FORGOTTEN AND IGNORED: SPECIAL EDUCATION IN FIRST NATIONS SCHOOLS IN CANADA

Usually reviews of special education in Canada describe the special education programs, services, policies, and legislation that are provided by the provinces and territories. The reviews consistently ignore the special education programs, services, policies, and legislation that are provided by federal government of Canada. The federal government of Canada is constitutionally responsible for the education, including special education, of First Nations students residing on reserves. This responsibility extends throughout Canada. This article describes the current status of special education programs provided to First Nations schools by the federal government and makes recommendations for the development of a comprehensive system of special education services and programs

Special Education in First Nations Schools in Canada: Policies of Cost Containment

The education of First Nations students in Canada on reserve is the legal responsibility of the federal government. This article reviews and critiques the federal government’s past and current special education policies and practices in regard to First Nations schools throughout Canada. The author has found that rather than establishing a comprehensive special education system for First Nations schools, the federal government has focused on limiting funding, services, and development. Four themes emerge from this review: (a) lack of willingness on the part of the federal government to honor constitutional obligations and responsibilities in special education to First Nations; (b) focus of providing provincial level of special education services resulted in little consultation with First Nations; (c) limited funding, and (d) lack of respect for First Nations expertise

Financing Maine’s Food Enterprises

There is a need to rebuild and retool the food system as the emphasis turns to more local and regional approaches. There is an abundance of social capital to make this happen and more and more financial capital. Ron Phillips provides an overview of the various ways Maine’s food-production and processing enterprises are financed and the critical components needed for financing to be secured. Two small businesses are profiled: MOO Milk, an organic dairy cooperative, and Look’s Gourmet Food of Washington County

Deadly Combinations: A Framework for Analyzing the GPL’s Viral Effect, 25 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 487 (2008)

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is free to use and can be downloaded from the Internet. This paper argues that adaptations that combine community source licensed software with an organization’s own intellectual property can trigger “viral” terms of the community source licenses in unexpected ways. The author proposes a model framework for analyzing software combinations to determine whether the viral terms are triggered, and illustrate that analysis against various technical combinations of community-sourced and proprietary software. Author Footnote: Vice President and General Counsel, Serlio Software Development Corporation; J.D. MarquetteUniversity Law School; B.S. University of Washington

Ambient Toxicity Assessments of Clark Fork River Water-Toxicity Tests and Metals Residues in Brown Trout Organs

Trout population densities decline dramatically in the Clark Fork River from nearly 2,000 catchable brown trout per mile just downstream of mine waste settling ponds to 50 trout Instream toxicity tests (1986-89), and analyses of metals in fish organs (1989) were conducted in various river reaches to try to understand how metals influence trout density patterns. Instream toxicity tests with swim-up stage rainbow trout fry demonstrate that river water induces chronic mortality during spring runoff when metals concentration, particularly copper, exceed chronic criteria for protection of aquatic life. Concentration of copper in livers of adult brown trout (salmo trutta) are higher than those in laboratory fish populations exposed for several generations to chronically toxic concentrations of copper. Both acute and chronic stress from metals, particularly copper, are implicated as contributing to poor fish production in the Clark Fork

The quantified cell

The microscopic world of a cell can be as alien to our human-centered intuition as the confinement of quarks within protons or the event horizon of a black hole. We are prone to thinking by analogy—Golgi cisternae stack like pancakes, red blood cells look like donuts—but very little in our human experience is truly comparable to the immensely crowded, membrane-subdivided interior of a eukaryotic cell or the intricately layered structures of a mammalian tissue. So in our daily efforts to understand how cells work, we are faced with a challenge: how do we develop intuition that works at the microscopic scale

Functional requirements document for the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Scientific Computing Facilities (SCF) of the NASA/MSFC Earth Science and Applications Division, 1992

Five scientists at MSFC/ESAD have EOS SCF investigator status. Each SCF has unique tasks which require the establishment of a computing facility dedicated to accomplishing those tasks. A SCF Working Group was established at ESAD with the charter of defining the computing requirements of the individual SCFs and recommending options for meeting these requirements. The primary goal of the working group was to determine which computing needs can be satisfied using either shared resources or separate but compatible resources, and which needs require unique individual resources. The requirements investigated included CPU-intensive vector and scalar processing, visualization, data storage, connectivity, and I/O peripherals. A review of computer industry directions and a market survey of computing hardware provided information regarding important industry standards and candidate computing platforms. It was determined that the total SCF computing requirements might be most effectively met using a hierarchy consisting of shared and individual resources. This hierarchy is composed of five major system types: (1) a supercomputer class vector processor; (2) a high-end scalar multiprocessor workstation; (3) a file server; (4) a few medium- to high-end visualization workstations; and (5) several low- to medium-range personal graphics workstations. Specific recommendations for meeting the needs of each of these types are presented

The Energetic Cost of Building a Virus

Viruses are incapable of autonomous energy production. Although many experimental studies make it clear that viruses are parasitic entities that hijack the host's molecular resources, a detailed estimate for the energetic cost of viral synthesis is largely lacking. To quantify the energetic cost of viruses to their hosts, we enumerated the costs associated with two very distinct but representative DNA and RNA viruses, namely T4 and influenza. We found that for these viruses, translation of viral proteins is the most energetically expensive process. Interestingly, the cost of building a T4 phage and a single influenza virus are nearly the same. Due to influenza's higher burst size, however, the overall cost of a T4 phage infection is only 2-3% of the cost of an influenza infection. The costs of these infections relative to their host's estimated energy budget during the infection reveal that a T4 infection consumes about a third of its host's energy budget, where as an influenza infection consumes only 1%. Building on our estimates for T4, we show how the energetic costs of double-stranded DNA viruses scale with virus size, revealing that the dominant cost of building a virus can switch from translation to genome replication above a critical virus size. Lastly, using our predictions for the energetic cost of viruses, we provide estimates for the strengths of selection and genetic drift acting on newly incorporated genetic elements in viral genomes, under conditions of energy limitation