Listening to High School Students: Purposefully Designed Spaces and the Impact on Students’ Engagement in Learning

Scholars have generally accepted the notion that context and students’ response to the environment influence their engagement in learning. Hence, a qualitative study was conducted to explore the impact purposefully designed learning spaces have on student engagement in a career-inspired high school. Focus groups were conducted before and after the move to a new high school. Through the group interviews, students engaged in discourse about the impact purposefully designed learning spaces have on their engagement in learning. The findings indicate that the students recognized the instructional importance and the impact of their new spaces. The student voices provide educators and architects insight into the design elements students value. For educators, the student voice informs educational processes and has implications for curricular design and delivery, leveraging purposely designed learning spaces and student preferences to achieve the best education possible. For architects, and other design professionals, these student voices detail the types of spaces that should be incorporated in order to ensure learning efficiency, learning preferences, and interdependenc

Cumulative Distribution of Ballistic Impact Failures of Common Twisted-Pair Data Cables at Orbital Speeds

Data wire cable runs are a significant presence on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS), and continued ISS mission support requires detailed assessment of cables due to micrometeoroid and orbit debris (MMOD) impact. These data wire cables are twisted-pair cables consisting of two 22AWG stranded conductors and fillers inside a tight fitting braided copper shield. The copper shield and its contents are covered with a jacket that has a nominal outer diameter of 3.76 mm and beta-cloth tape. The ISS engineering community has identified two loss-of-function mechanisms for these cables: open circuits due to severed conductors within the cable, and short circuits due to contact between conductors or grounded components. As these data cables are low power systems, short circuits are not expected to burn away the contact, so both open and short circuits are considered permanent loss-of-function for the cable. A total of ninety-seven impact experiments have been performed into these cables to develop a statistical model for the failure of these cables to be used in reliability studies. The experimental work has yielded cumulative distribution functions for these cables for steel and aluminum components of the orbital debris environment at representative speeds and impact obliquities

