Multidimensional Toggle Dynamics

J. Propp and T. Roby isolated a phenomenon in which a statistic on a set has the same average value over any orbit as its global average, naming it homomesy. One set they investigated was order ideals of partially ordered sets (posets). They proved that the cardinality statistic on order ideals of the product of two chains poset under rowmotion or promotion exhibits homomesy. We prove an analogous result in the case of the product of three chains where one chain has two elements. In order to prove this result, we generalize from two to n dimensions the recombination technique that D. Einstein and Propp developed to study homomesy. We see that our main homomesy result does not fully generalize to an arbitrary product of three chains, nor to larger products of chains; however, we have a partial generalization to an arbitrary product of three chains. Additional corollaries include refined homomesy results in the product of three chains and a new result on increasing tableaux. We also generalize recombination to any ranked poset and from this, obtain a homomesy result for a type B minuscule poset cross a two-element chain. We conclude by extending the definition of promotion to infinite posets, exploring homomesy, recombination, and a connection to monomial ideals

Building Bridges for Success: Rethinking Peace Operations Training for Complex Environments

Witnessing the changes in armed conflict since the 1990s, several global political-level agendas have emerged, recognizing the growing human suffering from armed conflict and the long-term consequences on societies. These high-level agendas, such as Protection of Civilians (POC), Women, Peace and Security (WPS), and Children in Armed Conflict (CAAC), address crucial issues that fall under a broader human security approach, and are to be addressed by peace operations. As such, they have at an increasing rate been included in strategic level doctrine and policy. The three global UN peace and security reviews published in 2015 stress the need for a shift to more people-centered, inclusive processes, establishing better context awareness, and investing in cooperation with external counterparts significantly. If peace operations are to remain relevant and effective in achieving international peace and security, this needs to be taken into account. This shift within peace operations requires that the preparation and training of peacekeepers follow suit in order to meet the challenges faced in increasingly complex environments. This policy brief therefore advocates for the adoption of an integrated approach to peace operations training, putting greater emphasis on comprehensive, people-centered approaches and contextual analysis.publishedVersio

PP-strict promotion and BB-bounded rowmotion, with applications to tableaux of many flavors

We define P-strict labelings for a finite poset P as a generalization of semistandard Young tableaux and show that promotion on these objects is in equivariant bijection with a toggle action on B-bounded Q-partitions of an associated poset Q. In many nice cases, this toggle action is conjugate to rowmotion. We apply this result to flagged tableaux, Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns, and symplectic tableaux, obtaining new cyclic sieving and homomesy conjectures. We also show P-strict promotion can be equivalently defined using Bender-Knuth and jeu de taquin perspectives.Comment: 39 pages, 14 figure

Variations in the constituent year effect in Junior World Championships in Alpine skiing : A window into relative devolopment effects?

While research on the effects of ‘birth month’ is usually referred to as relative age effects, the study of the effects of ‘birth year’ is described as the constituent year effect (CYE). In the present study we examined the impact of the CYE on participation in the Junior World Championship in alpine skiing. Based on previous research, we expected to find increasing numbers of participants the older the age-group, and that the CYE would be stronger in the speed events compared to the technical ones. The sample in the present study consisted of 1188 male skiers and 859 female skiers within the age range of 17 to 21 years at the time of competition. The results show that the number of male participants increased with increasing age, which can be described as a CYE. For female skiers, a CYE was found, but it dissipated two years earlier than for male skiers. The CYE varied with event and was more pronounced the higher the speed of the event. The findings thus suggest that a constituent year effect exists among skiers participating in the FIS Junior World Ski Championship in the alpine skiing championships, and that the effect varies with gender and event, rather unrelated to age. Thus, it seems that the effect may not be a relative age effect, but instead a relative developmentpublishedVersio

ESL Web Site Guides for Moodle

The author and his colleagues have, over the years, used authentic materials such as maps, menus, and newspaper inserts to expose ESL students to real-life English and culture in the classroom. Difficulties in collecting and maintaining a multiple-copy collection of authentic materials for the classroom and the proliferation of the Internet led to the addition of online lessons that used the Internet as a source of authentic materials. These lessons, each based on a popular and useful English Internet site, both introduced the site and taught site navigation. Now, using a Course Management System, these online lessons can be easily used in tandem with quizzes, checking the student’s understanding of the lesson along the way. This article will explain authentic-materials lessons that have been adapted to Moodle using the Web Page and Quiz modules

Creating ESL Single-Topic Units in Moodle

This paper will discuss how Single-Topic Units can be created in Moodle using various modules. Although the initial time investment is considerable, once created a completed unit is very easy to update, correct, add to, and embellish. Moodle single-topic units are easily shared and used with other courses. Select pages of an example Single- Topic Unit will be shown and explained. The example unit can be seen at http://www.studypage.org/doodle/

Hfe genotype, ferritin levels and transferrin saturation in patients with suspected hereditary hemochromatosis

HFE hemochromatosis is characterized by increased iron absorption and iron overload due to variants of the iron-regulating HFE gene. Overt disease is mainly associated with homozygosity for the C282Y variant, although the H63D variant in compound heterozygosity with C282Y (C282Y/H63D) contributes to disease manifestation. In this observational study, we describe the association between biochemical findings, age, gender and HFE genotype in patients referred from general practice to a tertiary care referral center for diagnostic workup based on suspected hemochromatosis due to persistent hyperferritinemia and HFE variants. C282Y and H63D homozygosity were, respectively, the most and least prevalent genotypes and we found a considerable variation in transferrin saturation and ferritin levels independent of HFE genotype, which may indeed represent a diagnostic challenge in general practice. While our results confirm C282Y homozygosity as the major cause of iron accumulation, non-C282Y homozygotes also displayed mild to moderate hyperferritinemia with median ferritin levels at 500–700 µg/L, well above the reference cut-off. Such findings have traditionally been ignored in the clinic, and initiation of iron depletion has largely been restricted to C282Y homozygotes. Nevertheless, superfluous iron can aggravate pathogenesis in combination with other diseases and risk factors, such as inflammation, cancer and hepatopathy, and this possibility should not be neglected by clinicians.publishedVersio