Conceptions and expectations of mentoring relationships in a teacher education reform context

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Lighting and Economic Considerations for a Hydroponic S-Based Greenhouse at Tri Cycle Farms

Hydroponics is an agricultural technology that involves growing plants without soil, instead using other growth media with added nutrients, typically inside a controlled facility such as a greenhouse. Hydroponics-based agriculture has a number of benefits, namely that it is more water efficient, requires less intensive labor, yields higher quality crops consistently in shorter time, and is easier to control. It also has the potential to be economically advantageous, due to its ability to grow certain crops in the off-season. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, a non-profit urban farm known as Tri Cycle Farms has been seeking a way to design, build, and implement a profitable hydroponics-based greenhouse in order to better offset their costs of operation. Tri Cycle Farms operates off of the motto of “Give a Third, Sell a Third, and Share a Third” of their produce, and currently does not have any paid staff. Tri Cycle tends to give and share more of its produce than they sell, and while admirable, makes it difficult to keep their doors open. After getting involved with Tri Cycle Farms as volunteers and consulting with Don Bennett, the owner, Sarah Gould and I decided to take on the initial stages of design for this hydroponics greenhouse, or “HydroHouse.” The objectives of this project are to 1) size and design the lighting needs for a hydroponic subsystem of Dutch buckets in the house based on Ms. Gould’s work, and 2) to produce a general set of engineering economics calculations and recommendations. This report includes the process of fulfilling these objectives, the justification behind various design decisions, and a discussion of the future work to be completed and the future impacts of the greenhouse for Tri Cycle Farms and the Northwest Arkansas community in general. As a conservative estimate, ten LED grow lights were determined to be needed for the Dutch bucket system based on the light requirements for tomatoes. Additionally, the simple payback period for the Dutch bucket system was calculated to be 0.43 years, or 5.1 months, with a Gross Annual Benefit of $20,000 for the first year, and$34,000 in following years

Reduced face identity aftereffects in relatives of children with autism.

Autism is a pervasive developmental condition with complex aetiology. To aid the discovery of genetic mechanisms, researchers have turned towards identifying potential endophenotypes - subtle neurobiological or neurocognitive traits present in individuals with autism and their "unaffected" relatives. Previous research has shown that relatives of individuals with autism exhibit face processing atypicalities, which are similar in nature albeit of lesser degree, to those found in children and adults with autism. Yet very few studies have examined the underlying mechanisms responsible for such atypicalities. Here, we investigated whether atypicalities in adaptive norm-based coding of faces are present in relatives of children with autism, similar to those previously reported in children with autism. To test this possibility, we administered a face identity aftereffect task in which adaptation to a particular face biases perception towards the opposite identity, so that a previously neutral face (i.e., the average face) takes on the computationally opposite identity. Parents and siblings of individuals with autism showed smaller aftereffects compared to parents and siblings of typically developing children, especially so when the adapting stimuli were located further away from the average face. In addition, both groups showed stronger aftereffects for adaptors far from the average than for adaptors closer to the average. These results suggest that, in relatives of children with autism, face-coding mechanism are similar (i.e., norm-based) but less efficient than in relatives of typical children. This finding points towards the possibility that diminished adaptive mechanisms might represent a neurocognitive endophenotype for autism

Laying down a path in walking : student teachers’ emerging ecological identities

We would like to thank the three reviewers who provided insightful commentary and useful suggestions for engaging with the complex and contested conceptualisations integrated into this study. Sitting at the intersection of current theoretical and methodological paradigms, their feedback has been extremely useful in taking our own thinking forward. We thank them wholeheartedly.Peer reviewedPostprin

Creativity in Science Education : producing new narratives for a sustainable future?

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