Gender blindness in Economics and Business studies

[EN] There is abundant international and national legislation requiring the inclusion of the gender perspective in higher education. This legislation is motivated by a social demand to avoid perpetuating gender inequality. This study investigates in detail the studies of economics and business in a Spanish university through an analysis of its activities and content from a gender perspective. Specifically, the teaching plans and their academic references are examined complemented with a qualitative analysis gathered through third- and fourth-year students focus groups. The results show how the gender perspective is only anecdotally present in the academic content and that bibliographic references and most of the senior academic figures are male, thus perpetuating the belief that knowledge is embodied in a masculine figure. The discussion groups with students confirm their lack of knowledge of the causes and consequences of gender inequalities, which makes them incapable of forming a critical vision of the economy and society. The results highlight the need to analyze aspects related to the transfer of current regulations to universities.[ES] Existe abundante legislación de carácter internacional y nacional que requiere incluir la perspectiva de género en la educación superior. Esta legislación viene motivada por la demanda social de evitar perpetuar la desigualdad de género. El objetivo de esta investigación es poner el foco en los estudios de economía y empresa en una universidad española a través de un análisis de sus actividades y contenido desde una perspectiva de género. En concreto se examinan los planes docentes, los referentes académicos y se realiza un análisis cualitativo de las opiniones del estudiantado a través de grupos de discusión de estudiantes que estan cursando los dos últimos cursos del grado. Los resultados muestran cómo la perspectiva de género está presente de manera anécdotica en los contenidos académicos y que tanto los referentes bibliográficos como las figuras de poder son principalmente autores hombres, perpetuando la imagen de que el conocimiento reside en la figura masculina. El estudiantado revela un grado considerable de desconocimiento de las causas y consecuencias de las desigualdades de género que les incapacita para formar una visión crítica de la economía y la sociedad. Los resultados subrayan la necesidad de analizar aspectos relacionados con la traslación de la normativa vigente a las universidades.Esta investigación fue financiada por el Center for Learning Innovation and Knowledge (CLIK) de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra (ref. 18 PLAQUID 2015-2016) y con la colaboración del Consejo General de Economistas de España.Oliveras, E.; Muñoz, M.; Crespo Sogas, P. (2021). La ceguera al género en los estudios de Economía y Empresa. REDU. Revista de Docencia Universitaria. 19(1):93-110. https://doi.org/10.4995/redu.2021.15057OJS93110191ANECA. (2005). Libro Blanco. Título de Grado en Economía y Empresa. 462.AQU Catalunya. (2019). Incorporating the gender perspective in higher education teaching, 69. http://www.aqu.cat/doc/doc_21331700_1.pdfBerg, M. (1992). The First Women Economic Historians. The Economic History Review, 45(2), 308-329. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1992.tb01303.xBooth, A.L., Burton, J., & Mumford, K. (2000). 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A Case for Gender Mainstreaming.Heijstra, T., Bjarnason, T., & Rafnsdóttir, G.L. (2015). Predictors of Gender Inequalities in the Rank of Full Professor. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 59(2), 214-230. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2014.904417Izquierdo Benito, M.J. (2008). Cuidado y provisión: el sesgo de género en las prácticas universitarias y su impacto en la función socializadora de la universidad. Madrid: Ministerio de Igualdad. Instituto de la Mujer.Jiménez Rodrigo, M., Román Onsalo, M., & Traverso Cortés, J. (2011). Lenguaje no sexista y barreras a su utilización. Un estudio en el ámbito universitario. Revista de Investigación En Educación, 2(9), 174-183. http://hdl.handle.net/11441/68433Kahn, S. (1993). Gender Differences in Academic Career Paths of Economists. The American Economic Review, Vol. 83(2), 52-56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2117639Kortendiek, B. (2011). Supporting the Bologna Process by Gender Mainstreaming: A Model for the Integration of Gender Studies in Higher Education Curricula. In L. Grünberg (Ed.), From Gender Studies to Gender IN Studies (pp. 211-228). UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tws.2012.02.007Lockwood, P. (2006). "Someone Like Me can be Successful": Do College Students Need Same-Gender Role Models? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30(1), 36-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.2006.00260.xLundberg, S. (2017). Committee on the status of women in the economics profession (CSWEP). American Economic Review, 107(5), 759-776. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.107.5.759Maroto, J.A., & Melle, M. (2002). Los economistas en España: Estudios y titulaciones. In Economía y economistas españoles (pp. 931-1052). Galaxia Gutenberg. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=989363May, A.M., McGarvey, M.G., & Kucera, D. (2018). Gender and European Economic Policy: A Survey of the Views of European Economists on Contemporary Economic Policy. Kyklos, 71(1), 162-183. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12166May, A.M., McGarvey, M.G., & Whaples, R. (2014). Are disagreements among male and female economists marginal at best?: A survey of aea members and their views on Economics and Economic policy. Contemporary Economic Policy, 32(1), 111- 132. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/coep.12004Mengel, F., Sauermann, J., & Zölitz, U. (2019). Gender bias in teaching evaluations. Journal of the European Economic Association, 17(2), 535-566. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvx057Miroiu, M. (2011). Guidelines for Promoting Gender-Inclusive Curriculum in Higher Education. In L. Grünberg (Ed.), From Gender Studies to Gender IN Studies (pp. 229-246). UNESCO-CEPES Studies in Higher Education.Misra, J., Lundquist, J.H., & Templer, A. (2012). Gender, Work Time, and Care Responsibilities Among Faculty. 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Prepulse inhibition predicts spatial working memory performance in the inbred Roman high- and low-avoidance rats and in genetically heterogeneous NIH-HS rats: relevance for studying pre-attentive and cognitive anomalies in schizophrenia

