33,272 research outputs found
Explore the Deep Oceans
This six-day unit provides an in-depth look at deep sea vents. Throughout the unit, students collect their findings in a portfolio. The comprehensive curriculum materials contain teacher tools, which include individually downloadable readings, detailed daily breakdowns of tasks with strategies for using the activities, a portfolio grading sheet, a project rubric sheet, and additional readings. In addition, there are three hands-on experiments, which look at how pressure affects water flow, how temperature changes water density, and how submarines are engineered. The site also has five eyewitness accounts of the expedition, called Dispatches from the Deep, which bring the sights, sounds, and research findings to life and a question and answer interview with a marine geologist that provides insight into her research and this exciting area of scientific discovery. Educational levels: High school, Middle school
Emotional capital development, positive psychology and mindful teaching : which links?
The start of university life requires a period of adaptation, which can sometimes have an
impact on the mental health of students. The latest results from the Observatoire
National de la Vie Etudiante (OVE, 2013) show that more that 40% of university
students report symptoms of psychological fragility (sleep problems, fatigue, depression,
stress or loneliness), which can impact their level of wellbeing and performance. Beyond
Savoirs [knowledge], Savoir Faire [knowing what to do], the role of Savoir Être
[knowing how to be] referring to a set of emotional competencies, is crucial in sustaining
human capital in a broad sense, personal development and health (Gendron 2004).
During the Initiatives d'Excellence en Formations Innovantes (IDEFI) Programme,
[Initiatives of Excellence in Innovative Training] 132 first year university students of
education underwent an intervention (a minimum of six workshops of four hours) aimed
at developing their emotional capital. Using two approaches PIA2 (European
Management and Project Management Methodology) and ACT Training derived from
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) the objective was to develop trainees’
social and personal emotional competencies such as self-esteem, self-knowledge,
empathy and conflict management. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on
educational theory, theory of human resources and positive psychology, the results show
that emotional capital, developed using positive psychology tools, can improve
wellbeing and contribute to a holistic personal development.peer-reviewe
Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research
According to the principles articulated in the agile manifesto, motivated and
empowered software developers relying on technical excellence and simple
designs, create business value by delivering working software to users at
regular short intervals. These principles have spawned many practices. At the
core of these practices is the idea of autonomous, self-managing, or
self-organizing teams whose members work at a pace that sustains their
creativity and productivity. This article summarizes the main challenges faced
when implementing autonomous teams and the topics and research questions that
future research should address
Bias Reduction via End-to-End Shift Learning: Application to Citizen Science
Citizen science projects are successful at gathering rich datasets for
various applications. However, the data collected by citizen scientists are
often biased --- in particular, aligned more with the citizens' preferences
than with scientific objectives. We propose the Shift Compensation Network
(SCN), an end-to-end learning scheme which learns the shift from the scientific
objectives to the biased data while compensating for the shift by re-weighting
the training data. Applied to bird observational data from the citizen science
project eBird, we demonstrate how SCN quantifies the data distribution shift
and outperforms supervised learning models that do not address the data bias.
Compared with competing models in the context of covariate shift, we further
demonstrate the advantage of SCN in both its effectiveness and its capability
of handling massive high-dimensional data
Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economical and social media activity
Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are
nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital
information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big
data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., bank card
transactions, geotagged photographs and tweets) in Spain for quantifying city
attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding of this papers is
a strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size.
The observed scaling exponent stays nearly the same for different ways of
defining cities and for different data sources, emphasizing the robustness of
our finding. Temporal variation of the scaling exponent is also considered in
order to reveal seasonal patterns in the attractivenessComment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
A semi-automated non-radiactive system for measuring recovery of RNA synthesis and unscheduled DNA synthesis using ethynyluracil derivatives
Nucleotide excision repair (NER) removes the major UV-photolesions from cellular DNA. In humans, compromised NER activity is the cause of several photosensitive diseases, one of which is the skin-cancer predisposition disorder, xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). Two assays commonly used in measurement of NER activity are ‘unscheduled DNA synthesis (UDS)’, and ‘recovery of RNA synthesis (RRS)’, the latter being a specific measure of the transcription-coupled repair sub-pathway of NER. Both assays are key techniques for research in NER as well as in diagnoses of NER-related disorders. Until very recently, reliable methods for these assays involved measurements of incorporation of radio-labeled nucleosides. We have established non-radioactive procedures for determining UDS and RRS levels by incorporation of recently developed alkyne-conjugated nucleoside analogues, 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU) and 5-ethynyuridine (EU). EdU and EU are respectively used as alternatives for 3H-thymidine in UDS and for 3H-uridine in RRS. Based on these alkyne-nucleosides and an integrated image analyser, we have developed a semi-automated assay system for NER-activity. We demonstrate the utility of this system for NER-activity assessments of lymphoblastoid samples as well as primary fibroblasts. Potential use of the system for large-scale siRNA-screening for novel NER defects as well as for routine XP diagnosis are also considered
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