A Conversation Analysis of Teacher's Feedback and Students' Uptake in an Intermediate English as a Second Language Classroom at INTO Newcastle University

This conversational analytic-informed study aims to investigate the role of teacher's feedback in an English as a Second Language classroom. The study draws on multiple excerpts from an extended sequence of an interaction collected at INTO Newcastle University, United Kingdom. The findings demonstrate that explicit feedback is proved to be effective in leading to students' uptake rather than being seen as not effective (Lyster and Ranta, 1997). Hand gestures, employed alongside the teacher's feedback, play a significant role in raising the students' awareness of the mismatch between their interlanguage and the target form, and encouraging students to repeat and self-correct the target form voluntarily. The findings reinforce the importance for future researchers to conduct a case-by-case emic analysis in order to fully understand how teachers to employ different types of feedback and interactional resources to create and facilitate learning opportunities in an acquisition-rich environment in the language classroom

Fracture through cavitation in a metallic glass

The fracture surfaces of a Zr-based bulk metallic glass exhibit exotic multi-affine isotropic scaling properties. The study of the mismatch between the two facing fracture surfaces as a function of their distance shows that fracture occurs mostly through the growth and coalescence of damage cavities. The fractal nature of these damage cavities is shown to control the roughness of the fracture surfaces

Distribution of the second virial coefficients of globular proteins

George and Wilson [Acta. Cryst. D 50, 361 (1994)] looked at the distribution of values of the second virial coefficient of globular proteins, under the conditions at which they crystallise. They found the values to lie within a fairly narrow range. We have defined a simple model of a generic globular protein. We then generate a set of proteins by picking values for the parameters of the model from a probability distribution. At fixed solubility, this set of proteins is found to have values of the second virial coefficient that fall within a fairly narrow range. The shape of the probability distribution of the second virial coefficient is Gaussian because the second virial coefficient is a sum of contributions from different patches on the protein surface.Comment: 5 pages, including 3 figure

Double solid twistor spaces: the case of arbitrary signature

In a recent paper (math.DG/0701278) we constructed a series of new Moishezon twistor spaces which is a kind of variant of the famous LeBrun twistor spaces. In this paper we explicitly give projective models of another series of Moishezon twistor spaces on nCP^2 for arbitrary n>2, which can be regarded as a generalization of the twistor spaces of a 'double solid type' on 3CP^2 studied by Kreussler, Kurke, Poon and the author. Similarly to the twistor spaces of 'double solid type' on 3CP^2, projective models of present twistor spaces have a natural structure of double covering of a CP^2-bundle over CP^1. We explicitly give a defining polynomial of the branch divisor of the double covering whose restriction to fibers are degree four. If n>3 these are new twistor spaces, to the best of the author's knowledge. We also compute the dimension of the moduli space of these twistor spaces. Differently from math.DG/0701278, the present investigation is based on analysis of pluri-(half-)anticanonical systems of the twistor spaces.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures; v2: title changed (the original title was "Explicit construction of new Moishezon twistor spaces, II".

The automorphism group of separable states in quantum information theory

We show that the linear group of automorphism of Hermitian matrices which preserves the set of separable states is generated by \emph{natural} automorphisms: change of an orthonormal basis in each tensor factor, partial transpose in each tensor factor, and interchanging two tensor factors of the same dimension. We apply our results to preservers of the product numerical range.Comment: 15 page

Glargine and detemir: Safety and efficacy profiles of the long-acting basal insulin analogs

Diabetes mellitus is a growing public health concern in the US and worldwide. Insulin therapy is the cornerstone of diabetes therapy, and the use of basal insulins will increase as clinicians strive to help their patients reach glycemic goals. Basal insulins have been continually improved upon over the years, and the long-acting basal insulin analogs, glargine and detemir, have many pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic advantages over neutral protamine Hagedorn insulin, namely, less variable absorption profiles, a less pronounced peak in effect, and a longer duration of action. Overall, glargine and detemir do not differ greatly in their safety and efficacy profiles. Major differences between the two include lower within-subject variability, lower risk of hypoglycemia, and a weight-sparing effect with insulin detemir. This review summarizes data from the key pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies, as well as clinical and observational studies to elucidate the role of each basal insulin analog in therapy