2003
Fostering students’ higher order thinking skills is considered an important educational goal. Although learning theories see the development of students’ thinking as an important goal for all students, teachers often believe that stimulating higher order thinking is appropriate only for high-achieving students. According to this view, low-achieving students are, by and large, unable to deal with tasks that require higher order thinking skills and should thus be spared the frustration generated by such tasks. Because this view may cause teachers to treat students in a nonegalitarian way, it is important to find out whether or not it is supported by empirical evidence. The goal of this study is to examine this issue in light of four different studies, by asking the following question: Do low-achieving students gain from teaching and learning processes that are designed to foster higher order thinking skills? Each of the4 studies addressed a different project whose goal was to teach higher order thinking in science classrooms. Following a brief general description of each project, we provide an analysis of its effects on students with low and high achievements. The findings show that by the end of each of the 4 programs, students with high academic achievements gained higher thinking scores than their peers with low academic achievements. However, students of both subgroups made considerable progress with respect to their initial score. In one of the 4 studies the net gain of low achievers was significantly higher than for high achievers. Our findings strongly suggest that teachers should encourage students of all academic levels to engage in tasks that involve higher order thinking skills.
Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism. Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers. His more strictly philosophical writings include work on epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language. His most recent book on such topics, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-authored with his Utah colleague Patricia Hanna, offers a systematic rethinking, with implications, among other things, for literary studies, of the philosophy of language, as it has developed since Russell and Frege, on the basis of a new reading of Wittgenstein. He is currently (2017) at work on a study of the nature of anti-Semitism, and the continuity between its traditional and contemporary forms, under the title Blaming the Jews: The Persistence of a Delusion. It develops and carries further some of the ideas proposed in his The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Updated in March 2017. |
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Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism. |
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In part I, we proposed and investigated a hybrid pulse position modulation/ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (PPM/ULP-CDMA) system for ultrafast optical communication networks. In this scheme, the large bandwidth of a ULP is efficiently utilized by virtue of the very high time resolution of a time-space processor. More detailed analysis and discussion on the receiver scheme using the time-space processor is now presented; nonideal performance of the time-space processor, including the reference pulse realization problem, as well as amplifier and detector noise, are taken into account. Discussions on physically achievable ranges of the system parameters that determine the performance of the proposed PPM/ULP-CDMA system are also made based upon current, state of the art technology. As remedies to overcome the physical limitations on the system parameters, two modified modulation/demodulation schemes are proposed and investigated to enhance the performance of the hybrid PPM/ULP-CDMA system.
In part I, we proposed and investigated a hybrid pulse position modulation/ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (PPM/ULP-CDMA) system for ultrafast optical communication networks. In this scheme, the large bandwidth of a ULP is efficiently utilized by virtue of the very high time resolution of a time-space processor. More detailed analysis and discussion on the receiver scheme using the time-space processor is now presented; nonideal performance of the time-space processor, including the reference pulse realization problem, as well as amplifier and detector noise, are taken into account. Discussions on physically achievable ranges of the system parameters that determine the performance of the proposed PPM/ULP-CDMA system are also made based upon current, state of the art technology. As remedies to overcome the physical limitations on the system parameters, two modified modulation/demodulation schemes are proposed and investigated to enhance the performance of the hybrid PPM/ULP-CDMA system.
T. Lehtolainen, Shwimmer, A. , Shpigel, N. Y. , Honkanen-Buzalski, T. , ו Pyorala, S.. 2003.
“In Vitro Antimicrobial Susceptibility Of Escherichia Coli Isolates From Clinical Bovine Mastitis In Finland And Israel”. J Dairy Scij Dairy Scij Dairy Sci, 86, Pp. 3927-32.
תקציר Minimal inhibition concentration (MIC) values of 100 Finnish and 100 Israeli Escherichia coli isolated from clinical bovine mastitis were determined for ampicillin, cephalexin, ceftazidime, dihydrostreptomycin, gentamicin, tetracycline, trimethoprim-sulfadiazine, and ciprofloxacin by an agar dilution method. The in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility of the E. coli isolates was high; only 27% showed resistance to one or more tested antimicrobial agents. Fifteen percent of the Israeli isolates and 14% of the Finnish isolates were resistant to tetracycline, 3 and 16% to cephalexin, 10 and 7% to ampicillin, 13 and 9% to dihydrostreptomycin, and 4 and 2% to trimethoprim-sulfadiazine. No gentamicin-, ceftazidime-, or ciprofloxacin-resistant isolates were detected. Eleven percent of all the isolates were resistant to two or more antimicrobial agents. Tetracycline was most often associated with multiresistant patterns. Most of the multiresistant isolates had very high MIC values, whereas most of those that were resistant to only one tested antibiotic had MIC values close to the susceptibility breakpoint. Antimicrobial resistance appeared to pose no problem in E. coli isolated from mastitic milk of both countries. This is probably due to the controlled use of antimicrobial agents in the treatment of dairy herds. Some differences were present in the resistance patterns, which may reflect the different use of antimicrobial agents in these two countries.
