Digital Commons Network^™

The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2010/2011, The John Muir Center

Muir Center Newsletters (1981-2015)

Page 1 transcription missing

PAGE 2 John Muir Back and Newsletter Going Digital After a year, we are back! Last year we announced that we would become an "occasional" newsletter, projecting two issues per year. We only released one issue this past year. In an age of high cost of reproduction and mailing we have decided to follow the trail of other newsletters by going digital. Those with e mail can continue to receive at no charge the newsletter as part of a web serve list. Simply e mail us at [email protected] and we will include you in our future …

The Fiscal Impact Of The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: 2010 – 2011 Update And Policy Options, Robert M. Costrell

School Choice Demonstration Project

In February 2008 and March 2009, the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) issued its first report and subsequent update on the fiscal impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) on taxpayers in Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin. These reports covered the period 1993-2009, and addressed two distinct questions: 1. What is the net impact of the MPCP on state and local public funds? That is, what is the difference between the public funds expended on Wisconsin students, including MPCP students, and the amount that would have been spent without the MPCP? 2. How is the fiscal impact distributed …

Making A Case For Arts Administrators: Maintaining Interdisciplinary Arts Programs In Public Schools, Samantha Jardon-Peppard

Graduate Theses

For decades interdisciplinary arts programs have been developed and implemented in public schools throughout our nation. Much research has been dedicated to proving the benefits of interdisciplinary arts education, results of which can be found in reports such as Champions of Change and Project Zero. However, little research has been dedicated to how an interdisciplinary arts program is maintained in a school once it has been initiated and who is responsible for its development and sustainability. Chapter one of this thesis reviews some history of arts education, why the arts have become a vital part of education, and how arts …

Acer Enews 12 December 2010, Acer

ACER eNews Archive 2001-2013

No abstract provided.

Antitrust 2025, Maurice Stucke

Scholarly Works

Antitrust policy in the United States has roughly twenty to thirty year cycles. So if past cycles are reliable indicators of future ones, we are at (or approaching) a new antitrust policy cycle, with 2025 being the approximate midpoint.

Any new policy cycle will be defined by three fundamental questions: a. What is competition? b. What are the goals of competition law? c. What should be the legal standards to promote these goals?

Rather than predict the state of antitrust policy in 2025 (such as more or less cartel enforcement), this Essay maps two scenarios based on these three fundamental …

Reference Priors For Exponential Families With Increasing Dimension, Bertrand Clarke, Subhashis Ghosal

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

In this article, we establish the asymptotic normality of the posterior distribution for the natural parameter in an exponential family based on independent and identically distributed data. The mode of convergence is expected Kullback-Leibler distance and the number of parameters p is increasing with the sample size n. Using this, we give an asymptotic expansion of the Shannon mutual information valid when p = pm increases at a sufficiently slow rate. The second term in the asymptotic expansion is the largest term that depends on the prior and can be optimized to give Jeffrey's prior as the reference prior in …

The Impact Of Content Courses On Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’ Mathematical Content Knowledge, Michael Matthews, Janice Rech, Neal Grandgenett

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

In response to research documenting the mathematical deficiencies of pre-service elementary teachers, many teacher preparation programs are requiring mathematical content courses specifically focusing on the mathematics taught at the elementary level. This study considers what impact two such courses (one course focusing on Arithmetic, and the other course focusing on Geometry and Measurement) had on the mathematical content knowledge and attitude towards mathematics by comparing a group of pre-service elementary teachers who took these courses to a group of pre-service elementary teachers who took only a more general mathematics course (such as College Algebra). Results indicated that those teachers who …

Easterner, Vol. 62, No. 10, December 1, 2010, Associated Students Of Eastern Washington University

Student Newspapers

This issue of the Easterner contains articles about proposed budget cuts, police escorts to provide safety for students, Pence Union Building (PUB) remodel planning, scholarships, new Board of Trustees members, police opinions of counter protesters to the Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, a faculty art exhibit, fighting in hockey, and the football team's championship run.