Animal models of schizophrenia-relevant symptoms are increasingly important for progress in our understanding of the neurobiological basis of the disorder and for discovering novel and more specific treatments. Prepulse inhibition (PPI) and working memory, which are impaired in schizophrenic patients, are among the symptoms/processes modeled in those animal analogues. We have evaluated whether a genetically-selected rat model, the Roman high-avoidance inbred strain (RHA-I), displays PPI deficits as compared with its Roman low-avoidance (RLA-I) counterpart and the genetically heterogeneous NIH-HS rat stock. We have investigated whether PPI deficits predict spatial working memory impairments (in the Morris water maze; MWM) in these three rat types (Experiment 1), as well as in a separate sample of NIH-HS rats stratified according to their extreme (High, Medium, Low) PPI scores (Experiment 2). The results from Exp. 1 show that RHA-I rats display PPI and spatial working memory deficits compared to both RLA-I and NIH-HS rats. Likewise, in Exp. 2, “Low-PPI” NIH-HS rats present significantly impaired working memory with respect to “Medium-PPI” and “High-PPI” NIH-HS subgroups. Further support to these results comes from correlational, factorial and multiple regression analyses, which reveal that PPI is positively associated with spatial working memory performance. Conversely, cued learning in the MWM was not associated with PPI.Thus, using genetically-selected and genetically heterogeneous rats, the present study shows, for the first time, that PPI is a positive predictor of performance in a spatial working memory task. These results may have translational value for schizophrenia symptom research in humans, as they suggest that either by psychogenetic selection or by focusing on extreme PPI scores from a genetically heterogeneous rat stock, it is possible to detect a useful (perhaps “at risk”) phenotype to study cognitive anomalies linked to schizophrenia

Atmospheric polarimetric effects on GNSS radio occultations: the ROHP-PAZ field campaign

The ROHP-PAZ mission will collect, for the first time, GPS radio occultations at two polarizations with the aim of characterizing rain. Prior to the mission's launch (2016), a field campaign has been conducted to identify and understand the measurements. In this study we present the set-up and the results of such a campaign: the main finding is the confirmation of sensitivity to heavy rain and, unexpectedly, to other frozen hydrometeors. This is key information for the spaceborne experiment.This study was conducted under the Spanish ACI2010-1089 and AYA2011-29183-C02-02 grant, with contributions from EUMETSAT’s ROM SAF CDOP2

Internet gaming disorder clustering based on personality traits in adolescents, and its relation with comorbid psychological symptoms

Altres ajuts: This work was funded by an AIS (Atención e Investigación en Socioaddiciones) intramural research program. This research is partially supported by the Marsden grant E2987-3648 (Royal Society of New Zealand).In recent years, the evidence regarding Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) suggests that some personality traits are important risk factors for developing this problem. The heterogeneity involved in problematic online gaming and differences found in the literature regarding the comorbid psychopathology associated with the problem could be explained through different types of gamers. Clustering analysis can allow organization of a collection of personality traits into clusters based on similarity. The objectives of this study were: (1) to obtain an empirical classification of IGD patients according to personality variables and (2) to describe the resultant groups in terms of clinical and sociodemographic variables. The sample included 66 IGD adolescent patients who were consecutive referrals at a mental health center in Barcelona, Spain. A Gaussian mixture model cluster analysis was used in order to classify the subjects based on their personality. Two clusters based on personality traits were detected: type I "higher comorbid symptoms" (n = 24), and type II "lower comorbid symptoms" (n = 42). The type I included higher scores in introversive, inhibited, doleful, unruly, forceful, oppositional, self-demeaning and borderline tendency traits, and lower scores in histrionic, egotistic and conforming traits. The type I obtained higher scores on all the Symptom Check List-90 items-Revised, all the State-Trait Anxiety Index scales, and on the DSM-5 IGD criteria. Differences in personality can be useful in determining clusters with different types of dysfunctionality

Red LED Light Acts on the Mitochondrial Electron Chain of Donkey Sperm and Its Effects Depend on the Time of Exposure to Light

