Conceptualizations of slope in Mexican intended curriculum

Slope is a fundamental mathematics concept in middle and high school that transcends to the university level. An understanding of slope is needed at the university level since slope plays an important role in understanding problems involving variation and change. In this study Mexican curricula documents were examined to determine which conceptualizations of slope are addressed in the intended mathematics curriculum. To explain the results, we use conceptualizations of slope identified in previous research. Our findings reveal that, to a certain extent, the conceptualizations proposed in the Mexican intended mathematics curriculum differ slightly in terms of the emphasis and timing of instruction from what others have identified in the U.S., with slope as a geometric ratio receiving less emphasis in the Mexican curriculum. There was also noted discontinuity within the Mexican curriculum in introducing slope in grade 9 and subsequently introducing of linear functions in grade 10 without explicit mention of slope. Suggestions are made for future studies, both to consider the conceptualizations of slope promoted in the Mexican textbooks and the impact they have in classroom instruction and student learning of slope.     

Scientists and mathematicians collaborating to build quantitative skills in undergraduate science

There is general agreement in Australia and beyond that quantitative skills (QS) in science, the ability to use mathematics and statistics in context, are important for science. QS in the life sciences are becoming ever more important as these sciences become more quantitative. Consequently, undergraduates studying the life sciences require better QS than at any time in the past. Ways in which mathematics and science academics are working together to build the QS of their undergraduate science students, together with the mathematics and statistics needed or desired in a science degree, are reported on in this paper. The emphasis is on the life sciences. Forty-eight academics from eleven Australian and two USA universities were interviewed about QS in science. Information is presented on: what QS academics want in their undergraduate science students; who is teaching QS; how mathematics and science departments work together to build QS in science and implications for building the QS of science students. This information leads to suggestions for improvement in QS within a science curriculum.     

基于平行DEA模型的我国小学教育资源配置效率分析

小学教育是教育阶段的基础,也是我国强制教育的一部分。但如何在各省份性别比例相差较大的情况下,更加有效的提高各省份小学教育资源配置效率是一个值得思考的问题。为了避免性别带来的影响,可以通过平行结构DEA模型根据学生性别分为两个平行子系统,来衡量我国2012~2018年各省份小学教育的资源配置情况。研究发现大部分省份小学教育资源配置的总系统效率未达到有效边界,仍有需要改进的地方。男学生在小学教育阶段的效率通常优于女学生在小学教育阶段的效率,但随着近些年我国教育体制的日益完善,女学生在小学教育阶段的效率呈上升趋势。此外,我国西部地区的小学教育资源配置效率在一些年份普遍优于东部和中部地区,而中部地区和东部地区小学教育总系统效率相对稳定,西部地区小学教育总系统效率波动较大。     

Sur la détermination d'une relation binaire à partir d'informations locales

This paper deals with the problematic aspect of the reconstruction of binary relations: it includes all the questions raising the possibility or impossibility to determine a structure by gathering given substructures. It is the continuation of three studies: the first made by G. Lopez [9] in 1972 about the determination of a binary relation through the types of isomorphism of its restrictions, the second made by K. B. Reid and C. Thomassen [15] in 1976 about the strongly self-complementary tournaments (every subtournament is self-complementary), the third made by C. Thomassen [16] in 1989 about the cycle space of a tournament. In the second section, we use the notion of class of difference (which was introduced in [9]) to extend a study made in [16] to binary relations. Then, in the third section, we improve the result of this last study in the case of the tournaments. After noticing that the result of [15] inferred itself naturally from the approach developed in [9], we extend, in the fourth section, the study made in [15] to binary relations.     

火灾发生的周期性规律及其在火灾非线性组合预测模型中应用

研究火灾发生规律及发展趋势,具有实用价值.分析历年中国火灾统计数据,发现中国火灾的发生规律同时具有增长趋势性和周期波动性特征:①中国火灾从90年代开始大幅度增加,在2002年达到最大,然后逐年缓慢下降;②每年12个月呈正弦函数波动,周期为12,1、2月发生起数最大,8、9月最小.借助于M ATLAB软件,根据2000-2006年中国火灾统计数据,建立火灾的月发生起数的非线性周期性组合预测模型,预测值与实际值的平均相对误差小于0.07.研究结论为消防研究、消防部门决策提供科学依据.     

