Determining the Relative Responsibilities for Educational Objectives in Four Selected Schools of Western Kansas

The purpose of this study was to determine the most important relative responsibilities of four selected schools in Western Kansas. An identification of the responsibilities for each of the participating schools was achieved through an analysis of a Relative Responsibility questionnaire. The questionnaire used consisted of sixty statements of desirable behavior of school students. The faculty and patrons of each school were requested to indicate the agency responsible for the achievement of each of the sixty statements. A review of the related material revealed that professional educators feel the school should be responsible for the development of: (1) a command of the fundamental processes, (2) appreciation of out American heritage, (3) vocational competency, (4) interest in the welfare of the public, (5) appreciation of family relationships, (6) civic responsibility and (7) aesthetic and artistic activities. An analysis of the Relative Responsibility questionnaire shoes the faculty and patrons believe the homes relative responsibilities should include: (1) development of skill in homemaking, (2) enjoying a sincere and varied social life, (3) maintaining democratic family relations, (4) proper use of leisure time, (5) development of skill in social behavior, (6) development of respect for the law and (7) selection of occupation. The relative responsibilities of the school, as determined by faculty-patron responses, include (1) development of a desire for learning, (2) providing activities for student participation in sports and other pastimes, (3) understanding the basic facts concerning health and disease, (4) providing aesthetic and artistic activities, (5) skill in listening and observing, (6) speaking the English language clearly, (7) understanding the merits of a free economic system, and (8) understanding the requirements and opportunities for various jobs, the extent to which generationals can be made upon the basis of this study are limited because the study did not encompass the total population. Therefore, predictions of relative responsibilities of schools in general cannot be made. Bearing this in mind the following generalizations were made. 1. The participant schools should emphasize those educational objectives which were indicated to be the responsibility of the school. 2. Less emphasis should be given to those educational objectives which were assigned to the home, e.g., skill in homemaking. 3. The occupation and education of respondents had a direct veering upon the member of educational objectives assigned to the school. 4. Studies in the area of responsibility are important in order to define the limits of a schools responsibility. 5. The establishment of responsibilities is important as all responsibilities must be recognized and vested in some agency. Otherwise the age old axiom, “what is everyone’s responsibility is nobody’s responsibility”, may prevail

Hacking the Non-Technical Brain: Maximizing Retention in a Core Introductory IT Course

Maximizing student retention of, and ability to apply, technical material in introductory information technology courses is a complex task, especially with respect to the general student population. This population struggles with the application of programming concepts in the time-constrained testing environment. Our study considers the implementation of daily quizzes in a core-curriculum information technology and programming course as a means to improve student concept retention and application. Between the first and second exams, the instructors implemented a series of high-frequency, no-risk quizzes. Of the four sections of the course that each instructor taught, two sections each were provided with the quizzes as the experimental group and two remained with the standard curriculum as the control. The results demonstrate the benefits of frequent, effortful recall on student performance in a core-curriculum information technology and programming course

Radiative force from optical cycling on a diatomic molecule

We demonstrate a scheme for optical cycling in the polar, diatomic molecule strontium monofluoride (SrF) using the X ^2\Sigma^+\toA^2\Pi_{1/2} electronic transition. SrF's highly diagonal Franck-Condon factors suppress vibrational branching. We eliminate rotational branching by employing a quasi-cycling $N=1\to N^\prime=0$ type transition in conjunction with magnetic field remixing of dark Zeeman sublevels. We observe cycling fluorescence and deflection through radiative force of an SrF molecular beam using this scheme. With straightforward improvements our scheme promises to allow more than $10^5$ photon scatters, possibly enabling the direct laser cooling of SrF

STEREO observations of stars and the search for exoplanets

The feasibility of using data from the NASA STEREO mission for variable star and asteroseismology studies has been examined. A data analysis pipeline has been developed that is able to apply selected algorithms to the entire data base of nearly a million stars to search for signs of variability. An analysis limited to stars of magnitude 10.5 has been carried out, which has resulted in the extraction of 263 eclipsing binaries (EBs), of which 122 are not recorded as such in the SIMBAD online data base. The characteristics of the STEREO observations are shown to be extremely well suited to variable star studies with the ability to provide continuous phase coverage for extended periods as well as repeated visits that allow both short- and long-term variability to be observed. This will greatly inform studies of particular stars, such as the pre-cataclysmic variable V471 Tau, as well as the entire classes of stars, including many forms of rotational variability. The high-precision photometry has also revealed a potentially substellar companion to a bright (R= 7.5 mag) nearby star (HD 213597), detected with 5σ significance. This would provide a significant contribution to the exoplanet research if follow-up observations ascertain the mass to be within the planetary domain. Some particularly unusual EBs from the recovered sample are discussed, including a possible reclassification of a well-known star as an EB rather than a rotational variable (HR 7355) and several particularly eccentric systems, including very long period EBs

Fish and chips: Various methodologies demonstrate utility of a 16,006-gene salmonid microarray

