948 research outputs found
Towards a Digital Pedagogy of Inclusive Active Distance Learning
This chapter focuses upon the concept of Active Distance Learning  [ADL] as a pedagogical approach to designing and teaching in a remote learning setting. This concept has been developed at the University of Northampton to complement their pedagogical approach of Active Blended Learning. ADL combines sense-making activities with focused and engaging interactions in synchronous and asynchronous online settings.  It engages students in knowledge construction, reflection and critique, the development of learner autonomy and the achievement of learning outcomes. The chapter also draws upon the Universal Design for Learning Framework for making ADL inclusive. This approach enables learning to be designed or modified for the greatest diversity of learners possible. This chapter is aligned with contemporary social constructivist, constructionist and connectivist learning theories that emphasise the social situatedness of learning in communities of practice where learners feel empowered to co-create knowledge. Key pedagogical approaches are mapped with the affordances of a range of digital tools  to exemplify inclusive ADL practice. A set of vignettes from practice demonstrates digital pedagogies and tools in action, showing how they can add pace, collaboration and engagement to synchronous and asynchronous online learning
Towards a Digital Pedagogy of Inclusive Active Distance Learning
This chapter focuses upon the concept of Active Distance Learning  [ADL] as a pedagogical approach to designing and teaching in a remote learning setting. This concept has been developed at the University of Northampton to complement their pedagogical approach of Active Blended Learning. ADL combines sense-making activities with focused and engaging interactions in synchronous and asynchronous online settings.  It engages students in knowledge construction, reflection and critique, the development of learner autonomy and the achievement of learning outcomes. The chapter also draws upon the Universal Design for Learning Framework for making ADL inclusive. This approach enables learning to be designed or modified for the greatest diversity of learners possible. This chapter is aligned with contemporary social constructivist, constructionist and connectivist learning theories that emphasise the social situatedness of learning in communities of practice where learners feel empowered to co-create knowledge. Key pedagogical approaches are mapped with the affordances of a range of digital tools  to exemplify inclusive ADL practice. A set of vignettes from practice demonstrates digital pedagogies and tools in action, showing how they can add pace, collaboration and engagement to synchronous and asynchronous online learning
Mobile Communication Signatures of Unemployment
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by
the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes
across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to
assess; thus the speed of which policies can be designed and evaluated is
limited. However, recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data as
an enabling methodology for demographic modeling and measurement. In this work,
we investigate whether indicators extracted from mobile phone usage can reveal
information about the socio-economical status of microregions such as districts
(i.e., average spatial resolution < 2.7km). For this we examine anonymized
mobile phone metadata combined with beneficiaries records from unemployment
benefit program. We find that aggregated activity, social, and mobility
patterns strongly correlate with unemployment. Furthermore, we construct a
simple model to produce accurate reconstruction of district level unemployment
from their mobile communication patterns alone. Our results suggest that
reliable and cost-effective economical indicators could be built based on
passively collected and anonymized mobile phone data. With similar data being
collected every day by telecommunication services across the world,
survey-based methods of measuring community socioeconomic status could
potentially be augmented or replaced by such passive sensing methods in the
future
Calibration of the distance scale from galactic Cepheids: I Calibration based on the GFG sample
New estimates of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies are presented based on
accurate distances of galactic Cepheids obtained by Gieren, Fouque and Gomez
(1998) from the geometrical Barnes-Evans method.
The concept of 'sosie' is applied to extend the distance determination to
extragalactic Cepheids without assuming the linearity of the PL relation. Doing
so, the distance moduli are obtained in a straightforward way.
The correction for extinction is made using two photometric bands (V and I)
according to the principles introduced by Freedman and Madore (1990). Finally,
the statistical bias due to the incompleteness of the sample is corrected
according to the precepts introduced by Teerikorpi (1987) without introducing
any free parameters (except the distance modulus itself in an iterative
scheme).
The final distance moduli depend on the adopted extinction ratio {R_V}/{R_I}
and on the limiting apparent magnitude of the sample. A comparison with the
distance moduli recently published by the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project
(HSTKP) team reveals a fair agreement when the same ratio {R_V}/{R_I} is used
but shows a small discrepancy at large distance.
In order to bypass the uncertainty due to the metallicity effect it is
suggested to consider only galaxies having nearly the same metallicity as the
calibrating Cepheids (i.e. Solar metallicity). The internal uncertainty of the
distances is about 0.1 magnitude but the total uncertainty may reach 0.3
magnitude.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, access to a database of extragalactic Cepheids.
