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We present an extension of the well-known micromagnetic package Mumax3 to simulate magnon-polaritons in realistic magnetic materials and nanostructures. Mumax3-cQED leverages the full GPU-accelerated capabilities of Mumax3 to model standard spin-spin interactions and the coupling of magnetic moments to external space- and time-dependent magnetic fields, with the additional unique feature of including the coupling to a cavity. We validate the code against results obtained from the Dicke model in both the paramagnetic and the superradiant phases. We show that hybrid magnon-light states can be calculated, as well as the non-equilibrium dynamics and their approach to equilibrium. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of Mumax3-cQED to reproduce experimental results and design magnon-cavity experiments, including three-dimensional and coplanar waveguide resonators. The code is fully available and will be useful for designing experiments involving microscopic saturated ferromagnets as well as systems featuring spin textures such as domain walls, vortices, or skyrmions., Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures

Precipitation events in large cities can be a challenge and a problem for continuing the regular dynamics of people flows and economic activities. It is enough to remember what happens at overpasses, on main avenues, as well as in the lower and marginalized parts of cities when we have intense rainfall. Unfortunately, the accelerated and disorganized growth of metropolises in Mexico has not allowed for the fulfillment of urban planning (S\'anchez-Rodr\'iguez et al., 2013), a situation that is especially evident during conditions of abundant rainfall. In this work, the behavior of rainfall in the municipality of Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, since 1951 and until 2022, is specifically explained and with a certain level of detail., Comment: in Spanish language

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating low-resource languages into multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We introduce a novel application of weighted cross-entropy, typically used for unbalanced datasets, to facilitate the integration of low-resource languages into pre-trained multilingual ASR models within the context of continual multilingual learning. We fine-tune the Whisper multilingual ASR model on five high-resource languages and one low-resource language, employing language-weighted dynamic cross-entropy and data augmentation. The results show a remarkable 6.69% word error rate (WER) reduction for the low-resource language compared to the fine-tuned model without applying our approach, and a 48.86% WER reduction compared to the original Whisper model. In addition, our approach yields an average WER reduction of 3.29% across the six languages, showing no degradation for the high-resource languages., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Presented at Interspeech 2024

As solar power continues to grow and replace traditional energy sources, the need for reliable forecasting models becomes increasingly important to ensure the stability and efficiency of the grid. However, the management of these models still needs to be improved, and new tools and technologies are required to handle the deployment and control of solar facilities. This work introduces a novel framework named Cloud-based Analysis and Integration for Data Efficiency (CAIDE), designed for real-time monitoring, management, and forecasting of solar irradiance sensor farms. CAIDE is designed to manage multiple sensor farms simultaneously while improving predictive models in real-time using well-grounded Modeling and Simulation (M&S) methodologies. The framework leverages Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to support the deployment and analysis of solar plants in dynamic environments. The system can adapt and re-train the model when given incorrect results, ensuring that forecasts remain accurate and up-to-date. Furthermore, CAIDE can be executed in sequential, parallel, and distributed architectures, assuring scalability. The effectiveness of CAIDE is demonstrated in a complex scenario composed of several solar irradiance sensor farms connected to a centralized management system. Our results show that CAIDE is scalable and effective in managing and forecasting solar power production while improving the accuracy of predictive models in real time. The framework has important implications for the deployment of solar plants and the future of renewable energy sources.

Acoustic local positioning systems (ALPSs) are an interesting alternative for indoor positioning due to certain advantages over other approaches, including their relatively high accuracy, low cost, and room-level signal propagation. Centimeter-level or fine-grained indoor positioning can be an asset for robot navigation, guiding a person to, for instance, a particular piece in a museum or to a specific product in a shop, targeted advertising, or augmented reality. In airborne system applications, acoustic positioning can be based on using opportunistic signals or sounds produced by the person or object to be located (e.g., noise from appliances or the speech from a speaker) or from encoded emission beacons (or anchors) specifically designed for this purpose. This work presents a review of the different challenges that designers of systems based on encoded emission beacons must address in order to achieve suitable performance. At low-level processing, the waveform design (coding and modulation) and the processing of the received signal are key factors to address such drawbacks as multipath propagation, multiple-access interference, nearfar effect, or Doppler shifting. With regards to high-level system design, the issues to be addressed are related to the distribution of beacons, ease of deployment, and calibration and positioning algorithms, including the possible fusion of information. Apart from theoretical discussions, this work also includes the description of an ALPS that was implemented, installed in a large area and tested for mobile robot navigation. In addition to practical interest for real applications, airborne ALPSs can also be used as an excellent platform to test complex algorithms, which can be subsequently adapted for other positioning systems, such as underwater acoustic systems or ultrawideband radiofrequency (UWB RF) systems.

