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This book showcases a case study of the development of a generalist early childhood education (ECE) teacher into a confident and competent teacher of science in early childhood with support from a mentor. It argues that with guided mentoring, and later, timely support of a mentor as and when required, ECE teachers can deliver the curriculum, teach science by providing opportunities to explore and then build on children's interest through intentionally planned activities, dialogue, and discourse. It presents a comprehensive literature review and research design including theoretical frames and methodology. It includes a chapter on teacher development and discusses different approaches to science investigations practiced by the teacher in the case study. The book provides evidence of children's science learning and presents the findings as response to research questions. It also includes a model of teaching as inquiry in the context of early childhood education.

This book is a report of a systematic study based on interviews with 120 school principals that addresses questions about the utilization of knowledge from social research. It offers evidence that challenges allegations about the "awful reputation" of educational research and its supposed lack of impact. The Untested Accusation: (1) Describes the methods used in the investigation; (2) Provides reviews of related work with social research impact; (3) Defines major terms; (4) Provides a conceptual model for thinking about the problem; (5) Provides both quantitative evidence and verbatim quotes from principals; (6) Compares research knowledge use among public, private, and independent schools in two national contexts: the United States and Australia; and (7) Discusses various strategies that can be used to improve the impact of educational research. Findings from this study details: (1) How principals are exposed to research knowledge and their attitudes concerning its use; (2) The types of research knowledge with which principals are familiar; and (3) Reports of research knowledge use in various schools. A summary of major findings and a discussion of conclusions and their implications are provided. This report concludes that educational research already has considerable impact and that school principals play active roles in converting that knowledge into innovative policies and practices. This book is for teachers, administrators, school board members, and others interested in educational and social research. This book is organized into the following nine chapters: (1) Does Research on Education Have an Impact?; (2) Thinking Out the Problem; (3) A Design for Investigation; (4) Principals' Exposure to Knowledge Sources; (5) Principals' Opinions About Research and Innovation; (6) Research Knowledge That Principals Volunteer; (7) Research Knowledge That Principals Recognize; (8) Principals' Reported Use of Research Knowledge; and (9) Findings, Conclusions, and Implications. The following are appended: (1) Interview Schedule; (2) Interview Schedule Supplement; (3) List A: Types of Information Sources for Technical Knowledge; (4) List B: Examples of Research-Generated Knowledge; (5) Supplementary Questionnaire [American Version]; and (6) Supplementary Questionnaire [Australian Version].

This paper proposes a new technique for Mobile IP (MIP) registration by WLAN host (WH) through GPRS network. The home agent (HA) of WH resides in external IP network. The gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) provides foreign agent (FA) functionality for WH in GPRS. After successful attach with GPRS network, WH needs two mandatory passes for MIP registration with HA. First it establishes PDP (packet data protocol) context in GPRS network and then it sends MIP registration request (MRR) to FA at GGSN. This causes a large delay for handoff from WLAN to GPRS. We propose a one-pass technique of MIP registration through GPRS network to reduce the handoff delay. We transport MIP-registration request of WH in the information field of activate-PDP-context request message to GGSN. Thus MIP registration message reaches GGSN before completion of PDP context establishment. This technique reduces the control signaling for handoff from WLAN to GPRS. We observed from simulated results that proposed one-pass technique reduces handoff delay by 18% compared to handoff delay in two-pass method. Keywords: 3G, GPRS, loose coupling, MIP, tight coupling, UMTS, WLAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical and optical properties of atmospheric aerosols were measured in the French Mediterranean coastal zone for over one year between October 2005 and 2006. BC mass concentration, absorption and scattering coefficients, number-size distributions of fine and coarse particles were continuously measured at ground level, along with the meteorological parameters. In addition to these surface based in situ measurements, a co-located Cimel Sun photometer continuously measured the columnar aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstroms coefficient ( ) and the other microphysical parameters. Large surface BC concentrations and high values of scattering coefficients occurred during winter, followed by lower values during spring and summer season. However, the columnar aerosols showed different seasonal behaviour, with high AOD values occurring mostly during the summer months, and low to moderate values prevailed during the rest of the period. Monthly mean AOD at mid-visible wavelengths ranged between ~0.1 and 0.34. The Angstroms coefficient ( ) remained high (>1.2) during the entire study period, thereby indicating the relative dominance of fine particles. Monthly mean BC concentrations varied between 303 and 1026 ng m−3. The surface single scattering albedo at 525 nm was in the range from 0.7 to 0.8, thereby indicating the dominance of absorbing aerosols over this region. Mean reduction in the diurnally averaged solar flux (as estimated using discrete ordinate radiative transfer model GAME) was found to be 24.9 Wm−2 and 61.8 Wm−2 for pollution and dust event respectively in June 2006. Keywords Aerosol optical properties, radiative forcing, coastal zone [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 12 of the book "Soilless Culture: Theory & Practice" is presented. It discusses inorganic and synthetic organic components of soilless culture and potting mixes. Most commonly used inorganic substrates include sand, tuff, perlite, vermiculite, expanded clay granules and zeolite. Most commonly used synthetic organic media include polyurethane, polystyrene and polyester fleece.