Astronomy & Astrophysics (in press) 200
MiniBooNE and LSND data: non-standard neutrino interactions in a (3+1) scheme versus (3+2) oscillations
The recently observed event excess in MiniBooNE anti-neutrino data is in
agreement with the LSND evidence for electron anti-neutrino appearance. We
propose an explanation of these data in terms of a (3+1) scheme with a sterile
neutrino including non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) at neutrino
production and detection. The interference between oscillations and NSI
provides a source for CP violation which we use to reconcile different results
from neutrino and anti-neutrino data. Our best fit results imply NSI at the
level of a few percent relative to the standard weak interaction, in agreement
with current bounds. We compare the quality of the NSI fit to the one obtained
within the (3+1) and (3+2) pure oscillation frameworks. We also briefly comment
on using NSI (in an effective two-flavour framework) to address a possible
difference in neutrino and anti-neutrino results from the MINOS experiment.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, discussion improved, new appendix added,
conclusions unchange
The demography of fine roots in response to patches of water and nitrogen
Fine root demography was quantified in response to patches of increased water and nitrogen availability in a natural, second-growth, mixed hardwood forest in northern Michigan, USA. As expected, the addition of water and water plus nitrogen resulted in a significant overall increase in the production of new fine roots. New root production was much greater in response to water plus nitrogen when compared with water alone, and the duration of new root production was related to the length of resource addition in the water plus nitrogen treatments; the average difference in new root length between the 20 vs. 40 d additions of water plus nitrogen amounted to almost 600%. Roots produced in response to the additions of water and water plus nitrogen lived longer than roots in the control treatments. Thus, additions of water and water plus nitrogen influenced both the proliferation of new roots and their longevity, with both proliferation and longevity related to the type and duration of resource supply. Results suggest that root longevity and mortality may be plastic in response to changes in soil resource availability, as is well known for root proliferation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65770/1/j.1469-8137.1993.tb03905.x.pd
Evolutionary relationships between Rhynchosporium lolii sp. nov. and other Rhynchosporium species on grass.
Copyright: 2013 King et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedThe fungal genus Rhynchosporium (causative agent of leaf blotch) contains several host-specialised species, including R. commune (colonising barley and brome-grass), R. agropyri (couch-grass), R. secalis (rye and triticale) and the more distantly related R. orthosporum (cocksfoot). This study used molecular fingerprinting, multilocus DNA sequence data, conidial morphology, host range tests and scanning electron microscopy to investigate the relationship between Rhynchosporium species on ryegrasses, both economically important forage grasses and common wild grasses in many cereal growing areas, and other plant species. Two different types of Rhynchosporium were found on ryegrasses in the UK. Firstly, there were isolates of R. commune that were pathogenic to both barley and Italian ryegrass. Secondly, there were isolates of a new species, here named R. lolii, that were pathogenic only to ryegrass species. R. lolii was most closely related to R. orthosporum, but exhibited clear molecular, morphological and host range differences. The species was estimated to have diverged from R. orthosporum ca. 5735 years before the present. The colonisation strategy of all of the different Rhynchosporium species involved extensive hyphal growth in the sub-cuticular regions of the leaves. Finally, new species-specific PCR diagnostic tests were developed that could distinguish between these five closely related Rhynchosporium species.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
Enteric Neurospheres Are Not Specific to Neural Crest Cultures: Implications for Neural Stem Cell Therapies
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited
Quantitative cross-species extrapolation between humans and fish: The case of the anti-depressant fluoxetine
This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Fish are an important model for the pharmacological and toxicological characterization of human pharmaceuticals in drug discovery, drug safety assessment and environmental toxicology. However, do fish respond to pharmaceuticals as humans do? To address this question, we provide a novel quantitative cross-species extrapolation approach (qCSE) based on the hypothesis that similar plasma concentrations of pharmaceuticals cause comparable target-mediated effects in both humans and fish at similar level of biological organization (Read-Across Hypothesis). To validate this hypothesis, the behavioural effects of the anti-depressant drug fluoxetine on the fish model fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) were used as test case. Fish were exposed for 28 days to a range of measured water concentrations of fluoxetine (0.1, 1.0, 8.0, 16, 32, 64 μg/L) to produce plasma concentrations below, equal and above the range of Human Therapeutic Plasma Concentrations (HTPCs). Fluoxetine and its metabolite, norfluoxetine, were quantified in the plasma of individual fish and linked to behavioural anxiety-related endpoints. The minimum drug plasma concentrations that elicited anxiolytic responses in fish were above the upper value of the HTPC range, whereas no effects were observed at plasma concentrations below the HTPCs. In vivo metabolism of fluoxetine in humans and fish was similar, and displayed bi-phasic concentration-dependent kinetics driven by the auto-inhibitory dynamics and saturation of the enzymes that convert fluoxetine into norfluoxetine. The sensitivity of fish to fluoxetine was not so dissimilar from that of patients affected by general anxiety disorders. These results represent the first direct evidence of measured internal dose response effect of a pharmaceutical in fish, hence validating the Read-Across hypothesis applied to fluoxetine. Overall, this study demonstrates that the qCSE approach, anchored to internal drug concentrations, is a powerful tool to guide the assessment of the sensitivity of fish to pharmaceuticals, and strengthens the translational power of the cross-species extrapolation
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