Digital Commons Network^™

Emissions From Biomass Burning In The Yucatan, Robert J. Yokelson, J. D. Crounse, P. F. Decarlo, T. Karl, S. P. Urbanski, E. Atlas, T. Campos, Y. Shinozuka, V. Kasputin, A. D. Clarke, A. Weinheimer, D. J. Knapp, D. D. Montzka, J. Holloway, P. Weibring, F. Flocke, W. Zheng, D. Toohey, P. O. Wennberg, C. Wiedinmyer, L. Mauldin, A. Fried, D. Richter, J. Walega, J. L. Jimenez, K. Adachi, P. R. Buseck, S. R. Hall, R. Shetter

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

In March 2006 two instrumented aircraft made the first detailed field measurements of biomass burning (BB) emissions in the Northern Hemisphere tropics as part of the MILAGRO project. The aircraft were the National Center for Atmospheric Research C-130 and a University of Montana/US Forest Service Twin Otter. The initial emissions of up to 49 trace gas or particle species were measured from 20 deforestation and crop residue fires on the Yucatan peninsula. This included two trace gases useful as indicators of BB (HCN and acetonitrile) and several rarely, or never before, measured species: OH, peroxyacetic acid, propanoic acid, hydrogen peroxide, …

Reinterpreting No Free Lunch, Jonathan E. Rowe, Michael D. Vose, Alden H. Wright

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Since it’s inception, the “No Free Lunch theorem” has concerned the application of symmetry results rather than the symmetries themselves. In our view, the conflation of result and application obscures the simplicity, generality, and power of the symmetries involved. This paper separates result from application, focusing on and clarifying the nature of underlying symmetries. The result is a general set-theoretic version of NFL which speaks to symmetries when arbitrary domains and co-domains are involved. Although our framework is deterministic, we note situations where our deterministic set-theoretic results speak nevertheless to stochastic algorithms.

Biomass Burning And Urban Air Pollution Over The Central Mexican Plateau, J. D. Crounse, P. F. Decarlo, Donald R. Blake, L. K. Emmons, T. L. Campos, E. C. Apel, A. D. Clarke, A. J. Weinheimer, D. C. Mccabe, Robert J. Yokelson, J. L. Jimenez, P. O. Wennberg

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Observations during the 2006 dry season of highly elevated concentrations of cyanides in the atmosphere above Mexico City (MC) and the surrounding plains demonstrate that biomass burning (BB) significantly impacted air quality in the region. We find that during the period of our measurements, fires contribute more than half of the organic aerosol mass and submicron aerosol scattering, and one third of the enhancement in benzene, reactive nitrogen, and carbon monoxide in the outflow from the plateau. The combination of biomass burning and anthropogenic emissions will affect ozone chemistry in the MC outflow.

Enhancing Statistics Instruction In Elementary Schools: Integrating Technology In Professional Development, Maria Meletiou-Mavrotheris, Efi Paparistodemou, Despina Stylianou

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The research discussed in this article comes from an ongoing multifaceted program for the teaching and learning of early statistical reasoning in Cyprus. The initial stage of the program was concerned with the design of a line of instructional materials for the development of statistical reasoning. Central to this design was the functional integration with existing core curricular ideas of the recently developed dynamic statistics software Tinkerplots@, which provides young students with the opportunity to model and investigate real world problems of statistics. Next, professional development seminars for the teaching of statistics with the use of Tinkerplots® were designed and …

Teaching Statistics Must Be Adapted To Changing Circumstances: A Case Study From Hungarian Higher Education, Andras Komaromi

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Teaching statistics can bring up difficulties of various types for the teacher. Some of these are independent of the environment, i.e. they could occur at any place and time; some are specifically conditional on the surrounding circumstances. This paper presents an example for both of these kinds from the practice of two Hungarian teachers.