Copyright of International MultiConference of Engineers & Computer Scientists 2008 is the property of Newswood Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There are 1500 distinct ethnolinguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa and civil conflicts for various reasons are numerous. The vast portion of the current literature on ethnic conflict claims that in-group prejudice, the tendency to judge, evaluate, and act so as to favor one's in-group over an out-group is common. Disputing the thesis that ethnicity is a prime cause for serious conflicts, I examine how ethnicity shapes the cross-cultural encounters and the making of a familiar social and political order, helping the process of state-building in sub-Saharan Africa. My contention is that derivative modernization and Westernization theories, putting disproportionate blame on negative ethnicity, represent many social and political unrealities. The question, as set up by Antonio Gramsci (1971) about consciousness that accepts or challenges cultural hegemony, is different from my core question posed in this chapter: what is the nature of a given line of discourse in sub-Saharan state-building? Is there any internal moral coherence in the African arguments in positive ethnicity? I conclude that the politics of social autonomy and presentation of varied social views should not be viewed as anti-state in terms of state-building. The empirical question is who can take initiatives and reestablish social control of state? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to the book "The Politics of Ethnicity and National Identity."

Data exchange with strong data transmission time guarantees is necessary in the internal communication of an aircraft. The Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) has been developed for this purpose. Its design is based on the principle of a switched network with physically redundant links to support availability. It should also be tolerant to transmission and link failures in the network. Recent research on an industrial case study by Anand et. al. reveals that AFDX frame management design is vulnerable to faults such as network errors, network babbling etc. Their proposed modifications, though are able to solve these problems, degrades the performance of network in terms of delay at receiving end and delay before the receiving end-system gets reset. They also do not present any performance analysis. We propose new solutions to alleviate these problems in AFDX frame management design, formally model it in Spin incorporating our proposed solution, thus also showing a finite state modeling of the above is possible. We also verify some of its relevant properties and carry out a performance analysis of the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We believe that intelligent information agents will represent their users interest in electronic marketplaces and other forums to trade, exchange, share, identify, and locate goods and services. Such information worlds will present unforeseen opportunities as well as challenges that can be best addressed by robust, self-sustaining agent communities. An agent community is a stable, adaptive group of self-interested agents that share common resources and must coordinate their efforts to effectively develop, utilize and nurture group resources and organization. More specifically, agents will need mechanisms to benefit from complementary expertise in the group, pool together resources to meet new demands and exploit transient opportunities, negotiate fair settlements, develop norms to facilitate coordination, exchange help and transfer knowledge between peers, secure the community against intruders, and learn to collaborate effectively. In this talk, I will summarize some of our research results on trust-based computing, negotiation, and learning that will enable intelligent agents to develop and sustain robust, adaptive, and successful agent communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have been conducted on pre-fetching models based on decision trees, Markov chains, and path analysis. However, the increased uses of dynamic pages, frequent changes in site structure and user access patterns have limited the efficacy of these static techniques. One of the techniques that are used for improving user latency is Caching and another is Web pre-fetching. Approaches that bank solely on caching offer limited performance improvement because it is difficult for caching to handle the large number of increasingly diverse files. An agent based method is proposed here to cluster related pages into different categories based on the access patterns. Additionally page ranking is used to build up the prediction model at the initial stages when users are yet to invoke any page. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Localization protocols enable an entity (called the verifier) to determine the physical location of another entity (called the prover), even if the prover maliciously advertises a false location or tries to corrupt the verifier's time measurements by time-shifting its responses. Unfortunately, the correctness of such protocols is critically dependent on the verifier's ability to make high-resolution time measurements and on the prover's ability and trustworthiness to send its response by the mandated time. To address these problems, we propose the idea of incorporating passive witnesses into the localization protocol. All witnesses monitor the same bilateral packet exchange between the prover and lead verifier and later report their respective inter-packet time measurements to the lead verifier for further processing. We show how the extra information provided by the witnesses can eliminate the threat of response-time shifting by a malicious prover. We also pose the question, how can we combine multiple localization observations to a single localization estimate? While analyzing that, we observe that the localization estimate is sensitive to the relative position of the prover among the verifiers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method for systematically selecting the large number of sequences needed to custom design an oligonucleotide microarray was presented. This approach uses a Perl script to query sequence databases with gene lists obtained from previously designed (and publicly available) microarrays. Homologous sequences passing a user-defined threshold are returned and stored in