Teacher Sense-Making: A Case Study Of The Implementation Of The Giffin Model

This study sought to shed light on teachers’ thinking as they implemented an educational intervention. Specifically, this study looked at teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpretations of a policy’s attributes, and how those views impacted implementation quality. The findings from this study describe how factors related to the implementation of a program interact with teachers’ knowledge and philosophies of teaching. This interaction was shown to be related to the success of implementation in these schools. Based on its findings, this study recommends that further investigation into the role of teacher sense-making and its impact on implementation using the framework proposed in this paper. Further efforts should be made to improve the survey for this purpose. The effectiveness of a program is mediated by the quality of implementation, which this research shows is related to perceptions of a program. As schools grapple with implementing programs, principals and other leaders of implementation should pay close attention the factors related to implementation that are described in this paper

Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I College Sports

The purpose of this report is to make transparent racial inequities in NCAA Division I college sports. Specifically, the authors offer a four-year analysis of Black men's representation on football and basketball teams versus their representation in the undergraduate student body on each campus. The report concludes with recommendations for the NCAA and commissioners of the six major sports conferences, college and university leaders, coaches and athletics directors, journalists, and Black male student-athletes and their families

Thermodynamic Entropy And The Accessible States of Some Simple Systems

Comparison of the thermodynamic entropy with Boltzmann's principle shows that under conditions of constant volume the total number of arrangements in simple thermodynamic systems with temperature-independent heat capacities is TC/k. A physical interpretation of this function is given for three such systems; an ideal monatomic gas, an ideal gas of diatomic molecules with rotational motion, and a solid in the Dulong-Petit limit of high temperature. T1/2 emerges as a natural measure of the number of accessible states for a single particle in one dimension. Extension to N particles in three dimensions leads to TC/k as the total number of possible arrangements or microstates. The different microstates of the system are thus shown a posteriori to be equally probable, with probability T-C/k, which implies that for the purposes of counting states the particles of the gas are distinguishable. The most probable energy state of the system is determined by the degeneracy of the microstates.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

On a Supernumerary Median Ocellus in Melanoplus Femur-Rubrum

Volume: 19 ; Start Page: 92 ; End Page: 9

Distinguishing Solar Flare Types by Differences in Reconnection Regions

Observations show that magnetic reconnection and its slow shocks occur in solar flares. The basic magnetic structures are similar for long duration event (LDE) flares and faster compact impulsive (CI) flares, but the former require less non-thermal electrons than the latter. Slow shocks can produce the required non-thermal electron spectrum for CI flares by Fermi acceleration if electrons are injected with large enough energies to resonate with scattering waves. The dissipation region may provide the injection electrons, so the overall number of non-thermal electrons reaching the footpoints would depend on the size of the dissipation region and its distance from the chromosphere. In this picture, the LDE flares have converging inflows toward a dissipation region that spans a smaller overall length fraction than for CI flares. Bright loop-top X-ray spots in some CI flares can be attributed to particle trapping at fast shocks in the downstream flow, the presence of which is determined by the angle of the inflow field and velocity to the slow shocks.Comment: 15 pages TeX and 2 .eps figures, accepted to Ap.J.Let

Reconnecting Magnetic Flux Tubes as a Source of In Situ Acceleration in Extragalactic Radio Sources

Many extended extragalactic radio sources require a local {\it in situ\/} acceleration mechanism for electrons, in part because the synchrotron lifetimes are shorter than the bulk travel time across the emitting regions. If the magnetic field in these sources is localized in flux tubes, reconnection may occur between regions of plasma \be (ratio of particle to magnetic pressure) $<<1$, even though $\beta$ averaged over the plasma volume may be \gsim 1. Reconnection in low $\beta$ regions is most favorable to acceleration from reconnection shocks. The reconnection X-point regions may provide the injection electrons for their subsequent non-thermal shock acceleration to distributions reasonably consistent with observed spectra. Flux tube reconnection might therefore be able to provide $in\ situ$ acceleration required by large scale jets and lobes.Comment: 14 pages, plain TeX, accepted to Ap.J.Let

Molecular gyroscopes and biological effects of weak ELF magnetic fields

Extremely-low-frequency magnetic fields are known to affect biological systems. In many cases, biological effects display `windows' in biologically effective parameters of the magnetic fields: most dramatic is the fact that relatively intense magnetic fields sometimes do not cause appreciable effect, while smaller fields of the order of 10--100 $\mu$T do. Linear resonant physical processes do not explain frequency windows in this case. Amplitude window phenomena suggest a nonlinear physical mechanism. Such a nonlinear mechanism has been proposed recently to explain those `windows'. It considers quantum-interference effects on protein-bound substrate ions. Magnetic fields cause an interference of ion quantum states and change the probability of ion-protein dissociation. This ion-interference mechanism predicts specific magnetic-field frequency and amplitude windows within which biological effects occur. It agrees with a lot of experiments. However, according to the mechanism, the lifetime $\Gamma^{-1}$ of ion quantum states within a protein cavity should be of unrealistic value, more than 0.01 s for frequency band 10--100 Hz. In this paper, a biophysical mechanism has been proposed that (i) retains the attractive features of the ion interference mechanism and (ii) uses the principles of gyroscopic motion and removes the necessity to postulate large lifetimes. The mechanism considers dynamics of the density matrix of the molecular groups, which are attached to the walls of protein cavities by two covalent bonds, i.e., molecular gyroscopes. Numerical computations have shown almost free rotations of the molecular gyros. The relaxation time due to van der Waals forces was about 0.01 s for the cavity size of 28 angstr\"{o}ms.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure