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This edited volume describes the population of heritage language speakers in the United States and outlines what needs to be done to help them develop their languages for use in academic and professional arenas. The book is divided into an introduction plus 14 chapters in 5 sections. The introduction, "Charting a New Course: Heritage Language Education in the United States," is written by the editors of this volume. "Defining the Field" has two chapters: "On Defining Heritage Languages and Their Speakers" (Terence G. Wiley) and "Heritage Language Students: Profiles and Possibilities" (Guadalupe Valdes). "Shaping the Field" has three chapters: "300-Plus Years of Heritage Language Education in the United States" (Joshua A. Fishman); "Policy Formation and Implementation" (Terence G. Wiley); and "Professional Opportunities for Heritage Language Speakers" (Maria Carreira and Regla Armengol). "Educational Issues" includes five chapters: "Heritage Language Communities and Schools: Challenges and Recommendations" (Carol J. Compton); "Heritage Language Students in the K-12 Education System" (Shuhan C. Wang and Nancy Green); "Heritage Language and Higher Education: Challenges, Issues, and Needs" (Nariyo Kono and Scott McGinnis); "Preparing Teachers To Work with Heritage Language Learners in the United States" (Surendra Gambhir); "Preparing Teachers To Work with Heritage Language Learners" (Ana Maria Schwartz). "Research and Practice" has two chapters: "Heritage Language Education: Needed Research" (Russell N. Campbell and Donna Christian); and "Heritage Language Education: Summaries of Research and Practice" (this chapter is an annotated bibliography). "A Call to Action" has two chapters: "Heritage Language Maintenance and Development: An Agenda for Action" (Ana Roca); "The Genealogy of Language Organizations and the Heritage Language Initiative" (James E. Alatis). References are found at the end of each chapter. (KFT)

Today, fundraising has become an essential component of institutions' financial viability, particularly as government support shrinks and tuition and fees (now straining families' ability to pay) level off. It has never been more important to have a well-designed, well-managed, and well-executed development program. This publication offers critical advice on how this often complex, mission-central board committee can develop an effective structure, charge, and good practices. It includes information on the purpose of the committee, responsibilities, composition, and tips to maximize effectiveness. Appended are: (1) Sample Charter for a Development, Alumni Relations, and Public Affairs Committee; (2) Sample Charter for a State University Foundation; and (3) Sample Development Dashboard. A list of references and resources is included. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

Although much United States national media attention and research surveys have publicized the many ways in which gender bias and inequities continue to flourish in education, the research on gender and literacy has not been systematically analyzed or reviewed. This book provides a synthesis of the research studies on gender and literacy for several important reasons: (1) to raise awareness of gender issues in learning and practicing literacy; (2) to call attention to successful interventions and recommendations useful to teachers and teacher educators; and (3) to find direction for future inquiries by examining the unanswered questions of the existing research. In the book, the review is confined to the observational or qualitative studies on gender and literacy, particularly those with a feminist perspective. The book identifies the silences as well as the findings of these studies. To assist educators and researchers in locating particular studies of interest to them, studies in the book are organized by genre: gender and discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literacy autobiography. The book offers hope to those who believe that through interventions made in the classroom regarding gender and literacies, a difference can be made in extending democracy and social justice to all. (Contains 103 references as well as 16 literature references. Appendixes contain separate bibliographies of studies on gender and discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literary autobiography.) (NKA)

This selection of essays on journal writing in education looks at the relationship between journal writing and the curriculum, classroom approaches, and implications for students' learning. The focus is on journal writing for deaf students and students of English as a Second Language. Essays include the following: "The Dialogue Journal: Reconceiving Curriculum and Teaching" (Bonnie Meath-Lang); "The Missing Link: Connecting Journal Writing to Academic Writing" (Lauren Vanett, Donna Jurich); "Interactive Teaching of Reading: A Model" (Margaret Walworth); "A Context for Collaboration: Teachers and Students Writing Together" (Lauren Vanett, Donna Jurich); "Dialogue Journal Writing and the Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphology" (Joy Kreeft Peyton); "Personal Journal Writing as a Classroom Genre" (Tamara Lucas); and "Coherence in Deaf Students' Writing" (John Albertini). (MSE)

