Teaching and Modeling Social Justice in University Teacher Education Programs and the Communities They Serve

The presentation will engage participants in discussion describing how a university teacher education program and the schools it serves collaborates through community partnerships to teach and model action for social justice. Research, instructional strategies, and practical examples will demonstrate ways to advocate for the inclusion of social justice in classrooms

Courageous conversations : Rural South Georgia Teachers Reflecting on the Role of Race and Racism in the Education of Rural South Georgia Students

Author\u27s abstract: The requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has forced school systems throughout the United States to consider the achievement gap between White students and non-White students, which had not previously been a factor in determining school success for federal and state funding. However, acknowledging the gap is not enough. Schools must move beyond acknowledging the gap to developing strategies to close the gap. A professional development course entitled Courageous Conversations About Race, written by Curtis Linton and Glenn E. Singleton was taught to thirty-seven teachers in a rural South Georgia school system. Eight of the teachers agreed to participate in this research project. The teachers, two Black females and six White females with teaching experience ranging from one to over twenty years, represented elementary, middle, and high schools. The participants\u27 reflections on racism, institutional racism, whiteness, and white privilege were analyzed through the theoretical framework lens of Critical Race Theory. Findings of this research show that teachers express a desire to move toward developing strategies to close the racial achievement gap. However, the history of racism in the patriarchal South is deeply embedded into these women\u27s personal identity and presents challenges that must be overcome before real change can occur

Promoting Sensitivity and Understanding in Classrooms with Undocumented Latinx Students

Participants will learn critical engagement strategies that, when paired with selected young adult novels, will expand perspectives from within Latinx communities and demonstrate ways for teachers to humanize classroom experiences. Participants will gain pedagogical approaches for cultivating inclusive classrooms where experiences of undocumented youth are honored and engaged, and the voices of Latinx students are amplified through literature and classroom experience

Survey of hydrogen production and utilization methods. Volume 1: Executive summary

The use of hydrogen as a synthetic fuel is considered. Processes for the production of hydrogen are described along with the present and future industrial uses of hydrogen as a fuel and as a chemical feedstock. Novel and unconventional hydrogen-production techniques are evaluated, with emphasis placed on thermochemical and electrolytic processes. Potential uses for hydrogen as a fuel in industrial and residential applications are identified and reviewed in the context of anticipated U.S. energy supplies and demands. A detailed plan for the period from 1975 to 1980 prepared for research on and development of hydrogen as an energy carrier is included

Assessing identity, redundancy and confounds in Gene Ontology annotations over time

MOTIVATION: The Gene Ontology (GO) is heavily used in systems biology, but the potential for redundancy, confounds with other data sources and problems with stability over time have been little explored. RESULTS: We report that GO annotations are stable over short periods, with 3% of genes not being most semantically similar to themselves between monthly GO editions. However, we find that genes can alter their 'functional identity' over time, with 20% of genes not matching to themselves (by semantic similarity) after 2 years. We further find that annotation bias in GO, in which some genes are more characterized than others, has declined in yeast, but generally increased in humans. Finally, we discovered that many entries in protein interaction databases are owing to the same published reports that are used for GO annotations, with 66% of assessed GO groups exhibiting this confound. We provide a case study to illustrate how this information can be used in analyses of gene sets and networks. AVAILABILITY: Data available at http://chibi.ubc.ca/assessGO. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Two Algorithms for Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Application to Clustering

Approximate matrix factorization techniques with both nonnegativity and orthogonality constraints, referred to as orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF), have been recently introduced and shown to work remarkably well for clustering tasks such as document classification. In this paper, we introduce two new methods to solve ONMF. First, we show athematical equivalence between ONMF and a weighted variant of spherical k-means, from which we derive our first method, a simple EM-like algorithm. This also allows us to determine when ONMF should be preferred to k-means and spherical k-means. Our second method is based on an augmented Lagrangian approach. Standard ONMF algorithms typically enforce nonnegativity for their iterates while trying to achieve orthogonality at the limit (e.g., using a proper penalization term or a suitably chosen search direction). Our method works the opposite way: orthogonality is strictly imposed at each step while nonnegativity is asymptotically obtained, using a quadratic penalty. Finally, we show that the two proposed approaches compare favorably with standard ONMF algorithms on synthetic, text and image data sets.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. New numerical experiments (document and synthetic data sets

Progress and challenges in the computational prediction of gene function using networks: 2012-2013 update

In an opinion published in 2012, we reviewed and discussed our studies of how gene network-based guilt-by-association (GBA) is impacted by confounds related to gene multifunctionality. We found such confounds account for a significant part of the GBA signal, and as a result meaningfully evaluating and applying computationally-guided GBA is more challenging than generally appreciated. We proposed that effort currently spent on incrementally improving algorithms would be better spent in identifying the features of data that do yield novel functional insights. We also suggested that part of the problem is the reliance by computational biologists on gold standard annotations such as the Gene Ontology. In the year since, there has been continued heavy activity in GBA-based research, including work that contributes to our understanding of the issues we raised. Here we provide a review of some of the most relevant recent work, or which point to new areas of progress and challenges

