The role of text messaging in team collaborative learning

Teamwork is essential to the successful completion of group tasks, and is therefore usually highlighted by universities as a desirable graduate attribute. To encourage the development of good teamwork skills among students, many university courses incorporate team assignments. In a conventional learning environment, students meet face-to-face in the classroom or somewhere on campus to complete their team assignments. However, it is interesting to note that today’s students prefer instead to have discussions or to collaborate using digital media. Today’s students use such digital communication media as email, text messaging, video chat, etc. to collaborate with team members in the process of completing their team assignments. As the students are familiar with and use some of these digital communication media in their everyday activities, it is quite possible that they also find them convenient and easy to use for academic work purposes. According to Nowak, Watt, and Walther’s (2005, 2009) efficiency framework, people tend to select communication media that they consider more effective in achieving certain objectives and those that require less cognitive and behavioural effort, and less time. However, is it true that digital communication media indeed help users to achieve greater team effectiveness, or is it just a perception myth? This study attempted to examine, when university students used text messaging for team collaboration purposes, if text messaging affected their copresence (modelled as a second-order formative construct which consists of two subconstructs: self copresence and partner copresence), media satisfaction, and perceived team effectiveness. This study conducted a questionnaire survey to collect responses from students who had been involved in team projects, and performed a partial least squares analysis of the responses. The findings show that copresence had a significant relationship with media satisfaction; media satisfaction had a significant relationship with perceived team effectiveness; and media satisfaction had a partial mediating effect between copresence and team effectiveness. This study could help explain why students may choose text messaging to facilitate team collaborative learning

Growing the Game: Soccer in America

This thesis looks to explore the history and culture of soccer in America, relative to that of the top nations in the sport, in order to design a youth academy to bolster the cultural interest. Soccer, although one of the oldest sports in history, is relatively unpopular in America, compared to the “Big” sports: Football, Baseball and Basketball. Sports play an important part of our daily lives economically, politically and socially. As entertainment they act as a catalyst in developing close-knit communities. The objective is to integrate these pieces of architecture into the city to create a social hub, focused around developing the youth and interest in the sport

Florence Ada Stoney: formidable feminism in the history of radiology

Background: Florence Ada Stoney is a pioneer of Radiology, but her successes often remain overlooked. She is credited as being the first female radiologist in the United Kingdom, but her life and work are not well documented compared with other pioneers of the time. Florence Stoney’s life and work are evidence of the struggles she faced due to her gender. She overcame many social constraints faced by women of the period, to train in medicine and contribute to the medical effort during World War I. Even today a gender gap in Radiology is evident. Each year fewer female students choose Radiology as their medical specialism, compared with their male peers. On the other hand, Radiography is a female dominated profession, with fewer male students studying and working in this field of healthcare. Purpose: - To celebrate the life of Florence Stoney. - To consider Florence Stoney’s achievements, and their impact on Radiology. - To explore the current position of medical/radiography education in the UK. Summary of Content: This submission focuses on Florence’s life, education, and work, celebrating Florence’s achievements and her contribution to Radiology. This submission also explores the socio-economic and gender issues of the period, which created barriers for Florence to overcome, some of which continue to have an impact on medical education in the United Kingdom today

Turbulent flow in a ribbed channel: Flow structures in the vicinity of a rib

PIV measurements are performed in a channel with periodic ribs on one wall. The emphasis of this study is to investigate the flow structures in the vicinity of a rib in terms of mean velocities, Reynolds stresses, probability density functions (PDF), and two-point correlations. The PDF distribution of u0 is bimodal in the separated shear layer downstream of the rib. The maximum Reynolds shear stresses occur at the leading edge of the rib. Based on quadrant analysis, it is found that ejection motions make a dominant contribution to the Reynolds shear stress in this region. Moreover, topology-based visualization is applied to the separation bubble upstream of the rib. Salient critical points and limit cycles are extracted, which gives clues to the physical processes occurring in the flow

Pyrometallurgical upgrading of PGM-rich leach residues from the Western Platinum Base Metals Refinery through roasting

The production of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) normally entails the smelting of PGM flotation concentrates, converting of the furnace matte and removal of the bulk of the Ni, Cu, Co, S and Fe through atmospheric and pressure leaching in a base metals refinery to produce a PGM-rich concentrate. A number of impurities, mostly Se, Te, As, Bi, Os and Pb, are not removed significantly during the oxidising leach process in sulphuric acid media. In addition slag inclusions in matte leads to contamination of the PGM residues with silica, fayalite, magnetite and trevorite phases. Furthermore some Cu, Ni, Fe and S also remain. For this reason a typical Precious Metal Refinery (PMR) feed material contains less than 65% PGMs. The PMR is based on a chloride process and requires contaminants to be within narrow specification limits to prevent the formation of PGM residues that must be reprocessed or tolled, leading to poor first pass metal efficiencies and extending the duration of the production pipeline for efficient recovery. A process has been developed to significantly upgrade the BMR leach residues through pyrometallurgical processing, which include a multistep process of roasting under oxidising atmospheres, a two-step smelting process of the roasted calcine (with engineered slag chemistry and slag-refractory interactions) and subsequent atomisation of the molten alloy which can be fed as a slurry into the HCl/Cl2 dissolution reactors in the precious metals refinery. These pyrometallurgical steps upgrade the BMR residue from a 45–50% grade up to an alloy grade of ca. 90% PGMs, whilst removing the most deleterious elements with major process impacts on the PMR. This paper will focus primarily on the roasting step and it will investigate the thermochemical and mineralogical changes occurring during roasting. These changes were evaluated through a combination of thermochemical modelling and experimental investigation. The roasting step needs to be in an oxidative environment in order to achieve the vapourisation of Se, Te, As, Os and S. The speciation of PGMs and their vapourisation behaviour are presented, as well as the sensitivity of precious metals deportment to changes in roast conditions.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/minenghb2014ai201

Raman Spectroscopy of Lymphocytes for the Identification of Prostate Cancer Patients with Late Radiation Toxicity Following Radiotherapy

The success of radiotherapy in tumour control depends on the total dose given. However, the tolerance of the normal tissues surrounding the tumour limits this dose. It is not known why some patients develop radiation toxicity and, currently, it is not possible to predict before treatment which patients will experience adverse effects. Thus, there is an unmet clinical need for a new test to identify patients at risk of radiation toxicity. Here, we report a new approach based on Raman spectroscopy.Blood samples were collected from 42 patients who had undergone radiotherapy for prostate cancer and had shown either severe or no/minimal late radiation toxicity in follow up. Radiation response was assessed following in vitro irradiation using Raman spectroscopy in addition to the G2 chromosomal radiosensitivity assay and the H2AX DNA damage assay.A Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis model was developed to classify patients using known radiation toxicity scores. A sensitivity of 95%, specificity of 92% and overall accuracy of 93% was achieved. In the future, this technology may have potential to lead to individualised patient radiotherapy by identifying which patients are at risk of radiation toxicity

Vibrational Spectroscopy of Liquid Biopsies for Prostate Cancer Diagnosis

Background: Screening for prostate cancer with prostate specific antigen and digital rectal examination allows early diagnosis of prostate malignancy but has been associated with poor sensitivity and specificity. There is also a considerable risk of over-diagnosis and overtreatment, which highlights the need for better tools for diagnosis of prostate cancer. This study investigates the potential of high throughput Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy of liquid biopsies for rapid and accurate diagnosis of prostate cancer. Methods: Blood samples (plasma and lymphocytes) were obtained from healthy control subjects and prostate cancer patients. FTIR and Raman spectra were recorded from plasma samples, while Raman spectra were recorded from the lymphocytes. The acquired spectral data was analysed with various multivariate statistical methods, principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and classical least squares (CLS) fitting analysis. Results: Discrimination was observed between the infrared and Raman spectra of plasma and lymphocytes from healthy donors and prostate cancer patients using PCA. In addition, plasma and lymphocytes displayed differentiating signatures in patients exhibiting different Gleason scores. A PLS-DA model was able to discriminate these groups with sensitivity and specificity rates ranging from 90% to 99%. CLS fitting analysis identified key analytes that are involved in the development and progression of prostate cancer. Conclusions: This technology may have potential as an alternative first stage diagnostic triage for prostate cancer. This technology can be easily adaptable to many other bodily fluids and could be useful for translation of liquid biopsy-based diagnostics into the clinic