Community Standards v. Teacher Rights: What Is Immoral Conduct under Missouri\u27s Teacher Tenure Act

In a recent Missouri case, Homa v. Carthage R-IX School District, the Court of Appeals for the Southern District upheld the Carthage School District\u27s decision to terminate one of its program directors for engaging in immoral conduct. 6 The Carthage school board terminated Lynda Homa, a teacher, and the director of its Parents-as-Teachers program, after it found that Homa authorized a parent-educator to visit an incarcerated program participant to convince the participant to put her child up for adoption.7 Interestingly, the court did not base its determination solely on the inappropriate adoption discussion. In its opinion, the court put Freater emphasis on Homa\u27s deceit and dishonesty in covering up the inciden

Electrical conduction mechanism at high voltages and dielectric breakdown strength in bulk ceramic insulators

Electrical conductivity at high electric fields and dielectric breakdown of bulk ceramic insulators is not well understood. In order to gain more insight we performed current-voltage measurements on different ceramics to identify whether ohmic, space charge limited, Schottky, or Poole-Frenkel conduction, is the dominating conduction mechanism. Voltages up to 70 kV were applied and revealed that space charge limited conduction (SCLC) prevails at high electric fields in all investigated ceramics. As SCLC is a size dependent phenomenon the transition from ohmic to SCLC was determined as a function of the thickness of the disc-shaped samples. As a consequence electric field assisted sintering or breakdown models based on ohmic conduction must be critically regarded whether they can be applied. In a second part of this presentation we present the dielectric breakdown strength of these ceramics as a function of the sample thickness. It turns out that besides the well-known inverse square root dependence of the sample thickness there is also an inverse square root permittivity dependence of the dielectric breakdown strength. A Griffith type energy release rate dielectric breakdown model based on SCLC is presented, which is able to describe the size and permittivity dependence of dielectric breakdown

Phase estimation without a priori knowledge in the presence of loss

We find the optimal scheme for quantum phase estimation in the presence of loss when no a priori knowledge on the estimated phase is available. We prove analytically an explicit lower bound on estimation uncertainty, which shows that, as a function of number of probes, quantum precision enhancement amounts at most to a constant factor improvement over classical strategiesComment: 8 pages, 2 figures, discussion on adaptive strategies adde

Internationale Frauenuniversität "Technik und Kultur": eine Neugründung 100 Tage für 100 Jahre

"Eine Internationale Frauenuniversität „Technik und Kultur" einzurichten, ist Anlaß, grundsätzlich über Mono-Edukation nachzudenken und unterschiedliche Konzepte von Frauenuniversitäten zu diskutieren. Ich möchte zunächst der Frage nachgehen, wie die Idee einer Frauenuniversität in Deutschland entstanden ist, und welchen Weg die Diskussionen genommen haben. Es geht auch um die Vorbildrolle der US-amerikanischen Women's Colleges, die zu Beginn der Diskussionen vor 15 Jahren kaum bedeutend waren, aber in den neunziger Jahren stark an Einfluß gewannen. Danach komme ich zu meinem Schwerpunktthema, zum Projet 'IFU', die im Jahre 2000 in Hannover veranstaltet werden soll. Ich werde das Konzept und den Entwicklungsstand der Internationalen Frauenuniversität „Technik und Kultur" vorstellen." (Autorenreferat

Separating invariants for modular P-groups and groups acting diagonally

We study separating algebras for rings of invariants of finite groups. We describe a separating subalgebra for invariants of p-groups in characteristic p using only transfers and norms. Also we give an explicit construction of a finite separating set for invariants of groups acting diagonally. © International Press 2009

The noether map i

Let æ : G GL(n, F) be a faithful representation of a finite group G. In this paper we study the image of the associated Noether map J G G : F[V(G)]G → F [V]G. It turns out that the image of the Noether map characterizes the ring of invariants in the sense that its integral closure Im (JG G = F [V]G. This is true without any restrictions on the group, representation, or ground field. Moreover, we show that the extension Im(J G G) ⊆ F [V]G is a finite p-root extension if the characteristic of the ground field is p. Furthermore, we show that the Noether map is surjective, if V = Fn is a projective FG-module. We apply these results and obtain upper bounds on the degrees of a minimal generating set of FVG and the Cohen-Macaulay defect of FV G. We illustrate our results with several examples. © de Gruyter 2009

The invariants of modular indecomposable representations of ℤp 2

We consider the invariant ring for an indecomposable representation of a cyclic group of order p 2 over a field of characteristic p. We describe a set of -algebra generators of this ring of invariants, and thus derive an upper bound for the largest degree of an element in a minimal generating set for the ring of invariants. This bound, as a polynomial in p, is of degree two. © 2008 Springer-Verlag