Educational Assistants Supporting Inclusive Education in Secondary Schools

As school boards in Ontario move towards more inclusive models of learning, more students with disabilities are taught in regular classes instead of self-contained placements. This move results in a role change for the educational assistant (EA). Research is needed to determine the overall framework that will make the use of EAs a more effective practice for student and school. Fifteen EAs working in secondary schools within a school board in southwestern Ontario which was moving to a more inclusive model of education were individually interviewed. EAs chosen for the study had a background of supporting students with developmental disabilities in self-contained placements and had recently moved to support students in a regular class setting. The purpose of the study was to answer the following question: What do EAs need in their profession to make the support of students with developmental disabilities transition from self-contained settings to inclusive classes in secondary schooling successful? Through thematic analysis of the interviews three themes became apparent as concerns for the EA role: collaboration, programming and relationships. The details of these findings can be used to assist school boards to create inclusive practice. It also outlines what EA’s need to support the transition of students with developmental disabilities from a self-contained setting to a regular class setting in secondary schools. Keywords: educational assistant, developmental disability, inclusion, secondar

Geringe Samenbank von beweidbaren Arten für die Etablierung von Waldweiden im Schweizer Mittelland

Kipfer T. and Bosshard A. 2007. Low seed bank of herb species suitable for grazing hampers the establishment of wood pastures in the Swiss lowlands. Bot. Helv. 117: 159 - 167. Controlled forest grazing is expected to yield benefits for biodiversity conservation, landscape quality, and in some cases also for land use economy. In the Swiss lowlands, first attempts are being made to reintroduce forest grazing in productive beech forests, but methodic experience is still limited. One main issue concerns the development of the vegetation after forest stands have been thinned to improve light conditions: Will grassland vegetation establish spontaneously? The present study analyses the composition of the soil seed bank of four beech forest stands. The seed bank density ranged from 1'244 to 28'651 seeds m−2. Seed banks mainly consisted of forest and ruderal species; most abundant were Juncus effusus, Carex sylvatica, Rubus spp. and Clematis vitalba. Seeds of grassland plants were restricted to a few species, and their abundance in the seed bank decreased rapidly with increasing distance from the forest edge. These results reveal that there is little potential for grasslands to develop spontaneously from the seed bank. The introduction of grassland species of local origin using the green hay method is therefore recommended to prevent soil degradation during the first years of grazing, to fulfil minimal biodiversity requirements and to lower the risk of an establishment of neophytes and other problematic plant specie

Preparation and decay of a single quantum of vibration at ambient conditions

A single quantum of excitation of a mechanical oscillator is a textbook example of the principles of quantum physics. Mechanical oscillators, despite their pervasive presence in nature and modern technology, do not generically exist in an excited Fock state. In the past few years, careful isolation of GHz-frequency nano-scale oscillators has allowed experimenters to prepare such states at milli-Kelvin temperatures. These developments illustrate the tension between the basic predictions of quantum mechanics that should apply to all mechanical oscillators existing even at ambient conditions, and the complex experiments in extreme conditions required to observe those predictions. We resolve the tension by creating a single Fock state of a vibration mode of a crystal at room temperature using a technique that can be applied to any Raman-active system. After exciting a bulk diamond with a femtosecond laser pulse and detecting a Stokes-shifted photon, the 40~THz Raman-active internal vibrational mode is prepared in the Fock state $|1>$ with $98.5\%$ probability. The vibrational state is read out by a subsequent pulse, which when subjected to a Hanbury-Brown-Twiss intensity correlation measurement reveals the sub-Poisson number statistics of the vibrational mode. By controlling the delay between the two pulses we are able to witness the decay of the vibrational Fock state over its $3.9$ ps lifetime at room temperature. Our technique is agnostic to specific selection rules, and should thus be applicable to any Raman-active medium, opening a new generic approach to the experimental study of quantum effects related to vibrational degrees of freedom in molecules and solid-state systems

A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs

Sorting is at the core of many database operations, such as index creation, sort-merge joins, and user-requested output sorting. As GPUs are emerging as a promising platform to accelerate various operations, sorting on GPUs becomes a viable endeavour. Over the past few years, several improvements have been proposed for sorting on GPUs, leading to the first radix sort implementations that achieve a sorting rate of over one billion 32-bit keys per second. Yet, state-of-the-art approaches are heavily memory bandwidth-bound, as they require substantially more memory transfers than their CPU-based counterparts. Our work proposes a novel approach that almost halves the amount of memory transfers and, therefore, considerably lifts the memory bandwidth limitation. Being able to sort two gigabytes of eight-byte records in as little as 50 milliseconds, our approach achieves a 2.32-fold improvement over the state-of-the-art GPU-based radix sort for uniform distributions, sustaining a minimum speed-up of no less than a factor of 1.66 for skewed distributions. To address inputs that either do not reside on the GPU or exceed the available device memory, we build on our efficient GPU sorting approach with a pipelined heterogeneous sorting algorithm that mitigates the overhead associated with PCIe data transfers. Comparing the end-to-end sorting performance to the state-of-the-art CPU-based radix sort running 16 threads, our heterogeneous approach achieves a 2.06-fold and a 1.53-fold improvement for sorting 64 GB key-value pairs with a skewed and a uniform distribution, respectively.Comment: 16 pages, accepted at SIGMOD 201