Performing nanoscale scanning electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) requires three essential ingredients. First, a static magnetic field together to field gradients to Zeeman split the electronic energy levels with spatial resolution. Second, a radiofrequency (rf) magnetic field capable of inducing spin transitions. Finally, a sensitive detection method to quantify the energy absorbed by spins. This is usually achieved by combining externally applied magnetic fields with inductive coils or cavities, fluorescent defects or scanning probes. Here, we theoretically propose the realization of a EPR scanning sensor merging all three characteristics into a single device: the vortex core stabilized in ferromagnetic thin-film discs. On one hand, the vortex ground state generates a significant static magnetic field and field gradients. On the other hand, the precessional motion of the vortex core around its equilibrium position produces a circularly polarized oscillating magnetic field, which is enough to produce spin transitions. Finally, the spin-magnon coupling broadens the vortex gyrotropic frequency, suggesting a direct measure of the presence of unpaired electrons. Moreover, the vortex core can be displaced by simply using external magnetic fields of a few mT, enabling EPR scanning microscopy with large spatial resolution. Our numerical simulations show that, by using low damping magnets, it is theoretically possible to detect single spins located on the disc's surface. Vortex nanocavities could also attain strong coupling to individual spin molecular qubits, with potential applications to mediate qubit-qubit interactions or to implement qubit readout protocols.

We derive an expression for the nearest-neighbor spacing distribution $P(s)$ of the energy levels of quantum systems with intermediate dynamics between regularity and chaos and missing levels due to random experimental errors. The expression is based on the Brody distribution, the most widely used for fitting mixed spectra as a function of one parameter. By using Monte Carlo simulations of intermediate spectra based on the $\beta$-Hermite ensemble of Random Matrix Theory, we evaluate the quality of the formula and its suitability for fitting purposes. Estimations of the Brody parameter and the fraction of missing levels can be obtained by a least-square two-parameter fitting of the experimental $P(s)$. The results should be important to distinguish the origins of deviations from RMT in experimental spectra.

In this work logistic regression when both the response and the predictor variables may be missing is considered. Several existing approaches are reviewed, including complete case analysis, inverse probability weighting, multiple imputation and maximum likelihood. The methods are compared in a simulation study, which serves to evaluate the bias, the variance and the mean squared error of the estimators for the regression coefficients. In the simulations, the maximum likelihood methodology is the one that presents the best results, followed by multiple imputation with five imputations, which is the second best. The methods are applied to a case study on the obesity for schoolchildren in the municipality of Viana do Castelo, North Portugal, where a logistic regression model is used to predict the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) indicator from physical examinations and the past values of the obesity status. All the variables in the case study are potentially missing, with gender as the only exception. The results provided by the several methods are in well agreement, indicating the relevance of the past values of IOTF and physical scores for the prediction of obesity. Practical recommendations are given., Comment: 13 pages, 14 tables

Cavity photons and ferromagnetic spins excitations can exchange information coherently in hybrid architectures, at speeds set by their mutual coupling strength. Speed enhancement is usually achieved by optimizing the geometry of the electromagnetic cavity. Here we show that the geometry of the ferromagnet plays also an important role, by setting the fundamental frequency of the magnonic resonator. Using focused ion beam patterning, we vary the aspect ratio of different Permalloy samples reaching operation frequencies above 10 GHz while working at low external magnetic fields. Additionally, we perform broad band ferromagnetic resonance measurements and cavity experiments that demonstrate that the magnon-photon coupling strength can be estimated using either open transmission lines or resonant cavities, yielding very good agreement. Finally, we describe a simple theoretical framework based on electromagnetic and micromagnetic simulations that successfully accounts for the experimental results. This approach can be used to design hybrid quantum systems exploiting whatsoever magnetostatic mode excited in ferromagnets of arbitrary size and shape and to tune their operation conditions.

