How Educators Use Policy Documents: A Misunderstood Relationship

As an English educator and co-director of a National Writing Project site, I have had many conversations with colleagues and educators who are anxious about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) being adopted in so many states throughout the nation. The anxiety comes in many forms, ranging from What do the CCSS mean for what and how I have to teach? to What does the drafting and implementation processes of the CCSS suggest for how people view me as a professional? to Are the CCSS really any good? and so on. As I listen to all the people I work with - preservice teachers, experienced teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, writing project directors and fellows - I keep returning to one major issue that I think is behind a lot of the concern. More specifically, I continue to wonder how educators actually use and develop policy documents (e.g., standards) in their day-to-day work. The assumption seems to be that teachers read the policies and then implement them; however, any teacher who has worked with standards documents knows that this process isn\u27t quite as clear-cut as the above assumption. It is this gap between how assumptions about educators use policy documents and how teachers actually use those policy documents. I sense this is the source for a lot of the anxiety I hear in the voices of the many educators I respect and work with

Error correction for deep space network teletype circuits

Error detection codes and correction devices for Deep Space Network /DSN/ teletypewriter system

Collaboration: Talk. Trust. Write.

We have long recognized English classrooms, at all levels, as sites ripe for collaborative activity among students; when students read, write, and learn together, the classroom becomes a microcosm of the work we do as professionals in the field. In writing, collaboration can be vital. Collaborative writing often leads to projects that are richer and more complex than those produced by individuals, potentially engaging multiple audiences in broader conversations. However, collaboration can also present its own particular set of challenges, ranging from the practical (How do authors find each other and determine publication avenues?) to the more theoretical (Is the negotiation of power an inherent part of the collaborative process, and if so, how can it be successfully managed?)

Efficient indexing of necklaces and irreducible polynomials over finite fields

We study the problem of indexing irreducible polynomials over finite fields, and give the first efficient algorithm for this problem. Specifically, we show the existence of poly(n, log q)-size circuits that compute a bijection between {1, ... , |S|} and the set S of all irreducible, monic, univariate polynomials of degree n over a finite field F_q. This has applications in pseudorandomness, and answers an open question of Alon, Goldreich, H{\aa}stad and Peralta[AGHP]. Our approach uses a connection between irreducible polynomials and necklaces ( equivalence classes of strings under cyclic rotation). Along the way, we give the first efficient algorithm for indexing necklaces of a given length over a given alphabet, which may be of independent interest

Participation and Collaboration in Digital Spaces: Connecting High School and College Writing Experiences

As literacy educators, we\u27re particularly mindful of two different and current conversations about digital literacies that directly inform our experiences in the classroom. The first conversation stems from the development and initial implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for high school instruction (Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO] and National Governors Association [NGA] 2010) and the work informing the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (Framework), a statement that outlines expectations for incoming college students (Council of Writing Program Administrators [CWPA], National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE], and the National Writing Project [NWP] 2011). These documents directly affect our curricular decisions in a host of ways. The second conversation that informs our experiences in the classroom is a larger cultural conversation about the implications of digital literacy practices and opportunities. Together, these twin conversations highlight the unsettled, ever-shifting landscape in which the authors of this chapter (Rachel Bear, a high school English teacher; Heidi Estrem and Dawn Shepherd, college professors and writing program administrators; and James E. Fredricksen, a college English education professor) work

Some Results on Sprout

Abstract. Sprout is a lightweight stream cipher proposed by Armknecht and Mikhalev at FSE 2015. It has a Grain-like structure with two State Registers of size 40 bits each, which is exactly half the state size of Grain v1. In spite of this, the cipher does not appear to lose in security against generic Time-Memory-Data Tradeoff attacks due to the novelty of its design. In this paper, we first present improved results on Key Recovery with partial knowledge of the internal state. We show that if 50 of the 80 bits of the internal state are guessed then the remaining bits along with the Secret Key can be found in a reasonable time using a SAT solver. Thereafter we show that it is possible to perform a distinguishing attack on the full Sprout stream cipher in the multiple IV setting using around 240 randomly chosen IVs on an average. The attack requires around 248 bits of memory. Thereafter we will show that for every Secret Key, there exist around 230 IVs for which the LFSR used in Sprout enters the all zero state during the Keystream generating phase. Using this observation, we will first show that it is possible to enumerate Key-IV pairs that produce keystream bits with period as small as 80. We will then outline a simple Key recovery attack that takes time equivalent to 266.7 encryptions with negligible memory requirement. This although is not the best attack reported against this cipher in terms of the Time complexity, it is the best in terms of the memory required to perform the attack

Antipersistent binary time series

Completely antipersistent binary time series are sequences in which every time that an $N$-bit string $\mu$ appears, the sequence is continued with a different bit than at the last occurrence of $\mu$. This dynamics is phrased in terms of a walk on a DeBruijn graph, and properties of transients and cycles are studied. The predictability of the generated time series for an observer who sees a longer or shorter time window is investigated also for sequences that are not completely antipersistent.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

To Jane

When you were three you found it hard To climb a stair, But trustingly you struggled up..