These materials address the use of dialogue journal writing in teaching speakers of English as a Second Language. Included is a handbook for teachers that provides background information and specific suggestions for classroom use, and an instructional packet for teachers and workshop leaders. The handbook contains chapters on: what constitutes a dialogue journal, including variations in format; the benefits of dialogue journal writing; using dialogue journals with students at various levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced writers); specific procedures for starting journals; strategies for maintaining the student-teacher dialogue; and strategies for handling specific communication problems. An additional chapter profiles four individual student writers. Lists of resources and additional readings are appended. The instructional packet is intended for use in workshops on dialogue journal writing, and contains: an abstract for use in proposing such a workshop; simple guidelines for leading the workshop, including group activities; masters for over 30 overhead transparencies; sample student journal entries from elementary and secondary students, to which workshop participants can respond; handouts for workshop participants; and background information for the presenter. (MSE)

Airborne allergens in the outdoor environment are associated primarily with pollen grains and mold spores and usually induce seasonal symptoms. Exposure varies according to geographic location, season, and weather conditions. Indoors, allergenic proteins derived from house dust mites, furred pets, mold, and pests, such as mice and cockroaches, may induce perennial symptoms. A variety of factors determine the impact of these indoor allergens on disease manifestations. For example, cat allergen is carried on small particles that remain airborne for long periods. As a result, a person with cat allergy may develop symptoms promptly upon entering a home with cats and may have asthma symptoms as small particles freely reach the lower airways. In contrast, dust mite allergen is associated with larger particles that do not remain airborne and are concentrated in locations that support mite survival such as bedding that maintains high moisture for their survival. These features of dust mite allergen explain the lack of acute reactions upon exposure. This chapter describes a variety of features of environmental allergens and emphasizes those that are relevant to allergen avoidance and timing of medical management (e.g., seasonal use of medications) for improved care of individuals with allergic respiratory disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade several experimental MIT systems have been developed which have overcome the difficulties of detecting low conductivity objects. There are several reports of systems that are capable of producing realistic 2D images of isolated conducting objects, or produces images showing the changes in electrical conductivity within an object using experimental data. However, absolute imaging of the conductivity distribution within an object presents a significant challenge. This paper focuses on the problem of reconstructing internal structure within low conductivity targets. One of the reasons this has proven to be a difficult task is that the flow of induced eddy currents inside the target is strongly dependent on the external boundary. Consequently, the boundary has a profound effect on the sensitivity of the mutual inductance values to changes in conductivity, which should be taken into account during image reconstruction. This typically involves time consuming eddy current calculations within an iterative procedure. This paper presents a method of producing sensitivity maps with lower computational cost than applying a forward problem solver which computes all the fields values every time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a typed calculus IL ("intermediate language") which supports the embedding of ML-like (strict, eager) and Haskell-like (non-strict, lazy) languages, without favoring either. IL's type system includes negation (continuations), but not implication (function arrow). Within IL we find that lifted sums and products can be represented as the double negation of their unlifted counterparts. We exhibit a compilation function from IL to AM—an abstract von Neumann machine—which maps values of ordinary and doubly negated types to heap structures resembling those found in practical implementations of languages in the ML and Haskell families. Finally, we show that a small variation in the design of AM allows us to treat any ML value as a Haskell value at runtime without cost, and project a Haskell value onto an ML type with only the cost of a Haskell deepSeq. This suggests that IL and AM may be useful as a compilation and execution model for a new language which combines the best features of strict and non-strict functional programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the feasibility of re-expressing concurrent algorithms with explicit locks in terms of lock free code written using Haskell's implementation of software transactional memory. Experimental results are presented which show that for multi-processor systems the simpler lock free implementations offer superior performance when compared to their corresponding lock based implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probabilistic atlas has broad applications in medical image segmentation and registration. The most common problem building a probabilistic atlas is picking a target image upon which to map the rest of the training images. Here we present a method to choose a target image that is the closest to the mean geometry of the population under consideration as determined by bending energy. Our approach is based on forming a distance matrix based on bending energies of all pair-wise registrations and performing multidimensional scaling (MDS) on the distance matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every now and then, a user of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler asks for a feature that requires specialised support from the storage manager. Memo functions, pointer equality, external pointers, finalizers, and weak pointers, are all examples. We take memo functions as our exemplar because they turn out to be the trickiest to support. We present no fewer than four distinct mechanisms that are needed to support