Calculating Dependent Probabilities, Mike Fletcher

The Mathematics Enthusiast

In the 2004 European soccer competition France were one of the favourites to win the World Cup and Thierry Henry, their star forward, was one of the favourites to be top goal scorer. Bookkeepers were offering odds of 4 :1 on France winning the competition and odds of 8: 1 on Thierry Henry being the top scorer. A large number of punters went into betting shops in the United Kingdom and made a single bet that France would win the competition and that Thierry Henry would be top scorer. The counter clerks in the betting shops accepted the bets and …

Teacher Knowledge And Statistics: What Types Of Knowledge Are Used In The Primary Classroom?, Tim Burgess

The Mathematics Enthusiast

School curricula are increasingly advocating for statistics to be taught through investigations. Although the importance of teacher knowledge is acknowledged, little is known about what types of teacher knowledge are needed for teaching statistics at the primary school level. In this paper, a framework is described that can account for teacher knowledge in relation to statistical thinking. This framework was applied in a study that was conducted in the classrooms of four second-year teachers, and was used to explore the teacher knowledge used in teaching statistics through investigations. As a consequence, descriptions of teacher knowledge are provided and give further …

Comparision Of High Achievers With Low Achievers: Discussion Of Juter’S (2007) Article, T. P. Hutchinson

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The use of questionnaires and interviews to compare the responses to a mathematical task of high achievers with low achievers has limitations. The partial information that they have provides a way of comparing high and low achievers. Some references are given here to relevant task formats and theories. An example is given of how examinees’ performance with unusual task formats (specifically, answer-until-correct) may be analysed to throw light on the mathematical description of partial information.

A Trailer, A Shotgun, And A Theorem Of Pythagoras, William H. Kazez

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Counselor: Please tell the Court your name.

Expert Witness: My name is Will Kazez

Counselor: No, no, no! Your name is…

This is not a good start. I am not naturally a nervous person. I have survived teaching calculus to a large class that included the entire freshman football team of the University of Pennsylvania, but I've never been an Expert Witness. Even though I'm confident of the mathematics, I'm not sure I like the idea of being cross-examined. But still, I'm just rehearsing my testimony with the lawyer, and even if I've got my own name a little wrong, …

Rational Number Fluency: A Prerequisite For Success In High School Mathematics Courses?, Renae Walter Seegmiller

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation examined high school students' skill with rational numbers and compared that skill level with the skill level of middle school students by testing 147 high school seniors with 16 rational number word problems released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments. The questions included equal amounts of fraction and money problems. The seniors were grouped by gender and by whether they had completed only beginning algebra and geometry or had more mathematics than geometry.

The findings of this study replicated the high school seniors' low rational number skill level seen in other studies with various age groups. …

Randomness In Tree Ensemble Methods, Joran Elias

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Tree ensembles have proven to be a popular and powerful tool for predictive modeling tasks. The theory behind several of these methods (e.g. boosting) has received considerable attention. However, other tree ensemble techniques (e.g. bagging, random forests) have attracted limited theoretical treatment. Specifically, it has remained somewhat unclear as to why the simple act of randomizing the tree growing algorithm should lead to such dramatic improvements in performance. It has been suggested that a specific type of tree ensemble acts by forming a locally adaptive distance metric [Lin and Jeon, 2006]. We generalize this claim to include all tree ensembles …

Decomposing The Increase In Reported Levels Of Subjective Well-Being In South Africa From 1993 To 1998, Benjamin Fitch-Fleischmann

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Reported levels of household life satisfaction, also referred to as subjective well-being, increased dramatically in South Africa following the end of Apartheid. This study uses household surveys from 1993-1994 and 1998 in South Africa to investigate why. Models of subjective well-being are estimated following previous literature and a Oaxaca decomposition is then applied, which allows subjective well-being and the determinants of subjective well-being to be examined in a new framework. The decomposition determines what portion of the life satisfaction increase in South Africa is due to improvements in living conditions and what portion is due to changes in the way …

Beyond Wilderness: Wildness As A Guiding Ideal, Christopher James Dunn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is largely a response to William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” found in The Great New Wilderness Debate. Cronon is himself responding to many things, in large part to Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and also to the wilderness vision typified by Dave Foreman; thus this thesis is also a response to McKibben and in many respects a defense of Foreman-like thought. Besides Cronon, I consider a wide variety of sources, taking from them in order to build a case for, and to explicate, wildness as a guiding ideal. …

Integration Of Higher-Order Physics In The Community Ice Sheet Model: Scientific And Software Concerns, Timothy Joseph Bocek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) is a next-generation land ice model that is designed to answer important questions regarding the response of Earth’s land ice to climate forcing. The program extends Glimmer, an ice sheet model based on the shallow ice approximation. This thesis concerns a project to ready CISM for these questions by integrating an ice velocity diagnostic based on a first-order approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations. I present in detail the derivation of the first-order momentum balance equations for both the interior of an ice sheet and a variety of boundary conditions. I discuss the numerical techniques …

