ePortfolios: models and implementation

This paper explores the use of ePortfolio tools to support teaching, learning and the personal and professional development of postgraduate students at the Institute of Education, University of London (IOE). The needs of tutors and students are considered alongside the affordances and limitations of specific tools in relation to these needs. The study involved five areas of postgraduate study at the IOE, one at PhD level, two at Masters level (MA in ICT in Education and MTeach) and two PGCE courses (PGCE in ICT and Post-Compulsory PGCE). Preliminary discussions with IOE staff revealed five common themes relating to the perceived purpose of an ePortfolio: model, ownership, collaboration, accessibility and support. The first theme relates to the definition of the ePortfolio, whilst the remaining themes address questions relating to ownership, control, use and user needs/development. In this paper, each of the themes and the questions raised within those areas are addressed in detail and a cross-comparative table of responses across each of five teaching scenarios is provided with levels of importance measured on a scale of 1 (low) to 4 (high)

Predicting the effects of basepair mutations in DNA-protein complexes by thermodynamic integration

AbstractThermodynamically rigorous free energy methods in principle allow the exact computation of binding free energies in biological systems. Here, we use thermodynamic integration together with molecular dynamics simulations of a DNA-protein complex to compute relative binding free energies of a series of mutants of a protein-binding DNA operator sequence. A guanine-cytosine basepair that interacts strongly with the DNA-binding protein is mutated into adenine-thymine, cytosine-guanine, and thymine-adenine. It is shown that basepair mutations can be performed using a conservative protocol that gives error estimates of ∼10% of the change in free energy of binding. Despite the high CPU-time requirements, this work opens the exciting opportunity of being able to perform basepair scans to investigate protein-DNA binding specificity in great detail computationally

Absence & Presence

I came to graduate school with a passion for producing ceramic sculpture, a love of the materiality of clay, and an interest in learning more about contemporary art. Upon arrival at the School for American Crafts, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, my work was primarily concerned with formal issues pertaining to objects, such as mass, visual weight, form, volume, and line. My journey throughout the two-year graduate program involved exploration of the ceramic processes, experimentation with methodologies of fabrication, and investigation into form and content. Academic classes, including Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Graduate Seminar, Forms of Inquiry, an independent study in Modern/Postmodern Theory, 20th Century Art (1945-1995), Art of the Last Decade, and Installation Art, were critical to expanding my modernist sensibility and increasing my awareness of the contemporary art world. With feedback from my professors and peers, I navigated through the trials and tribulations of discovering and producing a successful body of work

Stability radius and internal versus external stability in Banach spaces: an evolution semigroup approach

In this paper the theory of evolution semigroups is developed and used to provide a framework to study the stability of general linear control systems. These include time-varying systems modeled with unbounded state-space operators acting on Banach spaces. This approach allows one to apply the classical theory of strongly continuous semigroups to time-varying systems. In particular, the complex stability radius may be expressed explicitly in terms of the generator of a (evolution) semigroup. Examples are given to show that classical formulas for the stability radius of an autonomous Hilbert-space system fail in more general settings. Upper and lower bounds on the stability radius are provided for these general systems. In addition, it is shown that the theory of evolution semigroups allows for a straightforward operator-theoretic analysis of internal stability as determined by classical frequency-domain and input-output operators, even for nonautonomous Banach-space systemsComment: Also at http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen/preprint

Top 10 Photobooks of 2019

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2019 – selected by 1000 Words Editor in Chief, Tim Clark

Top 10 Photobooks of 2018

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2018 – selected by 1000 Words Editor in Chief, Tim Clark