Best Teaching Practices for Engaging Adult Students\u27 Foreign Language Learning

Government initiatives for strengthening the safety of the United States led to increased requirements for military linguists\u27 knowledge of foreign languages. This study explored the development of professional training for instructors at a military language school to address the gap in teaching services. The purpose of this single case study was to explore best teaching practices for engaging adult students\u27 foreign language learning following andragogical principles. Knowles\u27s theory of andragogy provided the conceptual framework. Data were collected using anonymous responses to an online survey from 26 instructors who answered 3 open-ended questions. Data were analyzed by coding answers to the research question and indicated that approximately one third of participants preferred language-centered practices for engaging their students\u27 foreign language learning. Another third of the respondents noted learner-centered approaches, and the remainder listed both language- and learner-centered approaches among best teaching practices. The proposed curriculum might facilitate discussion about the benefits of each approach to promote teaching and learning at the site. Participating in suggested training that is grounded in the theory of andragogy and local data may bring about positive change by advancing instructors\u27 expertise, improving educational services, and resulting in increased students\u27 proficiency

WIMP Dark Matter and the QCD Equation of State

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) of mass m freeze out at a temperature T_f ~ m/25, i.e. in the range 400 MeV -- 40 GeV for a particle in the typical mass range 10 -- 1000 GeV. The WIMP relic density, which depends on the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom at T_f, may be measured to better than 1% by Planck, warranting comparable theoretical precision. Recent theoretical and experimental advances in the understanding of high temperature QCD show that the quark gluon plasma departs significantly from ideal behaviour up to temperatures of several GeV, necessitating an improvement of the cosmological equation of state over those currently used. We discuss how this increases the relic density by approximately 1.5 -- 3.5% in benchmark mSUGRA models, with an uncertainly in the QCD corrections of 0.5 -- 1 %. We point out what further work is required to achieve a theoretical accuracy comparable with the expected observational precision, and speculate that the effective number of degrees of freedom at T_f may become measurable in the foreseeable future.Comment: 4pp, 2figs. More info including Matlab scripts used to generate equation of state curves at http://www.pact.cpes.sussex.ac.uk/arXiv/hep-ph/0501232

Training Curriculum for Students with Disabilities (ESE)

Against All Odds Ministry, Inc. (AAOM) is a non-profit organization created by CEO and Founder Carolynne Mather. Carolynne\u27s passion for serving the at-risk population dates to her years as a Preschool Owner providing moral and spiritual counseling to the young mothers of the children her facility provided care. Carolynne desired to mentor these women in a monthly meeting and guide them to see if they could move beyond their circumstances against the odds that faced them. The desire was to use the group meetings to write a book on women\u27s success from this mentoring group. The group produced two parents who went back to school and received their degrees and became a teacher. The other victory was a parent who decided to leave an abusive relationship and seek professional counseling and help to move her and her children on to the next level of their life. After the closure of the Preschool, Carolynne decided to continue the book, which she titled Against All Odds. The manuscript of the book is still in progress. Carolynne formed a not-for-profit organization in 2014 to continue her work with at-risk women. She provided a three-week course to the women at Lighthouse Ministry. A dream was born after having the opportunity to teach a class for my daughter on a commitment she had made. Against All Odds Ministry Inc. transitioned from a not-for-profit-to a non-profit 501c (3) organization to obtain a Vendor status with Vocational Rehabilitation to service youths ages 14-21 years of age, preparing them for the workforce, postsecondary educational opportunities, and transitioning to becoming productive citizens of their communities. As CEO of the company, this project allows me to provide a 60-hour training (three weeks) curriculum to ensure students with disabilities have essential workforce preparation and post-school transition opportunities. The curriculum will consist of Job Exploration Counseling, Peer Mentoring, Postsecondary Educational Counseling, Self-Advocacy Training, and Work-Readiness Training. VR provides vendors with training topics and forms to monitor the student\u27s success. Research shows students with disabilities (SWDs) are finding jobs, becoming independent, and attending colleges in increasing numbers (Orr & Hammig, 2009). According to the National Center for Education Statics (2002), 9% of U.S. undergraduates reported in 1999-2000 had a disability. The reasons for the increase in enrollment are numerous. They include better academic preparation, improved transitioning planning, and opportunities for non-profit organizations to become vendors via VR and provide services to their clients

There are no more words to the story

We have collaborated on the representation of Yupik folklore and traditions on and off since the 1980s. The result is usually a co-authored piece with a unified voice. For this article, we wanted to highlight the collaborative process by including some of the dialogue between us. We now live several hundred miles apart, so our collaboration takes place by telephone, facsimile, and mail when we cannot sit at the same table. What follows is a joint commentary on Phillip Charlie's quliraq, highlighted with direct quotations from our correspondence and conversations. These are presented as "interludes" in the text, identified as either Elsie Mather's (EM) or Phyllis Morrow's (PM) voice. We also present our metaconversation about collaboration.Note: quotation markes removed from title to ensure alphabetical order. Difference as follows; "There Are No More Words to the Story." Issue title; "Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation.

