New Osmosis Law and Theory: the New Formula that Replaces van't Hoff Osmotic Pressure Equation

This article derived a new abstract concept from the osmotic process and concluded it via "osmotic force" with a new law -- "osmotic law". The "osmotic law" describes that, in an osmotic system, osmolyte moves osmotically from the side with higher "osmotic force" to the side with lower "osmotic force". In addition, it was proved mathematically that the osmotic process could be explained perfectly via "osmotic force" and "osmotic laws", which can prevent the difficulties in using current "osmotic pressure" concept to explain the osmotic process and phenomenon. A theory and equation to describe the curve of osmotic pressure vs. different ideal solution concentrations are also derived, which can overcome the limitedness and incompleteness of van't Hoff osmotic pressure formula (a linear equation) which is applicable to ideal dilute solution only

Supervised and Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Question Answering

Although transfer learning has been shown to be successful for tasks like object and speech recognition, its applicability to question answering (QA) has yet to be well-studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the transferability of knowledge learned from a source QA dataset to a target dataset using two QA models. The performance of both models on a TOEFL listening comprehension test (Tseng et al., 2016) and MCTest (Richardson et al., 2013) is significantly improved via a simple transfer learning technique from MovieQA (Tapaswi et al., 2016). In particular, one of the models achieves the state-of-the-art on all target datasets; for the TOEFL listening comprehension test, it outperforms the previous best model by 7%. Finally, we show that transfer learning is helpful even in unsupervised scenarios when correct answers for target QA dataset examples are not available.Comment: To appear in NAACL HLT 2018 (long paper

The nature of the course team approach at the UK Open University

This thesis explores the nature of the course team approach at the UK Open University (UKOU) by investigating three issues: the formations of course teams, the process of working together in teams and the development of courses by teams.Adopting the naturalist paradigm, data were collected from three course teams of the UKOU using observations, interviews and documents. Altogether, 42 hours of observations were carried out over six months by observing 14 course team meetings.There were 28 hours of interview data from 21 interviews of 17 interviewees. A range of documents was collected.The study found that the formation of course teams is regulated by course approval protocol, and is derived from the effort of individual members. The responsibility of core academic course team members is vaguely demarcated. Academic's personal attributes are a key to team organisation. Previous experience of working together influences the members' current work in teams.In the process of working together as a team in meetings, the study shows that the .agendas of course team meetings often include practical issues. The course team meetings are flooded with practical concerns with pedagogical concerns remaining in the background.The development of courses by course teams, as this study shows, is framed by the system for course construction established by the University. An awareness of changing external environment contributes to the development of courses. There are differing views on the academic autonomy of academic course team members.Theorising of major findings leads to conclude that. both course teams and their work are contextualised because they interact with systemic, interpersonal, personal and historical contexts. Therefore, the suggestions to the successful adoption of the course team approach emphasize academic's attributes, teamwork and the system for course construction set up by the institution