The Preparation of a Student Handbook

The purpose of the field study project was to develop a functional student handbook for use at Crestwood School in Paris, Illinois. Crestwood School is a kindergarten through 8th grade elementary school and the initial intention was to produce a handbook for use at all nine grade levels. As the project took form, however, differences between the needs for grades K-5 and 6-8 became extensive to the point that it became obvious that separate handbooks would be required to fulfill the desired purposes. This project became, then, the production of the handbook for the middle school (6-8) grades. Handbooks currently in use were requested from other schools and these were studied both in regard to content and form. A faculty committee was also formed to provide input into the content and form of the handbook. Ideas and information gathered from these sources were reviewed and the actual text of the handbook was developed and written over about a two week period in June of 1979. The typed first drafts of this handbook were shared with the district superintendent and legal counsel. Minor revisions in the text were made as a result of suggestions from these sources. Following revision of the first draft the format for the actual handbook had to be decided upon. It was decided that professional printing was far too expensive for our needs and that, therefore, production would be left to school personnel. We chose, then, to reproduce the text of the handbook through the use of mimeograph stencils and simply staple the various pages together as the final product. A cover was considered and then rejected because other handbooks reviewed which had such school-produced covers seemed no more attractive or functional than those without them. The typing and printing of the handbook took about three weeks due to other demands on the secretarial staff as a result of the opening of school in the fall. The final product was readied by mid-September and placed in the hands of the students approximately two weeks into the 1979-80 school year. Specific recommendations to others attempting to develop a student handbook would include being certain to involve faculty and other staff members in the development, if not the actual writing, of the handbook, allowing plenty of lead time for the development, writing, and printing of the handbook, and planning to make revisions of the handbook in other years as expedient and cost-efficient as possible

Urea as a Source of Fertilizer Nitrogen for Crops in Kentucky

Kentucky farmers are finding proportionately more nitrogen being marketed each year in the chemical form of urea. This trend has resulted from a greatly expanded production capacity for urea by basic nitrogen producers. Judging from present projections, this increase in the production of urea is likely to continue. Although urea nitrogen has been marketed in Kentucky for several years, there are still many questions asked by farmers about its agronomic characteristics

Demonstration of linked UAV observations and atmospheric model predictions in chem/bio attack response

Both the faculty and staff from the Departments of Meteorology and Aeronautics evaluated the integration of components for a near-real time decision aid designed to enable small units to respond in a focused way to a ChemBio attack. This effort included the field-testing of an atmospheric dispersion prediction model, an instrumented UAV for collecting meteorological data, and the means for linking the UAV data to real-time dispersion prediction. The primary modeling effort focused on an adaptation of the 'Wind On Constant Streamline Surfaces' (WOCSS) model developed to run on a small computer with input from an external mesoscale model (MM5). The combined models were run for approximately one month for the region surrounding Camp Roberts, CA. In situ meteorological data were collected at the Camp Roberts airfield from 2 October to 5 November 2002 to validate the model predictions. The model results showed promise in capturing the diurnal evolution of near-surface temperatures that drive the local circulations in the warm season. Linking WOCSS with the atmospheric mesoscale model forecasts showed no significant improvement in wind forecasts when compared to the mesoscale model wind forecasts alone. Linking WOCSS to the trajectory visualization code revealed that vertical wind component estimates needed to be improved. The linked model/UAV demonstration of 7-9 October 2002 tested the synthesis of UAV measurements and dispersion model predictions. Although a UAV mishap occurred soon after the demonstration began, the instrumented UAV performance during this early period and in preliminary flight tests indicate that the hardware/software architecture for UAV data collection and its linkage with real-time dispersion prediction will be successful. Overall, the demonstration proved the feasibility of linking a coarse grid mesoscale model to a fine-scale diagnostic wind model for producing fine resolution forward and backward trajectories.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Trends in crops

Cover title."This bulletin is one of a series of four reports from the Department of Agricultural Economics Research Project 428, 'Trends in the Agricultural and Economic Development of Missouri'"--Page 3

Comparisons of Nitrogen Fertilizer Sources under Kentucky Soil and Climatic Conditions

A summary of yield data comparing different nitrogen fertilizer sources in field experiments conducted by the Agronomy Department staff should provide information that will help answer some of the inquiries regarding the comparative value of some of the nitrogen fertilizers being marketed in Kentucky. Since the nitrogen rates per acre shown in all tables are ACTUAL NITROGEN the COST PER POUND OF NITROGEN in the different materials is an important consideration when evaluating the various products

Foobaz: Variable Name Feedback for Student Code at Scale

Current traditional feedback methods, such as hand-grading student code for substance and style, are labor intensive and do not scale. We created a user interface that addresses feedback at scale for a particular and important aspect of code quality: variable names. We built this user interface on top of an existing back-end that distinguishes variables by their behavior in the program. Therefore our interface not only allows teachers to comment on poor variable names, they can comment on names that mislead the reader about the variable's role in the program. We ran two user studies in which 10 teachers and 6 students created and received feedback, respectively. The interface helped teachers give personalized variable name feedback on thousands of student solutions from an edX introductory programming MOOC. In the second study, students composed solutions to the same programming assignments and immediately received personalized quizzes composed by teachers in the previous user study.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Amar Bose Teaching Fellowship)Quanta Computer (Firm) (Qmulus Project

Vasculitis of the gastrointestinal tract in chronic periaortitis

The term "chronic periaortitis" (CP), proposed by Mitchinson in 1984, comprises 3 main entities: idiopathic retroperitoneal fibrosis (IRF), inflammatory abdominal aortic aneurysms (IAAAs), and perianeurysmal retroperitoneal fibrosis (PRF).The presence of constitutional symptoms, high acute-phase reactants, positive autoantibodies, and associated autoimmune diseases suggests a systemic inflammatory process. Histopathologic findings show vasculitis with fibrinoid necrosis involving the aortic vasa vasorum as well as the small and medium retroperitoneal vessels.We reviewed the medical records of 608 patients with a diagnosis of vasculitis involving the gastrointestinal (GI) tract at the Mayo Clinic between January 1996 and December 2007. Only patients with biopsy-proven or typical angiographic findings of vasculitis localized to the GI tract were included.Five patients were identified with evidence of CP (1 patient with PRF, 1 with IRF, and 3 with IAAAs). Three patients were men, and the median age at diagnosis was 49 years. The diagnosis of GI vasculitis and CP was made simultaneously in 4 patients. At the time of onset, all patients had abdominal pain and constitutional manifestations; the median erythrocyte sedimentation rate was 62.5 mm/1 h (range, 20-86 mm/1 h). All patients had evidence of mesenteric vasculitis at angiography. Three patients also had associated renal artery stenoses. Abdominal computed tomography showed spleen infarcts in 2 patients, bowel wall thickening in 1, and liver infarction in 1. Two patients underwent surgical intervention for acute abdomen; there was histologic evidence of small bowel infarcts and infarction of the spleen and liver in 1. Oral prednisone was administered to all 5 patients (median starting dose, 60 mg/d; range, 25-80 mg/d). Three patients also received immunosuppressive agents, 1 tamoxifen, and 1 anti-tumor necrosis factor therapy. All patients had at least 1 relapse or recurrence of vasculitis, but at last visit, GI vasculitis and CP were in remission in all 5 patients.This study provides evidence that GI manifestations due to mesenteric vasculitis may be associated with CP. Vasculitic involvement of the renal arteries is also frequently present in these patients. Aggressive immunosuppressive treatment should be promptly initiated to forestall abdominal complications. These findings reinforce the hypothesis that a vasculitic process plays an important role in the pathogenesis of CP