Group Work and Group Work Assessment for Computer Courses: A Systems Analysis and Design Case Study

Group work and group work assessment in higher education has been discussed, researched and written about widely. One of the driving forces behind the design and assessment of group work has been the need to expose, familiarise and equip students with the skills that they must possess to combat real world situations. Despite the call from employers for graduates who are able to communicate effectively with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and who must be prepared to work within or direct a team, assessing individual contribution to group activities appears to be the most inhibiting factor that repressed some academics from implementing the idea. Moreover, some critics who conduct group work and carry out group assessment are simply doing that because they are required to do so. This paper supports the established conviction that the ability to work as part of a team is one of the prerequisites for securing employment in the computing industry. The authors, both industry and teaching practitioners, use systems analysis and design as a case study to support their claim that computer professionals must be trained to be able to speak the languages of businessmen, politicians, technicians, computer users, managers, and so on. The study reported in this paper found that while students preferred to put themselves into groups (self select), teachers should be involved and give students guidance about the capability of each individual student and the various skills that are needed to complete group activities. The study also found that when it came to assessing group work, teachers were not considered by students as the experts in assessing group work because they did not know much about the contribution made by individual members of the group. The paper therefore recommends that self evaluation, peer assessment and individual assessment techniques should be used when assessing group work. This paper is a contribution towards increasing the awareness of the importance to include group work as an integral part of preparing computer professionals for survival in the wider business environment

Professional Doctorate Taught Courses: Some Metaknowledge and Intellectual Property Implications

Professional doctorate candidates engage in discipline specific investigations linking practical questions with current developments and creating new knowledge in computing and information technology as an outcome. Course content and a constructivist pedagogy is described and exemplified for a professional doctorate in computing and information technology in New Zealand. Both academic and student responses to the program are described. Problems and points of tension are identified, and solutions discussed

A mind weighted with unpublished matter

Rebecca Fortnum’s A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter marks a development in the history of portraiture, raising questions about the relationship between sitter and painter, issues of authority and control as well as social attitudes around gender. Working from photographs of nineteenth-century sculptures of women, Fortnum’s source material allows for continual extended returns to elusive objects, a type of close, careful looking that leads the artist towards the depiction of every surface detail. This is a rumination on how representation is mastered; on the ‘accomplished’, intrinsically feminine status of the copy of the work of art in comparison to its ‘inventive’, ‘ingenious’ original, wrought by male hands: a critique of a value-laden history that is inherently masculine, and copying as a submissive, secretive other. Fortnum’s transcriptions strive for a form of reduplication that creates a space for difference and subtle deviations to ask what other singular likenesses might emerge through the task of copying within the legacy of women artists’ thwarted ambitions. In essence, Fortnum’s works engage with her female portraits’ sources in a conversation across time and space, through the creation of intimate and empathetic cross-temporal facsimiles that reflect the sexed connections between reproduction, training and accomplishment

Fecal microbiota transfer between young and aged mice reverses hallmarks of the aging gut, eye, and brain

Background: Altered intestinal microbiota composition in later life is associated with inflammaging, declining tissue function, and increased susceptibility to age-associated chronic diseases, including neurodegenerative dementias. Here, we tested the hypothesis that manipulating the intestinal microbiota influences the development of major comorbidities associated with aging and, in particular, inflammation affecting the brain and retina. Methods: Using fecal microbiota transplantation, we exchanged the intestinal microbiota of young (3 months), old (18 months), and aged (24 months) mice. Whole metagenomic shotgun sequencing and metabolomics were used to develop a custom analysis workflow, to analyze the changes in gut microbiota composition and metabolic potential. Effects of age and microbiota transfer on the gut barrier, retina, and brain were assessed using protein assays, immunohistology, and behavioral testing. Results: We show that microbiota composition profiles and key species enriched in young or aged mice are successfully transferred by FMT between young and aged mice and that FMT modulates resulting metabolic pathway profiles. The transfer of aged donor microbiota into young mice accelerates age-associated central nervous system (CNS) inflammation, retinal inflammation, and cytokine signaling and promotes loss of key functional protein in the eye, effects which are coincident with increased intestinal barrier permeability. Conversely, these detrimental effects can be reversed by the transfer of young donor microbiota. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that the aging gut microbiota drives detrimental changes in the gut–brain and gut–retina axes suggesting that microbial modulation may be of therapeutic benefit in preventing inflammation-related tissue decline in later life. [MediaObject not available: see fulltext.] Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.

Fecal microbiota transfer between young and aged mice reverses hallmarks of the aging gut, eye, and brain

Background: Altered intestinal microbiota composition in later life is associated with inflammaging, declining tissue function, and increased susceptibility to age-associated chronic diseases, including neurodegenerative dementias. Here, we tested the hypothesis that manipulating the intestinal microbiota influences the development of major comorbidities associated with aging and, in particular, inflammation affecting the brain and retina. Methods: Using fecal microbiota transplantation, we exchanged the intestinal microbiota of young (3 months), old (18 months), and aged (24 months) mice. Whole metagenomic shotgun sequencing and metabolomics were used to develop a custom analysis workflow, to analyze the changes in gut microbiota composition and metabolic potential. Effects of age and microbiota transfer on the gut barrier, retina, and brain were assessed using protein assays, immunohistology, and behavioral testing. Results: We show that microbiota composition profiles and key species enriched in young or aged mice are successfully transferred by FMT between young and aged mice and that FMT modulates resulting metabolic pathway profiles. The transfer of aged donor microbiota into young mice accelerates age-associated central nervous system (CNS) inflammation, retinal inflammation, and cytokine signaling and promotes loss of key functional protein in the eye, effects which are coincident with increased intestinal barrier permeability. Conversely, these detrimental effects can be reversed by the transfer of young donor microbiota. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that the aging gut microbiota drives detrimental changes in the gut–brain and gut–retina axes suggesting that microbial modulation may be of therapeutic benefit in preventing inflammation-related tissue decline in later life

I care by...