a candidate gene database. Using this versatile technique, microarrays can be designed for any organism having sequence data. In addition, the ability to select specific input gene lists allows the design of microarrays tailored to address questions pertaining to specific pathways or processes. Given recent concerns about the accuracy of annotation in public sequence databases, it is also necessary to confirm the correct orientation of candidate sequences. This step is performed by a second Perl script that extracts protein similarity information from individual Unigene records, checks for consistency of features, and adds this information to the candidate gene database. Discrepancies between the orientations determined using protein similarities and that predicted by a given sequence's assigned orientation are readily apparent by querying the candidate gene database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among vertebrates, the mammalian systems that are frequently used to investigate questions related to human health have gained the most benefit from microarray technology to date. However, it is clear that biological investigations and the generalized conclusions drawn from them, can only be enhanced by including organisms in which specific processes can be readily studied because of their genetic, physiological, or developmental disposition. As a result, the field of functional genomics has recently begun to embrace a number of other vertebrate species. This review summarizes the current state of microarray technology in a subset of these vertebrate organisms, including Xenopus, Rana, zebrafish, killifish (Fundulus sp.), medaka (Oryzias latipes), Atlantic salmon, and rainbow trout. A summary of various applications of microarray technology and a brief introduction to the steps involved in carrying out a microarray experiment are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern development environments integrate various static analyses into the build process. Analyses that analyze the whole project whenever the project changes are impractical in this context. We present an approach to automatic incrementalization of analyses that are specified as tabled logic programs and evaluated using incremental tabled evaluation, a technique for efficiently updating memo tables in response to changes in facts and rules. The approach has been implemented and integrated into the Eclipse IDE. Our measurements show that this technique is effective for automatically incrementalizing a broad range of static analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tumor necrosis factor receptor associated factor 3 (TRAF3) is one of the most enigmatic members in the TRAF family that consists of six members, TRAF1 to 6. Despite its similarities with other TRAFs in terms of structure and protein-protein association, overexpression of TRAF3 does not induce activation of the commonly known TRAF-inducible signaling pathways, namely NF-ºB and JNK. This lack of a simple functional assay in combination with the mysterious early lethality of the TRAF3-deficient mice has made the study of the biological function of TRAF3 challenging for almost ten years. Excitingly, TRAF3 has been identified recently to perform two seemingly distinct roles. Namely, TRAF3 functions as a negative regulator of the NF-κB pathway and separately, as a positive regulator of type I IFN production, placing itself as a critical regulator of both innate and adaptive immune responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, three prediction servers used for predicting virulence factors, bacterial toxins, and neurotoxins have been described. VICMpred server predicts the functional proteins of gram-negative bacteria that include virulence factors, information molecule, cellular process, and metabolism molecule. BTXpred server allows users to predict bacterial toxins, its release, and further classification of exotoxins. NTXpred server allows prediction of neurotoxins and further classifying them based on their function and source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, two prediction servers of linear B-cell epiotpes have been described; (i) BcePred, based on physico-chemical properties that include hydrophilicity, flexibility/mobility, accessibility, polarity, exposed surface, turns, and antigenicity and ii) ABCpred, based on recurrent neural network. Both of the servers assist in locating linear epitope regions in a protein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major challenges in the field of subunit vaccine design is to identify the antigenic regions in an antigen, which can activate B cell. These antigenic regions are called B-cell epitopes. In this chapter, we describe how to use Bcipep, which is a database of experimentally determined linear B-cell epitopes of varying immunogenicity collected from literature and other publicly available databases. The current version of Bcipep database contains 3,031 entries that include 763 immunodominant, 1,797 immunogenic, and 471 null-immunogenic epitopes. The database provides a set of tools for analysis and extraction of data that includes keyword search, peptide mapping, and BLAST search. The database is available http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/bcipep/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, high As ground waters have been significantly recognized from vast alluvium of Bengal Delta Plain (BDP) and arsenicosis has emerged as an issue of great concern during the past decade due to rise in number of cancer cases. In BDP, arsenic removal plants (ARP) are often malfunctioning and field experience reveals that ARP needs serious attention from both implementers and beneficiaries, otherwise the quality of treated water is often questionable. The present study deals with groundwater (hydro) chemistry (high redox sensitive species, alkalinity and low Eh, SO42-, NO3-, DO) and development of anoxic condition of the affected aquifers. High AsT/As(III) groundwater (AsT - 475-532 μg L-1, As(III) - 290-316 μg L-1) is often associated (r²=0.43) with high Fe (16.20-2.23 mg L-1). Most of the FeT in the aqueous phase are Fe(II) (>95%) and the catalytic action of Fe(II) plays an important role in the fresh oxidative precipitation of Fe(III)(hydr)oxide and that can effectively disturb the Fe(III)/Fe(II) redox equilibria. BDP groundwaters (both natural and synthetic) are exposed (4 hrs, 9 am-1 pm) to sunlight to demonstrate