Differentiating Reading Comprehension Curriculum using NWEA Data

Just as the population of Minnesota students in inner-city and first ring-suburban high schools continues to grow more diverse in ethnicity, socioeconomic status, ability, interest and motivation, so too grows the expectation that all students show adequate yearly progress. Given the important challenge of holding all different types of students to the same rigorous academic standard and with the goal of maximizing individual reading comprehension growth, a series of differentiated units was developed using data from the Northwest Evaluation Association\u27s (NWEA) Measuring Academic Progress (MAP) test. The student data generated from the MAP test along with NWEA\u27s Descartes Continuum of learning allowed for manageable differentiation of content and yielded better than normative reading comprehension growth in just over forty percent of the sixty-eight students enrolled in English Concepts at Irondale High School

Extended Surfactants for Leather

Content: Surfactants of different ionic nature are used in virtually all steps of leather production. In processes like soaking, degreasing and wool washing, tremendous amounts of surfactants are applied and to a great extent discharged into the tannery effluent. In order to improve the sustainability of leather processing, there is a constant search for more efficient, environmentally friendly emulsifiers, which give superior results already in smaller usage amounts. By introduction of propylene oxide based lipophilic linkers between the hydrophilic head and hydrophobic tail, the wetting and emulsion capability of a surfactant can be increased significantly. The resulting surfactants, so called extended surfactants, are generally more hydrophobic and have an extended tail, which reaches further into the oil face without scarifying the water solubility, what would be the results when increasing the alkyl chain. Thus, the use of lipophilic linker changes the emulsion on a structural level. Extended surfactants have been found to be superior in various applications, including textile laundry or tertiary oil recovery. In the present work, the efficiency of various types of non-ionic and anionic extended surfactants is demonstrated in various stages of leather making. Model surfactants with lipophilic linkers are compared to their analogues without linker molecules. In many processes, significantly improved surfactant efficiencies are found making this group of molecules an interesting topic for further exploitation. Take-Away: Significantly improved surfactant efficiency for more sustainable leather processin

Talaria: Continuous Drag & Drop on a Wall Display

International audienceWe present an interaction technique combining tactile actions and Midair pointing to access out-of-reach content on large displays without the need to walk across the display. Users can start through a Touch gesture on the display surface and finish Midair by pointing to push content away or inversely to retrieve a content. The technique takes advantage of wellknown semantics of pointing in human-to-human interaction.These, coupled with the semantics of proximal relations and deictic proxemics make the proposed technique very powerful as it leverages on well-understood human-human interaction modalities. Experimental results show this technique to outperform direct tactile interaction on dragging tasks. From our experience we derive four guidelines for interaction with large-scale displays

Use of soil moisture information in yield models

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Algorithmic Interpretations of Fractal Dimension

We study algorithmic problems on subsets of Euclidean space of low fractal dimension. These spaces are the subject of intensive study in various branches of mathematics, including geometry, topology, and measure theory. There are several well-studied notions of fractal dimension for sets and measures in Euclidean space. We consider a definition of fractal dimension for finite metric spaces which agrees with standard notions used to empirically estimate the fractal dimension of various sets. We define the fractal dimension of some metric space to be the infimum delta>0, such that for any eps>0, for any ball B of radius r >= 2eps, and for any eps-net N, we have |B cap N|=O((r/eps)^delta). Using this definition we obtain faster algorithms for a plethora of classical problems on sets of low fractal dimension in Euclidean space. Our results apply to exact and fixed-parameter algorithms, approximation schemes, and spanner constructions. Interestingly, the dependence of the performance of these algorithms on the fractal dimension nearly matches the currently best-known dependence on the standard Euclidean dimension. Thus, when the fractal dimension is strictly smaller than the ambient dimension, our results yield improved solutions in all of these settings. We remark that our definition of fractal definition is equivalent up to constant factors to the well-studied notion of doubling dimension. However, in the problems that we consider, the dimension appears in the exponent of the running time, and doubling dimension is not precise enough for capturing the best possible such exponent for subsets of Euclidean space. Thus our work is orthogonal to previous results on spaces of low doubling dimension; while algorithms on spaces of low doubling dimension seek to extend results from the case of low dimensional Euclidean spaces to more general metric spaces, our goal is to obtain faster algorithms for special pointsets in Euclidean space