Turkish teachers' beliefs regarding moral psychology and implicit moral education: a case study

This thesis reports a mixed method case study of Turkish teachers’ and trainee teachers’ beliefs and attitudes regarding aspects of moral education and moral psychology, and the development of these beliefs and attitudes through teacher training and experience. Both internationally and in Turkey it is generally agreed that teachers are not well enough equipped to carry out moral education. This thesis explores a philosophical argument for why understanding the psychology of moral development could be valuable for teachers in informing their engagement with explicit and implicit moral education. A cross-sectional sample of participants was investigated using a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyse beliefs and attitudes relevant to moral education. The results indicate that Turkish teachers and trainee teachers are not equipped with the relevant set of knowledge and skills to consciously foster students’ moral development; neither teacher training nor teaching experience appear to influence the teachers’ belief development. However, teachers and trainee teachers are willing and interested both to engage with moral education, and to receive training relevant to conducting moral education. Key findings regarding teachers’ beliefs and attitudes concerning conducting moral education include an inclination towards providing pupils with a scaffold to foster moral development, rather than dogmatic imposition of a certain set of values and virtues; and an inclination towards creating a pluralistic moral environment in the school that fosters compassion and cooperation. Based on the understandings gained from the reviewed literature and analysed data, recommendations are made regarding how to improve ITE programmes with respect to preparing teachers to engage with moral education

Climbing ring robot for inspection of offshore wind turbines

A rapid expansion of wind turbine farms for sustainable electric power production is planned in Europe by 2020. At least in the UK, these will largely be located offshore to meet growing concerns about the visual intrusiveness and noise generation producedby onshore based farms. The necessary structural integrity inspection of offshore wind turbine blades poses tremendous problems of access, danger to human operatives and costs in the event of blades having to be taken out of service and transported on shore forschedules inspections. For these reasons robotic in-situ blade inspection of offshore wind turbines has been proposed and micro/nano focus computed axial X ray tomography (MNCAT) has been identified as the optimal if not the only solution for identification of safety critical defects in the thickest blade sections. The weight of such an inspection system is very high, typically 200kg and typical cross sectional scanner dimensions of 1 m × 2 m to encircle as blade, clearly involve very high destabilizing moments to be countered by the deployment robot. The solution is a climbing ring robot completely encircling a turbine tower, typically 3 meter in diameter, to provide the necessary adhesion forces and anti-destabilizing force moments. Because of the size and thus development costs of such a huge robot the optimal design path is to prototype a small scale model. First results on such a model are described and from its performance the load carrying capabilities of a full scale version can be computed and the scale model can then berefined by 'reverse engineering' to guarantee that a full scale construction is able tomeet requirements. The key design innovation is that the adhesive forces between the robot and climbing surface a provided entirely by mechanical means rather than by usingthe usual methods of vacuum suction or magnetic force, making the system much cheaper andeasier to manipulate. Furthermore the design is entirely modular. Copyright © 2008 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd

Zeeman Slowers for Strontium based on Permanent Magnets

We present the design, construction, and characterisation of longitudinal- and transverse-field Zeeman slowers, based on arrays of permanent magnets, for slowing thermal beams of atomic Sr. The slowers are optimised for operation with deceleration related to the local laser intensity (by the parameter $\epsilon$), which uses more effectively the available laser power, in contrast to the usual constant deceleration mode. Slowing efficiencies of up to $\approx$ $18$ $$ are realised and compared to those predicted by modelling. We highlight the transverse-field slower, which is compact, highly tunable, light-weight, and requires no electrical power, as a simple solution to slowing Sr, well-suited to spaceborne application. For $^{88}$Sr we achieve a slow-atom flux of around $6\times 10^9$ atoms$\,$s$^{-1}$ at $30$ ms$^{-1}$, loading approximately $5\times 10^8$ atoms in to a magneto-optical-trap (MOT), and capture all isotopes in approximate relative natural abundances

The association of neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio and lymphocyte-monocyte ratio with 3-month clinical outcome after mechanical thrombectomy following stroke

Background and aim Neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and lymphocyte-monocyte ratio (LMR) are associated with clinical outcomes in malignancy, cardiovascular disease and stroke. Here we investigate their association with outcome after acute ischaemic stroke treated by mechanical thrombectomy (MT). Methods Patients were selected using audit data for MT for acute anterior circulation ischaemic stroke at a UK centre from May 2016–July 2017. Clinical and laboratory data including neutrophil, lymphocyte and monocyte count tested before and 24 h after MT were collected. Poor functional outcome was defined as modified Rankin Scale (mRS) of 3–6 at 3 months. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to explore the relationship of NLR and LMR with functional outcome. Results One hundred twenty-one patients (mean age 66.4 ± 16.7, 52% female) were included. Higher NLR (adjusted OR 0.022, 95% CI, 0.009–0.34, p = 0.001) and lower LMR (adjusted OR − 0.093, 95% CI (− 0.175)−(− 0.012), p = 0.025) at 24-h post-MT were significantly associated with poorer functional outcome when controlling for age, baseline NIHSS score, infarct size, presence of good collateral supply, recanalisation and symptomatic intracranial haemorrhage on multivariate logistic regression. Admission NLR or LMR were not significant predictors of mRS at 3 months. The optimal cut-off values of NLR and LMR at 24-h post-MT that best discriminated poor outcome were 5.5 (80% sensitivity and 60% specificity) and 2.0 (80% sensitivity and 50% specificity), respectively on receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. Conclusion NLR and LMR tested at 24 h after ictus or intervention may predict 3-month functional outcome

Total Integrated Robotic Structural Inspection for Enhanced Aircraft Life and Safety

