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From symbiont to parasite: the evolution of for-profit science publishing.
Two 17th century institutions-learned societies and scientific journals-transformed science in ways that still dominate our professional lives today. Learned societies like the American Society for Cell Biology remain relevant because they provide forums for sharing results, discussing the practice of science, and projecting our voices to the public and the policy makers. Scientific journals still disseminate our work, but in the Internet-connected world of the 21st century, this is no longer their critical function. Journals remain relevant almost entirely because they provide a playing field for scientific and professional competition: to claim credit for a discovery, we publish it in a peer-reviewed journal; to get a job in academia or money to run a lab, we present these published papers to universities and funding agencies. Publishing is so embedded in the practice of science that whoever controls the journals controls access to the entire profession. We must reform our methods for evaluating the contributions of younger scientists and deflate the power of a small number of "elite" journals. More generally, given the recent failure of research institutions around the world to strike satisfactory deals with publishing giant Elsevier, the time has come to examine the motives and methods of those to whom we have entrusted the keys to the kingdom of science
As Thread
As Thread is a collection of poems which keeps account of the categories and modes of loss, using the death of my father as the catalyst, and how memory, as replacement, unravels, tangles, and mends--as thread does
Born from Myth, Built Anew: Senecaâs Medea as a Stoic Cautionary Tale
In Senecaâs Medea, there are two distinct âMedeasâ to be examined â Medea the character, who has been built up out of mythical and literary tradition, and Medea as a human individual. By dividing her in this way Seneca opens the door to reimagine an already extant figure through a Stoic lens. He exaggerates the negative portrayal of Medea in her traditional role to draw in the audience and to emphasize the disastrous outcome of the individual Medeaâs failure to moderate her human passions â in so doing, he first engages the audience with a familiar character and then challenges them to question what the outcome might have been if the individual Medea were truly separate from her traditional role
Some contributions to iodometric technique
Analysis is a very important branch of chemistry, for it is such a practical part of the science. Analysis is itself divided into two parts. Qualitative analysis discovers what things are present in the material in question. Quantitative analysis then determines how much of each ingredient is present. This thesis considers a limited section of quantitative analysis.
This thesis deals with the use of iodine in volumetric analysis, which is called either iodimetry or iodometry. In this type of analysis, the iodine is used in solution and reacts with some other material, also in solution, and takes up electrons. That is, the iodine is reduced, or electronized. In the second volume of the work referred to above the thirteenth chapter of some eighty pages is devoted to Practical Methods of Iodometry. 2 There are obviously many applications of this method. Our study was confined to the reaction of iodine with arsenic trioxide, concerning which Kolthoff says: Standardization against arsenious oxide has proved to be best.
Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types
Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types
This poster represents a mixed methods study conducted at the University of the West Indies (UWI), which seeks to determine the merits of two types of Academic Literacies (AL) courses in promoting successful academic outcomes. Its focus is the first quantitative research phase in which the grade point averages after the first year of study of Social Sciences students successful either in the general purposes Foun1019 âCritical Reading and Writing in the Disciplinesâ course or in the faculty-specific purposes Foun1013 âCritical Reading and Writing in the Social Sciencesâ course are compared. The second, qualitative phase will be presented in future publications. This study is a response to an unimplemented recommendation of an external 2018 Quality Assurance Review (QAR) of the UWI, Mona campus, English Language Section, that students successful in the first semester of Foun1019 switch in the second semester to their faculty-specific AL courses. The QAR rationale for the recommended course switch is that the non-faculty-specific nature of the second semester of Foun1019 is academically disadvantageous to students who have shown promise in its first semester. This study is relevant to the debate over the use of general versus disciplinary AL approaches, one publicized by Jordan (1997) and revived by de Chazal (2012) who makes a pedagogical and practical case favouring a general purposes approach. Underlying the study is the premise at the heart of AL courses: that by preparing incoming students, supposed novice writers and readers at the tertiary level of study, these courses serve to maximise their academic performance. Indeed, this is the premise upon which the required pursuit by university students of AL courses is based.
This Foun1019 general purposes course, introduced for students from all faculties who fail an English language proficiency entrance test (ELPT), places emphasis in the first semester on developmental reading and writing in English as well as on overcoming writer apprehension. Furthermore, a dual language identity â Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole â is conferred on students. This is because whereas English is Jamaicaâs sole official language, Jamaican Creole â which has an English lexicon but distinctly un-English grammar, syntax and phonology â is the first language of most of the students. The work undertaken in the first semester functions as a bridge for students, building their linguistic self-esteem and improving their English language proficiency in order to ease them into what is considered the bona fide AL focus of the second semester: âWriting from Sourcesâ. This latter focus is shared with one-semester, faculty-specific purposes AL courses, populated by students who pass or are exempt from the ELPT. These courses seek to respond to the AL development needs of individual facultiesâ constituent departments. To do this, they employ as much of a specific purposes AL approach as is possible given the wide range of parent disciplines involved. The Foun1013 course featured in this study, which is pursued by Faculty of Social Sciences students exclusively, falls into this faculty-specific category of UWI AL courses.
The Foun1019 and Foun1013 Year 1 student groups being compared have both been certified at the end of their first year of study to possess a satisfactory level of English language proficiency on the basis of attaining passing grades at the end of Semester two in their final and major AL assignment: a 1200-word documented expository essay scored via a common holistic rubric. To ensure further comparability of the two groups, control of the potentially influential independent variables of Socioeconomic Status (SES), Gender, Intellectual Aptitude (as estimated via matriculation qualifications) and other selected variables is accounted for by the multiple regression analysis component of the overall study design. To address the unevenness of the size of the two study populations, that is, the relatively small number (51) of Year 1 Foun1019 Social Sciences students versus the high number (630) of their Foun1013 counterparts, the Tukey test of statistical significance for unequal group sizes will be applied.
