Managing Special Education Statewide: Developing an Interdependent Management System

This article reports research on the development and evaluation of a statewide management network. A network of 529 persons nominated a peer task force which was determined to be highly representative of Michigan's 529 administrators and supervisors. This task force produced a series of products and procedures which the network of administrators and supervisors found both relevant and useful in their work. This research employed communication strategies appropriate to macrogroups to support the continued development of a Statewide Technical Assistance Network in Special Education (STANSE) — a model for state leadership personnel to use in producing state plans. It embodies public participation and annual reports to state governing boards, legislatures, and other significant publics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69035/2/10.1177_002246697801200203.pd

Fate of Crude and Refined Oils in North Slope Soils

Prudhoe Bay crude oil and refined diesel fuel were applied to five topographically distinct tundra soils at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The penetration of hydrocarbons into the soil column depended on soil moisture and drainage characteristics. Biodegradation, shown by changes in the pristane to heptadecane and resolvable to total gas chromatographic area ratios, appeared to be greatly restricted in drier tundra soils during one year exposure. Some light hydrocarbons, C9-C10, were recovered from soils one year after spillages. Hydrocarbons were still present in soils at Fish Creek, Alaska, contaminated by refined oil spillages 28 years earlier, attesting to the persistence of hydrocarbons in North Slope soils

Reliability data to improve high magnetic field coil design for high velocity coilguns.

Coilguns have demonstrated their capability to launch projectiles to 1 km/s, and there is interest in their application for long-range precision strike weapons. However, the incorporation of cooling systems for repetitive operation will impact the mechanical design and response of the future coils. To assess the impact of such changes, an evaluation of the ruggedness and reliability of the existing 50 mm bore coil designed in 1993 was made by repeatedly testing at stress levels associated with operation in a coilgun. A two-coil testbed has been built with a static projectile where each coil is energized by its own capacitor bank. Simulation models of the applied forces generated in this testbed have been created with the SLINGSHOT circuit code to obtain loads equivalent to the worst-case anticipated in a 50 mm coilgun that could launch a 236 g projectile to 2 km/s. Bench measurements of the seven remaining coils built in 1993 have been used to evaluate which coils were viable for testing, and only one was found defective. Measurements of the gradient of the effective coil inductance in the presence of the projectile were compared to values from SLINGSHOT, and the agreement is excellent. Repeated testing of the HFC5 coil built in 1993 has demonstrated no failures after 205 shots, which is an order of magnitude greater than any number achieved in previous testing. Although this testing has only been done on two coils, the results are encouraging as it demonstrates there are no fundamental weak links in the design that will cause a very early failure. Several recommendations for future coil designs are suggested based on observations of this study

The association between platelet autoantibody specificity and response to intravenous immunoglobulin G in the treatment of patients with immune thrombocytopenia

We retrospectively investigated the association between platelet autoantibody specificity and response to intravenous immunoglobulin G (IVIG) in 17 patients with immune thrombocytopenia (ITP). Platelet-associated antibodies against glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa, GPIb/IX, and GPIa/IIa were detected in 13, 10, and 8 patients, respectively. A response occurred in 7 of 7 patients without anti-GPIb/IX, but in only 3 of 10 patients with anti-GPIb/IX (

Bayes Wars Redivivus - An Exchange

An electronic exchange among 10 evidence scholars that began with a discussion of the restyled Federal Rules and grew into a significant restatement of debates in evidentiary scholarship over the last 50 years, touching on relevance, probative value, inference, Bayesianism and the foundations of evidence, with an introduction by Michael Risinger

Cascaded Multi-View Canonical Correlation (CaMCCo) for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer\u27s Disease via Fusion of Clinical, Imaging and Omic Features

The introduction of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as a diagnostic category adds to the challenges of diagnosing Alzheimer\u27s Disease (AD). No single marker has been proven to accurately categorize patients into their respective diagnostic groups. Thus, previous studies have attempted to develop fused predictors of AD and MCI. These studies have two main limitations. Most do not simultaneously consider all diagnostic categories and provide suboptimal fused representations using the same set of modalities for prediction of all classes. In this work, we present a combined framework, cascaded multiview canonical correlation (CaMCCo), for fusion and cascaded classification that incorporates all diagnostic categories and optimizes classification by selectively combining a subset of modalities at each level of the cascade. CaMCCo is evaluated on a data cohort comprising 149 patients for whom neurophysiological, neuroimaging, proteomic and genomic data were available. Results suggest that fusion of select modalities for each classification task outperforms (mean AUC = 0.92) fusion of all modalities (mean AUC = 0.54) and individual modalities (mean AUC = 0.90, 0.53, 0.71, 0.73, 0.62, 0.68). In addition, CaMCCo outperforms all other multi-class classification methods for MCI prediction (PPV: 0.80 vs. 0.67, 0.63)

Introducing chemistry students to the “real world” of chemistry

A majority of chemistry graduates seek employment in a rapidly changing chemical industry. Our attempts to provide the graduates with skills in entrepreneurship and the ability to understand and communicate with their chemical engineering colleagues, in addition to their fundamental knowledge of chemistry, are described. This is done at second-year level with practical projects in which student teams formulate and prepare relatively simple chemical products for marketing, followed a year later by a more advanced study of the feasibility of producing and marketing a fine chemical on a commercial scale