Using professional atandards : assessing work integrated learning in initial teacher education

All Australian teacher education programs must include practical experience--the practicum. It is a critical part of learning to become a teacher.  One of the major challenges in initial teacher education is to provide good quality assessment of the practicum.  Assessing the practicum is filled with tension for both the individual supervisor as well as the pre-service teacher. In 2011 the Australian National Professional Standards for Teachers were established.  On completion of teacher education programs, graduate teachers will have gained the knowledge and practice to meet the seven national standards.  For teacher preparation programs, the successful implementation of the standards will rely on the opportunities for preservice teachers to gather evidence of achieving the standards. This project focussed specifically on evidence of achievements of these standards through assessment practices during practicum.The overall aim of this project was to enhance the academic and school-based teacher educators\u27 and preservice teachers\u27 capacities and understandings of assessing the practicum.  To achieve this aim, four outcomes were developed to provide professional leaning for improving the assessment practices of the practicum: a website resource, a collaborative partnership process, a professional learning model (PLM) and a developmental \u27inventory\u27 of evidence of achievement of the first five national standards.  The website resource provides materials and activities for staff involved in the design of professional experience in initial teacher education programs, to work with partner schools and preservice teachers to facilitate high quality supervision and assessment in practicum sites.  The collaborateive partnership process used for achieving these soutcomes -- communities of reflective practitioners--is integral to the professional learning focus of the project.  It guides the use of the resource in future teacher education sites of practice.  The professional learning model and website materials emphasise the critical role that evidence-informed judgements play at school sites in learning and assessment of future teachers

CP Violation and the Cathedral Builders' Paradigm

Pointing out the profound and unique nature of CP violation, I sketch its basic phenomenology, its CKM prescription and QCD technologies relevant for heavy flavour physics. After emphasizing the paradigmatic character of the establishment of direct CP violation I turn to the future, namely indirect searches for New Physics in electric dipole moments, $K_{\mu 3}$ decays and charm transitions on one hand and in beauty decays on the other; these are described as exciting adventures with novel challenges not encountered before.Comment: 20 pages, LaTex, Introductory Lecture given at CPconf2000, Intern. Conf. on CP Violation Physics, Sept. 18 - 22, 2000, Ferrara, Italy; few additions, in particular one reference to an early paper by Mohapatra on CP violatio

COVID-19 response: mitigating negative impacts on other areas of health

'Vertical' responses focused primarily on preventing and containing COVID-19 have been implemented in countries around the world with negative consequences for other health services, people's access to and use of them, and associated health outcomes, especially in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). 'Lockdowns' and restrictive measures, especially, have complicated service provision and access, and disrupted key supply chains. Such interventions, alongside more traditional public health measures, interact with baseline health, health system, and social and economic vulnerabilities in LMICs to compound negative impacts. This analysis, based on a rapid evidence assessment by the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform in mid-2020, highlights the drivers and evidence of these impacts, emphasises the additional vulnerabilities experienced by marginalised social groups, and provides insight for governments, agencies, organisations and communities to implement more proportionate, appropriate, comprehensive and socially just responses that address COVID-19 in the context of and alongside other disease burdens. In the short term, there is an urgent need to monitor and mitigate impacts of pandemic responses on health service provision, access and use, including through embedding COVID-19 response within integrated health systems approaches. These efforts should also feed into longer-term strategies to strengthen health systems, expand universal healthcare coverage and attend to the social determinants of health-commitments, both existing and new-which governments, donors and international agencies must make and be held accountable to. Crucially, affected communities must be empowered to play a central role in identifying health priorities, allocating resources, and designing and delivering services

Categorifying the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov Connection

In the context of higher gauge theory, we construct a flat and fake flat 2-connection, in the configuration space of $n$ particles in the complex plane, categorifying the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov connection. To this end, we define the differential crossed module of horizontal 2-chord diagrams, categorifying the Lie algebra of horizontal chord diagrams in a set of $n$ parallel copies of the interval. This therefore yields a categorification of the 4-term relation. We carefully discuss the representation theory of differential crossed modules in chain-complexes of vector spaces, which makes it possible to formulate the notion of an infinitesimal 2-R matrix in a differential crossed module.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures; v3: final version to be published in Differential Geometry and its Application

On the instability regime of the rotating Kerr spacetime to massive scalar perturbations

The instability of rotating Kerr black holes due to massive scalar perturbations is investigated. It is well known that a bosonic field impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole. This superradiant scattering occurs for frequencies in the range $\omega<m\Omega$, where $\Omega$ is the angular frequency of the black hole and $m$ is the azimuthal harmonic index of the mode. If the incident field has a non-zero rest mass, $\mu$, then the mass term effectively works as a mirror, reflecting the scattered wave back towards the black hole. The wave may bounce back and forth between the black hole and some turning point amplifying itself each time. This may lead to a dynamical instability of the system, a phenomena known as a "black-hole bomb". In this work we provide a bound on the instability regime of rotating Kerr spacetimes. In particular, we show that Kerr black holes are stable to massive perturbations in the regime $\mu\geq\sqrt{2}m\Omega$.Comment: 5 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0910.073

Using professional standards: Assessing work integrated learning in initial teacher education: Final report 2013

All Australian teacher preparation programs must include practical experience - the practicum. It is a critical part of learning to become a teacher. One of the major challenges in initial teacher education is to provide good quality assessment of the practicum. Assessing the practicum is filled with tension for both the individual supervising teacher as well as the preservice teacher. In 2011 the Australian National Professional Standards for Teachers were established. On completion of teacher preparation programs, graduate teachers will have gained the knowledge and practice to meet the seven national standards. For teacher preparation programs, the successful implementation of the standards will rely on the opportunities for preservice teachers to gather evidence of achieving the standards. This project focused specifically on evidence of achievements of these standards through assessment practices during the practicum

