Students as change agents: new ways of engaging with learning and teaching in higher education

This is a set of practitioner resources for those wanting to set up student-based research projects in their institutions

Getting Ahead or Left Behind? The Politics and Policy of Education Reform in the United States

Are teacher characteristics a significant factor in student learning? If so, which characteristics are effective? An original analysis of reading test scores of 5,000 fourth graders across the United States confirmed the difficulties researchers face when measuring teacher quality; it appears to account for only small variations in scores. Given the complexity, first, of the politics of teacher quality and, second, the improvement of primary education in the U.S., I offer some modest recommendations

Getting Ahead or Left Behind? The Politics and Policy of Education Reform in the United States

Are teacher characteristics a significant factor in student learning? If so, which characteristics are effective? An original analysis of reading test scores of 5,000 fourth graders across the United States confirmed the difficulties researchers face when measuring teacher quality; it appears to account for only small variations in scores. Given the complexity, first, of the politics of teacher quality and, second, the improvement of primary education in the U.S., I offer some modest recommendations

Mitigating heat demand peaks in buildings in a highly renewable European energy system

Space and water heating accounts for about 40% of final energy consumption in the European Union and thus plays a key role in reducing overall costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Many scenarios to reach net-zero emissions in buildings rely on electrification, but meeting the heat demand peaks in the winter can be challenging, particularly when wind and solar resources are low. This paper examines how to mitigate space heating demand peaks most cost-effectively in a top-down, sector-coupled model with carbon dioxide emissions constraint to be net-zero. It introduces the first model that co-optimises both supply and efficiency simultaneously including all European countries with hourly resolution. The competition between technologies to address these heating peaks, namely building retrofitting, thermal energy storage and individual hybrid heat pumps with backup gas boilers is examined. A novel thought experiment demonstrates that the level of building renovation is driven by the strong seasonal heat peaks, rather than the overall energy consumption. If all three instruments are applied, total costs are reduced by up to 17%. Building renovation enables the largest benefit with cost savings of up to 14% and allows individual gas boilers to be removed from the energy system without significant higher costs.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Endogenous learning for green hydrogen in a sector-coupled energy model for Europe

Many studies have shown that hydrogen could play a large role in the energy transition for hard-to-electrify sectors, but previous modelling has not included the necessary features to assess its role. They have either left out important sectors of hydrogen demand, ignored the temporal variability in the system or neglected the dynamics of learning effects. We address these limitations and consider learning-by-doing for the full green hydrogen production chain with different climate targets in a detailed European sector-coupled model. Here, we show that in the next 10 years a faster scale-up of electrolysis and renewable capacities than envisaged by the EU in the REPowerEU Plan can be cost-optimal to reach the strictest +1.5oC target. This reduces the costs for hydrogen production to 1.26 €/kg by 2050. Hydrogen production switches from grey to green hydrogen, omitting the option of blue hydrogen. If electrolysis costs are modelled without dynamic learning-by-doing, then the electrolysis scale-up is significantly delayed, while total system costs are overestimated by up to 13% and the levelised cost of hydrogen is overestimated by 67%

The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe

Electricity transmission expansion has suffered many delays in Europe in recent decades, despite its significance for integrating renewable electricity into the energy system. A hydrogen network which reuses the existing fossil gas network could not only help to supply demand for low-emission fuels, but could also to balance variations in wind and solar energy across the continent and thus avoid power grid expansion. We pursue this idea by varying the allowed expansion of electricity and hydrogen grids in net-zero CO2 scenarios for a sector-coupled and self-sufficient European energy system with high shares of renewables. We cover the electricity, buildings, transport, agriculture, and industry sectors across 181 regions and model every third hour of a year. With this high spatio-temporal resolution, the model can capture bottlenecks in transmission networks, the variability of demand and renewable supply, as well as regional opportunities for the retrofitting of legacy gas infrastructure and the development of geological hydrogen storage. Our results show consistent system cost reductions with a pan-continental hydrogen network that connects regions with low-cost and abundant renewable potentials to demand centres, synthetic fuel production and cavern storage sites. Developing a hydrogen network reduces system costs by up to 26 billion Euros per year (3.4%), with the highest benefits when electricity grid reinforcements cannot be realised. Between 64% and 69% of this network could be built from repurposed natural gas pipelines. However, we find that hydrogen networks can only partially substitute for power grid expansion. While the expansion of both networks together can achieve the largest cost savings of 10%, the expansion of neither is truly essential as long as higher costs can be accepted and regulatory changes are made to manage grid bottlenecks.Comment: including supplementary materia

Comparison of head impact measurements via an instrumented mouthguard and an anthropometric testing device

The purpose of this study was to determine and compare the efficacy of head impact measurements via an electronic sensor framework, embedded within a mouthguard, against an anthropometric testing device. Development of the former is in response to the growing issue of head impacts and concussion in rugby union. Testing was conducted in a vehicle safety laboratory using a standard impact protocol utilising the headforms of anthropometric testing devices. The headforms were subjected to controlled front and side impacts. For each impact, the linear acceleration and rotational velocity was measured over a 104-ms interval at a frequency of 1 kHz. The magnitude of peak linear acceleration and peak rotational velocity was determined from the measured time-series traces and statistically compared. The peak linear acceleration and rotational velocity had intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.95 and 0.99, respectively. The root-mean-square error between the measurement systems was 4.3 g with a standard deviation of 3.5 g for peak linear acceleration and 0.7 rad/s with a standard deviation of 0.4 rad/s for rotational velocity. Bland and Altman analysis indicated a systematic bias of 2.5 g and − 0.5 rad/s and limits of agreement (1.96 × standard deviation) of ± 13.1 g and ± 1.25 rad/s for the instrumented mouthguard. These results provide the basis on which the instrumented mouthguard can be further developed for deployment and application within professional rugby, with a view to accurately and reliably quantify head collision dynamics

Towards a Jōmon food database: construction, analysis and implications for Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islands, Japan

One of the most entrenched binary oppositions in archaeology and anthropology has been the agriculturalist vs hunter-gatherer-fisher dichotomy fuelling a debate that this paper tackles from the bottom-up by seeking to reconstruct full past diets. The Japanese prehistoric Jōmon cultures survived without fully-developed agriculture for more than 10,000 years. Here we compile a comprehensive, holistic database of archaeobotanical and archaeozoological records from the two ends of the archipelago, the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido and the southernmost island-chain of Ryukyu. The results suggest Jōmon diets varied far more geographically than they did over time, and likely cultivated taxa were important in both regions. This provides the basis for examining how fisher-hunter-gatherer diets can fulfil nutritional requirements from varied environments and were resilient in the face of environmental change