Creating A Karen Culture And Language Toolkit

The research question addressed in this study was what components of a Karen language and culture toolkit for mainstream high school teachers and staff could impact their confidence and awareness of the needs of Karen students and improve teaching practices. The Karen population has increased in the United States and professional development and resources about this group are an area of need for teachers. This capstone provides research on the Karen, features of the Karen language, and features of the Karen culture. This capstone also includes research on teacher preparedness and professional development that then informed the creation of a Karen language and culture toolkit in both pamphlet form and website to be presented to staff and teachers

Systematics of Aligned Axions

We describe a novel technique that renders theories of $N$ axions tractable, and more generally can be used to efficiently analyze a large class of periodic potentials of arbitrary dimension. Such potentials are complex energy landscapes with a number of local minima that scales as $\sqrt{N!}$, and so for large $N$ appear to be analytically and numerically intractable. Our method is based on uncovering a set of approximate symmetries that exist in addition to the $N$ periods. These approximate symmetries, which are exponentially close to exact, allow us to locate the minima very efficiently and accurately and to analyze other characteristics of the potential. We apply our framework to evaluate the diameters of flat regions suitable for slow-roll inflation, which unifies, corrects and extends several forms of "axion alignment" previously observed in the literature. We find that in a broad class of random theories, the potential is smooth over diameters enhanced by $N^{3/2}$ compared to the typical scale of the potential. A Mathematica implementation of our framework is available online.Comment: 68 pages, 17 figure

Intelligent Design: Should We Teach It?

Belief about the origins of the universe and mankind is an important aspect of most world religions. While many ‘progressive’ Christians view the Genesis accounts of creation as mythical or allegorical, some ‘fundamentalist’ Christians claim it is a literal and historical account of the origins of life. The scientific community, on the other hand, views Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as the definitive explanation of the origin of all species on Earth including humans. As science has continued to line up behind evolution, it has been integrated into the public school curriculum. The question examined by this paper is: should the ‘plain sense’ or literal hermeneutic of the Genesis accounts of creation (commonly referred to as ‘Creationism’ or, more recently, ‘Intelligent Design’), be taught in public schools as an alternative explanation for the evolutionary understanding of the origins of life

Fact Sheet: Primary Health Care Matters

This Fact Sheet includes definitions, position statements and suggested reading about primary health care (PHC) as well as outlining the differences between comprehensive and selected PHC. And as a hard copy it can be disseminated at conferences and workshops or around the office

Brief Report:A Longitudinal Study of Excessive Smiling and Laughing in Children with Angelman Syndrome

Elevated laughing and smiling is a key characteristic of the Angelman syndrome behavioral phenotype, with cross-sectional studies reporting changes with environment and age. This study compares levels of laughing and smiling in 12 participants across three experimental conditions [full social interaction (with eye contact), social interaction with no eye contact, proximity only] at two data points. No differences were noted in frequency of laughing and smiling over time in any condition. However, with age as a covariate, the frequency of laughing and smiling decreased over time in the full social interaction (with eye contact) condition only. As this is the first longitudinal study to explore these behaviors in Angelman syndrome, the results suggest a gene–environment–time interaction within the behavioral phenotype.Full Tex