Music educators\u27 attitudes toward the placement of special education students in music classrooms.

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare elementary, middle school, junior high and high school music educators\u27 attitudes towards the inclusion of special education students in their respective classrooms. One hundred twelve (N=l 12) music educators from five Omaha-metropolitan area school districts were given a four-part survey to determine attitudes toward inclusion. The sample involved band, vocal, string and general music educators. Data was analyzed using SPSS 9.0 in order to show frequencies and allow for comparisons. Statistical analysis was conducted at p\u3c.05 and p\u3c.01. Results indicated an unwillingness in string educators in regards to inclusion. Band educators showed a variety of levels of willingness, from very willing to very unwilling, to teach varying disabilities. Vocal/choral and general music educators showed an overall willingness to work with special education students. Further research was recommended

Oceanographic drivers of deep-sea coral species distribution and community assembly on seamounts, islands, atolls, and reefs within the Phoenix Islands Protected Area

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Auscavitch, S. R., Deere, M. C., Keller, A. G., Rotjan, R. D., Shank, T. M., & Cordes, E. E. Oceanographic drivers of deep-sea coral species distribution and community assembly on seamounts, islands, atolls, and reefs within the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020): 42, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00042.The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, in the central Pacific waters of the Republic of Kiribati, is a model for large marine protected area (MPA) development and maintenance, but baseline records of the protected biodiversity in its largest environment, the deep sea (>200 m), have not yet been determined. In general, the equatorial central Pacific lacks biogeographic perspective on deep-sea benthic communities compared to more well-studied regions of the North and South Pacific Ocean. In 2017, explorations by the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer and R/V Falkor were among the first to document the diversity and distribution of deep-water benthic megafauna on numerous seamounts, islands, shallow coral reef banks, and atolls in the region. Here, we present baseline deep-sea coral species distribution and community assembly patterns within the Scleractinia, Octocorallia, Antipatharia, and Zoantharia with respect to different seafloor features and abiotic environmental variables across bathyal depths (200–2500 m). Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) transects were performed on 17 features throughout the Phoenix Islands and Tokelau Ridge Seamounts resulting in the observation of 12,828 deep-water corals and 167 identifiable morphospecies. Anthozoan assemblages were largely octocoral-dominated consisting of 78% of all observations with seamounts having a greater number of observed morphospecies compared to other feature types. Overlying water masses were observed to have significant effects on community assembly across bathyal depths. Revised species inventories further suggest that the protected area it is an area of biogeographic overlap for Pacific deep-water corals, containing species observed across bathyal provinces in the North Pacific, Southwest Pacific, and Western Pacific. These results underscore significant geographic and environmental complexity associated with deep-sea coral communities that remain in under-characterized in the equatorial central Pacific, but also highlight the additional efforts that need to be brought forth to effectively establish baseline ecological metrics in data deficient bathyal provinces.Funding for this work was provided by NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (Grant No. NA17OAR0110083) to RR, EC, TS, and David Gruber

Enabling Explainable Fusion in Deep Learning with Fuzzy Integral Neural Networks

Information fusion is an essential part of numerous engineering systems and biological functions, e.g., human cognition. Fusion occurs at many levels, ranging from the low-level combination of signals to the high-level aggregation of heterogeneous decision-making processes. While the last decade has witnessed an explosion of research in deep learning, fusion in neural networks has not observed the same revolution. Specifically, most neural fusion approaches are ad hoc, are not understood, are distributed versus localized, and/or explainability is low (if present at all). Herein, we prove that the fuzzy Choquet integral (ChI), a powerful nonlinear aggregation function, can be represented as a multi-layer network, referred to hereafter as ChIMP. We also put forth an improved ChIMP (iChIMP) that leads to a stochastic gradient descent-based optimization in light of the exponential number of ChI inequality constraints. An additional benefit of ChIMP/iChIMP is that it enables eXplainable AI (XAI). Synthetic validation experiments are provided and iChIMP is applied to the fusion of a set of heterogeneous architecture deep models in remote sensing. We show an improvement in model accuracy and our previously established XAI indices shed light on the quality of our data, model, and its decisions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System

PREDICTING SOYBEAN WEIGHT PER POD

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) makes predictions of soybean yield at both the state and national level. Experience indicates that the key to improving yield predictions is improving the prediction of soybean weight pod. Towards this end, NASS has entered into a three year cooperative agreement with the Department of Plant, Soil and General Agriculture at Southern lllinois University at Carbondale (SID-C) to investigate predictive models for soybean weight per pod based on a measurement of pod width and a count of the number of seeds per pod. Aside from the scientific issues involved in this effort, the practical issues of eventually developing procedures which can be implemented in the context of the NASS Objective Yield Survey, which is an immense data collection effort, must be addressed by this cooperative effort. The results obtained from the three years of this cooperative effort will provide a useful starting point for further work in this direction