The heavy fluxonium at zero external flux has a long-lived state when coupled capacitively to any other system. We analyze it by projecting all the fluxonium relevant operators into the qutrit subspace, as this long-lived configuration corresponds to the second excited fluxonium level. This state becomes a bound-state in the continuum (BIC) when the coupling occurs to an extended system supporting a continuum of modes. In the case without noise, we find BIC lifetimes that can be much larger than seconds $T_1\gg {\rm s}$ when the fluxonium is coupled to a superconducting waveguide, while typical device frequencies are in the order of ${\rm GHz}$. We have performed a detailed study of the different sources of decoherence in a realistic experiment, obtaining that upward transitions caused by a finite temperature in the waveguide and decay induced by $1/f$-flux noise are the most dangerous ones. Even in their presence, BICs decay times could reach the range of ${T_1\sim \rm 10^{-1} ms},$ while preparation times are of the order of $10^{2}$ns., Comment: 8 pages

We analyze the coupling of two flux qubits with a general many-body projector into the low-energy subspace. Specifically, we extract the effective Hamiltonians that controls the dynamics of two qubits when they are coupled via a capacitor and/or via a Josephson junction. While the capacitor induces a static charge coupling tunable by design, the Josephson junction produces a magnetic-like interaction easily tunable by replacing the junction with a SQUID. Those two elements allow to engineer qubits Hamiltonians with $XX$, $YY$ and $ZZ$ interactions, including ultra-strongly coupled ones. We present an exhaustive numerical study for two three-Josephson junctions flux qubit that can be directly used in experimental work. The method developed here, namely the numerical tool to extract qubit effective Hamiltonians at strong coupling, can be applied to replicate our analysis for general systems of many qubits and any type of coupling., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2110.12779

Successful partnerships between researchers, experts and public health authorities has been critical to navigate the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. In Costa Rica, we constructed a multilayer network model that incorporates a diverse contact structure for each individual (node). The different layers which constitute the individual's contact structure include: family, friends, and sporadic interactions. Different scenarios were constructed to forecast and have a better understanding of the possible routes of the pandemic in the country, given the information that was available at the time and the different measures implemented by the health authorities of the country. Strong collaboration within our diverse team allowed using the model to tailor advice on contingency measures to health authorities. The model helped develop informed strategies to prepare the public health system in Costa Rica. The development, evolution and applications of a multilayer network model of Covid-19 in the adoption of sanitary measures in Costa Rica has been an example of the potential of such partnerships., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, 3 Tables

A flux qubit can interact strongly when it is capacitively coupled to other circuit elements. This interaction can be separated in two parts, one acting on the qubit subspaces and one in which excited states mediate the interaction. The first term dominates the interaction between the flux qubit and an LC-resonator, leading to ultrastrong couplings of the form $\sigma^y(a+a^\dagger),$ which complement the inductive $\sigma^xi(a^\dagger-a)$ coupling. However, when coupling two flux qubits capacitively, all terms need to be taken into account, leading to complex non-stoquastic ultrastrong interaction of the $\sigma^y\sigma^y$, $\sigma^z\sigma^z$ and $\sigma^x\sigma^x$ type. Our theory explains all these interactions, describing them in terms of general circuit properties---coupling capacitances, qubit gaps, inductive, Josephson and capactive energies---, that apply to a wide variety of circuits and flux qubit designs., Comment: 4+5

