Using Balanced Literacy to Improve Literacy Instruction

What is the most effective and efficient pedagogical approach to reading literacy? This weighted question has challenged educators for decades and continues to challenge young teachers in today’s classrooms. This thesis project focuses on strategies to engage and motivate students to read while examining the reading process. It discusses reading approaches, reading strategies, and includes activities for teachers in the classroom as well as parents to utilize in the home, to support the student and child and continue positive, reading behaviors based on the balanced literacy approach. The paper highlights the importance of the key participants - parents, teachers, and students – remaining connected to and partnered in the balanced literacy strategy. The literature review examines the historical record of reading instruction as well as the impact of governmental policy, NCLB and ELA testing in particular. The active research component was performed over several months in a suburban school district, with ten fifth grade students of varying reading competency. Several measures and strategies were incorporated in the research. They included: Developmental Reading Assessments (DRA), student surveys, word study skill blocks and guided reading sessions. Study conclusions reveal an increased competency for above grade level and at grade level readers, while below grade readers struggled. (The study’s time span was noted as a possible factor in this result.

The Effect of Fines and Filler in Forward Centricleaners on Contaminant Removal Efficiency

In this study, the effect of fines and filler content on a forward centricleaner\u27s contaminant removal efficiency is evaluated. The paper industry has assumed that centricleaner contaminant removal efficiency is not influenced by the presence of clay or fines. However, it has never been documented. Thus, at the paper machine, centricleaners operate at the same efficiency at 1.0% consistency with 15 or 30% clay. The same assumption has also been made with fines content in the white water loop, which can vary from day to day depending on what specific grade is being made. This thesis has concentrated on whether or not this assumption is true. The results indicate an increase in contaminant removal efficiency as the fines level increases. increase. However, the effect of filler content nullifies this As filler content increases, the contaminant removal efficiency decreases

An exploration of relative frame potential

A frame for a vector space is a set of vectors which behaves in some ways like a basis for the vector space while having a more flexible structure that allows for frames to be constructed to fit a variety of application situations, such as in signal processing. The frame potential function, developed in 2001, takes a frame as input and returns its “frame potential value”. This value reveals important information about the properties of the input frame. In this paper, we adapt the frame potential function to create a “relative frame potential function”, which takes one frame as input with respect to another frame. We analyze the behavior of this function to determine what information the relative frame potential value can reveal about the relationship between the two frames.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?

The High Throughput Sequence Annotation Service (HT-SAS) – the shortcut from sequence to true Medline words

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Advances in high-throughput technologies available to modern biology have created an increasing flood of experimentally determined facts. Ordering, managing and describing these raw results is the first step which allows facts to become knowledge. Currently there are limited ways to automatically annotate such data, especially utilizing information deposited in published literature.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To aid researchers in describing results from high-throughput experiments we developed HT-SAS, a web service for automatic annotation of proteins using general English words. For each protein a poll of Medline abstracts connected to homologous proteins is gathered using the UniProt-Medline link. Overrepresented words are detected using binomial statistics approximation. We tested our automatic approach with a protein test set from SGD to determine the accuracy and usefulness of our approach. We also applied the automatic annotation service to improve annotations of proteins from <it>Plasmodium bergei </it>expressed exclusively during the blood stage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Using HT-SAS we created new, or enriched already established annotations for over 20% of proteins from <it>Plasmodium bergei </it>expressed in the blood stage, deposited in PlasmoDB. Our tests show this approach to information extraction provides highly specific keywords, often also when the number of abstracts is limited. Our service should be useful for manual curators, as a complement to manually curated information sources and for researchers working with protein datasets, especially from poorly characterized organisms.</p

Metallurgy study on swords from the Roman period burial ground in Czelin, West Pomeranian Voivodeship

Results of the metallurgy study on three, two-edged swords from a cremation burial ground in Czelin, representing the Pompeii, Lachmirowice-Apa and VimoseIllerup types indicate a variability in the material used as well as in technique of their production, and thus in the quality of the specimens. Two of them were made of a single piece of metal with low (specimen of the Lachmirowice-Apa type) or medium quality (specimen of the Pompeii type). A much higher level of craftsmanship is represented by the third sword of the Vimose-Illerup type, precisely forged from several pieces of diverse, high-quality material, representing the socalled pattern welding techniqu