Synthesis and Density Functional Theory Studies of Azirinyl and Oxiranyl Functionalized Isoindigo and (3Z,3’Z)-3,3’-(ethane-1,2-diylidene)bis(indolin-2-one) Derivatives

The design and synthesis of functionalized isoindigo compounds by reaction of isoindigo with (S)-glycidyl tosylate, epibromohydrin, 2-(bromomethyl)-1-(arylsulfonyl)aziridine, and 2-(bromomethyl)-1-(alkylsulfonyl)aziridine in the presence of MeONa proceed under mild conditions in moderate yields. (3Z,3’Z)-3,3’-(Ethane-1,2-diylidene)bis(1-(oxiran-2-ylmethyl)indolin-2-one), with an extended central olefin π-conjugated moiety was also reacted with methyl-oxiranes to give the corresponding N,N’-disubstituted derivative. Calculations with DFT and TD-DFT of hypothetical isoindigo-thiophene DA molecules with various electron withdrawing substituents, including aziridine, oxirane, nitrile, carbonyl, and sulfonate, indicated that the proximity and strength of the functional group have a significant effect on the HOMO, LUMO, vertical excitation energy, and oscillator strength of the π–π* transitions

Roach infestation optimization

Abstract only availableThere are many function optimization algorithms based on the collective behavior of natural systems — Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) are two of the most popular. This poster presents a new adaptation of the PSO algorithm, entitled Roach Infestation Optimization (RIO), which is inspired by recent discoveries in the social behavior of cockroaches. We present the development of the simple behaviors of the individual agents, which emulate some of the discovered cockroach social behaviors. We also describe a "hungry" version of the PSO and RIO, which we aptly call Hungry PSO and Hungry RIO. Comparisons with standard PSO show that Hungry PSO, RIO, and Hungry RIO are all more effective at finding the global optima of a suite of test functions.College of Engineering Undergraduate Research Optio

Coulomb crystal mass spectrometry in a digital ion trap

We present a mass spectrometric technique for identifying the masses and relative abundances of Coulomb-crystallized ions held in a linear Paul trap. A digital radio-frequency wave form is employed to generate the trapping potential, as this can be cleanly switched off, and static dipolar fields are subsequently applied to the trap electrodes for ion ejection. Close to 100% detection efficiency is demonstrated for Ca+ and CaF+ ions from bicomponent Ca+ − CaF+ Coulomb crystals prepared by the reaction of Ca+ with CH3F. A quantitative linear relationship is observed between ion number and the corresponding integrated time-of-flight (TOF) peak, independent of the ionic species. The technique is applicable to a diverse range of multicomponent Coulomb crystals—demonstrated here for Ca+ − NH3+ − NH4+ and Ca+ − CaOH+ − CaOD+ crystals—and will facilitate the measurement of ion-molecule reaction rates and branching ratios in complicated reaction systems

Inter-Regional Brain Communication and Its Disturbance in Autism

In this review article, we summarize recent progress toward understanding disturbances in functional and anatomical brain connectivity in autism. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language, social interaction, and repetitive behaviors. Recent studies have suggested that limitations of frontal–posterior brain connectivity in autism underlie the varied set of deficits associated with this disorder. Specifically, the underconnectivity theory of autism postulates that individuals with autism have a reduced communication bandwidth between frontal and posterior cortical areas, which constrains the psychological processes that rely on the integrated functioning of frontal and posterior brain networks. This review summarizes the recent findings of reduced frontal–posterior functional connectivity (synchronization) in autism in a wide variety of high-level tasks, focusing on data from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. It also summarizes the findings of disordered anatomical connectivity in autism, as measured by a variety of techniques, including distribution of white matter volumes and diffusion tensor imaging. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for autism and future directions for this line of research

Selective coherence transfers in homonuclear dipolar coupled spin systems

Mapping the physical dipolar Hamiltonian of a solid-state network of nuclear spins onto a system of nearest-neighbor couplings would be extremely useful for a variety of quantum information processing applications, as well as NMR structural studies. We demonstrate such a mapping for a system consisting of an ensemble of spin pairs, where the coupling between spins in the same pair is significantly stronger than the coupling between spins on different pairs. An amplitude modulated RF field is applied on resonance with the Larmor frequency of the spins, with the frequency of the modulation matched to the frequency of the dipolar coupling of interest. The spin pairs appear isolated from each other in the regime where the RF power (omega_1) is such that omega_weak << omega_1 << omega_strong. Coherence lifetimes within the two-spin system are increased from 19 us to 11.1 ms, a factor of 572.Comment: 4 pages. Paper re-submitted with minor changes to clarify that the scheme demonstrated is not an exact mapping onto a nearest neighbor system. However, this is the first demonstration of a controlled evolution in a subspace of an extended spin system, on a timescale that is much larger than the dipolar dephasing tim