Pedestrian intention recognition is very important to develop robust and safe autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionalities for urban driving. In this work, we develop an end-to-end pedestrian intention framework that performs well on day- and night- time scenarios. Our framework relies on objection detection bounding boxes combined with skeletal features of human pose. We study early, late, and combined (early and late) fusion mechanisms to exploit the skeletal features and reduce false positives as well to improve the intention prediction performance. The early fusion mechanism results in AP of 0.89 and precision/recall of 0.79/0.89 for pedestrian intention classification. Furthermore, we propose three new metrics to properly evaluate the pedestrian intention systems. Under these new evaluation metrics for the intention prediction, the proposed end-to-end network offers accurate pedestrian intention up to half a second ahead of the actual risky maneuver., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, IEEE Asilomar SSC

Coherent exchange between photons and different matter excitations (like qubits, acoustic surface waves or spins) allows for the entanglement of light and matter and provides a toolbox for performing fundamental quantum physics. On top of that, coherent exchange is a basic ingredient in the majority of quantum information processors. In this work, we develop the theory for coupling between magnetic textures (vortices and skyrmions) stabilized in ferromagnetic nanodiscs and photons generated in a circuit. In particular, we show how to perform broadband spectroscopy of the magnetic textures by sending photons through a transmission line and recording the transmission. We also discuss the possibility of reaching the strong coupling regime between these texture excitations and a single photon residing in a cavity.

High speed imaging was used to capture the fast dynamics of two injection methods. The first one and perhaps the oldest known, is based on solid needles and used for dermal pigmentation, or tattooing. The second, is a novel needle-free micro-jet injector based on thermocavitation. We performed injections in agarose gel skin surrogates, and studied both methods using ink formulations with different fluidic properties to understand better the end-point injection. Both methods were used to inject water and a glycerin-water mixture. Commercial inks were used with the tattoo machine and compared with the other liquids injected. The agarose gel was kept stationary or in motion at a constant speed, along a plane perpendicular to the needle. The agarose deformation process due to the solid needle injection was also studied. The advantages and limitations of both methods are discussed, and we conclude that micro-jet injection has better performance than solid injection when comparing several quantities for three different liquids, such as the energy and volumetric delivery efficiencies per injection, depth and width of penetrations. A newly defined dimensionless quantity, the penetration strength, is used to indicate potential excessive damage to skin surrogates. Needle-free methods, such as the micro-jet injector here presented, could reduce the environmental impact of used needles, and benefit the health of millions of people that use needles on a daily basis for medical and cosmetic use.

Classical epidemiology has focused on the control of confounding but it is only recently that epidemiologists have started to focus on the bias produced by colliders. A collider for a certain pair of variables (e.g., an outcome Y and an exposure A) is a third variable (C) that is caused by both. In a directed acyclic graph (DAG), a collider is the variable in the middle of an inverted fork (i.e., the variable C in A -> C <- Y). Controlling for, or conditioning an analysis on a collider (i.e., through stratification or regression) can introduce a spurious association between its causes. This potentially explains many paradoxical findings in the medical literature, where established risk factors for a particular outcome appear protective. We use an example from non-communicable disease epidemiology to contextualize and explain the effect of conditioning on a collider. We generate a dataset with 1,000 observations and run Monte-Carlo simulations to estimate the effect of 24-hour dietary sodium intake on systolic blood pressure, controlling for age, which acts as a confounder, and 24-hour urinary protein excretion, which acts as a collider. We illustrate how adding a collider to a regression model introduces bias. Thus, to prevent paradoxical associations, epidemiologists estimating causal effects should be wary of conditioning on colliders. We provide R-code in easy-to-read boxes throughout the manuscript and a GitHub repository (https://github.com/migariane/ColliderApp) for the reader to reproduce our example. We also provide an educational web application allowing real-time interaction to visualize the paradoxical effect of conditioning on a collider http://watzilei.com/shiny/collider/.