Analysis Of A Database Insider Threat Model, Andrea Samuel

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

According to Silicon.com's CIO Insight - Beware the Insider Security Threat, insiders are bigger threats to corporate security than external threats such as denial of service attacks or malware. Statistics show that 70% of fraud is perpetrated by staff and that the main data security threat comes from poorly trained or disgruntled employees who are authorized to have access to data and file stores [4]. This research project focuses specifically on the problem of insider threat in relational database systems. The project involves simulating research conducted in Qussai Yaseen and Brajendra Panda's research paper, Predicting and Preventing Insider Threat in …

Learning That Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts: Efforts To Build An Integrative Learning Model In Music Management, David Chase, Keith Hatschek

Conservatory of Music Faculty Articles

How can music industry programs best prepare students for the near constant change and ambiguity engendered by the rapid pace of technological and structural change to the global music and entertainment business? For the authors, the answer to this question has been to develop a new model for teaching and learning in the Music Management degree program they direct. This article provides an explanation for the process of developing this revised program. It is structured in two parts, which follow a brief introduction: the fi rst part looks at the changing landscape of approaches to student learning and its meaning …

Testing Shock Absorbers: Towards A Faster Parallelizable Algorithm, Christian Servin

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Cars are equipped with shock absorbers, which are designed to smooth out the shocks on the road. In practice, there is a need to test them. To test the shock absorbers, we need to estimate the values of the shock absorber's parameters. If we did not have any measurement errors, then two measurements would be sufficient to determine the parameters. However, in reality, there are measurement errors. Usually, in engineering practice, it is assumed that the errors are normally distributed with 0 mean, so we can use least squares method to test it. In practice, we often only know the …

Reducing Over-Conservative Expert Failure Rate Estimates In The Presence Of Limited Data: A New Probabilistic/Fuzzy Approach, Carlos M. Ferregut, F. Joshua Campos, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Unique highly reliable components are typical for aerospace industry. For such components, due to their high reliability and uniqueness, we do not have enough empirical data to make statistically reliable estimates about their failure rate. To overcome this limitation, the empirical data is usually supplemented with expert estimates for the failure rate. The problem is that experts tend to be -- especially in aerospace industry -- over-cautious, over-conservative; their estimates for the failure rate are usually much higher than the actual observed failure rate. In this paper, we provide a new fuzzy-related statistically justified approach for reducing this over-estimation.

Least Sensitive (Most Robust) Fuzzy "Exclusive Or" Operations, Jesus E. Hernandez, Jaime Nava

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In natural language, "or" sometimes means "inclusive or" and sometimes means "exclusive or". To adequately describe commonsense and expert knowledge, it is therefore important to have not only t-conorms describing fuzzy "inclusive or" operations, but also fuzzy "exclusive or" operations f(a,b). Since the degrees of certainty are only approximately defined, it is reasonable to require that the corresponding operation be the least sensitive to small changes in the inputs. In this paper, we show that the least sensitive fuzzy "exclusive or" operation has the form f(a,b)=min(max(a,b),max(1-a,1-b)).

Adding Constraints -- A (Seemingly Counterintuitive But) Useful Heuristic In Solving Difficult Problems, Olga Kosheleva, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Intuitively, the more constraints we impose on a problem, the more difficult it is to solve it. However, in practice, difficult-to-solve problems sometimes get solved when we impose additional constraints and thus, make the problems seemingly more complex. In this methodological paper, we explain this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon, and we show that, dues to this explanation, additional constraints can serve as a useful heuristic in solving difficult problems.

Ict In The Teaching Of Science And Mathematics In Year 8 In Australia: Report From The Iea Second International Technology In Education Study (Sites) Survey, John Ainley, Frances Eveleigh, Chris Freeman, Kate O'Malley

ACER Research Monographs

The IEA Second International Technology in Education Study (SITES) is an international comparative research program studying the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in education. Its central focus is on understanding how ICT affects the way teaching and learning takes place in schools. In many educational systems there is a desire to use ICT to support changes in teaching and learning and policies have been implemented to promote the use of ICT by equipping schools with computers and network connections, training teachers in the use of ICT and providing digital resources. Although there is a growing body of research …

Ua45/6 Commencement Program, Wku Registrar

WKU Administration Documents

Commencement program listing graduates.

Choices For Bates, December 2010

Occasional Publications

No abstract provided.

Putting Stock In Our Students, Mary Mcnally

Cal Poly Magazine

No abstract provided.

Where We Learn How To Learn, Matt Lazier

Cal Poly Magazine

No abstract provided.

A Practical Approach To Computer Donation Supply Chain For Non-Profit Organizations, John Jacob Burrell, Adam Robert Carpenter

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The United States today has a plethora of unused electronic equipment. This equipment comes from universities, small businesses, corporations, and many other sources. This project looks at the best way to put this equipment back to use for the remainder of its usable life by donating it to non-profit organizations in need. In order to complete this project it was necessary to research the areas of Supply Chain Management, Operations Research, and Engineering Economics. The approach for this specific project first involves analyzing the current donation process at California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo, and its ability to …

Optimal Palm Oil Processing Plant Size In South Sumatera, Shelly V. Gozali

Agribusiness

This study was conducted to determine if the palm oil processing plant with a capacity of thirty tons per hour is the optimal size for the Sutopo Lestari Jaya Company. This report represents two important techniques when performing the analysis. A net present value has been calculated in determining the feasibility of the palm oil processing plant in the next ten years after it is built. A break-even analysis has been performed to determine the number of units produced to cover the fixed cost after the processing plant operates.

