Open by Degrees: A Case of Flexibility or Personalization?

This chapter focuses on the history, development, and perceived value of The Open University UK’s BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree (hereafter referred to as “OUUK Open degree”) over the past half-century in the context of changing external pressures and addressing debates around the coherence and acceptance of such a personalized program of study. It touches on the changing views of “openness” over time, from the origins of The Open University’s “open entry” policy, through to ideas around flexibility of study, open education, and personalized learning. The chapter concludes with recommendations for other higher education institutions wishing to introduce a multidisciplinary open degree into their portfolio of curriculum

Evolution of the Ionizing Background at High Redshifts

We use a Maximum-Likelihood analysis to constrain the value and evolution of the ionizing background for 2<z<4.5, taking account of possible systematic errors. (The paper has a more detailed abstract)Comment: 12 figures (9 of those double plots), 17 pages. Accepted by MNRA

Harry Potter, The Goblet Of Fire…And The Communion Of Saints?

This is a review of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

The impact of faults on fluid flow in porous carbonate rocks

Faults may impact subsurface fluid flow over production and geological timescales. Predicting fault permeability is crucial for understanding subsurface fluid flow, which is required for a number of subsurface industries. Fault permeability is determined by the micro-fabric and distribution of fault rocks, which are influenced by the deformation mechanisms exhibited during faulting, fault-related diagenesis, and fault zone architectural evolution. Non-uniform strain distributions along fault zones lead to heterogeneous fault cores, therefore, predicting fault permeability is difficult. Empirical relationships linking lithological parameters to the petrophysical properties of different fault rocks are commonly utilised to predict fault permeability in clay-bearing sequences. However, no such relationships exist for carbonate rocks. A better understanding of these controls, in addition to the characterisation of fault rock permeability is required to establish predictive relationships for fault rock permeability. This thesis combines structural, microstructural and petrophysical data from a series of carbonate-hosted fault zones in Malta. Thereby enabling an understanding of the fault zone permeability structures in various lithofacies, whilst highlighting the heterogeneity on all scales of carbonate-hosted fault zones. The continuity of fault rock is shown to increase with displacement, and displacement thresholds for both a continuous fault core and cataclasite are established for fault zones in Malta. Only fault rocks derived from high porosity host rocks have the potential to retard fluid flow over reservoir scales. Lithological heterogeneity is retained within fault cores, whereby the heterogeneity of the faulted lithofacies is linked to the variability in fault rock petrophysical properties. Novel methods of upscaling fault permeability and implementing fault rock continuity relationships to fault property modelling are presented. The results provide an example of how porosity of the host carbonate can impact fault rock permeability under low stresses. Combined with similar studies from different lithofacies and structural settings, this thesis contributes towards a generalised understanding of the controls on fault permeability in porous carbonate rocks

myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop

Bioinformaticians regularly access the hundreds of databases and tools that are available to them on the Web. None of these tools communicate with each other, causing the scientist to copy results manually from a Web site into a spreadsheet or word processor. myGrids' Taverna has made it possible to create templates (workflows) that automatically run searches using these databases and tools, cutting down what previously took days of work into hours, and enabling the automated capture of experimental details. What is still missing in the capture process, however, is the details of work done on that material once it moves from the Web to the desktop: if a scientist runs a process on some data, there is nothing to record why that action was taken; it is likewise not easy to publish a record of this process back to the community on the Web. In this paper, we present a novel interaction framework, built on Semantic Web technologies, and grounded in usability design practice, in particular the Making Tea method. Through this work, we introduce a new model of practice designed specifically to (1) support the scientists' interactions with data from the Web to the desktop, (2) provide automatic annotation of process to capture what has previously been lost and (3) associate provenance services automatically with that data in order to enable meaningful interrogation of the process and controlled sharing of the results

Lower left temporal-frontal connectivity characterizes expert and accurate performance: High-alpha T7-Fz connectivity as a marker of conscious processing during movement

The Theory of Reinvestment argues that conscious processing can impair motor performance. The present study tested the utility of left temporal-frontal cortical connectivity as a neurophysiological marker of movement specific conscious processing. Expert and novice golfers completed putts while temporal-frontal connectivity was computed using high alpha Inter Site Phase Clustering (ISPC) and then analyzed as a function of experience (experts versus novices), performance (holed versus missed putts), and pressure (low versus high). Existing evidence shows that left temporal to frontal connectivity is related to dispositional conscious processing and is sensitive to the amount of declarative knowledge acquired during learning. We found that T7-Fz ISPC, but not T8-Fz ISPC, was lower in experts than novices, and lower when putts were holed than missed. Accordingly, our findings provide additional evidence that communication between verbal/language and motor areas of the brain during preparation for action and its execution is associated with poor motor performance. Our findings validate high-alpha left temporal-frontal connectivity as a neurophysiological correlate of movement specific conscious processin