Strong light-matter coupling is a necessary condition for exchanging information in quantum information protocols. It is used to couple different qubits (matter) via a quantum bus (photons) or to communicate different type of excitations, e.g. transducing between light and phonons or magnons. An unexplored, so far, interface is the coupling between light and topologically protected particle like excitations as magnetic domain walls, skyrmions or vortices. Here, we show theoretically that a single photon living in a superconducting cavity can be coupled strongly to the gyrotropic mode of a magnetic vortex in a nanodisc. We combine numerical and analytical calculations for a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator and different realizations of the nanodisc (materials and sizes). We show that, for enhancing the coupling, constrictions fabricated in the resonator are beneficial, allowing to reach the strong coupling in CoFe discs of radius $200-400$ nm having resonance frequencies of few GHz. The strong coupling regime permits to exchange coherently a single photon and quanta of vortex excitations. Thus, our calculations show that the device proposed here serves as a transducer between photons and gyrating vortices, opening the way to complement superconducting qubits with topologically protected spin-excitations like vortices or skyrmions. We finish by discussing potential applications in quantum data processing based on the exploitation of the vortex as a short-wavelength magnon emitter., Comment: published version

We put forward a novel calibration of p values, the "Adaptive Robust Lower Bound" (ARLB) which maps p values into approximations of posterior probabilities taking into account the effect of sample sizes. We build on the Robust Lower Bound proposed by Sellke, Bayarri and Berger (2001), but we incorporate a simple power of the sample size to make it adaptive to different amounts of data. We present several illustrations from where it is apparent that the ARLB closely approximates exact Bayes Factors. In particular, it has the same asymptotics as posterior probabilities but avoiding the problems of "Bayesian Information Criterion" (BIC) for small samples relative to the number of parameters. We prove that the ARLB is consistent as the sample size grows, and that it is information consistent (Berger and Pericchi, 2001) for the canonical Normal case, but with methods that are keen to be generalized. So ARLB also avoids the problems of certain conjugate priors as g-priors. In summary, this is a novel criterion easy to apply, as it only requires a real p value, a sample size and parameter dimensionality. This method is intended to aid the practitioners, who are increasingly aware of the lack of reproducibility of traditional hypothesis testing "findings" but at the same time, lack of concrete simple alternatives. Here is one., Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures

For a dynamical system, we study the set of points $\cal W$ whose orbit approximates any chosen point at certain specified rates. Our basic setting is that of left shift acting on topological Markov chains endowed with a local weak Gibbs measure. Our rates of recurrence are so fast that the corresponding set $\cal W$ has measure zero, but we obtain a generalized Bowen formula for Carath\'eodory dimension. For the case of Markov transformations with countable partition and big image (BI) property a Bowen-type formula is obtained for the Hausdorff dimension of those exceptional sets. In particular, we apply our general results to Gauss and Luroth maps, a not Bernoulli modification of Gauss map and some inner functions. Since we only require the existence of weak Gibbs measures we can deal with non H\"older potentials and we can also consider intermittent systems as the Manneville-Pomeau map., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:math/0703222 by other authors

The number of students that live in families where a language other than English is spoken has risen relative to the English-only households in the United States over the last 25 years. These students face the dual challenge of mastering English while acquiring academic skills and knowledge. The education of these students has been shaped by several national- and state- level legal decisions of the past that have required schools to take action by providing services to help linguistic minority students overcome language barriers that impede their equal participation. Those services most often take the form of either an "English-immersion" approach, in which students receive all instruction in English, or employ a "bilingual model" where students are initially taught in some combination of English and their native language and eventually transfer to English-only classrooms. The question of which model of instruction is more "effective" has been notoriously difficult to answer and remains an open and controversial debate. The authors of this article take advantage of a policy passed in California that changed the default instructional program for ELs . Prior to 1998, most ELs were placed into bilingual education. This state-level legislation forced schools to move students to move to a different instructional setting--a change that would not had been chosen otherwise--providing a natural experiment opportunity to evaluate the effect of bilingual education versus English immersion on the academic achievement of ELs. Also analyzed is how changes in the composition of the classroom affect the academic achievement of students. Findings indicate that the achievement scores of ELs declined by the switch from bilingual education to English immersion programs, with the exception of grades 2-3 reading scores. The authors also found that there is a beneficial effect of placing ELs into classrooms with more native English speakers. Tables and figures are appended.

