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Building students' confidence and conceptual understanding early sets a solid foundation for reasoning and exploration. "Nurturing Math Curiosity With Learners in Grades K-2" offers educational tools and strategies teachers can use to integrate mathematical argumentation in early elementary classrooms, allowing space for students' natural wonder and curiosity to shine while, at the same time, providing opportunities for students to see mathematics content in a new light. This book will help K-2 teachers: (1) discover ways to explore early mathematical concepts; (2) integrate classroom community building, teacher tools, and instructional strategies to nurture an environment of playful exploration; (3) read real examples from teachers who have implemented argumentation in their classrooms; (4) follow the layers of argumentation through an in-depth concrete example; and (5) reflect as mathematics learners with features that activate prior knowledge.

This book contains a report of a study commissioned by the California Legislature to examine charter schools in the state. The study considered the following four questions: (1) What population of students attends charter schools? (2) Is student achievement higher in charter schools than in conventional public schools? (3) What oversight and support do the chartering authorities provide? and (4) How do charter schools differ from conventional public schools in terms of their operation, including finances, academic environment, and staffing? Data for the study were gathered from surveys of principals in all charter schools, from a demographically matched subset of conventional public schools, from a survey of chartering authorities, from case studies at nine charter schools and all but one other chartering authority, and from a number of databases. The study found that charter schools are not homogeneous; they vary along a number of dimensions. There is no single charter-school effect. These differences affect accessibility, achievement, operation, and governance. The report includes a number of recommendations for policymakers. Appended are the research methods and instruments used in the study, a table of academic outcomes at charter schools, and a discussion of charter and conventional public-school comparison methods. (Contains 36 figures and 54 tables.) (WFA)

This book calls for changes in special-education fiscal policy, claiming that special-education finances need to be more fully incorporated into education-finance literature and fiscal-policy discussions. The first few chapters discuss fiscal and program-policy funding in the United States and in Europe. They trace the history of federal special-education legislation, contextualizing it within the Civil Rights movement. These articles discuss efforts to pool resources normally earmarked for separate programs in order to optimize educational quality for all students. The link between special-education funding systems and the integration of special-education students into regular education in Europe is described, along with an analytical framework to guide further research on the impact of funding on integration. The second section of the book presents methodological and policy profiles from the states, such as patterns of expenditures on students with disabilities and the effects of reforms on Pennsylvania's special-education system. This section likewise details the causes and effects of the large increase in the percentage of school-district allocations to special education in New York state, as well as proposed special-education finance reforms in New York City. The last section describes trends and developments in special-education funding. (RJM)

Difficult airway management (DAM) is one of the most fascinating tasks for anaesthesiologists, in a certain sense a continuous challenge which requires solutions for potentially life-threatening problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VeRT (Vehicular Remote Tolling) is a research program cofunded by GALILEO Joint Undertaking in the framework of the Activity C first call: Introduction of GALILEO services Using EGNOS GJU/03/118/issue2/OM/ms, 2003 31st July. The program belongs to the GJU activities aiming at the APPLICATIONS RESEARCH coming from the EGNOS and GALILEO employment, which are competitive with respect to the only GPS system usage. VeRT belongs to the "Road Applications" area and in particular it focuses on research of applications, sustainable from the economic and social point of view, either for enhancing the "Road Tolling" services or for introducing new added value services to be employed in the "mobility" field only by employing GALILEO. The VeRT programme aims at exploiting the capabilities offered by Galileo to provide new applications in the road sector, by means of the EGNOS system for demonstration purposes; specifically, an extended service concept of road tolling: it is indicated as "remote tolling", such to cover basic tolling service, but also additional "pay-per use services" on motorways transport, as well as in urban environment (parking and access to restricted zones) or in both the environments as the pay per use insurance. The higher level of accuracy and integrity provided by GALILEO (respect to the GPS-only) represents an essential condition connected with the services. From a general point of view, the users must be sure that they are paying for the offered service they are using, thus the right positioning of the users and the guarantee of the service provided assumes an important role in the service architecture. The adoption of a satellite based toll and road services facility in the infrastructural approach, opens the way to further commercial opportunities. This aspect is taken into right account within the VeRT project: a market analysis has been conducted in which revenue mechanism for the service provision has been estimated by analysing market opportunities and defining the opportune marketing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protocols for the isolation of recombinant baculoviruses and their use for foreign gene expression in insect cells have been described in detail in the preceding chapters (also see refs. 1-5). Generally, this approach involves the replacement of viral DNA sequences encoding the polyhedrin protein with foreign DNA sequences encoding the protein of interest. The recombinant virus is plaque-isolated, and used to infect cultured insect cells or larvae. The protein of interest will be expressed during the very late phase of infection, when polyhedrin would normally be expressed by the wild-type virus. One major advantage of baculovirus expression vectors is that they can be used to produce exceedingly large amounts of a recombinant protein. This is due to the strength of the polyhedrin promoter, which can induce the synthesis of a very large pool of mRNA for translation into large amounts of protein. A second big advantage of the baculovirus expression system is that insect cells have most of the protein-processing capabilities of higher eukaryotic cells (reviewed in ref. 6). Thus, proteins produced in recombinant baculovirusinfected cells can undergo coand posttranslational processing, resulting in an end product that is very similar, if not identical, to the native protein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]