Micro-Teaching

This research topic explores the use of micro-teaching curriculum to increase content mastery of mathematical topics that pertain to the California state assessment. The participants for the Capstone project include 28 fourth-grade students in a public elementary school located within California’s Silicon Valley. The project consists of in-class teaching using micro-lesson plans that focus on re-teaching subjects that are relevant to the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress testing. The project uses 2 tests given at the beginning and the end of a 2-week teaching period to show visual correlations between the curriculum and student’s content mastery. In the final project findings, the student’s appeared to comprehend course curriculum to a higher degree, which is shown through graphed data sets. In the future, this project could become informative in the creation of future content used to help students catch-up and keep-up with California’s state testing standards

Discovery of halloysite books in a ~270,000 year-old buried tephra deposit in northern New Zealand

As part of a wider study examining the geomechanical properties, especially sensitivity, of sequences of Quaternary pyroclastic and associated deposits and buried soils in the landslide-prone western Bay of Plenty area near Tauranga, eastern North Island, we examined the mineralogy of a pale pinkish-grey tephra deposit directly beneath non-welded, siliceous Te Ranga Ignimbrite (~2 m thick) in a ~25 m high cutting at Tauriko.http://www.smectech.com.au/ACMS/ACMS_Conferences/ACMS21/ACMS%202010%20Abstracts/ACMS%202010%20S1A6_Wyatt%20et%20al%20(Lowe).pd

Landslides in sensitive soils, Tauranga, New Zealand.

In the Tauranga region sensitive soil failures commonly occur after heavy rainfall events, causing considerable infrastructure damage. Several notable landslides include a large failure at Bramley Drive, Omokoroa in 1979, the Ruahihi Canal collapse in 1981, and numerous landslides in May 2005; recently the Bramley Drive scarp was reactivated in 2011. These failures are associated with materials loosely classified as the Pahoia Tephras - a mixture of rhyolitic pyroclastic deposits of approximately 1 Ma. The common link with extreme rainfall events suggests a pore water pressure control on the initiation of these failures. Recent research on the structure of the soils shows a dominance of halloysite clay minerals packed loosely in arrangements with high porosity (51 – 77 %), but with almost entirely micropores. This leads us to conclude that the permeability is very low, and the materials remain continuously wet. The formation of halloysite is encouraged by a wet environment with no episodes of drying, supporting this assumption. A high-resolution CPT trace at Bramley Drive indicates induced pore water pressures rising steadily to a peak at approximately 25 m depth; this depth coincides with the base of the landslide scarp. We infer that elevated pore water pressures develop within this single, thick aquifer, triggering failure through reduced effective stresses. The inactive halloysite clay mineral results in low plasticity indices (13 – 44 %) and hence high liquidity indices (1.2 – 2.4) due to the saturated pore space; remoulding following failure is sudden and dramatic and results in large debris runout distances

Discovery of halloysite books in altered silicic Quaternary tephras, northern New Zealand

Hydrated halloysite was discovered in books, a morphology previously associated exclusively with kaolinite. From ~1.5 μm to ~1500 μm in length, the books showed significantly greater mean Fe contents (Fe2O3 = 5.2 wt%) than tubes (Fe2O3 = 3.2 wt%), and expanded rapidly with formamide. They occurred, along with halloysite tubes, spheroids, and plates, in highly porous yet poorly-permeable, silt-dominated, Si-rich, pumiceous rhyolitic tephra deposits aged ~0.93 Ma (Te Puna tephra) and ~0.27 Ma (Te Ranga tephra) at three sites ~10-20 m stratigraphically below the modern land-surface in the Tauranga area, eastern North Island, New Zealand. The book-bearing tephras were at or near saturation, but have experienced intermittent partial drying, favouring the proposed changes: solubilized volcanic glass + plagioclase -> halloysite spheroids -> halloysite tubes -> halloysite plates -> halloysite books. Unlike parallel studies elsewhere involving both halloysite and kaolinite, kaolinite has not formed in Tauranga presumably because the low permeability ensures the sites largely remain locally wet so that the halloysite books are metastable. An implication of the discovery is that some halloysite books in similar settings may have been misidentified previously as kaolinite

On the two-loop four-derivative quantum corrections in 4D N = 2 superconformal field theories

In \cN = 2, 4 superconformal field theories in four space-time dimensions, the quantum corrections with four derivatives are believed to be severely constrained by non-renormalization theorems. The strongest of these is the conjecture formulated by Dine and Seiberg in hep-th/9705057 that such terms are generated only at one loop. In this note, using the background field formulation in \cN = 1 superspace, we test the Dine-Seiberg proposal by comparing the two-loop F^4 quantum corrections in two different superconformal theories with the same gauge group SU(N): (i) \cN = 4 SYM (i.e. \cN = 2 SYM with a single adjoint hypermultiplet); (ii) \cN = 2 SYM with 2N hypermultiplets in the fundamental. According to the Dine-Seiberg conjecture, these theories should yield identical two-loop F^4 contributions from all the supergraphs involving quantum hypermultiplets, since the pure \cN = 2 SYM and ghost sectors are identical provided the same gauge conditions are chosen. We explicitly evaluate the relevant two-loop supergraphs and observe that the F^4 corrections generated have different large N behaviour in the two theories under consideration. Our results are in conflict with the Dine-Seiberg conjecture.Comment: 26 pages, 4 EPS figures. V2: comments, appendix added. V3: a misprint removed, discussion in the appendix of cancellation of divergences improved. V4: typos corrected, the version to appear in NPB. V5: error in eq. (4.12) corrected, conclusions unchange

Teaching students to evaluate sources: getting back to basics

Video of conference presentation available from: [LINK]https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/1_718gp4a8[/LINK]Librarians and instructors regularly see students struggle with evaluating information. Is there a way to teach source evaluation in a one-shot session that leads to better student performance? We’ll present results of our research project, which compared multiple sections of students over two semesters. Some students were taught the CRAAP method, while others learned via the 6 journalistic question words. Was one method retained better than the other? Did student performance on quizzes and final papers differ based on the evaluation method they were taught? This presentation will engage you to think critically about teaching source evaluation in order to improve student learning

Towards a Novel Generalized Chinese Remainder Algorithm for Extended Rabin Cryptosystem

This paper proposes a number of theorems and algorithms for the Chinese Remainder Theorem, which is used to solve a system of linear congruences, and the extended Rabin cryptosystem, which accepts a key composed of an arbitrary finite number of distinct primes. This paper further proposes methods to relax the condition on the primes with trade-offs in the time complexity. The proposed algorithms can be used to provide ciphertext indistinguishability. Finally, this paper conducts extensive experimental analysis on six large data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are asymptotically tight to the existing decryption algorithm in the Rabin cryptosystem with the key composed of two distinct primes while maintaining increased generality