Capacity and Opportunity: Predicting Engagement for Middle School Students With Behavioral Disorders

This study examined the capacity and opportunity scores of 36 middle school students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) on the student version of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) Self-Determination Scale across three school engagement factors: grade point averages (GPA), school absences, and frequency of school disciplinary encounters. Poor grades, school absences, and frequency of disciplinary actions pose academic problems for middle school students with EBD. Three multiple regression models determined the predictive relationships between self-determination Capacity and Opportunity subscale scores and GPA, Absences, and Discipline. Higher capacity and opportunity scores predicted greater student GPA, fewer student absences, and fewer disciplinary encounters for students at school. Results of this study demonstrate the need for increased opportunities at school and home for students with EBD to learn and practice self-determination skills.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The role of macrophages and polymorphs in the levan-induced inhibition of Lewis lung carcinoma in C57BL mice.

High-mol.-wt levan injected locally inhibits the growth of Lewis lung carcinoma in C57BL mice. The inhibition is dependent on the number of tumour cells injected and on the dose of levan. The inhibition decreases tumour incidence and size as well as prolonging survival. The polysaccharide is most effective when injected daily beginning on the day of tumour-cell inoculation. Treatment begun on later dates is less effective. Treatment begun one day before tumour-cell inoculation enhances tumour growth. Histological studies showed that levan induces an intense polymorphonuclear (PMN) reaction followed by accumulation of vacuolated, levan-laden macrophages. Both PMN and activated macrophages seemed to have an inhibitory effect upon the growth of the tumour. The effector role of PMN was not explained by the histological study. Tumour cells in close contact with levan-laden macrophages appeared mostly necrotic. Administration of levan begun one day before tumour-cell inoculation produced a similar reaction, but the infiltrating cells did not appear to approach and damage the tumour cells

A MODEL ACCOUNTING PLAN FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION Current systems for monitoring the enrollments and status of special education programs do not meet current demands for increased account- ability. Project MAP (Model Accounting Plan) attempts to meet this dem

trict. Using existing pupil count data and a follow-up one year later, the MAP describes and predicts the paths special education students follow, taking into account the student's age, handicap, and instructional setting assignment. The MAP provides previously unavailable data to special educators and decision makers at all levels regarding program effectiveness and resource allocation and poses useful questions for further study

FUSE: Lightweight Guaranteed Distributed Failure Notification

FUSE is a lightweight failure notification service for building distributed systems. Distributed systems built with FUSE are guaranteed that failure notifications never fail. Whenever a failure notification is triggered, all live members of the FUSE group will hear a notification within a bounded period of time, irrespective of node or communication failures. In contrast to previous work on failure detection, the responsibility for deciding that afailure has occurred is shared between the FUSE service and the distributed application. This allows applications to implement their own definitions of failure. Our experience building a scalable distributed event delivery system on an overlay network has convinced us of the usefulness of this service. Our results demonstrate that the network costs of each FUSE group can be small; in particular, our overlay network implementation requires no additional liveness-verifying ping traffic beyond that already needed to maintain the overlay, making the steady state network load independent of the number of active FUSE groups

Carbon nanotube-based quantum pump in the presence of superconducting lead

Parametric electron pump through superconductor-carbon-nanotube based molecular devices was investigated. It is found that a dc current, which is assisted by resonant Andreev reflection, can be pumped out from such molecular device by a cyclic variation of two gate voltages near the nanotube. The pumped current can be either positive or negative under different system parameters. Due to the Andreev reflection, the pumped current has the double peak structure around the resonant point. The ratio of pumped current of N-SWNT-S system to that of N-SWNT-N system (I^{NS}/I^N) is found to approach four in the weak pumping regime near the resonance when there is exactly one resonant level at Fermi energy inside the energy gap. Numerical results confirm that in the weak pumping regime the pumped current is proportional to the square of the pumping amplitude V_p, but in the strong pumping regime the pumped current has the linear relation with V_p. Our numerical results also predict that pumped current can be obtained more easily by using zigzag tube than by using armchair tube

Beyond energy efficiency in evaluating sustainable development in planning and the built environment

The EU has set the policy target of reducing energy use by 20% by the year 2020. Therefore, a substantial consumption decrease is needed in the built environment sector. Despite the great energy efficiency improvements in households, recent energy consumption data analyses show that these targets will unlikely be reached. The general aim of this study is to point out the need to define new indicators and evaluation approaches in urban planning and the built environment which are based on the concept of ‘energy subsidiarity', focusing on local renewable resources rather than on current approaches based on energy efficiency. This concept correlates energy consumption with the energy supply from local renewable resources and is here proposed as the new urban planning evaluation approach toward a sustainable built environment. In the paper, the ‘Jevons Paradox' concept and the ‘energy rebound effect' phenomenon are used to demonstrate how current approaches based on energy efficiency, alone, cannot lead to a remarkable reduction of energy consumption. This is also supported by data on European energy consumption and European energy efficiency in the built environment. Finally, a number of well-known European ecological districts (‘eco-districts') are analysed in terms of sustainable energy strategy as well as energy efficiency and energy balance. This study shows that there is a contradiction between the purpose of some of the eco-districts to be low consumption (or low impacts), and the district renewable energy balance. Only a few of the analysed eco-districts are able to cover energy needs by using renewable energy obtained in the surrounding area. In most of the cases, the focus of the districts' activities is on energy efficiency. According to the ‘Jevons Paradox' and ‘energy rebound effect' paradigm, energy efficiency alone will unlikely lead to an effective reduction in resources' consumption. These results point out the need for a radical shift toward the development of new approaches in the assessment and management of the built environment for sustainabilit

Quantitative cross-species extrapolation between humans and fish: The case of the anti-depressant fluoxetine

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Fish are an important model for the pharmacological and toxicological characterization of human pharmaceuticals in drug discovery, drug safety assessment and environmental toxicology. However, do fish respond to pharmaceuticals as humans do? To address this question, we provide a novel quantitative cross-species extrapolation approach (qCSE) based on the hypothesis that similar plasma concentrations of pharmaceuticals cause comparable target-mediated effects in both humans and fish at similar level of biological organization (Read-Across Hypothesis). To validate this hypothesis, the behavioural effects of the anti-depressant drug fluoxetine on the fish model fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) were used as test case. Fish were exposed for 28 days to a range of measured water concentrations of fluoxetine (0.1, 1.0, 8.0, 16, 32, 64 μg/L) to produce plasma concentrations below, equal and above the range of Human Therapeutic Plasma Concentrations (HTPCs). Fluoxetine and its metabolite, norfluoxetine, were quantified in the plasma of individual fish and linked to behavioural anxiety-related endpoints. The minimum drug plasma concentrations that elicited anxiolytic responses in fish were above the upper value of the HTPC range, whereas no effects were observed at plasma concentrations below the HTPCs. In vivo metabolism of fluoxetine in humans and fish was similar, and displayed bi-phasic concentration-dependent kinetics driven by the auto-inhibitory dynamics and saturation of the enzymes that convert fluoxetine into norfluoxetine. The sensitivity of fish to fluoxetine was not so dissimilar from that of patients affected by general anxiety disorders. These results represent the first direct evidence of measured internal dose response effect of a pharmaceutical in fish, hence validating the Read-Across hypothesis applied to fluoxetine. Overall, this study demonstrates that the qCSE approach, anchored to internal drug concentrations, is a powerful tool to guide the assessment of the sensitivity of fish to pharmaceuticals, and strengthens the translational power of the cross-species extrapolation