This work aimed to investigate how stimulation of donkey sperm with red LED light affects mitochondrial function. For this purpose, freshly diluted donkey semen was stimulated with red light for 1, 5, and 10 min, in the presence or absence of oligomycin A (Omy A), a specific inhibitor of mitochondrial ATP synthase, or FCCP, a specific disruptor of mitochondrial electron chain. The results obtained in the present study indicated that the effects of red LED light on fresh donkey sperm function are related to changes in mitochondria function. In effect, irradiation of donkey sperm resulted in an increase in mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP), the activity of cytochrome C oxidase and the rate of oxygen consumption. In addition, in the absence of oligomycin A and FCCP, light-stimulation augmented the average path velocity (VAP) and modified the structure of motile sperm subpopulations, increasing the fastest and most linear subpopulation. In contrast, the presence of either Omy A or FCCP abolished the aforementioned effects. Interestingly, our results also showed that the effects of red light depend on the exposure time applied, as indicated by the observed differences between irradiation protocols. In conclusion, our results suggest that exposing fresh donkey sperm to red light modulates the function of their mitochondria through affecting the activity of the electron chain. However, the extent of this effect depends on the irradiation pattern and does not exclude the existence of other mechanisms, such as those related to thermotaxis

SAT Modulo Linear Arithmetic for Solving Polynomial

Polynomial constraint solving plays a prominent role in several areas of hardware and software analysis and verification, e.g., termination proving, program invariant generation and hybrid system verification, to name a few. In this paper we propose a new method for solving non-linear constraints based on encoding the problem into an SMT problem considering only linear arithmetic. Unlike other existing methods, our method focuses on proving satisfiability of the constraints rather than on proving unsatisfiability, which is more relevant in several applications as we illustrate with several examples. Nevertheless, we also present new techniques based on the analysis of unsatisfiable cores that allow one to efficiently prove unsatisfiability too for a broad class of problems. The power of our approach is demonstrated by means of extensive experiments comparing our prototype with state-of-the-art tools on benchmarks taken both from the academic and the industrial world

NetBenchmark: a bioconductor package for reproducible benchmarks of gene regulatory network inference

Background: In the last decade, a great number of methods for reconstructing gene regulatory networks from expression data have been proposed. However, very few tools and datasets allow to evaluate accurately and reproducibly those methods. Hence, we propose here a new tool, able to perform a systematic, yet fully reproducible, evaluation of transcriptional network inference methods. Results: Our open-source and freely available Bioconductor package aggregates a large set of tools to assess the robustness of network inference algorithms against different simulators, topologies, sample sizes and noise intensities. Conclusions: The benchmarking framework that uses various datasets highlights the specialization of some methods toward network types and data. As a result, it is possible to identify the techniques that have broad overall performances.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Specific LED-based red light photo-stimulation procedures improve overall sperm function and reproductive performance of boar ejaculates

The present study evaluated the effects of exposing liquid-stored boar semen to different red light LED regimens on sperm quality and reproductive performance. Of all of the tested photo-stimulation procedures, the best pattern consisted of 10min light, 10min rest and 10min of further light (10-10-10 pattern). This pattern induced an intense and transient increase in the majority of motility parameters, without modifying sperm viability and acrosome integrity. While incubating non-photo-stimulated sperm at 37°C for 90min decreased all sperm quality parameters, this reduction was prevented when the previously-described light procedure was applied. This effect was concomitant with an increase in the percentage of sperm with high mitochondrial membrane potential. When sperm were subjected to 'in vitro' capacitation, photo-stimulation also increased the percentage of sperm with capacitation-like changes in membrane structure. On the other hand, treating commercial semen doses intended for artificial insemination with the 10-10-10 photo-stimulation pattern significantly increased farrowing rates and the number of both total and live-born piglets for parturition. Therefore, our results indicate that a precise photo-stimulation procedure is able to increase the fertilising ability of boar sperm via a mechanism that could be related to mitochondrial function