effective As removal (98-95%). The batch studies illustrate that increasing initial As(III) concentration (600-1000 μg L-1) decreases As removal (83 to 54%). Attempt is made to optimize and accelerate the As removal by adding various water-soluble chelating agents (EDTA, Na-citrate, oxalic and tartaric acid) and EDTA is the best among the lot (98% removal) whereas Na-citrate is the another suitable option (92% removal). The later chemical agent can be easily replaced with locally available natural source (lemon). The green chemistry approach and user-friendly technique can be further recommended for large-scale field trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human performance in computer-aided system has engrossed inevitably human issues in cognitive functioning. The present endeavor focuses on the associated influence of training, automation reliability on the monitoring performance and workload in multi-task ambience. MAT battery was utilized with engine-system monitoring, two dimensional tracking, and fuel resource management tasks were the concerned elements, in which only system engine-monitoring task was automated in the training as well as in the final test sessions. A 2 x 2 x 2 x 3, mixed factorial design was employed. Monitoring performance, false alarms, reaction time and root mean square error performance were recorded as dependent measures. Results revealed that automation-induced complacency might be the feature of multi-task condition where subjects detected automation failures under high static system reliability. Results further showed that mental workload significantly reduced from pre- to post-sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of burrs on the finished workpiece often leads to difficulty in assembly operation, injury to operators, etc., necessitating incorporation of additional processes of deburring. Exit burr formation by milling usually occurs when the cutter moves out of the work piece. One method for minimizing this problem is to prevent the tool from exiting the workpiece while removing material. Burr formation can also be reduced considerably by edge beveling of the workpiece. In the present work, the influence of beveling the exit edge of the workpiece on the burr formation in milling has been experimentally investigated to find out the optimum condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is a major concern for a large fraction of sensor network applications. Douceur first introduced the notion of sybil attack [4], where a single entity(node) illegitimately presents multiple identities. As the nodes in sensor networks can be physically captured by an adversary, sybil attack can manifest in a severe form leading to the malfunction of basic operational protocols including routing, resource allocation and misbehavior detection. In this study, we propose a location verification based defense against sybil attack for sensor network where we assume that the network is consisted of static sensor nodes. We report quantitatively about the probability of not being able to detect sybil attack. This probability is indicative of the usefulness of our proposed protocol. Keywords: Sybil attack, Security, Wireless Sensor Network, Triangulation, Location Verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In WDM optical networks, prior to data transfer, lightpath establish-ment between source and destination nodes is usually carried out through a wavelength reservation process. The two common approaches for this, namely Source Initiated Reservation (SIR) and Destination Initiated Reservation (DIR) use only one wavelength for reservation, and, under heavy load, it is often blocked due to outdated link information. The situation can be improved by increasing the number of wavelengths to be attempted for reservation concurrently. This idea, implemented on DIR in this paper, is termed as Destination Initiated Multiwavelength Reservation Protocol (DIMRP). DIMRP is analyzed to find that an optimum number named as selectivity (i.e., number of simultaneous wavelengths to be attempted for reservation) exists for a given value of mean connection requests and total number of wavelengths per link. DIMRP is compared with its peers and overall result appears quite promising to draw the attention of network providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are interested in the problem of coordination of ground-based control stations and orbiting space probes for allocating monitoring tasks for emerging environmental situations that have the potential to become catastrophic events threatening life and property. We assume that ground based sensor networks have recognized seismic, geological, atmospheric, or some other natural phenomena that has created a rapidly evolving event which needs immediate, detailed and continuous monitoring. Control stations can calculate the resources needed to monitor such situations, but must concurrently negotiate with multiple autonomous orbiters to allocate the monitoring tasks. While control stations may prefer some orbiters over others based on their position, trajectory, equipment, etc, orbiters too have prior commitments to fulfill. We evaluate three different negotiation schemes that can be used by the control station and the orbiters to complete the monitoring task assignment. We use utilitarian and egalitarian social welfare as the metric to be maximized and discuss the relative performances of these mechanisms under different preference and resource constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes and analyzes a real-time guarantee scheme for time-sensitive messages on ad hoc sensor network built on top of dual channels, each of which exploits a time-slotted channel access mechanism synchronized across the dual channels. Each message is evenly partitioned to produce two identical message sets for the coordinator to determine the polling schedule according to the EDF policy. The slot rearrangement step maximizes the number of switchable pairs so that the scheduled polls can be switched dynamically between the channels in response to the current channel status. By the runtime slot exchange procedure that reclaims slots reserved but not used due to channel error, the deadline meet ratio can be further improved. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the real-time performance by up to 12.5 % compared with global EDF or NCASP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]