BACKGROUND: We have developed and fabricated a salmonid microarray containing cDNAs representing 16,006 genes. The genes spotted on the array have been stringently selected from Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout expressed sequence tag (EST) databases. The EST databases presently contain over 300,000 sequences from over 175 salmonid cDNA libraries derived from a wide variety of tissues and different developmental stages. In order to evaluate the utility of the microarray, a number of hybridization techniques and screening methods have been developed and tested. RESULTS: We have analyzed and evaluated the utility of a microarray containing 16,006 (16K) salmonid cDNAs in a variety of potential experimental settings. We quantified the amount of transcriptome binding that occurred in cross-species, organ complexity and intraspecific variation hybridization studies. We also developed a methodology to rapidly identify and confirm the contents of a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library containing Atlantic salmon genomic DNA. CONCLUSION: We validate and demonstrate the usefulness of the 16K microarray over a wide range of teleosts, even for transcriptome targets from species distantly related to salmonids. We show the potential of the use of the microarray in a variety of experimental settings through hybridization studies that examine the binding of targets derived from different organs and tissues. Intraspecific variation in transcriptome expression is evaluated and discussed. Finally, BAC hybridizations are demonstrated as a rapid and accurate means to identify gene content

Bright low mass eclipsing binary candidates observed by STEREO

Observations from the Heliospheric Imagers (HI-1) on both the STEREO spacecraft have been analysed to search for bright low mass eclipsing binaries (EBs) and potential brown dwarf transits and to determine the radii of the companions. A total of 9 EB candidates have been found, ranging in brightness from V=6.59 mag to V=11.3 mag, where the radius of the companion appears to be less than 0.4 Rsol, with a diverse range of host temperatures, from 4074 K to 6925 K. Both components of one candidate, BD-07 3648, appear to be less than 0.4 Rsol and this represents a particularly interesting system for further study. The shapes of the eclipses in some cases are not clear enough to be certain they are total and the corresponding radii found should therefore be considered as lower limits. The EBs reported in this paper have either been newly found by the present analysis, or previously reported to be eclipsing by our earlier STEREO/HI-1 results. One of the new objects has subsequently been confirmed using archival SuperWASP data. This study was made possible by using an improved matched filter extraction algorithm, which is described in this paper.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA

The low-order wavefront sensor for the PICTURE-C mission

The PICTURE-C mission will fly a 60 cm off-axis unobscured telescope and two high-contrast coronagraphs in successive high-altitude balloon flights with the goal of directly imaging and spectrally characterizing visible scattered light from exozodiacal dust in the interior 1-10 AU of nearby exoplanetary systems. The first flight in 2017 will use a 10[superscript -4] visible nulling coronagraph (previously flown on the PICTURE sounding rocket) and the second flight in 2019 will use a 10[superscript -7] vector vortex coronagraph. A low-order wavefront corrector (LOWC) will be used in both flights to remove time-varying aberrations from the coronagraph wavefront. The LOWC actuator is a 76-channel high-stroke deformable mirror packaged on top of a tip-tilt stage. This paper will detail the selection of a complementary high-speed, low-order wavefront sensor (LOWFS) for the mission. The relative performance and feasibility of several LOWFS designs will be compared including the Shack-Hartmann, Lyot LOWFS, and the curvature sensor. To test the different sensors, a model of the time-varying wavefront is constructed using measured pointing data and inertial dynamics models to simulate optical alignment perturbations and surface deformation in the balloon environment.United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX15AG23G S01

Polarization properties of broad absorption line QSOs : new statistical clues

We report the results of statistical tests performed on a sample of 139 broad absorption line (BAL) QSOs with good quality optical spectra and/or optical polarization data. Correlations between optical indices and the polarization degree p_0 are systematically searched for. In order to identify the most important correlations, we perform a principal component analysis with a sample of 30 BAL QSOs and eight quantities (including p_0). Most of the variance in the data is contained in two principal components (PC): PC1 is mainly dominated by the correlation between the balnicity index BI and the strength of the feii emission, and may be driven by the accretion rate of matter onto the central compact object. The variance in PC2 is essentially due to the anti-correlation between p_0 and the detachment index DI. PC2 may be related to the orientation of the BAL QSOs with respect to the line of sight. We also consider a spectropolarimetric sample of 21 BAL QSOs for which we define four indices describing the polarization properties of the absorption and emission lines. We find a possible anti-correlation between the detachment index and a quantity SI which measures the ratio of the depths of the civ absorption in the polarized flux and in the total flux. This correlation indicates that in BAL QSOs with P cygni profiles, the BAL troughs in the polarized flux are nearly as deep as in the total flux while, in BAL QSOs with detached absorptions, the BAL troughs in the polarized flux are much weaker than in the total flux. We show that our main results may be explained in the framework of a 'two-component' wind model. In this model, the broad absorption occurs in a dense equatorial wind emerging from the accretion disk, while scattering and polarization mainly take place in a polar region.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysic

The low-order wavefront sensor for the PICTURE-C mission

The PICTURE-C mission will fly a 60 cm off-axis unobscured telescope and two high-contrast coronagraphs in successive high-altitude balloon flights with the goal of directly imaging and spectrally characterizing visible scattered light from exozodiacal dust in the interior 1-10 AU of nearby exoplanetary systems. The first flight in 2017 will use a 10^(-4) visible nulling coronagraph (previously flown on the PICTURE sounding rocket) and the second flight in 2019 will use a 10^(-7) vector vortex coronagraph. A low-order wavefront corrector (LOWC) will be used in both flights to remove time-varying aberrations from the coronagraph wavefront. The LOWC actuator is a 76-channel high-stroke deformable mirror packaged on top of a tip-tilt stage. This paper will detail the selection of a complementary high-speed, low-order wavefront sensor (LOWFS) for the mission. The relative performance and feasibility of several LOWFS designs will be compared including the Shack-Hartmann, Lyot LOWFS, and the curvature sensor. To test the different sensors, a model of the time-varying wavefront is constructed using measured pointing data and inertial dynamics models to simulate optical alignment perturbations and surface deformation in the balloon environment