Decoding strategies for emerging readers

The effects of using explicit decoding and phonological awareness instruction for struggling readers were studied. Four kindergarten students who were showing no academic gains in reading took part in an intervention program over seven weeks, while a comparison group of four students at a similar reading level continued their business as usual reading program. The students were tested using sections from the Woodcock Reading Mastery and Fountas and Pinnel Reading Level test before and after the study. The results showed support for the hypotheses that an explicit decoding and phonological awareness intervention would improve student reading level

The Skinny House

The title of my thesis is The Skinny House, a phrase which might indicate: 1) The body of a human or other animal, 2) A coffin or grave, and 3) A residence in Mamaroneck, New York built of recycled materials (e.g. railroad ties and a chicken coop) by an African-American carpenter named Nathan T. Seely in 1932. Seely and his brother ran a business that thrived for several years prior to the Great Depression, catering specifically to Southern blacks moving north. While only a few pages of my thesis are directly concerned with the Mamaroneck residence and its social implications, I was intrigued by this ten-foot wide house on a narrow lot which was a gift from one friend (an Italian-American neighbor to whom Seely had originally sold the plot of land on which the home is built) to another down on his luck (Seely). The phenomenon of the “skinny house” is also associated with an architectural phenomenon spiritually antithetical to Seely’s gift—the “spite house,” a home built primarily to obstruct another property, prevent construction in a given neighborhood, or more generally to inconvenience and offend a neighbor. What else do skinny houses and spite houses have to do with my poems? Before pursuing my Master’s degree, I worked as a marketing manager at an architecture firm. I have always been fascinated by how buildings and landscapes are intertwined with people’s inner lives—even more so now that I am raising a child abroad. Audre Lorde said, “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.” “Skeleton architecture” suggests the bones of an architectural or animal body—that framework without which the structure will not stand but which is only apparent when revealed by 1) an artist’s rendering—i.e. a sectional drawing or floor plan—or 2) the destruction, or gradual decay of said structure with the passage of time. These two possible forms of revelation tell me that art is a labor of both construction and salvage. Salvage in art is honoring the small, momentary, else neglected objects and perceptions in the world (to include the writings of others). One must honor particularly that which resists interpretation, which remains itself and not (or not any longer) part of a system. As George Oppen slightly misquotes Charles Reznikoff: “The girder, still itself among the rubble.” As Hannah Arendt has written of Walter Benjamin (the lover of verbal scraps, debris, and the past for its own sake), “For him the size of an object was in inverse ratio to its significance.” Benjamin himself wrote, “What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.” The poet is tasked with recording not only beauty, but also the phenomenon of its appearance, the change that it makes in the world and the poet. An architect friend said to me, “When I was young I thought the aim of architecture was beauty, poetry, sculpture. Now I realize the most important thing is that it doesn’t leak.” While I attempt to seal the leaks in my verse, to make solid musical and intellectual constructions, I do not mask or shelter the core of a poem—whether it is emotionally warm and dry, or cold and wet. A poem is also what Philip Whalen called “a picture or graph of a mind moving.” If “recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth), that graph nonetheless records the seismic spikes of rage and fear; at times it mimes the lull of workaday heartbreak and regret. My poems are bound to the weather in the mountains and the desert, the oceans and the rivers, the factories and the graveyards of the places where I was raised and where I have passed the seasons—I hope you will hear them

The global bacterial regulator H-NS promotes transpososome formation and transposition in the Tn5 system

The histone-like nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS) is an important regulator of stress response and virulence genes in gram-negative bacteria. In addition to binding regulatory regions of genes in a structure-specific manner, H-NS also binds in a structure-specific manner to sites in the Tn10 transpososome, allowing it to act as a positive regulator of Tn10 transposition. This is the only example to date of H-NS regulating a transposition system by interacting directly with the transposition machinery. In general, transposition complexes tend to include segments of deformed DNA and given the capacity of H-NS to bind such structures, and the results from the Tn10 system, we asked if H-NS might regulate another transposition system (Tn5) by directly binding the transposition machinery. We show in the current work that H-NS does bind Tn5 transposition complexes and use hydroxyl radical footprinting to characterize the H-NS interaction with the Tn5 transpososome. We also show that H-NS can promote Tn5 transpososome formation in vitro, which correlates with the Tn5 system showing a dependence on H-NS for transposition in vivo. Taken together the results suggest that H-NS might play an important role in the regulation of many different bacterial transposition systems and thereby contribute directly to lateral gene transfer