Tunneling spectroscopy studies of aluminum oxide tunnel barrier layers

We report scanning tunneling microscopy and ballistic electron emission microscopy studies of the electronic states of the uncovered and chemisorbed-oxygen covered surface of AlOx tunnel barrier layers. These states change when chemisorbed oxygen ions are moved into the oxide by either flood gun electron bombardment or by thermal annealing. The former, if sufficiently energetic, results in locally well defined conduction band onsets at ~1 V, while the latter results in a progressively higher local conduction band onset, exceeding 2.3 V for 500 and 600 C thermal anneals

Large normally hyperbolic cylinders in a priori stable Hamiltonian systems

We prove the existence of normally hyperbolic invariant cylinders in nearly integrable hamiltonian systems

Japanese Landscapes: Where Land and Culture Merge

From the busy streets of Tokyo to the secluded shores of Kyushu, from the volcanoes of Hokkaido to the temples of Kyoto, the treasured landscapes of Japan are brought to life in this concise visual guide. Drawing upon years of observation, Cotton Mather, P.P. Karan, and Shigeru Iijima explore the complex interaction of culture, time, and space in the evolution of landscapes in Japan. The authors begin with a discussion of the landscape\u27s general characteristics, including paucity of idle land, scarcity of level land, and its meticulous organization and immaculate nature. They then apply those characteristics to such favorite subjects as home gardens, sculpted plants, and flower arrangements, but also to more mundane matters such as roadside shoulders, utility lines, and walled urban areas. This unique blending of physical and social sciences with humanities perspectives offers a unified analysis of the Japanese landscape. Cotton Mather is the author of Beyond the Great Divide. P.P. Karan, chair of the Japanese Studies committee and professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, is the co-editor of The Japanese City. Shigeru lijima is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology in the Tokyo Institute of Ethnology. The comparison of current landscapes with what might be called traditional landscapes is instructive in a much larger context. -- Allen G. Noble An elegantly produced short book, of which about half is taken up by a series of black and white photographs of the Japanese landscapes. -- Geographical Journal Puts Japan’s renowned urbanization within a broader cultural and national context. -- Journal of Urban Design Will provide a valuable starting point for the study of Japanese landscape. -- Landscape Research A large part of the enjoyment of this book comes from the chance to compare notes with the authors about what is essential in Japan’s landscape, and to engage them in a quiet, one-sided debate while reading. -- Pacific Affairs The book excels in explaining and categorizing the faces of Japan through physical environmental constraints interwoven with cultural attitudes. -- Todd Stradford The authors draw on years of observation and experience to explore the interaction of culture, time and space in the Japanese landscape. -- UK Newshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_asian_history/1001/thumbnail.jp

On the number of Mather measures of Lagrangian systems

In 1996, Ricardo Ricardo Ma\~n\'e discovered that Mather measures are in fact the minimizers of a "universal" infinite dimensional linear programming problem. This fundamental result has many applications, one of the most important is to the estimates of the generic number of Mather measures. Ma\~n\'e obtained the first estimation of that sort by using finite dimensional approximations. Recently, we were able with Gonzalo Contreras to use this method of finite dimensional approximation in order to solve a conjecture of John Mather concerning the generic number of Mather measures for families of Lagrangian systems. In the present paper we obtain finer results in that direction by applying directly some classical tools of convex analysis to the infinite dimensional problem. We use a notion of countably rectifiable sets of finite codimension in Banach (and Frechet) spaces which may deserve independent interest

Adjoint inversion of the thermal structure of Southeastern Australia

The variation of temperature in the crust is difficult to quantify due to the sparsity of surface heat flow observations and lack of measurements on the thermal properties of rocks at depth. We examine the degree to which the thermal structure of the crust can be constrained from the Curie depth and surface heat flow data in Southeastern Australia. We cast the inverse problem of heat conduction within a Bayesian framework and derive its adjoint so that we can efficiently find the optimal model that best reproduces the data and prior information on the thermal properties of the crust. Efficiency gains obtained from the adjoint method facilitate a detailed exploration of thermal structure in SE Australia, where we predict high temperatures within Precambrian rocks of 650 °C due to relatively high rates of heat production (0.9–1.4 μW m−3). In contrast, temperatures within dominantly Phanerozoic crust reach only 520 °C at the Moho due to the low rates of heat production in Cambrian mafic volcanics. A combination of the Curie depth and heat flow data is required to constrain the uncertainty of lower crustal temperatures to ±73 °C. We also show that parts of the crust are unconstrained if either data set is omitted from the inversion.This work was supported by resources provided by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre with funding from the Australian Government and the Government of Western Australia