memo tables, and that (in various combinations) satisfy a variety of other needs. The resulting set of primitives is undoubtedly powerful and useful. Whether they are too powerful is not yet clear. While the focus of our discussion is on Haskell, there is nothing Haskell-specific about most of the primitives, which could readily be used in other settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a compiler writer, generating good machine code for a variety of platforms is hard work. One might try to reuse a retargetable code generator, but code generators are complex and difficult to use, and they limit one's choice of implementation language. One might try to use C as a portable assembly language, but C limits the compiler writer's flexibility and the performance of the resulting code. The wide use of C, despite these drawbacks, argues for a portable assembly language. C-- is a new language designed expressly for this purpose. The use of a portable assembly language introduces new problems in the support of such high-level run-time services as garbage collection, exception handling, concurrency, profiling, and debugging. We address these problems by combining the C-- language with a C--run-time interface. The combination is designed to allow the compiler writer a choice of source-language semantics and implementation techniques, while still providing good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-linear 3D warping is implemented for registration of a planar (2D) image into an anatomical reference volume space for accurate spatial mapping. The mutual information based automatic warping algorithm is expanded to include the 2D-to-3D mapping of slice images exhibiting localized out-of-plane geometric deformations. Presented in this work is demonstration and evaluation of the control point based 3D thin-plate-spline (TPS) function applied to the correction of local deformations in MR slice images. Automated 3D warping of a slice into an anatomical reference volume space is achieved by optimization of the mutual information cost function calculated from the gray values of the image pair, i.e., the reference volume and a slice. Accuracy in spatial mapping was assessed by using the simulated MR data sets in a standard anatomical coordinate system and locally induced deformations in a slice image with known TPS transformation parameters. The results indicate the sensitivity of the final optimization to DOF and selected control point locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have implemented automatic 3D thin-plate spline warping as a geometric interpolant to map one dataset volume onto another. Homologous control points in one space are iteratively moved by an optimizer to maximize the global mutual information between the two data volumes. Given two different poses between highly deformed objects we desire to compute the relative geometric deformation using a minimal set of control points as determined by number and placement. The general solution to this problem is not known. In this paper we assess retrospective control point selection for the case of significant patient motion during MRI breast imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on the ongoing parallelisation of LOLITA, a natural language engineering system. Although LOLITA currently exhibits only modest parallelism, we believe that it is the largest parallel functional program ever, comprising more than 47,000 lines of Haskell. LOLITA has the following interesting features common to real world applications of lazy languages:the code was not specifically designed for parallelism;laziness is essential for efficiency in LOLITA;LOLITA interfaces to data structures outside the Haskell heap, using a foreign language interface;LOLITA was not written by those most closely involved in the parallelisation. Our expectations in parallelising the program were to achieve moderate speedups with small changes in the code. To date speedups of up to 2.4 have been achieved for LOLITA running under a realistic simulation of our 4 processor shared-memory target machine. Most notably, the parallelism is achieved with a very small number of changes to, and without requiring an understanding of most of the application. On the Sun SPARCserver target machine wall-clock speedup is currently limited by physical memory availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of late it has become very common for research compilers to emit C as their target code, relying on a C compiler to generate machine code. In effect, C is being used as a portable compiler target language. It offers a simple and effective way of avoiding the need to re-implement effective register allocation, instruction selection, and instruction scheduling, and so on, all for a variety of target architectures. The trouble is that C was designed as a programming language not as a compiler target language, and is not very suitable for the latter purpose. The obvious thing to do is to define a language that is designed as a portable target language. This paper describes C--, a portable compiler target language, or assembler. C-- has to strike a balance between being high-level enough to allow the back end a fair crack of the whip, while being low level enough to give the front end the control it needs. It is not clear that a path exists between these two rocks; the ghost of UNCOL lurks ominously in the shadows [6]. Yet the increasing popularity of C as a compiler target language (despite its unsuitability) suggests strong demand, and provides an existence proof that something useful can be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our corpus-based, multivariate approach to the analysis of text is keyed to the interaction of two dozen language features that have shown potential for assessing affect, agency, evaluation and intention. They include public and private or perceptual verbs; several categories of adverbs, modals, pronouns and discourse markers. The language features, which we use as variables, make up what text and corpus linguists define as stance. Stance is how people use their words to signal confidence or doubt, appraisal or judgment [1] about topics, values, audiences, situations, or viewpoints. Speakers construct different personae out of the ways they use language features that signal modality, evidentiality, hedging, attribution, concession, or consequentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]