Analyzing and improving team teaching practices in Southampton Township Schools

The purpose of this study was to analyze current practices of regular and special education teachers working in inclusive settings. The methodology of this study was based on a pre and post test design. The Inclusion Team Teaching Analysis Protocol (ITTAP), developed by Rick Welsh, was administered prior to a four day team teaching training session, and again after the training session. This protocol was administered individually and confidentially. The sample consisted of three teams of teachers who had been team teaching together for varying amounts of time. The ITTAP was analyzed for purposes of comparison on twenty team teaching behaviors and seven team teaching domains as identified by the ITTAP. The findings revealed two of the three teaching teams illustrated clear improvement according to responses given on both team teaching behaviors and team teaching domains following training. One team did not illustrate clear improvement on both team teaching behaviors and team teaching domains following training

A Silicon Surface Code Architecture Resilient Against Leakage Errors

Spin qubits in silicon quantum dots are one of the most promising building blocks for large scale quantum computers thanks to their high qubit density and compatibility with the existing semiconductor technologies. High fidelity single-qubit gates exceeding the threshold of error correction codes like the surface code have been demonstrated, while two-qubit gates have reached 98\% fidelity and are improving rapidly. However, there are other types of error --- such as charge leakage and propagation --- that may occur in quantum dot arrays and which cannot be corrected by quantum error correction codes, making them potentially damaging even when their probability is small. We propose a surface code architecture for silicon quantum dot spin qubits that is robust against leakage errors by incorporating multi-electron mediator dots. Charge leakage in the qubit dots is transferred to the mediator dots via charge relaxation processes and then removed using charge reservoirs attached to the mediators. A stabiliser-check cycle, optimised for our hardware, then removes the correlations between the residual physical errors. Through simulations we obtain the surface code threshold for the charge leakage errors and show that in our architecture the damage due to charge leakage errors is reduced to a similar level to that of the usual depolarising gate noise. Spin leakage errors in our architecture are constrained to only ancilla qubits and can be removed during quantum error correction via reinitialisations of ancillae, which ensure the robustness of our architecture against spin leakage as well. Our use of an elongated mediator dots creates spaces throughout the quantum dot array for charge reservoirs, measuring devices and control gates, providing the scalability in the design

Incremental online learning in high dimensions

this article, however, is problematic, as it requires a careful selection of initial ridge regression parameters to stabilize the highly rank-deficient full covariance matrix of the input data, and it is easy to create too much bias or too little numerical stabilization initially, which can trap the local distance metric adaptation in local minima.While the LWPR algorithm just computes about a factor 10 times longer for the 20D experiment in comparison to the 2D experiment, RFWR requires a 1000-fold increase of computation time, thus rendering this algorithm unsuitable for high-dimensional regression. In order to compare LWPR's results to other popular regression methods, we evaluated the 2D, 10D, and 20D cross data sets with gaussian process regression (GP) and support vector (SVM) regression in addition to our LWPR method. It should be noted that neither SVM nor GP methods is an incremental method, although they can be considered state-of-the-art for batch regression under relatively small numbers of training data and reasonable input dimensionality. The computational complexity of these methods is prohibitively high for real-time applications. The GP algorithm (Gibbs & MacKay, 1997) used a generic covariance function and optimized over the hyperparameters. The SVM regression was performed using a standard available package (Saunders et al., 1998) and optimized for kernel choices. Figure 6 compares the performance of LWPR and gaussian processes for the above-mentioned data sets using 100, 300, and 500 training data point

OUTER RETINAL TUBULATION IN ADVANCED AGE-RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION: Optical Coherence Tomographic Findings Correspond to Histology

PURPOSE: To compare optical coherence tomography (OCT) and histology of outer retinal tubulation (ORT) secondary to advanced age-related macular degeneration in patients and in postmortem specimens, with particular attention to the basis of the hyperreflective border of ORT. METHOD: A private referral practice (imaging) and an academic research laboratory (histology) collaborated on two retrospective case series. High-resolution OCT raster scans of 43 eyes (34 patients) manifesting ORT secondary to advanced age-related macular degeneration were compared to high-resolution histologic sections through the fovea and superior perifovea of donor eyes (13 atrophic age-related macular degeneration and 40 neovascular age-related macular degeneration) preserve

A Pre-registered Meta-analysis Based on Three Empirical Studies Reveals No Association Between Prenatal (Amniotic) Cortisol Exposure and Fluctuating Asymmetry in Human Infants

Developmental instability (DI) reflects an organism’s inability to develop an ideal phenotype when challenged by genetic and environmental insults. DI can be estimated via the proxy measure of fluctuating asymmetry (FA), i.e., the small random deviations from perfect bilateral symmetry observed in the morphology of paired traits. The mechanisms involved in the genesis of FA in human populations are relatively unknown, though animal research indicates that hormonal processes may be involved. As maternal stress during pregnancy is detrimental to various developmental processes, elevated prenatal cortisol may represent a causal factor in the subsequent emergence of an asymmetrical phenotype. The main purpose of this pre-registered meta-analysis based on three empirical studies was to investigate whether mid-trimester amniotic cortisol levels predict subsequent FA in finger lengths of infants from Germany, Portugal, and the UK. No statistically significant relationships were observed, and meta-analytic combination of the effect size estimates yielded a null result. We did, however, detect significant positive correlations between the cortisol present in the amniotic fluid and maternal plasma in the Portuguese cohort, and observed that FA in the German cohort was significantly lower at 70-months than at either 9- or 20-months. Taken together, the current findings run contrary to animal research showing that elevated prenatal corticosterone exposure leads to increased FA. However, this may be because a single cortisol assay obtained via amniocentesis is an inadequate proxy for average gestational exposure, and/or that prenatal cortisol levels at an earlier (i.e., first rather than second trimester) stage of pregnancy is what explains variance in subsequent FA.publishersversionpublishe

