The Status of Middle Schools in the Southeastern United States: Perceptions and Implementation of the Middle School Model

For more than 100 years, education communities have debated how best to educate the young adolescent. Proponents of both the junior high school model and the current middle school model have advocated for a specialized approach to educating adolescents that emphasizes the developmental needs of students. To accomplish this, various organizational structures and instructional approaches are recommended. This survey study examines the perceptions of these middle school practices and the implementation of those practices in middle schools in the Southeastern region of the United States. We note several key trends in our results and highlight key differences in perception of importance and implementation of middle school components and strategies compared to the most recent large scale survey administered by McEwin and Greene (2011)

Radial and orbital excitations of static-light mesons

We present results for the spectrum of static-light mesons from Nf=2 lattice QCD. These results were obtained using all-to-all light quark propagators on an anisotropic lattice, yielding an improved signal resolution when compared to more conventional lattice techniques. With a light quark mass close to the strange quark, we have measured the splittings between the ground-state S-wave static-light meson and higher excitations. We attempt to identify the quantum numbers of the excited states in the context of the reduced spatial symmetries of the lattice.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

MagicPairing: Apple's Take on Securing Bluetooth Peripherals

Device pairing in large Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is a challenge for device manufacturers and users. Bluetooth offers a comparably smooth trust on first use pairing experience. Bluetooth, though, is well-known for security flaws in the pairing process. In this paper, we analyze how Apple improves the security of Bluetooth pairing while still maintaining its usability and specification compliance. The proprietary protocol that resides on top of Bluetooth is called MagicPairing. It enables the user to pair a device once with Apple's ecosystem and then seamlessly use it with all their other Apple devices. We analyze both, the security properties provided by this protocol, as well as its implementations. In general, MagicPairing could be adapted by other IoT vendors to improve Bluetooth security. Even though the overall protocol is well-designed, we identified multiple vulnerabilities within Apple's implementations with over-the-air and in-process fuzzing

Static-light mesons on a dynamical anisotropic lattice

We present results for the spectrum of static-light mesons from Nf=2 lattice QCD. These results were obtained using all-to-all light quark propagators on an anisotropic lattice, yielding an improved signal resolution when compared to more conventional lattice techniques. In particular, we consider the inversion of orbitally-excited multiplets with respect to the `standard ordering', which has been predicted by some quark models.Comment: 3 pages with 3 figures. Talk by JF at "Quarks and Nuclear Physics", Madrid 5th-10th June 200

Peace punks and punks against racism: resource mobilization and frame construction in the punk movement

In recent years, scholars have begun to attend to the gap in our understanding of the relationship between music and social movements. One such example is Corte’s and Edwards’ “White Power Music and the Mobilization of Racist Social Movements”. Our research shares the perspective of Corte and Edwards (2008) which emphasizes the centrality of music to social movement organizations, especially in terms of resource mobilization, but rather than look at how punk music was used as an instrument by an external social movement like the White Power movement, we look at how punks themselves joined social movements and altered the dynamics of the movements they joined. We also provide examples of punk involvement in left wing social movements to emphasize the indeterminate nature of punk politics. We examine two such cases: the Rock Against Racism movement in the U.K., and the Peace movement in the U.S. In both cases, punks made use of their independent media as a means to provide an infrastructure for mobilization of resources to sustain the punks’ involvement in these social movements and the unique framing provided by punks, which altered the dynamic of the movements they joined. What makes punk an interesting case is that the “do-it-yourself” ethic of independent media construction that was at the centre of the punk movement made it possible for punks to make connections to various other social movements as well as alter the dynamics of those social movements. In these cases, punk music was not used as a means toward an end, but rather punks themselves had a significant impact on these movements both in terms of resource mobilization and frame alignment

SB72-14/15: Resolution Regarding the Affordable Care Act and Student Employment

SB72-14/15: Resolution Regarding the Affordable Care Act and Student Employment. This resolution passed unanimously during the March 11, 2015 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM)

SB52-13/14: Amending Fiscal Policy

SB52-13/14: Amending Fiscal Policy. This resolution passed during the December 4, 2013 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM)

Static-light hadrons on a dynamical anisotropic lattice

We present preliminary results for the static-light meson and baryon spectra for $N_f=2$ QCD. The study is performed on an anisotropic lattice and uses a new all-to-all propagator method allowing us to determine particle masses to a high precision.Comment: 6 pages, Contribution to Lattice2005, PoS styl