Apoptosis: its origin, history, maintenance and the medical implications for cancer and aging

Programmed cell death is a basic cellular mechanism. Apoptotic-like programmed cell death (called apoptosis in animals) occurs in both unicellular and multicellular eukaryotes, and some apoptotic mechanisms are observed in bacteria. Endosymbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells took place early in the eukaryotic evolution, and some of the apoptotic-like mechanisms of mitochondria that were retained after this event now serve as parts of the eukaryotic apoptotic machinery. Apoptotic mechanisms have several functions in unicellular organisms: they include kin-selected altruistic suicide that controls population size, sharing common goods, and responding to viral infection. Apoptotic factors also have non-apoptotic functions. Apoptosis is involved in the cellular aging of eukaryotes, including humans. In addition, apoptosis is a key part of the innate tumor-suppression mechanism. Several anticancer drugs induce apoptosis, because apoptotic mechanisms are inactivated during oncogenesis. Because of the ancient history of apoptosis, I hypothesize that there is a deep relationship between mitochondrial metabolism, its role in aerobic versus anaerobic respiration, and the connection between apoptosis and cancer. Whereas normal cells rely primarily on oxidative mitochondrial respiration, most cancer cells use anaerobic metabolism. According to the Warburg hypothesis, the remodeling of the metabolism is one of the processes that leads to cancer. Recent studies indicate that anaerobic, non-mitochondrial respiration is particularly active in embryonic cells, stem cells, and aggressive stem-like cancer cells. Mitochondrial respiration is particularly active during the pathological aging of human cells in neurodegenerative diseases. According to the reversed Warburg hypothesis formulated by Demetrius, pathological aging is induced by mitochondrial respiration. Here, I advance the hypothesis that the stimulation of mitochondrial metabolism leads to pathological aging

Assessing Undergraduate Nursing Students’ Information Needs and Perceptions of the Library: A Longitudinal Evaluation - Year 1

Poster presentation for the Medical Library Association Annual Meeting 2016.This project will follow incoming undergraduate students in the traditional Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program over four years. Using both surveys and focus group interviews, we hope to better understand their level of information need and information seeking behaviors, perceptions of library resources and the role of informationists, and identify gaps in their needs and the library's integration in the curriculum. Gathering yearly data will help us improve and expand upon our current level of involvement in the U-M School of Nursing (UMSN) undergraduate curriculum by making incremental updates to our content and improve the timing for interventions and communication.Taubman Health Sciences LibraryUM Library Research and Creative Projects Awardhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117637/1/MLA16_Undergrad_info_needs.pdfDescription of MLA16_Undergrad_info_needs.pdf : Poste

Computer based sport talent identification

This paper presents the concept of the computer decision support system for talent identification in sport. In this concept the use of two methods was assumed: pattern recognition based on multicriteria optimization and machine learning supervised classification algorithm: decision forest. The data for sport dyscyplin patterns has obtained from publication (Santos, Dawson, Matias et al. 2014). This data also has been used to generate test data sets to research purposes. The researches were carried out in author’s application and in the cloud environment Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio. The results show that both methods can be used with success to talent identification in sport

Novel KCNQ1 mutations in patients after myocardial infarction

Background: Patients after myocardial infarction (MI) are at greater risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) than people in the overall population. The aim of this study was to detect mutations, including intronic ones, in the KCNQ1 gene coding for proteins of cardiac potassium channels and evaluate their possible effects on the clinical course in patients after MI. Methods: The study group was composed of 100 Polish patients after MI, which included 27 women (mean age 69 years) and 73 men (mean age 67 years). All patients underwent clinical examinations and genetic tests. The genetic test results have been correlated with the clinical data. The following parameters have been chosen as endpoints for this survey: sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) or SCD, complex ventricular arrhythmia, QT interval and QT dispersion values assessed during 24-hour Holter ECG monitoring in relation to ventricular arrhythmias as well as the minimum and maximum heart rate (HR) observed during the examination. Results: Six new mutations in the KCNQ1 gene: C2505734T, A2753831C in exons and C2505846A, G2753881A, T2755854C, T2755875G in introns. Detected intronic mutations in patients after MI were related to a worse clinical course and frequent occurrence of SCA. Conclusions: The novel intronic mutations may have a significant influence on the clinical course of the disease. (Cardiol J 2008; 15: 252-260