It is concluded that the processing plant with a capacity of …

Completeness Of Ordered Fields, James Forsythe Hall

Mathematics

The main goal of this project is to prove the equivalency of several characterizations of completeness of Archimedean ordered fields; some of which appear in most modern literature as theorems following from the Dedekind completeness of the real numbers, while a couple are not as well known and have to do with other areas of mathematics, such as nonstandard analysis. Continuing, we study the completeness of non-Archimedean fields, and provide several examples of such fields with varying degrees of properties, using nonstandard analysis to produce some relatively "nice" (in particular, they are Cantor complete) final examples. As a small detour, …

Home By Marilyn Robinson, Picador, 2010, Judi Morrel

LAS Faculty Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Fertilizer And Stormwater Runoff Outreach Program In Newcastle, Nh, David Anderson

PREP Reports & Publications

The New Hampshire Coastal Protection Partnership (NH Coast) implemented a year long pilot public education and outreach program in the Town of New Castle aimed at reducing nitrogen pollution from lawn fertilizers and promoting rain gardens as a solution to storm water runoff and nonpoint source pollution. A total of 77 landowners representing 138 acres of land pledged to either not use lawn fertilizers or use only low phosphorus, slow release nitrogen brands. The program also resulted in the installation of New Castle’s first demonstration rain garden.

An Octonian Algebra Originating In Combinatorics, Dragomir Ž. Đokovic, Kaiming Zhao

Mathematics Faculty Publications

C.H. Yang discovered a polynomial version of the classical Lagrange identity expressing the product of two sums of four squares as another sum of four squares. He used it to give short proofs of some important theorems on composition of δ-codes (now known as T-sequences). We investigate the possible new versions of his polynomial Lagrange identity. Our main result shows that all such identities are equivalent to each other.

Cpa Client Bulletin, December 2010, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Doppler-Broadening Of Light Nuclei Gamma-Ray Spectra, Melinda D. Whitfield

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Non-destructive methods of material interrogation are used to locate hidden explosives and thwart terrorism attempts. In one such method materials are bombarded with neutrons which react with the nuclei of the atoms within causing a de-excitation process emitting a gamma-ray. The spectrum displayed by the collection of these gamma-rays gives valuable information regarding the material’s elemental make-up. It has been hypothesized that gamma-rays from neutron-induced gamma-ray reactions on light elements with atomic numbers less than 20, including most of the gamma-rays of interest in explosives detection, are Doppler-broadened. This thesis focuses on the gamma ray spectra from the 4438 keV …

Farmers' Markets In Kentucky: A Geospatial, Statistical, And Cultural Analysis, Elizabeth Ann Schmitz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

To assess what factors are driving the exponential growth of farmers’ markets in Kentucky, geospatial and statistical analysis of a database of 121 farmers’ markets was conducted. A statewide survey of market leaders and a case study of a single farmers’ market both identified reasons for growing support of farmers’ markets in Kentucky.

Market distribution, vendor levels, and gross sales were mapped against a backdrop of county urban classification, median household income, and education levels. Kruskal-Wallace analysis was used to identify if Kentucky’s rural, micropolitan, and metropolitan markets differ significantly in terms of their age, number of vendors, and market …

Internet Gis As A Historic Place-Making Tool For Mammoth Cave National Park, Ann E. Epperson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This project laid the groundwork for an Internet-delivered Public Participation Geographic Information System to facilitate exploration and discovery of the past communities of the Mammoth Cave Park area. The emergence of Internet Web 2.0 design along with distributed GIS services allows for anyone to interact with and add to the information found on central Internet sites. Historical geography often relies upon public participation from individuals outside the academic world to provide narrative descriptions, photographs and manuscripts of past places and events to augment information held by institutions and academia. A public-participation website for the Mammoth Cave Historic GIS (MCHGIS) created …

The Resilience Of Computationalism, Gualtiero Piccinini

Philosophy Faculty Works

Computationalism—the view that cognition is computation—has always been controversial. It faces two types of objection. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, cognitive processes are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y, and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) computations. In this article, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a better account of computation.