Bringing the World to School: Integrating News and Media Literacy in Elementary Classrooms

For three years, the Powerful Voices for Kids program, a university-school partnership program of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, developed a multifaceted approach to integrate news and current events into in-school and after-school instruction in K-6 schools. Three case studies detailing the program’s impact on an undergraduate novice instructor, an in-school technology mentor, and an experienced classroom teacher illustrate the ways in which different stakeholders at the school approached news integration. Though approaches, interests, and values of each teacher vary considerably, all teachers share a commitment to the following classroom principles: (1) the use of inquiry to guide lesson development, (2) the role of ambiguity and uncertainty in otherwise structured learning environments, (3) the use of scaffolding and planning to limit and shape students’ experiences with a variety of unpredictable media texts in the classroom, and (4) written reflection on how individual teacher values and motivations contribute to the unique classroom culture. Implications for future professional development in K-6 news literacy are explored

Exactly Marginal Operators and Running Coupling Constants in 2D Gravity

The Liouville action for two--dimensional quantum gravity coupled to interacting matter contains terms that have not been considered previously. They are crucial for understanding the renormalization group flow and can be observed in recent matrix model results for the phase diagram of the Sine--Gordon model coupled to gravity. These terms insure, order by order in the coupling constant, that the dressed interaction is exactly marginal. They are discussed up to second order.Comment: 22 pages, plain Tex, CALT-68-1817 (Some modifications but same results. Figures will be faxed upon request.

Towards Interactive Multidimensional Visualisations for Corpus Linguistics

We propose the novel application of dynamic and interactive visualisation techniques to support the iterative and exploratory investigations typical of the corpus linguistics methodology. Very large scale text analysis is already carried out in corpus-based language analysis by employing methods such as frequency profiling, keywords, concordancing, collocations and n-grams. However, at present only basic visualisation methods are utilised. In this paper, we describe case studies of multiple types of key word clouds, explorer tools for collocation networks, and compare network and language distance visualisations for online social networks. These are shown to fit better with the iterative data-driven corpus methodology, and permit some level of scalability to cope with ever increasing corpus size and complexity. In addition, they will allow corpus linguistic methods to be used more widely in the digital humanities and social sciences since the learning curve with visualisations is shallower for non-expert

The Effect of Cone Opsin Mutations on Retinal Structure and the Integrity of the Photoreceptor Mosaic

Purpose. To evaluate retinal structure and photoreceptor mosaic integrity in subjects with OPN1LW and OPN1MW mutations. Methods. Eleven subjects were recruited, eight of whom have been previously described. Cone and rod density was measured using images of the photoreceptor mosaic obtained from an adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscope (AOSLO). Total retinal thickness, inner retinal thickness, and outer nuclear layer plus Henle fiber layer (ONL+HFL) thickness were measured using cross-sectional spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) images. Molecular genetic analyses were performed to characterize the OPN1LW/OPN1MW gene array. Results. While disruptions in retinal lamination and cone mosaic structure were observed in all subjects, genotype-specific differences were also observed. For example, subjects with “L/M interchange” mutations resulting from intermixing of ancestral OPN1LW and OPN1MW genes had significant residual cone structure in the parafovea (∼25% of normal), despite widespread retinal disruption that included a large foveal lesion and thinning of the parafoveal inner retina. These subjects also reported a later-onset, progressive loss of visual function. In contrast, subjects with the C203R missense mutation presented with congenital blue cone monochromacy, with retinal lamination defects being restricted to the ONL+HFL and the degree of residual cone structure (8% of normal) being consistent with that expected for the S-cone submosaic. Conclusions. The photoreceptor phenotype associated with OPN1LW and OPN1MW mutations is highly variable. These findings have implications for the potential restoration of visual function in subjects with opsin mutations. Our study highlights the importance of high-resolution phenotyping to characterize cellular structure in inherited retinal disease; such information will be critical for selecting patients most likely to respond to therapeutic intervention and for establishing a baseline for evaluating treatment efficacy

GWTC-2.1: Deep Extended Catalog of Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run

The second Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog reported on 39 compact binary coalescences observed by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors between 1 April 2019 15:00 UTC and 1 October 2019 15:00 UTC. We present GWTC-2.1, which reports on a deeper list of candidate events observed over the same period. We analyze the final version of the strain data over this period with improved calibration and better subtraction of excess noise, which has been publicly released. We employ three matched-filter search pipelines for candidate identification, and estimate the astrophysical probability for each candidate event. While GWTC-2 used a false alarm rate threshold of 2 per year, we include in GWTC-2.1, 1201 candidates that pass a false alarm rate threshold of 2 per day. We calculate the source properties of a subset of 44 high-significance candidates that have an astrophysical probability greater than 0.5. Of these candidates, 36 have been reported in GWTC-2. If the 8 additional high-significance candidates presented here are astrophysical, the mass range of events that are unambiguously identified as binary black holes (both objects ≥3M⊙) is increased compared to GWTC-2, with total masses from ∼14M⊙ for GW190924_021846 to ∼182M⊙ for GW190426_190642. The primary components of two new candidate events (GW190403_051519 and GW190426_190642) fall in the mass gap predicted by pair instability supernova theory. We also expand the population of binaries with significantly asymmetric mass ratios reported in GWTC-2 by an additional two events (the mass ratio is less than 0.65 and 0.44 at 90% probability for GW190403_051519 and GW190917_114630 respectively), and find that 2 of the 8 new events have effective inspiral spins χeff>0 (at 90% credibility), while no binary is consistent with χeff < 0 at the same significance