We fabricated YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_7$ (YBCO) direct current (dc) nano superconducting quantum interference devices (nanoSQUIDs) based on grain boundary Josephson junctions by focused ion beam patterning. Characterization of electric transport and noise properties at 4.2$\,$K in magnetically shielded environment yields a very small inductance $L$ of a few pH for an optimized device geometry. This in turn results in very low values of flux noise $<50\,{\rm n}\Phi_0/{\rm Hz}^{1/2}$ in the thermal white noise limit, which yields spin sensitivities of a few $\mu_{\rm B}/{\rm Hz}^{1/2}$ ($\Phi_0$ is the magnetic flux quantum and $\mu_{\rm B}$ is the Bohr magneton). We observe frequency-dependent excess noise up to 7$\,$MHz, which can only partially be eliminated by bias reversal readout. This indicates the presence of fluctuators of unknown origin, possibly related to defect-induced spins in the SrTiO$_3$ substrate. We demonstrate the potential of using YBCO nanoSQUIDs for the investigation of small spin systems, by placing a 39$\,$nm diameter Fe nanowire, encapsulated in a carbon nanotube, on top of a non-optimized YBCO nanoSQUID and by measuring the magnetization reversal of the Fe nanowire via the change of magnetic flux coupled to the nanoSQUID. The measured flux signals upon magnetization reversal of the Fe nanowire are in very good agreement with estimated values, and the determined switching fields indicate magnetization reversal of the nanowire via curling mode., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure and supplemental material (4 pages)

In this work, we review and expand recent theoretical proposals for the realization of electronic thermal diodes based on tunnel-junctions of normal metal and superconducting thin films. Starting from the basic rectifying properties of a single hybrid tunnel junction, we will show how the rectification efficiency can be largely increased by combining multiple junctions in an asymmetric chain of tunnel-coupled islands. We propose three different designs, analyzing their performance and their potential advantages. Besides being relevant from a fundamental physics point of view, this kind of devices might find important technological application as fundamental building blocks in solid-state thermal nanocircuits and in general-purpose cryogenic electronic applications requiring energy management., Comment: 9 pages, 5 color figures

Knowledge of the mechanisms of interaction between self-aggregating peptides and nucleic acids or other polyanions is key to the understanding of many aggregation processes underlying several human diseases (e.g. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases). Determining the affinity and kinetic steps of such interactions is challenging due to the competition between hydrophobic self-aggregating forces and electrostatic binding forces. Kahalalide F (KF) is an anticancer hydrophobic peptide which contains a single positive charge that confers strong aggregative properties with polyanions. This makes KF an ideal model to elucidate the mechanisms by which self-aggregation competes with binding to a strongly charged polyelectrolyte such as DNA. We use optical tweezers to apply mechanical forces to single DNA molecules and show that KF and DNA interact in a two-step kinetic process promoted by the electrostatic binding of DNA to the aggregate surface followed by the stabilization of the complex due to hydrophobic interactions. From the measured pulling curves we determine the spectrum of binding affinities, kinetic barriers and lengths of DNA segments sequestered within the KF-DNA complex. We find there is a capture distance beyond which the complex collapses into compact aggregates stabilized by strong hydrophobic forces, and discuss how the bending rigidity of the nucleic acid affects such process. We hypothesize that within an in vivo context, the enhanced electrostatic interaction of KF due to its aggregation might mediate the binding to other polyanions. The proposed methodology should be useful to quantitatively characterize other compounds or proteins in which the formation of aggregates is relevant., Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, Supplementary Information

California currently faces an opportunity to develop an effective data system that can assist in improving the state's future understanding of the educational progress of English learners (ELs). This policy brief outlines the needs for good data on ELs and makes recommendations for creating an effective longitudinal data system for ELs. It provides general advice on how to enhance the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS), which tracks individual students over time, and the California Longitudinal Teacher Integrated Data Education System (CALTIDES), which tracks individual teachers over time. Ultimately, legislators, practitioners, and researchers can all benefit from the creation of an effective longitudinal data system that better assesses the effectiveness of various programs serving the state's EL population.

