Connecting to nature in pre-school

Outdoor environments and nature could positively support pre-school children living in lowsocial economic urban environments. By valuing the role of lived experiences, this research explores how outdoor places and nature could support and counteract the widespread inequities that affect these children. While the literature has evidence for the role of nature in children´s development and positive senses of place, it has been argued for the need for studies in different economic and cultural backgrounds, which is addressed by this thesis. The study is a participative, child-centered, empirical, qualitative study that investigates the role of distinct environments in children's agency to use, play and learn and concurrently develop senses of place. Experiences of a group of pre-school children's outdoor environments during pre-school days are explored while assuming the dynamic interrelationship of the physical, social, and organizational characteristics of everyday life related to children's development. The departure is taken in the socioecological framework for human development by Bronfenbrenner, Stokols; Sense of place by Relph and Place-relations literature. This research explores how children attending a pre-school located in a low-social economic area in the south of Sweden create meaning and experience places in their everyday lives, including their schoolyard, their local neighborhood, and occasional excursions to the Landscape Laboratory in SLU Alnarp. This inquiry draws on ethnographic methods: participant observation with fieldnotes, photographs, and workshops in which children would draw favorite places, including informal conversations and a walking interview with children and informal conversations with the school's pedagogues. Following children outdoors on many occasions during autumn 2020 revealed aspects of the environment connected to their use of places. The inductive, qualitative analysis suggested the importance of access to suitable outdoor environments containing nature, giving children the opportunity for free play and adult support in children's development of place meaning. The results explore the underpinned value of outdoor environments and nature whilst relating to the value of the cultivation of positive place relationships in childhood. The result highlighted how natural environments in the schoolyard related to children's agency during active play, social interactions, and self-learning activities. Regular visits to a site with a natural environment with a larger abundance of affordances facilitating usage and play seemed to make an imprint on their play in their schoolyard, with a larger and more creative usage of place. Regular walks in their local neighborhood also supported children's agency to create positive place relations to their local environments. In the results section, a "narrative map" illustrates places in terms of children's meaning-making experiences. A thematic result explored how outdoor environments became places related to children's learning experiences. The discussion suggests implications for environmental planning, pedagogical practices, and organizational efforts to counteract the negative environmental impacts on pre-school children living in low-social economical areas and could be applied in pre-school children in all contexts, supporting their development and learning

The combinatorics of interval-vector polytopes

An \emph{interval vector} is a $(0,1)$-vector in $\mathbb{R}^n$ for which all the 1's appear consecutively, and an \emph{interval-vector polytope} is the convex hull of a set of interval vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We study three particular classes of interval vector polytopes which exhibit interesting geometric-combinatorial structures; e.g., one class has volumes equal to the Catalan numbers, whereas another class has face numbers given by the Pascal 3-triangle.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Energy modeling framework for optimizing heat recovery in a seasonal food processing facility

pre-printSocietal, cultural and economic factors are driving food processors to reduce energy consumed per unit mass of food. This presents a unique problem because time variant batch processing using low to medium grade heat is common in food production facilities. Heat recovery methods may be implemented by food processors to reduce energy consumption; however, temporal variance in the process and utility flow require the development of a robust, easily implemented energy model to accurately determine system effectiveness and economic incentive. A bottom-up modular computational framework is proposed to model the energy consumption of a cannery. The model predicts that the cannery will require 612 kJ gas/kg product produced, which is within the ranges provided in previous literature. Results show that adding a globally optimized indirect heat recovery system will reduce the gas consumption by 6% annually. The proposed framework, used here to represent a cannery, may be adapted to many different types of food processing facilities. With a clear picture of energy consumption by device, and the ability to predict the impact of process modification or heat recovery, plant-level energy usage for food processing may be significantly reduced

Academic Rigor for All: A Review of Literature

In this literature review, we will attempt to address the issue of academic rigor in several ways. First, we will review federal and Virginia policy documents that discuss academic rigor, and the research reports that influenced these documents. We will then attempt to articulate a clear definition of academic rigor that applies across academic contexts. This definition draws on the work of educational psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of teaching and learning. Finally we will review the research literature on rigorous classroom practice in two disciplines, history and mathematics

Academic Rigor: A Research Report

Rigor can be defined in any number of ways. We found an imbalance between the ways in which rigor has been defined by the Virginia Department of Education, and how education scholars define rigor in the respective academic disciplines. (1) The Commonwealth of Virginia defines rigor as college and career readiness as measured by attendance in post-secondary educational institution, achievement of high Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores, as well as participation in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs. (2) Educational Psychologists tend to define rigor in ways that are generalizable across contexts. Researchers in this tradition focus on academic press, or the extent to which educational stakeholders, including students, are oriented towards demanding coursework. Studies in this tradition have also found that student motivation is crucial, and that this motivation is mediated by the extent to which tasks are challenging, related to the world outside of school, and provide opportunities for students to collaborate when problem solving. (3) Discipline-Based Scholars of Teaching and Learning define rigor in ways that reflect the core concepts of their discipline. Thus, a rigorous math class is one where students are encouraged to think mathematically, i.e. to use mathematical approaches to solve problems. Although specific pedagogical styles are discussed in this literature, the overall emphasis is on depth rather than breadth, with curricula being designed around building understanding of key concepts rather than covering (or efficiently delivering) factual information and procedural steps. In other words, a US history course might be organized around the way that the idea of freedom developed over the course of US history