Towards neuro-inspired symbolic models of cognition: linking neural dynamics to behaviors through asynchronous communications

A computational architecture modeling the relation between perception and action is proposed. Basic brain processes representing synaptic plasticity are first abstracted through asynchronous communication protocols and implemented as virtual microcircuits. These are used in turn to build mesoscale circuits embodying parallel cognitive processes. Encoding these circuits into symbolic expressions gives finally rise to neuro-inspired programs that are compiled into pseudo-code to be interpreted by a virtual machine. Quantitative evaluation measures are given by the modification of synapse weights over time. This approach is illustrated by models of simple forms of behaviors exhibiting cognition up to the third level of animal awareness. As a potential benefit, symbolic models of emergent psychological mechanisms could lead to the discovery of the learning processes involved in the development of cognition. The executable specifications of an experimental platform allowing for the reproduction of simulated experiments are given in “Appendix”

The Brain's Router: A Cortical Network Model of Serial Processing in the Primate Brain

The human brain efficiently solves certain operations such as object recognition and categorization through a massively parallel network of dedicated processors. However, human cognition also relies on the ability to perform an arbitrarily large set of tasks by flexibly recombining different processors into a novel chain. This flexibility comes at the cost of a severe slowing down and a seriality of operations (100–500 ms per step). A limit on parallel processing is demonstrated in experimental setups such as the psychological refractory period (PRP) and the attentional blink (AB) in which the processing of an element either significantly delays (PRP) or impedes conscious access (AB) of a second, rapidly presented element. Here we present a spiking-neuron implementation of a cognitive architecture where a large number of local parallel processors assemble together to produce goal-driven behavior. The precise mapping of incoming sensory stimuli onto motor representations relies on a “router” network capable of flexibly interconnecting processors and rapidly changing its configuration from one task to another. Simulations show that, when presented with dual-task stimuli, the network exhibits parallel processing at peripheral sensory levels, a memory buffer capable of keeping the result of sensory processing on hold, and a slow serial performance at the router stage, resulting in a performance bottleneck. The network captures the detailed dynamics of human behavior during dual-task-performance, including both mean RTs and RT distributions, and establishes concrete predictions on neuronal dynamics during dual-task experiments in humans and non-human primates

Le processus de conception descendante : Conception d'une école en Islande avec la participation de ses futurs utilisateurs

Voici le cas d’un architecte qui a conçu une école en partenariat avec les futurs utilisateurs. L’architecte a mis au point un processus qui lui permet de travailler avec les élèves, le personnel de l’école et la population locale pour concevoir un environnement pédagogique dans lequel la liberté et la créativité sont intégrées au processus quotidien d’acquisition de savoirs des élèves. La future école, baptisée Ingunnarskoli, doit devenir un lieu de formation, qui répond aux besoins des enfants, de leurs familles et de la population locale.conception, communauté

Investigating CLI and GUI Designs Based on User Feedback

User experience (UX) is a highly complex and notoriously difficult-to-study area of software design. One reason for this difficulty is that researchers often look at examples of high-quality UIs and then explain why they think they’re good. A better way to study UX is to compare different UIs that offer the same functionality for the same piece of software. We conducted one such experiment. According to the results collected from our survey, text-based UIs are difficult for most people to use; graphical UIs should be preferred. Accepted, industry-standard principles adhere to visual minimalism, usage of vector graphics instead of bitmaps, easy first-time-user experience, consistency, designs that give users control of the software, and knowing users before they start using your software. Furthermore, we also recommend not relying too heavily on user feedback as users don’t always understand, realize, or use the software for long enough to know what makes its current UI effectively or ineffectively designed. If feedback is to be used to make specific design decision(s), it should be specific and thorough, consisting of several detailed and specific questions; the questions should be as specific as the design choice being made and justifications for doing it one way over another