Sex differences in stress-induced social withdrawal: role of brain derived neurotrophic factor in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis

Depression and anxiety disorders are more common in women than men, and little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms that contribute to this disparity. Recent data suggest that stress-induced changes in neurotrophins have opposing effects on behavior by acting in different brain networks. Social defeat has been an important approach for understanding neurotrophin action, but low female aggression levels in rats and mice have limited the application of these methods primarily to males. We examined the effects of social defeat in monogamous California mice (Peromyscus californicus), a species in which both males and females defend territories. We demonstrate that defeat stress increases mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) protein but not mRNA in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in females but not males. Changes in BDNF protein were limited to anterior subregions of the BNST, and there were no changes in the adjacent nucleus accumbens (NAc). The effects of defeat on social withdrawal behavior and BDNF were reversed by chronic, low doses of the antidepressant sertraline. However, higher doses of sertraline restored social withdrawal and elevated BDNF levels. Acute treatment with a low dose of sertraline failed to reverse the effects of defeat. Infusions of the selective tyrosine-related kinase B receptor (TrkB) antagonist ANA-12 into the anterior BNST specifically increased social interaction in stressed females but had no effect on behavior in females naïve to defeat. These results suggest that stress-induced increases in BDNF in the anterior BNST contribute to the exaggerated social withdrawal phenotype observed in females

The Cosmic Background Imager

Design and performance details are given for the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), an interferometer array that is measuring the power spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) for multipoles in the range 400 < l < 3500. The CBI is located at an altitude of 5000 m in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It is a planar synthesis array with 13 0.9-m diameter antennas on a 6-m diameter tracking platform. Each antenna has a cooled, low-noise receiver operating in the 26-36 GHz band. Signals are cross-correlated in an analog filterbank correlator with ten 1 GHz bands. This allows spectral index measurements which can be used to distinguish CMBR signals from diffuse galactic foregrounds. A 1.2 kHz 180-deg phase switching scheme is used to reject cross-talk and low-frequency pick-up in the signal processing system. The CBI has a 3-axis mount which allows the tracking platform to be rotated about the optical axis, providing improved (u,v) coverage and a powerful discriminant against false signals generated in the receiving electronics. Rotating the tracking platform also permits polarization measurements when some of the antennas are configured for the orthogonal polarization.Comment: 14 pages. Accepted for publication in PASP. See also http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/CBI

Simulating Turbulence Using the Astrophysical Discontinuous Galerkin Code TENET

In astrophysics, the two main methods traditionally in use for solving the Euler equations of ideal fluid dynamics are smoothed particle hydrodynamics and finite volume discretization on a stationary mesh. However, the goal to efficiently make use of future exascale machines with their ever higher degree of parallel concurrency motivates the search for more efficient and more accurate techniques for computing hydrodynamics. Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods represent a promising class of methods in this regard, as they can be straightforwardly extended to arbitrarily high order while requiring only small stencils. Especially for applications involving comparatively smooth problems, higher-order approaches promise significant gains in computational speed for reaching a desired target accuracy. Here, we introduce our new astrophysical DG code TENET designed for applications in cosmology, and discuss our first results for 3D simulations of subsonic turbulence. We show that our new DG implementation provides accurate results for subsonic turbulence, at considerably reduced computational cost compared with traditional finite volume methods. In particular, we find that DG needs about 1.8 times fewer degrees of freedom to achieve the same accuracy and at the same time is more than 1.5 times faster, confirming its substantial promise for astrophysical applications.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the SPPEXA symposium, Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering (LNCSE), Springe

Complex and flexible catabolism in Aromatoleum aromaticum pCyN1

Large quantities of organic matter are continuously deposited, and (a)biotic gradients intersect in the soil-rhizosphere, where biodegradation contributes to the global cycles of elements. The betaproteobacterial genus Aromatoleum comprises cosmopolitan, facultative denitrifying degradation specialists. Aromatoleum aromaticum. pCyN1 stands out for anaerobically decomposing plant-derived monoterpenes in addition to monoaromatic hydrocarbons, polar aromatics and aliphatics. The catabolic network's structure and flexibility in A. aromaticum pCyN1 were studied across 34 growth conditions by superimposing proteome profiles onto the manually annotated 4.37 Mbp genome. Strain pCyN1 employs three fundamentally different enzymes for C-H-bond cleavage at the methyl groups of p-cymene/4-ethyltoluene, toluene and p-cresol respectively. Regulation of degradation modules displayed substrate specificities ranging from narrow (toluene and cyclohexane carboxylate) via medium-wide (one module shared by p-cymene, 4-ethyltoluene, alpha-phellandrene, alpha-terpinene, gamma-terpinene and limonene) to broad (central benzoyl-CoA pathway serving 16 aromatic substrates). Remarkably, three variants of ATP-dependent (class I) benzoyl-CoA reductase and four different beta-oxidation routes establish a degradation hub that accommodates the substrate diversity. The respiratory system displayed several conspicuous profiles, e.g. the presence of nitrous oxide reductase under oxic and of low-affinity oxidase under anoxic conditions. Overall, nutritional versatility in conjunction with network regulation endow A. aromaticum pCyN1 with broad adaptability