产能约束对闭环供应链回收渠道选择的影响

在制造商存在产能约束下,建立了再制造闭环供应链回收渠道决策的Stackelberg博弈模型,得出了三种回收渠道下的回收率、零售价以及制造商、零售商和供应链的利润,分析了制造商的生产能力对回收渠道决策的影响。研究表明:存在产能约束时,制造商回收渠道中的回收率总是最高的,这与无产能约束时零售商回收渠道中回收率最高的情况明显不同;同时,若废旧产品回收转移支付价格较低,制造商会选择自己回收,此时的零售价最低,制造商、零售商和供应链利润最高;若回收转移支付价格较高,制造商会选择零售商回收,此时的零售价最低,制造商和供应链利润最高。     

Scan Statistics on Enron Graphs

We introduce a theory of scan statistics on graphs and apply the ideas to the problem of anomaly detection in a time series of Enron email graphs. Previous presentation: Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Newport Beach, CA, April 23, 2005. Carey E. Priebe received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1984, the M.S. degree in computer science from San Diego State University in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in information technology (computational statistics) from George Mason University in 1993. From 1985 to 1994 he worked as a mathematician and scientist in the US Navy research and development laboratory system. Since 1994 he has been a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. At Johns Hopkins, he holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Imaging Science. He is a past President of the Interface Foundation of North America—Computing Science & Statistics, a past Chair of the Section on Statistical Computing of the American Statistical Association, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and Computational Statistics. His research interests are in computational statistics, kernel and mixture estimates, statistical pattern recognition, statistical image analysis, and statistical inference for high-dimensional and graph data. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2002. John M. Conroy received a B.S. in Mathematics from Saint Joseph's University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1986. Since then he has been a research staff member for the IDA Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, MD. His research interest is applications of numerical linear algebra. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computational Linguistics. David J. Marchette received a B.A. in 1980, and an M.A. in mathematics in 1982, from the University of California at San Diego. He received a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics in 1996 from George Mason University under the direction of Ed Wegman. From 1985–1994 he worked at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego doing research on pattern recognition and computational statistics. In 1994 he moved to the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren Virginia where he does research in computational statistics and pattern recognition, primarily applied to image processing, text processing, automatic target recognition and computer security. Dr. Marchette is a Fellow of the American Statistical Society. Youngser Park received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Inha University in Korea in 1985, the M.S. degree in computer science from The George Washington University in 1991, and had pursued a doctoral degree there. From 1998 to 2000 he worked at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes as a senior research engineer. Since 2003 he is working as a research analyst in the Center for Imaging Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are clustering algorithm, pattern classification, and data mining.     

Combinatorics of generalized q-Euler numbers

New enumerating functions for the Euler numbers are considered. Several of the relevant generating functions appear in connection to entries in Ramanujan's Lost Notebook. The results presented here are, in part, a response to a conjecture made by M.E.H. Ismail and C. Zhang about the symmetry of polynomials in Ramanujan's expansion for a generalization of the Rogers-Ramanujan series. Related generating functions appear in the work of H. Prodinger and L.L. Cristea in their study of geometrically distributed random variables. An elementary combinatorial interpretation for each of these enumerating functions is given in terms of a related set of statistics.     

Multilevel preconditioning and low‐rank tensor iteration for space–time simultaneous discretizations of parabolic PDEs

This paper addresses the solution of parabolic evolution equations simultaneously in space and time as may be of interest in, for example, optimal control problems constrained by such equations. As a model problem, we consider the heat equation posed on the unit cube in Euclidean space of moderately high dimension. An a priori stable minimal residual Petrov–Galerkin variational formulation of the heat equation in space–time results in a generalized least squares problem. This formulation admits a unique, quasi‐optimal solution in the natural space–time Hilbert space and serves as a basis for the development of space–time compressive solution algorithms. The solution of the heat equation is obtained by applying the conjugate gradient method to the normal equations of the generalized least squares problem. Starting from stable subspace splittings in space and in time, multilevel space–time preconditioners for the normal equations are derived. In order to reduce the complexity of the full space–time problem, all computations are performed in a compressed or sparse format called the hierarchical Tucker format, supposing that the input data are available in this format. In order to maintain sparsity, compression of the iterates within the hierarchical Tucker format is performed in each conjugate gradient iteration. Its application to vectors in the hierarchical Tucker format is detailed. Finally, numerical results in up to five spatial dimensions based on the recently developed htucker toolbox for MATLAB are presented. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Controlling an oscillating Jackson-type network having state-dependent service rates

