Inclusive education technologies: emerging opportunities for people with visual impairments

Technology has become central to many activities of learning, ranging from its use in classroom education to work training, mastering a new hobby, or acquiring new skills of living. While digitally-enhanced learning tools can provide valuable access to information and personalised support, people with specific accessibility needs, such as low or no vision, can often be excluded from their use. This requires technology developers to build more inclusive designs and to offer learning experiences that can be shared by people with mixed-visual abilities. There is also scope to integrate DIY approaches and provide specialised teachers with the ability to design their own low cost educational tools, adapted to pedagogical objectives and to the variety of visual and cognitive abilities of their students. For researchers, this invites new challenges of how to best support technology adoption and its evaluation in often complex educational settings. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in accessibility and education to share best practices and lessons learnt for technology in this space; and to jointly discuss and develop future directions for the next generation design of inclusive and effective education technologies

The USNO/NRL Green Bank interferometer program

Application of the connected-element radio interferometer of the National Radio Astronomy Observation in Green Bank, West Virginia to the determination of improved source coordinates, astronomical constants, and variations in Earth rotation parameters is discussed. It is concluded that because of the brevity and discontinuity of the data so far no reliable conclusions regarding the accuracy of the data can be drawn

Knowledge Transfer and Teaching Public Administration: the Academy Model

Since the beginnings of Public Administration in the US and its accompanying education in other parts of the world, government and policy have become more complex. The education in Public Administration created a professional pathway to public service. The addition of education to Public Administration came out of the Progressive Movement in the United States to make knowledge in Public Administration more important in the face of corruption brought on by patronage appointments. When nonprofits became part the US public sector as elsewhere along with nonprofit healthcare, the complexity expanded enormously, requiring professionals to know more in what has become a multidisciplinary field of study. Given the diversity and complexity of the public sector and the need for Public Administration to embrace more knowledge from many disciplines, it stands to reason that an earlier start on the education portion of Public Administration or a pathway would be beneficial. A model of early Public Administration knowledge transfer is described and illustrated below. The Academy described is based on the US career pathways and high school academies as part of the school to work educational movement. The success of the combination of these two areas will also be pointed out in the academy described. Translation of lessons learned from the Acdemy to Europe and Asia are also considered

Experimental Evidence of Time Delay Induced Death in Coupled Limit Cycle Oscillators

Experimental observations of time delay induced amplitude death in a pair of coupled nonlinear electronic circuits that are individually capable of exhibiting limit cycle oscillations are described. In particular, the existence of multiply connected death islands in the parameter space of the coupling strength and the time delay parameter for coupled identical oscillators is established. The existence of such regions was predicted earlier on theoretical grounds in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5109 (1998); Physica 129D, 15 (1999)]. The experiments also reveal the occurrence of multiple frequency states, frequency suppression of oscillations with increased time delay and the onset of both in-phase and anti-phase collective oscillations.Comment: 4 aps formatted RevTeX pages; 6 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Identification of a Rare Coding Variant in Complement 3 Associated with Age-related Macular Degeneration

Macular degeneration is a common cause of blindness in the elderly. To identify rare coding variants associated with a large increase in risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), we sequenced 2,335 cases and 789 controls in 10 candidate loci (57 genes). To increase power, we augmented our control set with ancestry-matched exome sequenced controls. An analysis of coding variation in 2,268 AMD cases and 2,268 ancestry matched controls revealed two large-effect rare variants; previously described R1210C in the CFH gene (fcase = 0.51%, fcontrol = 0.02%, OR = 23.11), and newly identified K155Q in the C3 gene (fcase = 1.06%, fcontrol = 0.39%, OR = 2.68). The variants suggest decreased inhibition of C3 by Factor H, resulting in increased activation of the alternative complement pathway, as a key component of disease biology

A large genome-wide association study of age-related macular degeneration highlights contributions of rare and common variants.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.3448Advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, with limited therapeutic options. Here we report on a study of >12 million variants, including 163,714 directly genotyped, mostly rare, protein-altering variants. Analyzing 16,144 patients and 17,832 controls, we identify 52 independently associated common and rare variants (P < 5 × 10(-8)) distributed across 34 loci. Although wet and dry AMD subtypes exhibit predominantly shared genetics, we identify the first genetic association signal specific to wet AMD, near MMP9 (difference P value = 4.1 × 10(-10)). Very rare coding variants (frequency <0.1%) in CFH, CFI and TIMP3 suggest causal roles for these genes, as does a splice variant in SLC16A8. Our results support the hypothesis that rare coding variants can pinpoint causal genes within known genetic loci and illustrate that applying the approach systematically to detect new loci requires extremely large sample sizes.We thank all participants of all the studies included for enabling this research by their participation in these studies. Computer resources for this project have been provided by the high-performance computing centers of the University of Michigan and the University of Regensburg. Group-specific acknowledgments can be found in the Supplementary Note. The Center for Inherited Diseases Research (CIDR) Program contract number is HHSN268201200008I. This and the main consortium work were predominantly funded by 1X01HG006934-01 to G.R.A. and R01 EY022310 to J.L.H