The maximum number of cliques in graphs without large matchings

Given two graphs $T$ and $F$, the maximum number of copies of $T$ in an $F$-free graph on $n$ vertices is denoted by $ex(n,T,F)$ and is called the Generalized Tur\'{a}n number. When $T=K_2$, it reduces to the classical Tur\'{a}n number $ex(n,F)$. In 1961, Erd\H{o}s and Gallai proved that $$ex(n,M_{k+1})=\max\left\{\binom{2k+1}{2}, \binom{k}{2}+k(n-k)\right\},$$ where $M_{k+1}$ is a matching of size $k+1$. In this note, we prove that for any $s\geq 2$, $$ex(n,K_s,M_{k+1})=\max\left\{\binom{2k+1}{s}, \binom{k}{s}+(n-k)\binom{k}{s-1}\right\}.$$Comment: Zoltan Furedi, Alexandr Kostochka and Ruth Luo's paper "A variation of a theorem by Posa" indicates an even shorter proo

Perancangan Environment pada Film Animasi 2D "Rhythm of Angklung"

Salah satu unsur pembentuk film animasi yang berperan penting adalah environment. Desain dari suatu environment memberikan aspek visual dan suasana yang digambarkan bersama dengan karakter dalam film. Emosi penonton dapat dibangun melalui penggambaran environment yang baik. Environment membentuk sebuah visualisasi dimana sebuah karakter akan hidup dan berinteraksi dengan elemen yang lain dan memiliki kesinambungan. Umumnya penonton akan berpikir bahwa karakter sangatlah penting sebagai unsur pengerak animasi. Namun, karakter harus berinteraksi dengan environment, maka komposisi environment harus dibuat sebaik mungkin. Penggunaan komposisi yang tepat, baik itu penempatan elemen, perspektif, dan warna dalam environment akan menciptakan estetika visual yang terkoneksi dengan cerita, sehingga reaksi penonton akan terbangun

Development of Accelerated Solvent Extraction - Solid Phase Microextraction Method for the Analysis of Brevetoxins in Sediment Samples

The inability of modern harmful algal bloom detection techniques to identify past K. brevis events has left the field without access to almost 300 years of historical data essential to the assessment of their apparent increase in frequency and intensity. As such, the marine sediments underlying K. brevis affected areas, and the final sink of the brevetoxins they produce when in bloom, represent the only means of establishing the spatial and temporal history of past occurrences. In this work, a novel accelerated solvent extraction - solid phase microextraction method has been developed and optimized for the extraction and quantification of brevetoxins from marine sediments. Although the extraction method requires further optimization to improve its extraction efficiency and robustness, the method provides an effective means of recovering brevetoxins from most normal marine sediments, with total recoveries of spiked sediments as high as 62.0 ± 9.5% for brevetoxin-2 and 61.6 ± 6.5% for brevetoxin-3. The development of the method has allowed for several procedural pitfalls to be identified, including the potential presence of several contaminants and interferences detrimental to the precise and accurate quantification of brevetoxin using mass spectrometry. The most important among these limiting factors is the presence of high concentrations of co-extracted hydrophobic organic carbon, which affects the extraction efficiency of brevetoxins through the entrainment and sedimentation of extracted brevetoxins from the sediment extract by the formation of organic matter-rich flocculates. A strong relationship exists between organic carbon concentration and brevetoxin recoveries, which allows correcting for the effect of flocculation

Peran Environment Designer dalam Proyek Animasi Cerita Rakyat Berjudul Teduhnya Bukit Kelam di Pusat Pengembangan dan Pelindungan Bahasa dan Sastra.

Indonesia memiliki keanekaragaman budaya dan sastra yang berlimpah, terutama dalam cerita rakyat. Namun seiring berkembangnya zaman, karya sastra yang ada semakin kurang diminati oleh kaum muda terutama di era digital saat ini. Oleh karena itu, karya sastra direvitalisasi melalui animasi sehingga inti cerita dapat dipahami dengan mudah dan diterima oleh masyarakat daripada disampaikan secara lisan/tertulis. Penulis diberi kesempatan untuk berperan dalam program magang di Pusat Pengembangan dan Pelindungan Bahasa dan Sastra sebagai Environment Designer untuk pembuatan animasi cerita rakyat yang berjudul "Teduhnya Bukit Kelam". Dalam program magang ini, penulis dapat mempelajari proses pembuatan animasi secara teknis seperti membuat color script, membuat konsep awal Bukit Kelam, membuat production bible, dsb. Selain teknis, penulis juga belajar untuk mengerjakan proyek tepat waktu, membangun relasi dan berkolaborasi sesama tim. Dalam melakukan proyek magang ini, penulis mengalami beberapa kendala. Namun dengan adanya kendala, penulis dapat belajar untuk mencari solusi serta mengembangkan ide kreatif dan inovatif dalam menghadapi masalah