Brave New World: Can We Engineer a Better Start for Freshers?

Abstract - The crucial importance of first experiences in shaping future success has been widely acknowledged. Creating the best foundations in large cohorts of students from diverse backgrounds presents special problems of its own. But a secure foundation can enhance student achievement and improve retention – and the students may even have fun too. Research has suggested that building learning communities can enhance student engagement and achievement. This paper examines how introducing non-technical activities can establish sound foundations for a university career by a) addressing objectives in the wider curriculum and b) promoting non-technical skills and experience of group working. A set of changes introduced to five degree cohorts in our academic school were designed to complement enhancements to our technical curriculum introduced during many years of debate and consideration. The changes have impacted upon generic and technical educational experiences. The paper presents an evaluation of the programme of changes through two iterations from the perspective of both faculty and student

RELEVANCY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE POLICY ARENA: IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS: DISCUSSION

Agricultural and Food Policy,

The case for long range chemoreceptive piloting in Chelonia

The reproductive ecology and migration habits of Chelonia are investigated. Efforts were made to determine if the turtle navigates by chemoreception and if sensory responses of the migrating animals could be electronically tracked through telemetry. Efforts were also made to: (1) explain why certain small islands or restricted areas of mainland shore are chosen by Chelonia as nesting grounds, even when located a thousand miles or more from the year round feeding grounds of the population; (2) identify guidance mechanisms used by migrants in their periodic open ocean travels; and (3) account for the so called lost year - the virtually complete disappearance of young sea turtles during their first year of life. It was suggested that turtle migration is aided by an olfactory mechanism, sun compass, and ocean currents. The tracking experiment was unsuccessful; the equipment was lost or damaged and stopped functioning after about two hours

Fractional charge excitations in fermionic ladders

The system of interacting spinless fermions hopping on a two-leg ladder in the presence of an external magnetic field is shown to possess a long range order: the bond density wave or the staggered flux phase. In both cases the elementary excitations are $Z_2$ kinks and carry one half the charge of an electron.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Vortex macroscopic superpositions in ultracold bosons in a double-well potential

We study macroscopic superpositions in the orbital rather than the spatial degrees of freedom, in a three-dimensional double-well system. We show that the ensuing dynamics of $N$ interacting excited ultracold bosons, which in general requires at least eight single-particle modes and ${N+7 \choose N}$ Fock vectors, is described by a surprisingly small set of many-body states. An initial state with half the atoms in each well, and purposely excited in one of them, gives rise to the tunneling of axisymmetric and transverse vortex structures. We show that transverse vortices tunnel orders of magnitude faster than axisymmetric ones and are therefore more experimentally accessible. The tunneling process generates macroscopic superpositions only distinguishable by their orbital properties and within experimentally realistic times.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Entangled Dynamics in Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling of Bose-Einstein Condensates

Tunneling of a quasibound state is a non-smooth process in the entangled many-body case. Using time-evolving block decimation, we show that repulsive (attractive) interactions speed up (slow down) tunneling, which occurs in bursts. While the escape time scales exponentially with small interactions, the maximization time of the von Neumann entanglement entropy between the remaining quasibound and escaped atoms scales quadratically. Stronger interactions require higher order corrections. Entanglement entropy is maximized when about half the atoms have escaped.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.516