505,575 research outputs found
ExoData: A python package to handle large exoplanet catalogue data
Exoplanet science often involves using the system parameters of real
exoplanets for tasks such as simulations, fitting routines, and target
selection for proposals. Several exoplanet catalogues are already well
established but often lack a version history and code friendly interfaces.
Software that bridges the barrier between the catalogues and code enables users
to improve the specific repeatability of results by facilitating the retrieval
of exact system parameters used in an articles results along with unifying the
equations and software used. As exoplanet science moves towards large data,
gone are the days where researchers can recall the current population from
memory. An interface able to query the population now becomes invaluable for
target selection and population analysis. ExoData is a Python interface and
exploratory analysis tool for the Open Exoplanet Catalogue. It allows the
loading of exoplanet systems into Python as objects (Planet, Star, Binary etc)
from which common orbital and system equations can be calculated and measured
parameters retrieved. This allows researchers to use tested code of the common
equations they require (with units) and provides a large science input
catalogue of planets for easy plotting and use in research. Advanced querying
of targets are possible using the database and Python programming language.
ExoData is also able to parse spectral types and fill in missing parameters
according to programmable specifications and equations. Examples of use cases
are integration of equations into data reduction pipelines, selecting planets
for observing proposals and as an input catalogue to large scale simulation and
analysis of planets.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 9 tables. Accepted by Computer Physics
Communication
The design of a first course in programming
A course was designed to teach Top-Down programming to second
level students who had no previous computer experience. The
purposes of the course were a) to enable them to become computer
literate and b) to develop their problem-solving ability. The
course was designed to teach programming in a manner which was
independent of any particular programming language or machine.
This approach was prompted by dissatisfaction with traditional
courses which generally concentrate on the syntax and semantics
of a particular programming language, at the expense of
developing important underlying concepts.
Initially, a review of the history of programming languages was
carried out to identify the essential elements of programming.
This review found that there was general agreement about the
fundamental importance of structure and that it was not
necessary to use all of the control constructs contained in the
available languages (BASIC, COMAL and PASCAL). Both a mini-language; containing just two control structures,
and a diagrammatic representation (structure diagrams) of the
mini-language were then designed. The chosen control structures
were IF/THEN/ELIF/ELSE for selection and a WHILE loop for
iteration. The students were trained to solve problems using
the mini-language and structure diagrams and were supplied with
translation rules to convert their solutions into COMAL.
Translation rules were also drawn up for PASCAL and BASIC.
The course was tested with girls aged 15 and 16 years in a
Dublin secondary school. These trials showed that the method
may be used successfully with students of this age
Adopting Moodle:Case Studies in the Diffusion of Innovation
This joint research paper among five part-time English teachers at Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen University, hereafter called Kyoai University, represents a focused practical application of Action Research based on CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) in the classroom and syllabus. This research builds upon the history and development of CALL at the University, including previous research based on student perceptions of CALL (Deadman, 2014) and teacher’s perceptions and evaluations of multimedia technologies (Mason, 2014). The paper details and investigates how CALL is adopted amongst the teachers in this study, through the existent software Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). Two of the members of this group have used Moodle, whereas the three other part-time teachers have had limited exposure and experience using it. The aim of this research group is to peer-teach each other in a community of practice, in order that our own technology skills increase, ultimately transferring this to better learning experiences for the students.
The paper will use teachers experience, observations and planning to detail the purposefulness of technology in the curriculum; the teacher’s own perceptions of the technology; the subsequent selection, planning and design of appropriate class-specific Moodle applications; and each teacher’s initial evaluations of Moodle as they begin to construct their own Moodle accounts for various classes. A general e-mail was sent to all Japanese part-time teachers who would be interested in jointly partaking in a research paper, based on the above considerations. As such, the members of this research paper are equal in membership and responsibility for the research, as per the ethical considerations of practitioner research (Hammersley, M., Gomm, R., and Woods, P., 2003)
Summarisation and visualisation of e-Health data repositories
At the centre of the Clinical e-Science Framework (CLEF) project is a repository of well organised,
detailed clinical histories, encoded as data that will be available for use in clinical care and in-silico
medical experiments. We describe a system that we have developed as part of the CLEF project, to perform the task of generating a diverse range of textual and graphical summaries of a patient’s clinical history from a data-encoded model, a chronicle, representing the record of the patient’s medical history. Although the focus of our current work is on cancer patients, the approach we
describe is generalisable to a wide range of medical areas
Event notification services: analysis and transformation of profile definition languages
The integration of event information from diverse event notification sources is, as with meta-searching over heterogeneous search engines, a challenging task. Due to the complexity of profile definition languages, known solutions for heterogeneous searching cannot be applied for event notification.
In this technical report, we propose transformation rules for profile rewriting. We transform each profile defined at a meta-service into a profile expressed in the language of each event notification source. Due to unavoidable asymmetry in the semantics of different languages, some superfluous information may be delivered to the meta-service. These notifications are then post-processed to reduce the number of spurious messages. We present a survey and classification of profile definition languages for event notification, which serves as basis for the transformation rules. The proposed rules are implemented in a prototype transformation module for a Meta-Service for event notification
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