Investigating The Relationships Between Seventh And Eighth Grade Science Teachers' Background, Self-Efficacy Toward Teaching Science As Inquiry, And Attitudes And Beliefs On Classroom Control, William T. Joern

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

An important component of science reform is the teaching of science as inquiry. Many barriers toward teaching science as inquiry have been documented but the list is incomplete. This study utilized a non-experimental correlational design to examine middle school science teachers' background and the relationships this has with teacher efficacy toward teaching science as inquiry and teachers' attitudes and beliefs toward classroom control. Because science inquiry activities involve greater classroom control skills by the instructor as opposed to teacher-centered instruction, the relationship between teacher efficacy toward teaching science as inquiry and teachers' attitudes and beliefs toward classroom control were important …

Math Ability And Gendered Self-Perceptions, Lorianne Deleen Burhop

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Gender stereotypes continue to be prevalent in American society and have the potential to influence the self-perceptions of both males and females. One stereotype that has been particularly persistent is the belief that mathematics is a masculine subject and that males are inherently better at math than females. Despite increasing evidence showing males and females to be equally competent in the subject, previous studies have indicated that females frequently underestimate their abilities to succeed in mathematics. This study uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS: 88) and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002). Both …

Multivariate Statistical Analysis Of Three Crania Housed At The University Of Montana Physical Anthropology Lab, Bonny Marie Christy

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The purpose of this research was to attempt to identify the population affinity of three crania (UMFC 103, 104, and 120), housed at the University of Montana Physical Anthropology Lab, using multivariate statistical analyses. A database collected by Dr. Hanihara and another collected by researchers at the University of Michigan were used for comparative purposes. Multiple populations from both databases were chosen so as to be representative of various Asian, African, Indian, and Native American populations. Two variations of each of the databases were used in the following statistical analyses: principal components analysis and discriminant function analysis. It was shown …

Teacher, Leadership, And Curriculum Factors Predictive Of Student Achievement In Indian Education For All, Erin Robin Lipkind

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study examines the teacher, leader, and curriculum variables predictive of student achievement in Indian Education for All (IEFA). IEFA, a Montana educational mandate based on Montana constitutional law, was first funded in 2005, and little research had previously been conducted on the effectiveness of implementation efforts. While compulsory, implementation had been piecemeal and wrought with misunderstanding, differences in opinion, prejudice, and questions about its legitimacy. The challenges inherent in the implementation of an ambiguous educational reform with no state-adopted curriculum or benchmarks for student achievement have become evident. With the dearth of research, it was not known how well …

A Comparison Study Of Montana's Intermediate And K-8 Schools With Regard To Student Performance On A Criterion Referenced Test, Incidence Of At-Risk Behaviors, And Perceptions Of Educators From Both Grade Configurations, Robert Jeffrey Watson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Within the last ten years, middle schools have been criticized for focusing too much on social development while ignoring academics. Several large school districts around the country are transforming their middle schools into K-8 schools. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to compare K-8 schools with intermediate schools in the State of Montana. Quantitative research examined the relationship between school grade configuration and student performance on a criterion referenced test. Descriptive analysis examined the relationship between school grade configuration and incidence of at-risk behavior among students. Additional data was collected through 1-1 comparison interviews with educators from both …

The Relationship Between Positive Behavior Supports, Student Achievement, Severe Problem Behavior, And Administrative Stress, Jennifer Guthals

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Guthals, Jennifer, Ed. D., May 2009 Educational Leadership

The Relationship between Positive Behavior Supports, Student Achievement, Severe Problem Behavior, and Administrative Stress

Chair: Dr. John Matt

Due to the pressures and expectations for current and future principals to create safe and welcoming schools with high student achievement, a better of understanding of the relationship between Positive Behavior Supports (PBS), student achievement, severe problem behavior, and administrative stress was needed. This study investigated the relationship between these four factors, as measured through the Effective Behavior Supports Survey (Sugai, Horner, & Todd, 2003), Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) (OPI, 2008), suspension/expulsion rates, the …

