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This article explores technology's integration, assessment, and reflection within a single secondary education program at a Mountain West university. In light of the publication of the Teacher Education Technology Competencies (TETCs), faculty members of a secondary education program focused on existing practices and pathways for expansion to better align with the TETC standards in the future. The purpose of this study was to explore existing practices of incorporating technology into secondary methods coursework and to search for new spaces to implement the TETC guidelines and structure, as well as explore the roles faculty play in the adoption and implementation of technologies. Vignettes authored by faculty in each content area provide a rich depth of faculty experience and dispositions regarding technology integration, as well as spaces for the deeper use of technology based on the TETC recommendations. Key questions emerged about the efficacy of current technology practices, as well as the experiences and dispositions of the faculty within the secondary education program. Findings show that secondary education faculty use domain/content-specific technologies in their course; are expected to be "meta-experts", both discovering and implementing technology simultaneously; and tend to discover technologies through content-specific interactions and discussions.

The increasing complexity and flexibility of modern land use requires that cadastres need to manage information on the third and temporal (fourth) dimension. This article considers the registration of legal space of utility networks in cadastre in this 3D + time (=4D) context. A requirement analysis in three countries that have methods to register utility networks complying with their legal, organizational and technical structure (Turkey, the Netherlands and Queensland, Australia) is the basis for three alternatives for 4D cadastre to register utility networks. The three alternatives are analysed with respect to legal, organizational and technical cadastral requirements. This article presents a case study and a prototype from the Netherlands. In this country by law utilities are considered to be real estate objects with obligatory registration of ownership and geometry. This study shows that the 3D space and separate temporal attributes approach (state-based model) is a very promising solution to maintain temporal changes of utility networks and that this approach is to be preferred above the current practice, where the 3D and temporal aspects are not considered when registering a network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores technology's integration, assessment, and reflection within a single secondary education program at a Mountain West university. In light of the publication of the Teacher Education Technology Competencies (TETCs), faculty members of a secondary education program focused on existing practices and pathways for expansion to better align with the TETC standards in the future. The purpose of this study was to explore existing practices of incorporating technology into secondary methods coursework and to search for new spaces to implement the TETC guidelines and structure, as well as explore the roles faculty play in the adoption and implementation of technologies. Vignettes authored by faculty in each content area provide a rich depth of faculty experience and dispositions regarding technology integration, as well as spaces for the deeper use of technology based on the TETC recommendations. Key questions emerged about the efficacy of current technology practices, as well as the experiences and dispositions of the faculty within the secondary education program. Findings show that secondary education faculty use domain/content-specific technologies in their course; are expected to be "meta-experts", both discovering and implementing technology simultaneously; and tend to discover technologies through content-specific interactions and discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tenuous macroeconomic climate that characterizes the U.S. economy today, signaled by record-level federal budget and trade deficits, has increasingly raised concern over the possibility of a hard landing for the U.S. dollar. This paper argues that such concern is warranted: a hard landing scenario — characterized by widespread capital flight and a large and sudden depreciation of the dollar — is indeed a realistic possibility. Further, the paper examines the tradeoffs of one strategy that has been offered to reduce the likelihood of a hard landing — confronting Chinese currency manipulation — and concludes that such a strategy involves potentially large tradeoffs, and is less preferable to one that falls more directly within U.S. government control, namely, reducing the budget deficit. Finally, it concludes with a brief discussion of the rationale for a strategy that focuses on reducing the budget deficit, and the prospect of fiscal discipline as a means to that end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the poem "Ancient Customs," by Rod Thompson.

Point clouds contain high detail and high accuracy geometry representation of the scanned Earth surface parts. To manage the huge amount of data, the point clouds are traditionally organized on location and map-scale; e.g. in an octree structure, where top-levels of the tree contain few points suitable for small scale overviews and lower levels of the tree contain more points suitable for large scale detailed views. The drawback of this solution is that it is based on discrete levels, causing visual artifacts in the form of data density shocks when creating the commonly used perspective views. This paper presents a method based on an optimized distribution of points over continuous levels, avoiding the visualization shocks. The traditional distribution ratio's of data amounts over discrete levels of raster or vector data is considered the reference. How to convert this to point clouds with continuous levels (still benefiting from the proven advantages of the data distribution in discrete levels for efficient access at a wide range of scales)? In our solution, for each point a cLoD (continuous Level of Detail) value is computed and added as dimension to the point. A SFC (Space Filling Curve)-based nD data clustering technique can be used to organize the points, so that they can be efficiently queried. It should be noted that also other multi-dimensional indexing and clustering techniques could be applied to realize continuous levels based on the cLoD value. Besides the mathematical foundation of the approach also several implementations are described, varying from a 3D web-browser based solution to an augmented reality point cloud app in a mobile phone. The cLoD enables interactive real-time visualization using perspective views without data density shocks, while supporting continuous zoom-in/out and progressive data streaming between server and client. The described cLoD based approach is generic and supports different types of point clouds: from airborne, terrestrial, mobile and indoor laser scanning, but also from dense matching optical imagery or multi-beam echo soundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The handling of the child abuse investigations by social workers is being called into question following recent events in Rochdale and the Orkneys.