Dissecting Dialogue: The Value of Music Education in ESL/ELL Programs

Among educators and philosophers alike, critical dialogue is widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to communicate and educate in the classroom. In his quintessential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire reflects upon the importance of dialogue stating, “Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue, there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education.” This point is reinforced in other notable texts such as Teaching as a Subversive Activity, which describes the “new education” as not only student and question centered, but “language-centered” as well. From a theoretical point of view, these approaches to learning bear merit and, in many cases, are effective when successfully applied in the field. However, with the dawn of the twenty-first century and the continued growth and complexity of globalization, these theories are in need of constant revisions as educators attempt to apply dated practices in an ever-changing society. Particularly in the United States of America, which since its inception, has maintained its reputation of a “melting pot” of peoples and cultures, it is vital that educators incorporate progressive interpretations of these principles in order to best enlighten, and therefore educate, an increasingly diverse population of students. Accompanied with a wide range of cultural beliefs that span numerous languages, educators currently face this paradox: How does one use dialogical tools to nurture what Freire deems “critical thinking” in classrooms where linguistic differences inhibit the implementation of these same tools? In response to this dilemma, the responsibility falls on music educators and administrators to develop policies that address the educational inequalities produced by the cultural and linguistic differences found in classrooms to provide an egalitarian and accessible education to all students that simultaneously encourages and utilizes dialogue and praxis

Interdisciplinary Research-Based Learning in Organic Chemistry and Microbiology Laboratories: Synthesis and Biological Testing of Novel Penicillin Derivatives

Interests in the mechanism that penicillin bestows on its target protein has driven the curiosity of its binding specificity towards the methicillin resistant strain of Staphylococcus areus, and its expression of a unique penicillin binding protein that has enabled its resistance. The ability of bacteria to gain antibiotic resistance has strengthened the ongoing need to synthesize and discover novel drugs to combat the diseases that follow infection. If it were not for the collaborations between scientific disciplines, the production of effective novel drugs such as penicillin would not be the same. To encourage undergraduate students to make real world connections across disciplines, the development of an interdisciplinary organic chemistry-microbiology laboratory experiment was developed. By utilizing discovery-based, authentic research to intentionally encourage student collaboration and improve retention of knowledge gained, a pedagogical experiment involving students from both organic chemistry and microbiology was designed to meet these goals. To implement this educational experiment into existing curriculum, an original experiment was designed and tested in the fall of 2014 to develop a synthetic experimental procedure and biological assay that could be used by organic chemistry and microbiology students in the following spring. The synthetic experimental portion had to be completed within a three-hour laboratory period, yet provide enough versatility for each set of students to synthesize different penicillin compounds by varying the acyl tails attached to the penicillin head group. Once the penicillin compounds were synthesized, the organic chemistry students prepared brief presentations to explain the chemistry behind their syntheses to the microbiology students, who aided in their biological testing, allowing students to visualize the antimicrobial efficacy of their antibiotic on bacterial strains. Microbiology students collaborated in the biological analysis by teaching the chemistry students how to perform a disc diffusion assay and interpret possible susceptibility that the antibiotics may have had on gram-negative and gram-positive bacterial strains. This experiment illustrated the benefits of performing open-ended research to create new possible antibiotics in a chemistry course and of testing the synthesized products in a biology course to visualize the antimicrobial efficacy of their antibiotic on bacterial strains. Overall, this experiment gave students in each course the chance to teach and share their newly learned expertise with their peers, to make scientific connections across disciplines and to address an authentic, open-ended research problem through cooperative learning

Isotropic Radio Background from Quark Nugget Dark Matter

Recent measurements by the ARCADE2 experiment unambiguously show an excess in the isotropic radio background at frequencies below the GHz scale. We argue that this excess may be a natural consequence of the interaction of visible and dark matter in the early universe if the dark matter consists of heavy nuggets of quark matter. Explanation of the observed radio band excess requires the introduction of no new parameters, rather we exploit the same dark matter model and identical normalization parameters to those previously used to explain other excesses of diffuse emission from the centre of our galaxy. These previously observed excesses include the WMAP Haze of GHz radiation, keV X -ray emission and MeV gamma-ray radiation.Comment: updated plot and references reflecting a revised analysis of the isotropic radio background exces

The Dawn of Fully Automated Contract Drafting: Machine Learning Breathes New Life Into a Decades-Old Promise

Technological advances within contract drafting software have seemingly plateaued. Despite the decades-long hopes and promises of many commentators, critics doubt this technology will ever fully automate the drafting process. But, while there has been a lack of innovation in contract drafting software, technological advances have continued to improve contract review and analysis programs. “Machine learning,” the leading innovative force in these areas, has proven incredibly efficient, performing in mere minutes tasks that would otherwise take a team of lawyers tens of hours. Some contract drafting programs have already experimented with machine learning capabilities, and this technology may pave the way for the full automation of contract drafting. Although intellectual property, data access, and ethical obstacles may delay complete integration of machine learning into contract drafting, full automation is likely still viable

Trumpet Initial Data for Boosted Black Holes

We describe a procedure for constructing initial data for boosted black holes in the moving-punctures approach to numerical relativity that endows the initial time slice from the outset with trumpet geometry within the black hole interiors. We then demonstrate the procedure in numerical simulations using an evolution code from the Einstein Toolkit that employs 1+log slicing. The Lorentz boost of a single black hole can be precisely specified and multiple, widely separated black holes can be treated approximately by superposition of single hole data. There is room within the scheme for later improvement to re-solve (iterate) the constraint equations in the multiple black hole case. The approach is shown to yield an initial trumpet slice for one black hole that is close to, and rapidly settles to, a stationary trumpet geometry. Initial data in this new approach is shown to contain initial transient (or "junk") radiation that is suppressed by as much as two orders of magnitude relative to that in comparable Bowen-York initial data.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figure