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Despite considerable efforts, the disproportionate representation of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in special education programs remains among the most persistent problems in the field of education. Using data from Texas' public school districts, this study examined the relationships between a set of school districts' sociodemographic variables on the proportion of students identified with LEP and students identified as economically disadvantaged served in special education programs. Results indicate a strong association between the sociodemographic variables examined and the overrepresentation of these two student populations in special education programs. In addition, a logistic regression analysis revealed that including the statewide geographic region where a school district resides as a variable was a significantly better model than examining only sociodemographic characteristics. Findings indicate that knowing a school district's sociodemographic characteristics is important in determining the likelihood of students being identify as needing special education services but it is important to note that the impact of the sociodemographic characteristics differs by statewide geographic region. Recommendations for policy, practice, and research are discussed.

People nowadays are surrounded by the environment filled with lots of different kinds of media. The impressions of the media help us to form our views of the world and the values of the things. The stories of media offer signs, myth and sources through the lives we share together. The messages of media tell us who has the power, and who can have the abilities of interpretation. The study focuses on the gender representations and the underlying gender messages of jeans advertisements in the magazines, and how they interact with the culture. Besides the newly fashion magazines, the four top selling magazines, VOGUE, Cool, Men¡¦s Uno and GQ, are more than 10 years. From the ads in those magazines in 1998 and in 2007, the study uses the semiotics to analyze the signifier and signified, connotation and denotation of the jeans advertisements. The study hopes to find out the differences of the gender codes in the magazines and the interactions between the advertisements and the culture in Taiwan.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2009. / Title from title screen (viewed November 13, 2009). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning in the Faculty of Science. Includes graphs and tables. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Proefschriff--Amsterdam. / "Lijst van geraadpleegde werken": p. 251-255. "Stellingen": 2 p. laid in.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 1925. / Vita.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-144).

Thesis (M.A.)--Zheng zhi zuo zhan xue xiao, 1975. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 1-5 (2nd group)).

Inaug.-Diss.--Freiburg i. Br. / Lebenslauf.

Providing destruction in games is usually achieved by having pre-calculated fracturingpoints, swapping models at appropriate times while hiding the crimes witha puff of smoke or an explosion. An area of continued research is procedural destructionwhere an object will fracture in a realistic way depending on appliedforces such as gravity, explosions or load. This thesis proposes and begins the implementation for a triangle based surfacerepresentation capable of supporting procedural destruction in real-time for anunderlying point-based simulation; deriving the methodology from the paper byM. Pauly et al [12]. Too wide project scoping prevented the implementation from fully realising theinitial goals; where the surface and physics simulations was never married intoa single simulation. It is one half of a larger project on procedural destruction,focusing primarily on the surface representation where the second half is detailedin the report by C. Stegmayr [14]. Even without a complete simulation, performance is an evidently limiting factor.For more detailed simulations, with a simple test mesh and a small step size whenpropagating a fracture, frame times quickly raise up to almost 247 ms/frame.There are multiple areas of improvement for the implementation to reduce frametimes; however, scalability and performance are still major points of concern dueto inherent challenges with running multiple fractures in parallel. Unless scalingcan be improved, it is worth pursuing alternative approaches.