Aircraft life can be extended, safety standards and passenger confidence enhanced, and structural inspection costs dramatically reduced, by establishing at major airports specialised ‘Total Inspection Centres’ that would be open 24 hours a day. Aircraft would be flown to these centres. Here every relevant type of Non Destructive Testing (NDT) sensor would be deployed by multi-axis robots moving on Cartesian gantries to cover the wing, fuselage, tail and rudder. Each inspection would produce a defect map of 100% of the aircraft surface. This is very unreliable if done manually because of operator fatigue. A gantry robotic system has the advantage that very heavy NDT sensors such as X-ray tubes and SQUID magnetometers can be deployed in addition to all the more common sensors such as ultrasonic and Eddy current probe arrays. Acoustic emission monitoring of an entire airframe can be achieved with robotic scanning without the need for a vast and expensive array of sensors. This would be most useful for fuselage pressure testing. At present NDT of aircraft is carried out in many relatively small units attached to individual airports that cannot possibly afford the whole range of NDT equipment and robotic deployment facilities. A specialised centre can do so and in addition achieve complete data fusion of the results from different sensors

The Centre for Automated and Robotic Non-Destructive Testing

The Centre was established in 1992 to research and develop inspection robots and NDT techniques to [1,2]: • Bring automation to the NDT task to eliminate errors caused by human operators due to fatigue on jobs that require a great deal of inspection in difficult environmental conditions. • Improve defect detection by using the ability of robotics to improve sensor probe positioning accuracy and repeatability and use the programmable flexibility of robots to optimally deploy a wide variety of sensor probes and inspection techniques. • Reduce the cost of performing the inspection by using wall climbing and mobile robots that provide access to test sites that are remotely located on large structures and/or in hazardous environments and hence not easily accessible to humans. • Reduce costs substantially by performing in-service NDT with robotic deployment of sensor probes thereby eliminating outage costs and production losses. • Reducing capital equipment costs by developing compact multi-function inspection robots that can flexibly perform a variety of different NDT tasks on different sites. Thus the robots should be readily transportable between different sites, be able to move over floors, change surfaces and climb walls, ceilings and other structures of variable curvature whilst carrying a payload of NDT sensors that can scan test surfaces by deployment with multi-axis arms

Automated inspection system for NDT of steel plates

The aim of the research project is to automate NDT data acquisition and analysis on large steel plates with an ultrasonic inspection technique that is implemented with robotics instrumentation. The project researches NDT sensor deployment, ultrasonic data acquisition and analysis and intelligent flaw detection. A robotic system has been developed for the inspection of internal imperfections in flat steel plates and produces a map of defective areas. It is a magnetic vehicle with a self-navigating system that carries 16 transducers for ultrasonic testing. The software that has been developed controls the scan trajectory of the vehicle and locates and plots position of the ultrasonic sensors and the presence of any defects at these positions. Internal imperfections in the steel plate are detected by monitoring the backwall echo or the echo associated with an imperfection during the scanning. The system has easy mobility to carry out inspection from site to site and a display and image processing system to analyse and show results of the ultrasonic inspection

Default Parallels: The Science Potential Of JWST Parallel Observations During TSO Primary Observations

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will observe several stars for long cumulative durations while pursuing exoplanets as primary science targets for both Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) and very likely General Observer (GO) programs. Here we argue in favor of an automatic default parallels program to observe e.g., using the F200W/F277W filters or grism of NIRCAM/NIRISS in order to find high redshift (z >> 10) galaxies, cool red/brown dwarf-sub-stellar objects, Solar System objects, and observations of serendipitous planetary transits. We argue here the need for automated exploratory astrophysical observations with unused JWST instruments during these long duration exoplanet observations. Randomized fields that are observed in parallel mode reduce errors due to cosmic variance more effectively than single continuous fields of a typical wedding cake observing strategy (Trenti & Stiavelli 2008). Hence, we argue that the proposed automated survey will explore a unique and rich discovery space in high redshift Universe, Galactic structure, and Solar System. We show that the GTO and highly-probable GO target list of exoplanets covers the Galactic disk/halo and high redshift Universe, mostly well out of the plane of the disk of the Milky Way. Exposure times are of the order of the CEERS GTO medium deep survey in a single filter, comparable to CANDELS in HST's surveys and deep fields. The area covered by NIRISS and NIRCam combined could accumulate to a half square degree surveyed.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication by PAS

The bright-end galaxy candidates at z ~ 9 from 79 independent HST fields

We present a full data analysis of the pure-parallel Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging observations in the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies Survey (BoRG[z9]) in Cycle 22. The medium-deep exposures with five HST/WFC3IR+UVIS filter bands from 79 independent sightlines (~370 arcmin^2) provide the least biased determination of number density for z>9 bright galaxies against cosmic variance. After a strict two-step selection for candidate galaxies, including dropout color and photometric redshift analyses, and revision of previous BoRG candidates, we identify one source at z~10 and two sources at z~9. The z~10 candidate shows evidence of line-of-sight lens magnification (mu~1.5), yet it appears surprisingly luminous (MUV ~ -22.6\pm0.3 mag), making it one of the brightest candidates at z > 8 known (~ 0.3 mag brighter than the z = 8.68 galaxy EGSY8p7, spectroscopically confirmed by Zitrin and collaborators). For z ~ 9 candidates, we include previous data points at fainter magnitudes and find that the data are well fitted by a Schechter luminosity function with alpha ~ -2.1, MUV ~ -21.5 mag, and log phi ~ -4.5 Mpc^-3mag^-1, for the first time without fixing any parameters. The inferred cosmic star formation rate density is consistent with unaccelerated evolution from lower redshift.Comment: 18pages, 7figures, 6tables. accepted to the Astrophysical Journa