Materiality As The Basis For The Aesthetic Experience In Contemporary Art, Christina Murdoch Mills

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A number of historical philosophical theories relate to materiality in contemporary art and the role of art objects as an extension of ontology, or the study of the nature of being. The Kantian idea of the “aesthetic experience” is the point of departure, tracing philosophical discourse of how art functions via its materiality through the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Maritain to the post-modern considerations of David Hickey and Arthur Danto. The research for this thesis focuses on how contemporary art, in all its various forms, functions via art’s material qualities or materiality. The objective …

Simple Two-Sided Rational Vector Spaces Of Rank Two, John Walker Hart

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The purpose of this thesis is to find sufficient conditions under which a non-commutative version of the polynomial ring in two variables exists. The non-commutative rings we construct are non-commutative symmetric algebras over a two-sided vector space. After reviewing the definition of a two-sided vector space and giving some examples, we briefly recall the theory of simple two-sided vector spaces. We then assume k is a field of characteristic zero and t is transcendental over k and we find sufficient conditions under which a simple k-central two-sided vector space V over k(t) has left and right dimension two. Given such …

Institutional Assessment Report, 2009, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of The Provost

University of Montana Planning and Assessment Reports, 1969-2016

The University of Montana 2009 Institutional Assessment Report, issued by the Office of the Provost.

Lost Legislative Intent: What Will Montanans Do When The Meaning Isn't Plain?, Stacey L. Gordon, Helia Jazayeri

Montana Law Review

Lost Legislative Intent

Statistics Teaching In An Agricultural University: A Motivation Problem, Klara Lokos Toth

The Mathematics Enthusiast

There are many teaching methods and there are various teaching materials even in one university, not to mention different universities specialising in different disciplines. So I cannot talk about Hungarian method in general, but about my experience in teaching statistics. I teach statistics on several levels (BSc, MSc, PhD) and in different faculties (Agriculture and environmental Sciences, Economic and Social Sciences) and in different forms. I find different problems according to the faculties and forms. In this paper I focus on only one of them, which is the most important for me.

From The Natural To The Supernatural, Rosalyn Lapier

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

The Blackfeet understanding of the natural world is based on their religious belief system, world view and relationship with the supernatural world.

To Publish Or Not To Publish?- That Is The (Editorial) Question, Bharath Sriraman

The Mathematics Enthusiast

No abstract provided.

What Makes A “Good” Statistics Student And A “Good” Statistics Teacher In Service Courses?, Sue Gordon, Peter Petocz, Anna Reid

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Statistics is taught within a diverse array of disciplines and degree programs at university. In recent research we investigated international educators’ ideas about teaching and learning ‘service’ statistics. This paper investigates what these educators think are important attributes, knowledge and skills for learners and teachers of statistics. Results show that educators are in agreement about qualities of ‘good’ statistics students, such as curiosity and critical thinking. An emerging issue was the role mathematics plays in learning statistics as a service subject with some academics postulating mathematics as the basis of statistical learning, others proposing it has limited or little importance …

Students’ Conceptions About Probability And Accuracy, Ignacio Nemirovsky, Mónica Giuliano, Silvia Pérez, Sonia Concari, Aldo Sacerdoti, Marcelo Alvarez

The Mathematics Enthusiast

College students’ conceptions about probability and accuracy were explored. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were done by means of two tests applied at two different moments. We show the results referring to the beliefs and conceptions about probability, margin for error, accuracy, certainty, truth and validity. Previous misconceptions about science may cause difficulties in the interpretation of scientific models. So, to find out students’ beliefs about science and technology, a Likert scale type test was made and presented to part of the sample. Although most of the people who answered the survey accredited the incidence of probability in the results …

Undergraduate Student Difficulties With Independent And Mutually Exclusive Events Concepts, Adriana D'Amelio

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The concepts of disjunctive events and independent events are didactical ideas that are used widely in the classroom. Previous observations of attitudes in assessments given to students at university level who attended the introductory Statistics course helped to detect the confusion between disjunctive and independent events, and indicate the spontaneous ideas that students tend to elaborate about both concepts in different situations in which these appear. However the didactical relation between these ideas and their formal definitions is not known in detail. In this work, we analyze students’ misconceptions, their persistence, and the process by which the student confronts his …