Achieving a Vision of Success For English Language Learners

This qualitative research study explored participant perceptions of a district-sponsored leadership program for Language Learners, the International Youth Leadership Council, specifically as it applies to student advocacy, leadership, empowerment, and voice. This study utilized Critical Race Theory and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy to examine a comparison of participant perceptions of personal and institutional barriers to leadership opportunities for Emergent Bilingual students in American educational systems and their experience participating in the district’s leadership program specifically designed for Emergent Bilingual students. Results showed that participants in the district’s Emergent Bilingual leadership program experienced high cultural alignment, racially, culturally, and linguistically aligned support staff, and increases in leadership, social justice and advocacy skills, and academic success as a result of participation in the district’s International Youth Leadership Council. By contrast, participants shared narratives regarding marginalization, stigmatization, teacher low expectations, and invisibility in American educational systems in regard to access to leadership and academic opportunities at the high school level. This qualitative study investigated student and staff participants of the International Youth Leadership Council’s activities for English Learners and of these activities’ impact on student participants’ leadership skills, sense of empowerment, and student voice. The study explored the results and its implications for education and English Language Learners, specifically regarding participant perception of racially, culturally and linguistically aligned leadership programs

Parametric Study of Horizontal Permanent Displacement on Sand

Dynamic loading such as cyclic loading should be taken into account in designing shallow foundations for any dynamically related structures. Horizontal permanent displacement, which can occur at any time due to wind and/or wave and dynamic loads of moving vehicles, can significantly reduce the bearing capacity of the footing. Effects of dynamic soil properties, e.g. frequency, Poisson\u27s ratio, Young\u27s modulus, on the permanent displacement are considered and the assumption of the linear variation between deformation and cycles can be used to predict the long-term horizontal permanent displacement. Sensitivity analyses for both pure sliding and coupled rocking and sliding vibrations of a rigid rectangular footing are also carried out with the following variables: internal damping, added soil mass, rocking level, amplitude of cyclic load and initial constant horizontal load

A VLSI pipeline design of a fast prime factor DFT on a finite field

A conventional prime factor discrete Fourier transform (DFT) algorithm is used to realize a discrete Fourier-like transform on the finite field, GF(q sub n). A pipeline structure is used to implement this prime factor DFT over GF(q sub n). This algorithm is developed to compute cyclic convolutions of complex numbers and to decode Reed-Solomon codes. Such a pipeline fast prime factor DFT algorithm over GF(q sub n) is regular, simple, expandable, and naturally suitable for VLSI implementation. An example illustrating the pipeline aspect of a 30-point transform over GF(q sub n) is presented

On the energy efficiency of NOMA for wireless backhaul in multi-tier heterogeneous CRAN

This paper addresses the problem of wireless backhaul in a multi-tier heterogeneous cellular network coordinated by a cloud-based central station (CCS), namely heterogeneous cloud radio access network (HCRAN). A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is adopted in the power domain for improved spectral efficiency and network throughput of the wireless downlink in the HCRAN. We first develop a power allocation for multiple cells of different tiers taking account of the practical power consumption of different cell types and wireless backhaul. By analysing the energy efficiency (EE) of the NOMA for the practical HCRAN downlink, we show that the power available at the cloud, the propagation environment and cell types have significant impacts on the EE performance. In particular, in a large network, the cells located at the cloud edge are shown to suffer from a very poor performance with a considerably degraded EE, which accordingly motivates us to propose an iteration algorithm for determining the maximal number of cells that can be supported in the HCRAN. The results reveal that a double number of cells can be covered in the urban environment compared to those in the shadowed urban environment and more than 1.5 times of the number of microcells can be deployed over the macrocells, while only a half number of cells can be supported when the distance between them increases threefol

An HMM-based Comparative Genomic Framework for Detecting Introgression in Eukaryotes

One outcome of interspecific hybridization and subsequent effects of evolutionary forces is introgression, which is the integration of genetic material from one species into the genome of an individual in another species. The evolution of several groups of eukaryotic species has involved hybridization, and cases of adaptation through introgression have been already established. In this work, we report on a new comparative genomic framework for detecting introgression in genomes, called PhyloNet-HMM, which combines phylogenetic networks, that capture reticulate evolutionary relationships among genomes, with hidden Markov models (HMMs), that capture dependencies within genomes. A novel aspect of our work is that it also accounts for incomplete lineage sorting and dependence across loci. Application of our model to variation data from chromosome 7 in the mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) genome detects a recently reported adaptive introgression event involving the rodent poison resistance gene Vkorc1, in addition to other newly detected introgression regions. Based on our analysis, it is estimated that about 12% of all sites withinchromosome 7 are of introgressive origin (these cover about 18 Mbp of chromosome 7, and over 300 genes). Further, our model detects no introgression in two negative control data sets. Our work provides a powerful framework for systematic analysis of introgression while simultaneously accounting for dependence across sites, point mutations, recombination, and ancestral polymorphism