We consider a Jackson-type network comprised of two queues having state-dependent service rates, in which the queue lengths evolve periodically, exhibiting noisy cycles. To reduce this noise a certain heuristic, utilizing regions in the phase space in which the system behaves almost deterministically, is applied. Using this heuristic, we show that in order to decrease the probability of a customers overflow in one of the queues in the network, the server in that same queue – contrary to intuition – should be shut down for a short period of time. Further noise reduction is obtained if the server in the second queue is briefly shut down as well, when certain conditions hold.     

On Potential Theoretic Skeletons of Polyhedra

We prove that any polyhedron in two dimensions admits a type of potential theoretic skeleton called mother body. We also show that the mother bodies of any polyhedron in any number of dimensions are in one-to-one correspondence with certain kinds of decompositions of the polyhedron into convex subpolyhedra. A consequence of this is that there can exist at most finitely many mother bodies of any given polyhedron. The main ingredient in the proof of the first mentioned result consists of showing that any polyhedron in two dimensions contains a convex subpolyhedron which sticks to it in the sense that every face of the subpolyhedron has some part in common with a face of the original polyhedron.     

Comparing the Development of Fractions in the Fifth‐ and Sixth‐Graders' Textbooks of Singapore,Taiwan, and the USA

This research examined the presentation of fractions in textbooks used by fifth and sixth graders in Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. The specific textbooks examined were My Pals Are Here! Maths (MPHM) in Singapore; Kung Hsung (KH) in Taiwan; and Mathematics in Context (MiC) in the USA. Results show the problems posed in MiC put more emphasis on real‐life situations than KH textbooks in Taiwan and MPHM in Singapore. Designing materials that provide opportunities to connect mathematics content with applications in real life is consistent with recommendations from professional organizations. The activities in KH and MPHM tended to emphasize procedures, while the activities of MiC focused more on conceptual understanding and less on the development of procedures. An examination of the mathematics textbooks revealed that MPHM introduced and developed fractions the earliest among the three countries investigated and the content taught in MPHM was about one grade earlier than when the same content was experienced by students in KH and MiC.     

Improving the adaptability in automated vessel scheduling in container ports using intelligent software agents

Faster turnaround time of vessels and high berth productivity are paramount factors in container terminals for assuring competitive advantage in the shipping industry. An autonomous decision-making capability in the terminal is vital in achieving the required productivity. Vessel scheduling/berthing system in a container terminal is regarded as a very complex dynamic application in today’s business world. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has been researching in the field of intelligent (or rational) agents for more than a decade and implementations are found in many commercial applications. The Beliefs, Desires and Intention (BDI) agent architecture is probably the most mature model for many industrial applications in today’s context. However, it is not the best agent model for complex applications that must learn and adapt their behaviours in making rational decisions. We propose a new hybrid BDI framework with an intelligent module to overcome the limitations in the generic BDI model. Learning and the adaptability of the environments are assured with the introduction of the Knowledge Acquisition Module (KAM) in the generic BDI architecture in our proposed framework. The dynamic selection of the intention structures has been improved with a trained neural network. The knowledge required to handle vagueness or uncertainty in the environment has been modelled with an Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) in berths. Finally, the benefits and the usability of hybrid BDI model for a vessel berthing application is discussed with experiential results.     

CFD simulation of gas–solid flow with a cluster structure-dependent drag coefficient model in circulating fluidized beds

To model the effect of clusters on hydrodynamics of gas and particles phases in risers, the interfacial drag coefficient is taken into account in computational fluid dynamic simulations by means of a two-fluid model. The momentum and energy balances that characterize the clusters in the dense phase and dispersed particles in the dilute phase are described by the multi-scale resolution approach. The model of cluster structure-dependent (CSD) drag coefficient is proposed on the basis of the minimization of energy dissipation by heterogeneous drag (MEDHD) in the full range of Reynolds number. The model of CSD drag coefficient is then incorporated into the two-fluid model to simulate flow behavior of gas and particles in a riser. The distributions of volume fraction and velocity of particles are predicted. Simulated results are in agreement with experimental data published in the literature.     