In Eilat Mazar’s excavations in the Ophel in Jerusalem, a partially preserved inscription engraved on the shoulder of a pithos was found in 2012 in a context dated to the 10th century BCE. Although close to a dozen interpretations of the inscription have been offered over time, its reading remains highly disputed. All of these interpretations consider the script to be Canaanite. In this study, it is argued that the inscription was engraved in the Ancient South Arabian script and that its language is Sabaean. The inscription reads “ ]šy ladanum 5.” The aromatic ladanum (Cistus ladaniferus), rendered as lḏn in the inscription, is most probably שׁ ְ חֵ לֶ ת (šǝḥēlet), the second component of incense according to Exod 30:34. The inscription was engraved before the locally made vessel was fired, leading to the conclusion that a Sabaean functionary entrusted with aromatic components of incense was active in Jerusalem by the time of King Solomon.
Optimal incentive mechanisms may require that agents are rewarded differentially even when they are completely identical and are induced to act the same. We demonstrate this point by means of a simple incentive model where agents decisions about effort exertion is mapped into a probability that the project will succeed. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for optimal incentive mechanisms to be discriminatory. We also show that full discrimination across all agents is required if and only if the technology has increasing return to scale. In the non-symmetric framework we show that negligible differences in agents attributes may result in major differences in rewards in the unique optimal mechanism.
The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment. Professor Regenia Gagnier is a critical theorist and cultural historian of 19th-century Britain. Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, she was a Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Director of the Programme in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University from 1982 to 1996, and Professor of English, Director of Research, Dean of the Graduate School, and Director of Exeter Interdisciplinary Institute at the University of Exeter since 1996. Her books include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (Boston, 1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Basingstoke, 2010), and two guest-edited special issues of New Literary History (Economics, Culture and Value [2000]) and Victorian Literature and Culture (Victorian Boundaries [2004]). She is the Editor in Chief of Literature Compass and its Global Circulation Project and the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Updated October 18, 2010 |
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The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment. |
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The formation of amorphous calcium phosphate (ACP) and its transformation into octacalcium phosphate (OCP) in the presence of poly-L-glutamic acid (PGA, Mw 3000 Da and 50,000 Da), poly-L-lysine (Mw 50,000 Da) and polystyrene sulfonate (MW 70,000 Da) has been investigated. All polyelectrolytes at low concns. induced and at high concns. retarded nucleation of the cryst. ppt. In addn., the polyelectrolytes inhibited aggregation of ACP particles and growth of the cryst. phase. The intensity of the effects depended on the charge, mol. mass, and concn. of the specific polymer. [on SciFinder(R)]
Stef Proost, Adler, Nicole , De Borger, Bruno , Calthrop, Edward , De Palma, Andre , Henstra, Dirk , Lindsey, Robin , Ramjerdi, Farideh , Shepherd, Simon , Vold, Arild , ו others, . 2003.
“Integrated Conceptual And Applied Model Analysis”.
The E. coli BglG protein inhibits transcription termination within the bgl operon in the presence of beta-glucosides. BglG represents a family of transcriptional antiterminators that bind to RNA sequences, which partially overlap rho-independent terminators, and prevent termination by stabilizing an alternative structure of the transcript. The activity of BglG is determined by its dimeric state, which is modulated by reversible phosphorylation catalyzed by BglF, a PTS permease. Only the non-phosphorylated BglG dimer binds to RNA and allows read-through of transcription. BglG is composed of three domains: an RNA-binding domain followed by two domains, PRD1 and PRD2 (PTS regulation domains), which are similar in their sequence and folding. Based on the three-dimensional structure of dimeric LicT, a BglG homologue from Bacillus subtilis, the interactions within the dimer are PRD1-PRD1 and PRD2-PRD2. We have shown before that PRD2 mediates homodimerization very efficiently. Using genetic systems and in vitro techniques that assay and characterize protein-protein interactions, we show here that the PRD1 dimerizes very slowly, but once it does, the homodimers are stable. These results support our model that formation of BglG dimers initiates with PRD2 dimerization followed by zipping up of two BglG monomers to create the active RNA-binding domain. Moreover, our results demonstrate that PRD1 and PRD2 heterodimerize efficiently in vitro and in vivo. The affinity among the PRDs is in the following order: PRD2-PRD2 > PRD1-PRD2 > PRD1-PRD1. The interaction between PRD1 and PRD2 offers an explanation for the requirement of conserved residues in PRD1 for the phosphorylation of PRD2 by BglF.
