175 research outputs found
Comparing indicators of authorial stance in psychology students' writing and published research articles
Get PDFThe Journal of Writing Research is available via open access: http://jowr.org/ It is an international, on-line, peer reviewed journal.International audienceThis article presents the results of a pilot study examining the use of first-person pronouns, certain adjectives and grading adverbs in a corpus of 51 French psychology student papers written in English as a second language. These results were compared to a corpus of published psychology articles and to a sub-corpus of psychology student texts from the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). Strategic use of pairs of evaluative words was found in the students' texts but not in the published texts. However, the variables of native language and level of field expertise cannot explain all of the variance observed. Future work will improve the validity of the findings by using larger corpora of student and published texts
Breakout group allocation schedules and the social golfer problem with adjacent group sizes
Get PDFThe current pandemic has led schools and universities to turn to online meeting software solutions such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The teaching experience can be enhanced via the use of breakout rooms for small group interaction. Over the course of a class (or over several classes), the class will be allocated to breakout groups multiple times over several rounds. It is desirable to mix the groups as much as possible, the ideal being that no two students appear in the same group in more than one round. In this paper, we discuss how the problem of scheduling balanced allocations of students to sequential breakout rooms directly corresponds to a novel variation of a well-known problem in combinatorics (the social golfer problem), which we call the social golfer problem with adjacent group sizes. We explain how solutions to this problem can be obtained using constructions from combinatorial design theory and how they can be used to obtain good, balanced breakout room allocation schedules. We present our solutions for up to 50 students and introduce an online resource that educators can access to immediately generate suitable allocation schedules
Identifying Hendra Virus Diversity in Pteropid Bats
Get PDFHendra virus (HeV) causes a zoonotic disease with high mortality that is transmitted to humans from bats of the genus Pteropus (flying foxes) via an intermediary equine host. Factors promoting spillover from bats to horses are uncertain at this time, but plausibly encompass host and/or agent and/or environmental factors. There is a lack of HeV sequence information derived from the natural bat host, as previously sequences have only been obtained from horses or humans following spillover events. In order to obtain an insight into possible variants of HeV circulating in flying foxes, collection of urine was undertaken in multiple flying fox roosts in Queensland, Australia. HeV was found to be geographically widespread in flying foxes with a number of HeV variants circulating at the one time at multiple locations, while at times the same variant was found circulating at disparate locations. Sequence diversity within variants allowed differentiation on the basis of nucleotide changes, and hypervariable regions in the genome were identified that could be used to differentiate circulating variants. Further, during the study, HeV was isolated from the urine of flying foxes on four occasions from three different locations. The data indicates that spillover events do not correlate with particular HeV isolates, suggesting that host and/or environmental factors are the primary determinants of bat-horse spillover. Thus future spillover events are likely to occur, and there is an on-going need for effective risk management strategies for both human and animal health
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