Hiring Practices in the Newborough Unified School District

This case was commissioned by Public Education Network (PEN) and prepared by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. This case was designed for use at PEN's 2006 annual conference, and focuses on hiring practices within a fictitious city's school system

Educational Choice or Unfair Competition: Charter Schools in Benton

This case was commissioned by Public Education Network (PEN) and prepared by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. This case was designed for use at PEN's 2006 annual conference, and focuses on the topic of charter schools and school choice in a fictitious large city

Educating English Language Learners in Dexter

This case was commissioned by Public Education Network (PEN) and prepared by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. This case was designed for use at PEN's 2006 annual conference, and focuses on meeting the educational needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) in a fictitious community

A Time for Change: The Search for a New Superintendent in Carlton City

This case was commissioned by Public Education Network (PEN) and prepared by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. This case was designed for use at PEN's 2006 annual conference, and focuses on a fictitious capital city's search for a new superintendent of schools

Politeness and bias in dialogue summarization: two exploratory studies

In this chapter, two empirical pilot studies on the role of politeness in dialogue summarization are described. In these studies, a collection of four dialogues was used. Each dialogue was automatically generated by the NECA system and the politeness of the dialogue participants was systematically manipulated. Subjects were divided into groups who had to summarize the dialogues from a particular dialogue participant’s point of view or the point of view of an impartial observer. In the first study, there were no other constraints. In the second study, the summarizers were restricted to summaries whose length did not exceed 10% of the number of words in the dialogue that was being summarized. Amongst other things, it was found that the politeness of the interaction is included more often in summaries of dialogues that deviate from what would be considered normal or unmarked. A comparison of the results of the two studies suggests that the extent to which politeness is reported is not affected by how long a summary is allowed to be. It was also found that the point of view of the summarizer influences which information is included in the summary and how it is presented. This finding did not seem to be affected by the constraint in our second study on the summary length

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationUropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) cause the overwhelming majority of community-acquired urinary tract infections (UTI) worldwide. A particularly problematic aspect of UPEC-associated UTI is the rate of recurrent infections- one in four UTIs will recur within six months of the initial infection. In the majority of cases, the strain responsible for the primary infection is identical to the strain causing the recurrent infection. Usually, the urinary tract is maintained as a sterile environment by an array of host defenses. Some of the genetic mechanisms by which UPEC cope with or subvert host defenses in order to colonize and persist within the urinary tract is the primary focus of this thesis. I start by exploring the effects of global metabolic and stress response transcriptional regulation on the virulence potential of UPEC within the murine urinary tract. Therein, I better define the metabolic and stress response limitations affecting UPEC colonization of this niche. I then address the advantages of chromosomally encoded toxin-antitoxin systems in allowing for niche-specific colonization of the urinary tract and explore how these small genetic elements can specifically affect the stress resistance and antibiotic persistence of UPEC. This work, specifically, identifies a novel target for chemotherapeutic agents that would theoretically home in on and hinder only uropathogenic subsets of E. coli, combating UTI while leaving commensal E. coli iv unphazed. Lastly, I attempt to better understand the generation of UPEC stress resistance by studying the evolutionarily conserved genomic rearrangement of chromosomally encoded toxin-antitoxin hicAB within these pathogens. I found that constructing this evolutionarily conserved hicAB truncation within the ancestral E. coli MG1655 promotes serum resistance and survival of this characteristically nonpathogenic strain of E. coli within the blood of a murine host. Furthermore, ancestral strains carrying this truncated allele are, in general, more resistant to stress than their unevolved counterparts. In total, this body of work better defines the stress resistance and persistence capacities of UPEC

HgCdTe for NASA EOS missions and detector uniformity benchmarks

Important NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) missions, Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS-N), which require detector spectral response in the range of 14 to 17 microns at medium background flux levels and operation in the range of temperatures between 65 to 95 K, will be flown beginning in the next few years. Currently, a prime candidate detector technology for these missions is trapping-mode photoconductive HgCdTe devices. These devices can be tailored to the exact cutoff wavelengths required by those missions, and thus offer the performance advantages of an intrinsic detector which is ideally matched to the mission wavelength. Under the long wavelength-background-temperature conditions of these EOS missions, any detector will at best be thermal generation-recombination noise limited. Photoconductive devices are generally preferred under these circumstances, since at elevated temperatures their performance degrades with n(sub i) while for photovoltaic detectors performance degrades as n sub i(exp 2) n sub i is the intrinsic carrier concentration which is a function of alloy composition and temperature, but not doping. Very high performance trapping-mode photoconductive HgCdTe detectors have been developed which can be reproducibly fabricated. Detectivity (D asterisk) at 80K and 16 micron cutoff wavelength in excess of 10(exp 11) Jones has been measured for these devices. Power dissipation is at least two orders of magnitude less than conventional HgCdTe photoconductors - on the order of 0.12 W/cm(exp 2) compared with 12 W/cm(exp 2). EOS missions define thermal noise limited conditions for the long wavelength operating bands. Trapping-mode photoconductive HgCdTe detectors are linear under such conditions and responsivity is independent of background flux. At lower temperatures or high flux conditions in which background flux limits detector performance, trapping-mode detectors have a responsivity which varies with background flux. Internal calibration must be provided for radiometric measurements under the latter conditions (not an EOS mission concern). Liquid phase epitaxy is used to grow these HgCdTe device structures. This technique has been shown to give control of the cutoff wavelength on the order of 16 plus or minus 1 micron or less, both from run to run and across wafer dimensions of several centimeters on a side

Sentiment and behaviour annotation in a corpus of dialogue summaries

This paper proposes a scheme for sentiment annotation. We show how the task can be made tractable by focusing on one of the many aspects of sentiment: sentiment as it is recorded in behaviour reports of people and their interactions. Together with a number of measures for supporting the reliable application of the scheme, this allows us to obtain sufficient to good agreement scores (in terms of Krippendorf's alpha) on three key dimensions: polarity, evaluated party and type of clause. Evaluation of the scheme is carried out through the annotation of an existing corpus of dialogue summaries (in English and Portuguese) by nine annotators. Our contribution to the field is twofold: (i) a reliable multi-dimensional annotation scheme for sentiment in behaviour reports; and (ii) an annotated corpus that was used for testing the reliability of the scheme and which is made available to the research community

Can Carbon Find a Home on the Range?

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,