Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

Estimating Pasture Intake by Dairy Cows

Proper nutrient management planning minimizes the environmental impact of manure from dairy farms. Manure output from dairy cows can be predicted from feed intake (Wilkerson et al., 1997). Weighing feed and refusals each day can determine accurately the feed intake of dairy cows in confinement. Intake determination is more difficult for dairy cows on pasture (Vasquez & Smith, 2000). As part of a larger study aimed at estimating manure production of dairy cows on pasture, this study compares 3 methods for estimating pasture yield and feed intake

Bohr Hamiltonian with deformation-dependent mass term

The Bohr Hamiltonian describing the collective motion of atomic nuclei is modified by allowing the mass to depend on the nuclear deformation. Exact analytical expressions are derived for spectra and wave functions in the case of a gamma-unstable Davidson potential, using techniques of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. Numerical results in the Xe-Ba region are discussed.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figure

Towards the rapid and efficient stereoselective synthesis of tetrahydropyrans

A number of stereoselective syntheses have been investigated employing the ability of a furanyl ether chiral centre to epimerise under acidic conditions, therefore allowing the more stable diastereoisomer to preferentially form under thermodynamic control. As the furanyl group is able to undergo a number of synthetically useful transformations (e.g. Diels-Alder reactions, hydrogenations, oxidative cleavage, Achmatowicz oxidation, etc.) these syntheses represent a highly useful pathway to important moieties in a number of biologically active and pharmaceutically interesting molecules. Previous work within the group has investigated utilising the acid-catalysed epimerisation of furanyl ether chiral centres on conformationally well-defined scaffolds. This has been demonstrated in the synthesis of 2,6-disubstituted tetrahydropyrans, 2,6-disubstituted piperidines and also in spiroketals. In all cases high levels of stereocontrol were observed. Attention was focused on the stereoselective synthesis of 2,4-disubstituted and 2,4,5-trisubstituted tetrahydropyrans starting from ‘stereorandom’ precursors. In all cases high levels of stereocontrol were observed, going from an approximately 1:1 diastereomeric mixture of the corresponding diol or triol to ratios exceeding 10:1 in the case of the disubstituted tetrahydropyrans and to ratios exceeding 15:1:0.9:0 in the case of the trisubstituted tetrahydropyrans. This is due to the rapid epimerisation of the furanyl chiral centre allowing the substituents to adopt the thermodynamically favoured equatorial position on a chair conformation

Multifactor Models and Their Consistency with the APT

We examine the consistency of several prominent multifactor models from the empirical asset pricing literature with the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) framework. We follow the APT-related literature and estimate the common factor structure from a rich cross-section (associated with 42 major CAPM anomalies) by employing the asymptotic principal components method. Our benchmark model contains six statistical factors and clearly dominates, in both economic and statistical terms, most of the empirical multifactor models proposed in the literature by a good margin. These results represent a critical challenge to the current workhorse models in terms of explaining large-scale equity risk premiums

The Plant Ontology: A common reference ontology for plants

The Plant Ontology (PO) (http://www.plantontology.org) (Jaiswal et al., 2005; Avraham et al., 2008) was designed to facilitate cross-database querying and to foster consistent use of plant-specific terminology in annotation. As new data are generated from the ever-expanding list of plant genome projects, the need for a consistent, cross-taxon vocabulary has grown. To meet this need, the PO is being expanded to represent all plants. This is the first ontology designed to encompass anatomical structures as well as growth and developmental stages across such a broad taxonomic range. While other ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) (The Gene Ontology Consortium, 2010) or Cell Type Ontology (CL) (Bard et al., 2005) cover all living organisms, they are confined to structures at the cellular level and below. The diversity of growth forms and life histories within plants presents a challenge, but also provides unique opportunities to study developmental and evolutionary homology across organisms

The Plant Ontology facilitates comparisons of plant development stages across species

The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution

A study of public housing management.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1971. B.S.Includes bibliographical references.B.S