This report presents the results from a seven-month study of successful schools in California performed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). It explored some of the concepts underlying the "successful schools" approach to defining education adequacy and considered their implications for analyzing educational adequacy in California. The successful schools approach seeks to determine the cost of the education needed to reach a specified level of educational outcomes by identifying districts achieving these outcomes and determining how much they are spending. This study sought to improve on this basic approach by selecting schools that have been consistently performing at a higher level than the one predicted by their demographics, rather than selecting successful schools that are above an absolute level of performance in a given year or over a given period of time. The AIR analyzed these schools that were "beating the odds" (BTO) with regard to student achievement and compared them to low-performing (LP) schools. Telephone interviews were also conducted with 23 schools from both groups to understand their resource allocation practices and to identify common themes in the factors principals deemed necessary for success. A major premise underlying all approaches to education adequacy is that success is directly linked to the resources available. This study explored this assumption by looking for evidence to confirm or disprove the idea that resource quantities constitute the primary distinguishing factor between successful schools and all others. Following an Introduction, Chapter 2 reviews findings from prior successful schools studies and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these alternative applications. Chapter 3 describes the data and methods used to address the subsequent research questions for this study. Chapter 4 presents methods for appropriately conceptualizing "successful schools" for the purposes of this study, and presents analyses of these schools. Chapter 4 also analyzes the observed resources differences in these schools compared to "low performing" and other schools statewide. Finally, Chapter 5 presents the results of phone interviews with a subset of BTO and LP school principals in an attempt to assess the extent the resource findings from Chapter 4 are corroborated and to identify other factors said to be related to the educational outcomes produced by these schools. The final chapter of this report contains a discussion of possible implications for considering education adequacy in California. (Contains 34 exhibits.)

We have synthesized the intermetallic YPrFe17 compound by arc-melting. X-ray and neutron powder diffraction show that the crystal structure is rhombohedral with View the MathML source space group (Th2Zn17-type). The investigated compound exhibits a broad isothermal magnetic entropy change {\Delta}SM(T) associated with the ferro-to-paramagnetic phase transition (TC \approx 290 K). The |{\Delta}SM| (\approx 2.3 J kg-1 K-1) and the relative cooling power (\approx 100 J kg-1) have been calculated for applied magnetic field changes up to 1.5 T. A single master curve for {\Delta}SM under different values of the magnetic field change can be obtained by a rescaling of the temperature axis. The results are compared and discussed in terms of the magneto-caloric effect in the isostructural R2Fe17 (R = Y, Pr and Nd) binary intermetallic alloys., Comment: Preprint, 5 pages (postprint), 4 figures, regular paper

Modelling outliers and structural breaks in dynamic linear models with a novel use of a heavy tailed prior for the variances: An alternative to the Inverted Gamma, Comment: in press Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics

The number of people using online social networks in their everyday life is continuously growing at a pace never saw before. This new kind of communication has an enormous impact on opinions, cultural trends, information spreading and even in the commercial success of new products. More importantly, social online networks have revealed as a fundamental organizing mechanism in recent country-wide social movements. In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of the structural and dynamical patterns emerging from the activity of an online social network around the ongoing May 15th (15M) movement in Spain. Our network is made up by users that exchanged tweets in a time period of one month, which includes the birth and stabilization of the 15M movement. We characterize in depth the growth of such dynamical network and find that it is scale-free with communities at the mesoscale. We also find that its dynamics exhibits typical features of critical systems such as robustness and power-law distributions for several quantities. Remarkably, we report that the patterns characterizing the spreading dynamics are asymmetric, giving rise to a clear distinction between information sources and sinks. Our study represent a first step towards the use of data from online social media to comprehend modern societal dynamics., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures

In June of 1998, Proposition 227 was passed by 61 percent of the California electorate. Intended to change how the state's English learners (ELs) are instructed, Proposition 227 required that ELs be taught "overwhelmingly in English" through sheltered/structured English immersion (SEI) programs during a transition period and then transferred to English-language mainstream classrooms. Thirteen months later, in July of 1999, the English Language Acquisition Program (ELAP) was established by Assembly Bill 1116 in order "to improve the English proficiency of California pupils in grades 4 through 8 and to better prepare them to meet the state academic content and performance standards." ELAP pursues this goal by providing funds to districts to be spent on English learner instruction. This report is part of a five-year study being conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and WestEd for the California Department of Education (CDE). The Study, "Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners", evaluates the impact of Proposition 227, and includes an evaluation of ELAP. This report presents findings from the ELAP evaluation. Appended are: (1) Year 4 ELAP Survey (ELAP-LEA Evaluation Report); (2) Language Arts SAT-9 Mean Scaled Scores, by Cohort; and (3) Regression Results for Student Achievement Analysis Models. (Contains 16 tables, 18 color enhanced graphs, and 20 endnotes.)

Research in the Life Sciences depends on the integration of large, distributed and heterogeneous data sources and web services. The discovery of which of these resources are the most appropriate to solve a given task is a complex research question, since there is a large amount of plausible candidates and there is little, mostly unstructured, metadata to be able to decide among them.We contribute a semi-automatic approach,based on semantic techniques, to assist researchers in the discovery of the most appropriate web services to full a set of given requirements., Comment: in Adrian Paschke, Albert Burger, Andrea Splendiani, M. Scott Marshall, Paolo Romano: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences, Berlin,Germany, December 8-10, 2010

The univariate spline quasi-interpolants (abbr. QIs) studied in this paper are approximation operators using B-spline expansions with coefficients which are linear combinations of discrete or weighted mean values of the function to be approximated. When working with nonuniform partitions, the main challenge is to find QIs which have both good approximation orders and uniform norms which are bounded independently of the given partition. Near-best QIs are obtained by minimizing an upper bound of the infinity norm of QIs depending on a certain number of free parameters, thus reducing this norm. This paper is devoted to the study of two families of near-best QIs of approximation order 3.

Lifelong learning is becoming a necessity in the new Information Society where everyone, particularly small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), must keep up with new technologies. Education and training are of the most importance in this updating. An interdisciplinary and inter-university work group called "Canalejas" (Spain) has developed a multimedia educational CD-ROM, "Basic Course on Telecommunications for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises," a client-server application which includes the "Virtual Class" distance learning environment and interactive multimedia courses on telecommunication services. This paper addresses the technical and educational issues addressed in developing a multimedia educational CD-ROM, beginning with an overview of the objectives and presentation of the work group, educating for the Information Society/lifelong learning, and new technologies for distance learning. The CD-ROM course is then described, including hardware configuration, distance learning environment, and steps in the multimedia development methodology. Two figures present the user interface. (Author/AEF)

Data-based decision making has been the mantra of the school reform movement since the late 1980s, but California does not yet have an effective system for collecting and using vital school information. California has taken a number of steps to address this shortcoming. These include the Public School Accountability Act of 1999 and Senate bills 1453 and 1614, which improve California's education data system by establishing student and teacher tracking mechanisms. Despite these efforts, California continues to lag behind other states in data collection and management, in policy evaluation and data use, and in funding for local school districts to support the collection and maintenance of reliable education data. This brief highlights the elements of an effective data system, with a particular focus on issues related to data collection. The authors show that valuable lessons can be learned from the high quality data systems that have been created in other states, and in organizations in both the public and private sectors. They argue that data, if used wisely, can help to transform California's education system. (Contains 6 tables and 15 endnotes.)

Over the past six decades, satellite remote sensing technology has contributed to the transformation of using earth science not only to advance science, but to improve quality of life. With satellite missions launched almost every year, new types of earth science data are being incorporated into science, models and decision-making systems in a broad array of organizations. A challenge for space agencies has been ensuring that satellite missions serve both the scientific community and the applied community of decision makers without the missions becoming unfocused and overly expensive. By understanding and considering the needs of the environmental data and applied research user community early on in the mission-design process, agencies can ensure that satellites meet the needs of multiple constituencies. This paper describes the mission development process in the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and compares and contrasts the successes of and challenges faced by these agencies in balancing science and applications within their missions.