An Accessible Maths Journey

The four narratives that follow bring together the stories from the lived experiences of a post-graduate blind maths student, her tutor, her transcriber and a learning technologist over the course of five years. It provides an insight into what is needed to help one student with their own way of learning maths. It also demonstrates how pulling at one thread can help to unravel and reveal the many lenses through which accessible maths needs to be approached

Bioinformatics Lab: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience Curriculum

This is a computer lab course intended to give students technical and practical experience in analyzing sequencing data. We focus on bacterial genomes from recently isolated bacteria, so there is a possibility of discovery of new microbial diversity. Collaborative learning will be encouraged, but students will work individually to assemble, annotate, and analyze a bacterial genome. Each week will begin with a review on the topic to be covered for that week. When applicable, there will be pre-recorded lectures to introduce lab topics, and students are expected to have watched these before coming to class. Our time in class will be spent as a computer lab, where students will work collaboratively and at their own pace to complete their genome sequencing and analysis. The guided analysis will transition into independent study. Students will produce a final capstone report in the style of the Microbiology Resource Announcements published by the American Society of Microbiology. This course fulfils the Microbiology Major requirement as a Major Laboratory Elective, and the Microbiology Graduate requirement as a core graduate-level course in microbial science.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/micro_ed_materials/1002/thumbnail.jp

The manuscripts of John of Damascus on Paul

This thesis sets out to determine whether the following three manuscripts constitute a newly identified textual family in Rom 13–1 Cor 4: Gregory-Aland (GA) 0150, GA 2110, and GA 1506. The term “family” refers to a homogeneous group for which a textual critic can confidently construct the archetypal text. The steps taken to prove a family relationship between the above witnesses include quantitative analysis, reading by reading analysis, and consideration of the scholia and marginalia. Others have suggested that the relationship of GA 0150 and GA 2110 is one of exemplar and of copy. Without any clear causal connections between the two manuscripts, however, a common exemplar best explains their remarkable similarity. Since the scholia of John of Damascus account for half the text on any given page, examination of these demonstrated that the special relationship shared by the lemmata extends to the scholia. The family is important because its archetypal text represents that which was available to John of Damascus. Therefore, the archetypal text of the family dates to the Umayyad Caliphate (mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries) and comes from the Mar Saba monastery east of Jerusalem. Since the family represents the text available to—and transmitted by—a specific person, it should be referenced in critical editions as relating to John of Damascus rather than direct New Testament witnesses. There is also a component of digital humanities in this thesis since the study included the creation and utilization of a new desktop computer application and a web application

Bible as Interface

The book is undergoing a major technological transition as print wanes in its dominance and the internet and mobile devices transform our reading and writing technologies. With the entangled histories of bible and book, our emerging technological age and its transformation of the materiality of bible forces us to engage bible as something irreducible to a book. The connections between the major technological transition from roll to codex in antiquity and the contemporary move toward the internet and mobile technologies as reading platforms encourage us to consider bible as an interface that affords high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy. Building on a growing attention to materiality in the study of religion and iconic books like the bible, I suggest bible as interface here to signal that bible is more than a container of content. Rather, bible as interface is a relationship between a material platform and a user that cannot be reduced to simple consumption of content. Rooted in the material religion approaches of Brent Plate and James Watts and animated by the interface theory of Johanna Drucker extended through a Levinasian optics of proximity, I will explore the many contact points of high surface area, the interruptive processes of collaboration, and the irreducibility to a single original text or single proper use in anarchy through a close look at the materiality of bible from ancient roll to digital API

14 Examples of How LLMs Can Transform Materials Science and Chemistry: A Reflection on a Large Language Model Hackathon

Large-language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 caught the interest of many scientists. Recent studies suggested that these models could be useful in chemistry and materials science. To explore these possibilities, we organized a hackathon. This article chronicles the projects built as part of this hackathon. Participants employed LLMs for various applications, including predicting properties of molecules and materials, designing novel interfaces for tools, extracting knowledge from unstructured data, and developing new educational applications. The diverse topics and the fact that working prototypes could be generated in less than two days highlight that LLMs will profoundly impact the future of our fields. The rich collection of ideas and projects also indicates that the applications of LLMs are not limited to materials science and chemistry but offer potential benefits to a wide range of scientific disciplines

OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians

We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone—called to action by the example set by our chapter authors—might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1510/thumbnail.jp

Digital Classical Philology

The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems

Bacterial diversity and function within an epigenic cave system and implications for other limestone cave systems

There are approximately 48,000 known cave systems in the United States of America, with caves formed in carbonate karst terrains being the most common. Epigenic systems develop from the downward flow of meteoric water through carbonate bedrock and the solutional enlargement of interconnected subsurface conduits. Despite carbonate karst aquifers being globally extensive and important drinking water sources, microbial diversity and function are poorly understood compared to other Earth environments. After several decades of research, studies have shown that microorganisms in caves affect water quality, rates of carbonate dissolution and precipitation, and ecosystem nutrition through organic matter cycling. However, limited prior knowledge exists for the most common system, epigenic caves, regarding microbial taxonomic diversity, their metabolic capabilities, and how community function changes during and following environmental disturbances. To evaluate community development and succession, as well as potential roles in organic matter cycling, bacteria from the Cascade Cave System (CCS) in Kentucky were investigated. From geochemical and metagenomic data collected during a five-month colonization experiment, taxonomically distinct planktonic and sediment-attached bacterial communities formed along the epigenic cave stream. This represents one of the largest metagenomic studies done from any cave. Betaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, and Opitutae were the most abundant groups. Planktonic bacteria pioneered sediment-attached communities, likely attributed to functional differences related to cell motility and attachment. Organic matter cycling affected exogenous heterotrophic community composition and function downstream because of diminished organic matter quality over time. This was reflected in significantly different abundances of genes encoding for carbohydrate and lignin degradation between habitats and depending on cave location. The ubiquity of environmental controls on bacteria functional diversity in karst is unknown because these environments have generally been left out of microbial biogeography research. In a spatial meta-analyses of bacterial diversity data from global cave systems, the ubiquity of some bacteria in karst is evident. Despite evidence for undersampling and difficulties comparing sequencing technologies and strategies, some caves appear to have novel lineages while other caves have taxonomically similar communities despite being 1000s of kilometers apart. The implications are that microbes in karst (i.e., carbonate) caves around the world are functionally comparable

AIUCD2016 - Book of Abstracts

Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract dei contributi accolti al convegno AIUCD 2016, dal titolo "Edizioni digitali: rappresentazione, interoperabilità, analisi del testo e infrastrutture" (Digital editions: representation, interoperability, text analysis and infrastructures). Si tratta del quinto convegno dell'Associazione di Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale (AIUCD), tenutosi a Venezia dal 7 al 9 Settembre 2016, che è stato infatti dedicato alla rappresentazione e allo studio del testo sotto vari punti di vista (risorse, analisi, infrastrutture di pubblicazione), con lo scopo di far dialogare intorno al testo filologi, storici, umanisti digitali, linguisti computazionali, logici, informatici e ingegneri informatici. Il presente volume raccoglie dunque gli abstract dei soli interventi accettati al convegno, che hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione anonima sotto la responsabilità del Comitato Scientifico di AIUCD 2016

AIUCD2016 - Book of Abstracts

Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract dei contributi accolti al convegno AIUCD 2016, dal titolo "Edizioni digitali: rappresentazione, interoperabilità, analisi del testo e infrastrutture" (Digital editions: representation, interoperability, text analysis and infrastructures). Si tratta del quinto convegno dell'Associazione di Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale (AIUCD), tenutosi a Venezia dal 7 al 9 Settembre 2016, che è stato infatti dedicato alla rappresentazione e allo studio del testo sotto vari punti di vista (risorse, analisi, infrastrutture di pubblicazione), con lo scopo di far dialogare intorno al testo filologi, storici, umanisti digitali, linguisti computazionali, logici, informatici e ingegneri informatici. Il presente volume raccoglie dunque gli abstract dei soli interventi accettati al convegno, che hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione anonima sotto la responsabilità del Comitato Scientifico di AIUCD 2016