Stars in the Hand: The Manuscript and Intellectual Contexts of British Latin Medieval Chiromancy and its Scholastic and Astrological Influences

This thesis aims to demonstrate the impact that other intellectual traditions had upon British Latin chiromantic manuals from the art’s first extant emergence from popular culture into European written culture in 1160 CE until the end of the medieval period (c.1500 CE) when the art had already begun to return to the popular level, bringing with it scholastic and astrological accretions it gained while transmitted and embellished by the learned elite. In this survey of the 27 extant manuscripts containing British Latin chiromantic texts from this period I have determined the specific intellectual contexts in which chiromantic texts circulated through careful analysis of the manuscript context in which they were transmitted. This allows me to expand and confirm many observations made by other scholars as well as to identify how the specific intellectual streams in which chiromancy circulated influenced the art’s development. I engage with the debate as to whether Latin chiromancy originated as a Greek, Arabic, or oral British tradition. Despite most branches of medieval European magic originating in the Greek or Arabic worlds before being translated into Latin following the twelfth-century Renaissance, the findings of this study support the theory, proposed by Charles Burnett, that Latin chiromancy (which holds no clear links to other chiromantic traditions) was recorded in a rudimentary form from oral sources. Once it entered into the learned environment it was shaped both in reaction to authoritative condemnations and the scholastic natural philosophy with which it was associated and bound. Scribal authors and transmitters deliberately anchored the art in accepted cosmographical theories to demonstrate that it was in fact a valid science. I then propose that the learned transmitters then brought this newly processed chiromancy with them out of the learned context, facilitating popular interest in the material which stimulated the production of the many fifteenth-century vernacular translations of chiromantic manuals. These accretions made chiromancy readily integrated with other contemporary branches of magic

Experimental data and model for the turbulent boundary layer on a convex, curved surface

Experiments were performed to determine how boundary layer turbulence is affected by strong convex curvature. The data gathered on the behavior of the Reynolds stress suggested the formulation of a simple turbulence model. Data were taken on two separate facilities. Both rigs had flow from a flat surface, over a convex surface with 90 deg of turning and then onto a flat recovery surface. The geometry was adjusted so that, for both rigs, the pressure gradient along the test surface was zero. Two experiments were performed at delta/R approximately 0.10, and one at weaker curvature with delta/R approximately 0.05. Results show that after a sudden introduction of curvature the shear stress in the outer part of the boundary layer is sharply diminished and is even slightly negative near the edge. The wall shear also drops off quickly downstream. When the surface suddenly becomes flat again, the wall shear and shear stress profiles recover very slowly towards flat wall conditions. A simple turbulence model, which was based on the theory that the Prandtl mixing length in the outer layer should scale on the velocity gradient layer, was shown to account for the slow recovery

The Effect of Natural Dissolved Organic Carbon on the Acute Toxicity of Copper to Larval Freshwater Mussels (\u3cem\u3eGlochidia\u3c/em\u3e)

The present study examined the effect of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), both added and inherent, on Cu toxicity in glochidia, the larvae of freshwater mussels. Using incremental additions of natural DOC concentrate and reconstituted water, a series of acute copper toxicity tests were conducted. An increase in DOC from 0.7 to 4.4 mg C/L resulted in a fourfold increase (36–150 μg Cu/L) in the 24-h median effective concentration (EC50) and a significant linear relationship (r2=0.98, p=0.0008) between the DOC concentration and the Cu EC50 of Lampsilis siliquoidea glochidia. The ameliorating effect of added DOC on Cu toxicity was confirmed using a second mussel species, the endangered (in Canada) Lampsilis fasciola. The effect of inherent (i.e., not added) DOC on Cu toxicity was also assessed in eight natural waters (DOC 5–15 mg C/L). These experiments revealed a significant relationship between the EC50 and the concentration of inherent DOC (r2=0.79, p=0.0031) with EC50s ranging from 27 to 111 μg Cu/L. These laboratory tests have demonstrated that DOC provides glochidia with significant protection from acute Cu toxicity. The potential risk that Cu poses to mussel populations was assessed by comparing Cu and DOC concentrations from significant mussel habitats in Ontario to the EC50s. Although overall mean Cu concentration in the mussel’s habitat was well below the acutely toxic level given the concentration of DOC, episodic Cu releases in low DOC waters may be a concern for the recovery of endangered freshwater mussels. The results are examined in the context of current Cu water quality regulations including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) biotic ligand model