Increased entropy of signal transduction in the cancer metastasis phenotype

Studies into the statistical properties of biological networks have led to important biological insights, such as the presence of hubs and hierarchical modularity. There is also a growing interest in studying the statistical properties of networks in the context of cancer genomics. However, relatively little is known as to what network features differ between the cancer and normal cell physiologies, or between different cancer cell phenotypes. Based on the observation that frequent genomic alterations underlie a more aggressive cancer phenotype, we asked if such an effect could be detectable as an increase in the randomness of local gene expression patterns. Using a breast cancer gene expression data set and a model network of protein interactions we derive constrained weighted networks defined by a stochastic information flux matrix reflecting expression correlations between interacting proteins. Based on this stochastic matrix we propose and compute an entropy measure that quantifies the degree of randomness in the local pattern of information flux around single genes. By comparing the local entropies in the non-metastatic versus metastatic breast cancer networks, we here show that breast cancers that metastasize are characterised by a small yet significant increase in the degree of randomness of local expression patterns. We validate this result in three additional breast cancer expression data sets and demonstrate that local entropy better characterises the metastatic phenotype than other non-entropy based measures. We show that increases in entropy can be used to identify genes and signalling pathways implicated in breast cancer metastasis. Further exploration of such integrated cancer expression and protein interaction networks will therefore be a fruitful endeavour.Comment: 5 figures, 2 Supplementary Figures and Table

2017 GJMPP Monograph Series: Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program

The Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program (GJMPP), formerly the African American Professors Program (AAPP)/Carolina Diversity Professors Program (CDPP) at the University of South Carolina, is honored to publish its sixteenth edition of this annual monograph series. AAPP recognizes the significance of offering its scholars a venue through which to engage actively in research and to publish their refereed papers that continually contribute to their respective fields of study. Parallel with the publication of their manuscripts is the opportunity to gain visibility among colleagues throughout postsecondary institutions at national and international levels. Scholars who have contributed papers for this monograph are acknowledged for embracing the value of including this responsibility within their academic milieu. Writing across disciplines adds broadly to the intellectual diversity of these manuscripts. From neophytes to quite experienced individuals, the chapters have been researched and written in depth. Founded in 1997 through the Department of Educational Leadership and Policies in the College of Education, AAPP was designed originally to address the under-representation of African American professors on college and university campuses. Its mission is to expand the pool of these professors in critical academic and research areas. Sponsored historically by the University of South Carolina, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the South Carolina General Assembly, the program recruits doctoral students for disciplines in which African Americans currently are underrepresented among faculty in higher education. The continuation of this monograph series is seen as responding to a window of opportunity to be sensitive to an academic expectation of graduates as they pursue career placement and, at the same time, to allow for the dissemination of products of scholarship to a broader community. The importance of this series has been voiced by one of our 2002 AAPP graduates, Dr. Shundelle LaTjuan Dogan, formerly an Administrative Fellow at Harvard University, a Program Officer for the Southern Education Foundation, and a Program Officer for the Arthur M. Blank Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs Manager for IBM-International Business Machines in Atlanta, Georgia and has written an impressive Foreword for the 2014 monograph. Dr. Dogan wrote: “One thing in particular that I want to thank you for is having the African American Professors Program scholars publish articles for the monograph. I have to admit that writing the articles seemed like extra work at the time. However, in my recent interview process, organizations have asked me for samples of my writing. Including an article from a published monograph helped to make my portfolio much more impressive. You were ‘right on target’ in having us do the monograph series” (AAPP 2003 Monograph, p. xi). The Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program purports to advance the tradition of spearheading international scholarship in higher education as evidenced through inspiration from this group of interdisciplinary manuscripts. I hope that you will envision these published papers for serving as an invaluable contribution to your own professional and career enhancement. John McFadden, PhD The Benjamin Elijah Mays Distinguished Professor Emeritus Director, Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolinahttps://scholarcommons.sc.edu/mcfadden_monographs/1004/thumbnail.jp

Markers of Inflammation, Metabolic Risk Factors, and Incident Heart Failure in American Indians: The Strong Heart Study

Inflammation may play a role in increased risk of heart failure (HF) that is associated with obesity, metabolic syndrome (MS), and diabetes. This study investigated associations between inflammatory markers, MS, and incident HF in a population with high prevalence of diabetes, obesity, and MS. The cohort consisted of 3098 American Indians, without prevalent cardiovascular disease who had C-reactive protein (CRP) and fibrinogen measured at the SHS Phase II exam. Independent associations between inflammatory markers, MS, and HF were analyzed by Cox hazard models. During mean follow-up of 11 years, 218 participants developed HF. After the adjustment for cardiovascular risk factors, fibrinogen, (HR 1.36, 95% C.I.:1.15–1.59) but not CRP, (HR 1.25, 95% C.I.:0.97–1.32) remained significant HF predictor. In individuals without diabetes, concomitant presence of MS and elevated CRP or fibrinogen increased HF risk (for MS and CRP: HR 2.02, 95% C.I.: 0.95–4.31; for CRP and fibrinogen: HR 1.75, 95% C.I.:0.83–3.72). In a population with high prevalence of obesity, MS, and diabetes, elevated CRP and fibrinogen predict increased HF risk. These associations are attenuated by the adjustments for conventional risk factors suggesting that inflammation acts in concert with metabolic and clinical risk factors in increasing HF risk