一个修正的PVT算法

对Fkshima(1998）所提出的PVT算法给出一种修正算法，称为修正PVT算法，这一修正算法对PVT原算法中的并行步中的停止准则和同步步骤作了修正。修正PVT算法的停止条件对PVT原算法的停止条件弱，因此更适用于并行计算，并且计算时间比PVT原算法少。     

Chapter 8 Estimating production frontier shifts: An application of DEA to technology assessment

Evaluating the separate impacts of factors which affect the productive efficiency of organizations is difficult. This is because the impact of a factor is often contingent on other organizational, managerial or environmental characteristics. Standard econometric methods are limited in their ability to discriminate between efficient and inefficient units, and often impose considerable structure in parametrically specified functional forms. We show how a nonparametric data envelopment approach can be employed to focus on the best that can be achieved, with and without the key characteristic of interest. We illustrate the approach with real data from the service sector requiring the evaluation of the impact of a new information technology. The analytical technique estimates the annual savings in materials cost for an average store using the information technology to be over $4,000 (2.04% of materials cost), well in excess of the amortized annual cost for its installation. Establishing the separation in the production frontier in different regions, we show that the information technology had a substantially larger impact for the bigger stores. The savings were about 80% greater in the larger volume stores than in the smaller volume operations, an important consideration in setting the priorities for installation. The illustration underscores the flexibility of DEA in detecting different impacts of a new technology in different environments.     

泄爆诱导的湍流、旋涡和外部爆炸

基于k-ε湍流模型和Eddy-dissipation燃烧模型,采用同位网格SIMPLE算法,对充满甲烷-氧气预混气的带导管柱形泄爆容器向空气中泄爆的情形进行了数值模拟．根据计算结果,分析了泄爆后外流场中可燃云团、火焰和压力的变化过程．结果表明,外部爆炸是因射流火焰点燃高压区中的可燃云团,从而引起的剧烈湍流燃烧所致．同时还讨论了外流场湍流和涡量的分布特征．射流火焰进入外部可燃云团后,湍流主要分布在平均动能梯度较大的区域,而不在火焰阵面上．涡量分布主要受斜压效应的影响,在压力和密度梯度斜交区域,其值较大．     

Lightcone dualities for hypersurfaces in the sphere

In this paper, we consider hypersurfaces in the unit lightlike sphere. The unit sphere can be canonically embedded in the lightcone and de Sitter space in Minkowski space. We investigate these hypersurfaces in the framework of the theory of Legendrian dualities between pseudo‐spheres in Minkowski space.     

Nevanlinna theory of meromorphic functions on annuli

In this survey paper, we discuss the recent development of Nevanlinna theory of meromorphic functions on annuli, which extends results in Nevanlinna theory in the complex plane or in a disk. In particular, we show that the approach taken on annuli is a unified treatment of functions meromorphic in the complex plane, a disk and an annulus. It allows one to obtain many results in the complex plane and in a disk as corollaries of our results in annuli.     

Mathematical analysis of the dynamics of COVID-19 in Africa under the influence of asymptomatic cases and re-infection

Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) hit the world in December 2019, and only less than 5% of the 15 million cases were recorded in Africa. A major call for concern was the significant rise from 2% in May 2020 to 4.67% by the end of July 15, 2020. This drastic increase calls for quick intervention in the transmission and control strategy of COVID-19 in Africa. A mathematical model to theoretically investigate the consequence of ignoring asymptomatic cases on COVID-19 spread in Africa is proposed in this study. A qualitative analysis of the model is carried out with and without re-infection, and the reproduction number is obtained under re-infection. The results indicate that increasing case detection to detect asymptomatically infected individuals will be very effective in containing and reducing the burden of COVID-19 in Africa. In addition, the fact that it has not been confirmed whether a recovered individual can be re-infected or not, then enforcing a living condition where recovered individuals are not allowed to mix with the susceptible or exposed individuals will help in containing the spread of COVID-19.