To assess the groupsâ relative academic performance, the official UWI measurement standard, Grade Point Average (GPA), is used. This measurement shows the typical course result of a student for a semester or year, and ultimately determines the quality of degree awarded (for example, First Class Honours, Lower Second Class Honours, Pass). This measurement encompasses nine bands ranging from 0.00-1.29 to 4.00-4.30 points. The points in question represent the numerical value given to letter grades, e.g. C+ (55-59%) = 2.30 points, F2 (40-44%) = 1.30 points. Grade points are determined by multiplying the points earned by the credit weighting of the course, which is based on the duration of the course (whether one or two semesters). Students earn three credits for one-semester courses, and six credits for two-semester ones. 2.00 is the minimum grade point deemed acceptable (University of the West Indies, 2014).
The investigation reveals that the overall Year 1 student pass rates for Foun1013 and Foun1019 at the end of the second semester of the 2017/18 academic year were 60.2% (630/1047) and 62.2% (51/82) respectively. Preliminary findings on the GPAs of the passing groups are as follows: 1) Foun1013 studentsâ GPAs are more widely spread across the band ranges than those of Foun1019 students; 2) The modal band range of the two groups is 2.30-2.99: 42.6% (269/630) of Foun1013 students versus 54.9% (28/51) of Foun1019 students; 3) The GPAs of 41.9% (264/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the four highest band ranges (3.00-4.29) versus 25.5% (13/51) for Foun1019 students; 4) The GPAs of 10.6% (66/630) of the Foun1013 students fall into the 2:00-2:29 (just acceptable) band range versus 15.7% (8/51) for 1019 students; 5) The GPAs of 4.9% (31/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the three lowest band ranges (0.00 -1.99) versus 3.9% (2/51) for Foun1019 students. Thus, overall, the Year 1 Foun1013 specific purposes students outperformed their Foun1019 general counterparts with respect to their higher band ranges, but the modal range of scores for both groups (a low but acceptable one) was the same; in addition, the Foun1019 group had slightly better outcomes in terms of its lower proportion of students with poor GPAs (under 2.0). Therefore, this cross-tabulation of the two groupsâ GPAs reveals that student success in the general purposes course is not more highly correlated with Year 1 academic failure than student success in the faculty-specific purposes course, but it may hold implications for the passing grades received. Corresponding results for Year 2, 3 and 4 students, along with these Year 1 results, will be subjected to the finer-grained statistical analysis needed to reach definitive conclusions, while the qualitative phase of the study will use course content analysis and questionnaire and interview data from students and academic staff to seek explanations for the conclusions drawn.
References
de Chazal, E. (2012). The general-specific debate in EAP: Which case is the most convincing for most contexts? Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research, 2(1), 135â148. http://pops.uclan.ac.uk/index.php/jsltr/article/view/90/37
Feak, C. (2011). Culture shock? Genre shock? In S. Etherington (Ed.), English for Specific Academic Purposes: Proceedings of the 2009 BALEAP Conference (pp. 35â45). Garnet Education.
Hyland, K. (2016). General and specific EAP. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English for academic purposes (pp. 17â29). Routledge.
Jordan, R. R. (1997). English for academic purposes: A guide and resource book for teachers. Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, M. (2017). What do Jamaican children speak? A language resource. The University of the West Indies Press.
University of the West Indies. (2014). Grade point average regulations (Internal document). UWI. https://www.uwi.edu/gradingpolicy/docs/regulations.pd
High-Sensitivity Magnetic Sensors Based on GMI Microwire-SAW IDT Design
This work presents a design approach for a highly sensitive, miniaturized magnetic sensor. The design makes use of GMI microwires and a multi-electrode SAW IDT. The use of SAW IDTs allows for the magnetic effect of the GMI microwire to be measured through the transduction process. This approach permits simultaneous measurement at different frequencies of operation, enabling highly sensitive measurement over a wide range of magnetic fields. This technique may find application in magnetic sensing for non-invasive battery SOC measurement
DNA damage induces nuclear actin filament assembly by Formin-2 and Spire-1/2 that promotes efficient DNA repair
© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in eLife 4 (2015): e07735, doi:10.7554/eLife.07735.Actin filaments assemble inside the nucleus in response to multiple cellular
perturbations, including heat shock, protein misfolding, integrin engagement, and serum stimulation.
We find that DNA damage also generates nuclear actin filamentsâdetectable by phalloidin and
live-cell actin probesâwith three characteristic morphologies: (i) long, nucleoplasmic filaments;
(ii) short, nucleolus-associated filaments; and (iii) dense, nucleoplasmic clusters. This DNA
damage-induced nuclear actin assembly requires two biologically and physically linked nucleation
factors: Formin-2 and Spire-1/Spire-2. Formin-2 accumulates in the nucleus after DNA damage, and
depletion of either Formin-2 or actinâs nuclear import factor, importin-9, increases the number of
DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), linking nuclear actin filaments to efficient DSB clearance. Nuclear
actin filaments are also required for nuclear oxidation induced by acute genotoxic stress. Our results
reveal a previously unknown role for nuclear actin filaments in DNA repair and identify the molecular
mechanisms creating these nuclear filaments.Howard Hughes Medical Institute; National Institutes of Health, GM061010, GM079556, 5F31AG39147-2; National Science
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