpc, but only if a weak lensing survey is conducted in concert. [Abridged]Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted by MNRAS, minor changes to match the accepted versio

Spacecraft Glow and the Eisg/skirt Experiment

The objective of this experiment is to develop an understanding of the physical processes leading to spacecraft glow phenomena. The emphasis is to be on surface temperature and altitude effects. A complete understanding of the phenomena could be used to accomplish the following: (1) characterize optical instrument backgrounds; (2) provide guidelines for thermal insulations; (3) characterize material selection for flight optics and associated spacecraft; and (4) affect flight-operation altitude selection for relevant missions

Particle-based platforms for malaria vaccines

Recombinant subunit vaccines in general are poor immunogens likely due to the small size of pep-tides and proteins, combined with the lack or reduced presentation of repetitive motifs and missing complementary signal(s) for optimal triggering of the immune response. Therefore, recombinant sub-unit vaccines require enhancement by vaccine delivery vehicles in order to attain adequate protective immunity. Particle-based delivery platforms, including particulate antigens and particulate adjuvants,are promising delivery vehicles for modifying the way in which immunogens are presented to both theinnate and adaptive immune systems. These particle delivery platforms can also co-deliver non-specific immunostimodulators as additional adjuvants. This paper reviews efforts and advances of the Particle-based delivery platforms in development of vaccines against malaria, a disease that claims over 600,000lives per year, most of them are children under 5 years of age in sub-Sahara Africa

Scorpion toxin peptide action at the ion channel subunit level

This review categorizes functionally validated actions of defined scorpion toxin (SCTX) neuropeptides across ion channel subclasses, highlighting key trends in this rapidly evolving field. Scorpion envenomation is a common event in many tropical and subtropical countries, with neuropharmacological actions, particularly autonomic nervous system modulation, causing significant mortality. The primary active agents within scorpion venoms are a diverse group of small neuropeptides that elicit specific potent actions across a wide range of ion channel classes. The identification and functional characterisation of these SCTX peptides has tremendous potential for development of novel pharmaceuticals that advance knowledge of ion channels and establish lead compounds for treatment of excitable tissue disorders. This review delineates the unique specificities of 320 individual SCTX peptides that collectively act on 41 ion channel subclasses. Thus the SCTX research field has significant translational implications for pathophysiology spanning neurotransmission, neurohumoral signalling, sensori-motor systems and excitation-contraction coupling