The Care research group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) was conceived in the last week of June 2020, a month after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, an act which catalysed global protests on systemic racism and police brutality. In the UK, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to show solidarity with demonstrators in the US. Coinciding with the easing of the lockdown restrictions imposed to manage the coronavirus, the marches shone a light on the government’s failure to protect Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people from the disproportionate risk posed by COVID- 19, and on the police’s increased use of stop and search in areas with large BAME populations. The pandemic has shone the harshest of lights on the question of care in the age of neoliberalism: who gets it; who needs it; who does it; who controls it. The Care research group, comprising staff and postgraduate researchers within the School of Arts and Humanities at the RCA, works in this light. Over the course of a year, as the inequalities of the virus were becoming all too clear, the group regularly came together via Zoom to reflect on: the question of how to care for the human body in the technical-patriarchal societies the virus has re-inscribed; the ‘un-doing’ of what Judith Butler describes as the binary of vulnerability and resistance; the politically-transformative potential of prioritising care (rooted in empathy, solidarity, kinship) over capitalist gain; the activation of creative research practices (including but by no means limited to writing, looking, painting, drawing, filming, performing, collecting, assembling, curating, making public) as means of caring/transforming. The group’s activities through the year of trying, failing, and trying again to care for its work and members are gathered in a co-authored Declaration of Care, published here, and expanded upon with attention to some of the methods group members developed in their research through practice. The Declaration was recited in a participatory performance with invited artist Jade Montserrat on 10 March 2021. Over the course of a two-hour webinar, participants including members of the public were invited to draw alongside Montserrat with whatever materials they had to hand as they listened to texts on the vulnerabilities of bodies, the structuring of care within institutions, and the tactile, sensory, healing qualities of creative practice. This book includes a selection of the participants’ drawings, a Reader comprising the texts that were shared, and Montserrat’s drawings created through the performance. Ahead of the performance, Montserrat delivered an address to the Care research group which looked back on a lifetime of calling for a kind of care that was never provided. Excerpts from Montserrat’s address are included here too, alongside a text and image which reflect on the group’s affective reactions to the experience of listening to it, titled Episode. The Declaration is a list of methods (approaches, processes, techniques), an enumeration of how Care research group members have worked, and would like to work: ‘I care by…’. This is a statement which has reverberated throughout the year, which bears repeating, which resounds still. Gemma Blackshaw, Care research group convenor, 2020–202

Effect of height on the competitive ability of wheat with oats

Copyright © 2008 by the American Society of AgronomyCompetitive ability of wheat is influenced by a range of attributes such as plant height, tiller number, and light interception. This study focused on the effect of plant height on weed competitiveness of a set of near-isogenic wheat lines (NILs). The set included seven bread wheat (Triticum aestivium L.) and six durum wheat (T. turgidum L.) cultivars, each having a semidwarf and tall near-isogenic line. These lines were examined in field experiments conducted over two growing seasons. Oats (Avena sativa 'Marloo') were used as a weed mimic and sown with the wheat and various plant traits were recorded. The tall NILs were more competitive than the corresponding semidwarf lines, having consistently lower yield losses in both years with differences between NILs ranging from 3 to 10% for bread wheat and 10 to 17% for durum wheat. Greater suppression of oat seed production was observed during 2003, tall NILs reduced oat seed production by 26% (P < 0.01) in bread wheat and 41% (P < 0.001) in durum wheat. Increasing plant height improved bread and durum wheat's ability to tolerate and suppress oats. In addition to plant height, traits associated with early vigor such as length and width of leaves 1 and 2, early plant biomass and leaf area index (LAI) were also shown to have a significant influence on crop yield loss and weed suppression, but these correlations were not consistent across both years. The results suggest that selection for high early vigor could reduce the negative effect of reduced plant height on weed competitive ability. Copyright © 2008 by the American Society of Agronomy, All rights reserved.Michael C. Zerner, Gurjeet S. Gill, and Rebecca K. Vandeleu

Median Plot of SAGE Tag <i>K-</i>Means Cluster Analysis Using 24 Clusters

<p>Tags present at greater than 0.1% in one or more of the ten wild-type total retina libraries are considered. SAGE libraries are plotted on the x-axis, and tag abundance, plotted as a fraction of the total tags for a gene in the library in question, is shown on the y-axis. A full list of tags and their abundance levels used for the analysis is detailed in <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020247#st003" target="_blank">Table S3</a>.</p

Transcription Factor Cascade in Photoreceptor Development

<p>Transcription factors that are selectively expressed in developing rods (and possibly cones as well) are shown. The schematic diagram integrates gene expression data from previously identified photoreceptor-enriched transcription factors and from genes explored in this study. The genes shown are <i>Mm.193526/Yboxbp4, Mm.3499/Rax, Mm. 89623/mCas, Mm.1635/PIAS3,</i> and <i>Mm.235550/ERRβ</i>. See Figure S6 for images of the developmental expression patterns of previously characterized transcription factors. Sections were from central retina. Cellular laminae of both the developing and mature retina are indicated with colored bars. All pictures were taken at 200x. See Table S5 for a full list of probes used.</p