On-line transformer condition monitoring through diagnostics and anomaly detection

This paper describes the end-to-end components of an on-line system for diagnostics and anomaly detection. The system provides condition monitoring capabilities for two in- service transmission transformers in the UK. These transformers are nearing the end of their design life, and it is hoped that intensive monitoring will enable them to stay in service for longer. The paper discusses the requirements on a system for interpreting data from the sensors installed on site, as well as describing the operation of specific diagnostic and anomaly detection techniques employed. The system is deployed on a substation computer, collecting and interpreting site data on-line

Josiah Parsons Cooke Jr.: Epistemology in the Service of Science, Pedagogy, and Natural Theology

Josiah Parsons Cooke established chemistry education at Harvard University, initiated an atomic weight research program, and broadly impacted American chemical education through his students, the introduction of laboratory instruction, textbooks, and influence on Harvard's admissions requirements. The devoutly Unitarian Cooke also articulated and defended a biogeochemical natural theology, which he defended by arguing for commonalities between the epistemologies of science and religion. Cooke's pre-Mendeleev classification scheme for the elements and atomic weight research were motivated by his interest in numerical order in nature, which reflected his belief in a divine lawgive

Argumentation in school science : Breaking the tradition of authoritative exposition through a pedagogy that promotes discussion and reasoning

The value of argumentation in science education has become internationally recognised and has been the subject of many research studies in recent years. Successful introduction of argumentation activities in learning contexts involves extending teaching goals beyond the understanding of facts and concepts, to include an emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive processes, epistemic criteria and reasoning. The authors focus on the difficulties inherent in shifting a tradition of teaching from one dominated by authoritative exposition to one that is more dialogic, involving small-group discussion based on tasks that stimulate argumentation. The paper builds on previous research on enhancing the quality of argument in school science, to focus on how argumentation activities have been designed, with appropriate strategies, resources and modelling, for pedagogical purposes. The paper analyses design frameworks, their contexts and lesson plans, to evaluate their potential for enhancing reasoning through foregrounding the processes of argumentation. Examples of classroom dialogue where teachers adopt the frameworks/plans are analysed to show how argumentation processes are scaffolded. The analysis shows that several layers of interpretation are needed and these layers need to be aligned for successful implementation. The analysis serves to highlight the potential and limitations of the design frameworks

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

The 'black box' problem in the study of participation

Research on citizen participation has been guided by two core issues: first, the observation of a widening repertory of modes of participation, and second, the argument that participation is not an undifferentiated phenomenon, but must be conceived as an inherently multidimensional reality. In this article, we argue that conventional participation research has focused too one-sidedly on quantitatively expanding the range of types of activities, while the complex dimensionality is not reflected in the measures used. We formulate a methodological critique by using the metaphor of the 'black box', which refers to the implicit and unquestioned assumption that distinct types of activities and associations represent homogeneous and consistent realities that do not warrant further analytical decomposition. Surveys of participation allocate individuals to different 'participation boxes' by means of a binary logic, leaving a void of what is actually happening inside the boxes. To conclude, we reflect upon the fundamental dilemmas the black box of participation raises for theory and research, and offer conceptual and methodological keys to unlock the participation box