Inclusion of the personal biography in daily care : a qualitative study

Introduction: In Switzerland, 39% of nursing home residents have a dementia related disease. Behavioral symptoms are increasingly observed as dementia progresses. These symptoms impair patients’ quality of life and are distressing to family caregivers and nurses. A person-centered approach, which includes the resident’s individual biography, reduces such symptoms. The most current literature describes how therapists include biographical information in designated therapies. However person-centered care takes place not only in specific activities. Nurses are responsible for their patients’ care 24 hours a day. Aim: The goal of this study is to explore how nurses include biographical information in their daily care. Method: Data were collected from qualitative interviews with registered nurses (n=10) in a nursing home and analysed according to the Charmaz Grounded Theory approach. Results: The inclusion of the personal biography in daily care appears as a continuous, repetitive process with three main categories: “negotiating“, “connecting” and “being-in-good-hands”. Nurses in this study report that they can trigger positive reactions and reduce behavioral symptoms by means of meaningful interventions, when connected to the residents’ biography. Meaningful interventions can support residents in making contact to their current everyday life, acting independently and perceiving self-efficacy (= connecting). To initiate meaningful interventions, nurses need to connect biographical information to current experiences of the resident (= negotiating). This requires a thorough understanding of the residents’ situation. Nurses obtain an in-depth understanding through caring relationships, which are characterized by continuity of care and a mutual dialogue, where needs and experiences are shared, understood and evaluated (= being-in-good-hands). Einleitung: In der Schweiz sind 39% der Pflegeheimbewohnenden von einer dementiellen Erkrankung betroffen. Bei fortschreitender Demenz treten vermehrt Verhaltensauffälligkeiten auf. Dies beeinträchtigt die Lebensqualität von Betroffenen und belastet Angehörige und Pflegende. Ein personzentrierter Ansatz, der die Biographie der Bewohnenden berücksichtigt, reduziert solche Verhaltensauffälligkeiten. In der bestehenden Literatur wird vorwiegend beschrieben, wie biographische Informationen bei punktuellen Therapien und von den ausführenden therapeutischen Fachpersonen einbezogen werden. Personzentrierte Pflege findet jedoch nicht nur während bestimmter Aktivitäten statt: Pflegepersonen sind rund um die Uhr für die Betreuung der Betroffenen zuständig. Ziel: Das Ziel dieser Studie ist es, zu untersuchen, wie Pflegende biographische Informationen im Pflegealltag berücksichtigen. Methode: Es wurden qualitative Interviews mit Pflegefachpersonen (n=10) geführt und anhand des Grounded-Theory-Ansatzes nach Charmaz analysiert. Ergebnisse: Das Einbeziehen der Biographie in den Alltag zeigt sich als kontinuierlicher, sich wiederholender Prozess mit drei Hauptkategorien: „Aushandeln“, „Anknüpfen“ und „Aufgehoben sein“. Pflegende dieser Studie berichten, dass positive Reaktionen hervorgerufen und Verhaltensauffälligkeiten reduziert werden können. Voraussetzung dazu sind pflegerische Interventionen, die für die Betroffenen eine spezielle, an ihre Biographie anknüpfende Bedeutung in sich tragen. Sie werden damit für die Betroffenen bedeutungsvoll. Bedeutungsvolle Interventionen erlauben es den Bewohnenden, an den Alltag anzuknüpfen, eigenständig zu handeln und sich als wirksam zu erleben (=Anknüpfen). Um bedeutungsvolle Interventionen zu gestalten, werden biographische Informationen mit aktuellen Erfahrungen verbunden (=Aushandeln). Dazu sind vertiefte Kenntnisse über die Bewohnenden nötig. Diese erhalten Pflegende durch vertrauensvolle Beziehungen, welche sich durch Kontinuität und einen Austausch auszeichnen, bei dem Bedürfnisse und Erfahrungen erfasst, verstanden und gemeinsam eingeschätzt werden (=Aufgehoben sein)