Re-Focusing - Building a Future for Entrepreneurial Education & Learning

The field of entrepreneurship has struggled with fundamental questions concerning the subject’s nature and purpose. To whom and to what means are educational and training agendas ultimately directed? Such questions have become of central importance to policy makers, practitioners and academics alike. There are suggestions that university business schools should engage more critically with the lived experiences of practising entrepreneurs through alternative pedagogical approaches and methods, seeking to account for and highlighting the social, political and moral aspects of entrepreneurial practice. In the UK, where funding in higher education has become increasingly dependent on student fees, there are renewed pressures to educate students for entrepreneurial practice as opposed to educating them about the nature and effects of entrepreneurship. Government and EU policies are calling on business schools to develop and enhance entrepreneurial growth and skill sets, to make their education and training programmes more proactive in providing innovative educational practices which help and facilitate life experiences and experiential learning. This paper makes the case for critical frameworks to be applied so that complex social processes become a source of learning for educators and entrepreneurs and so that innovative pedagogical approaches can be developed in terms both of context (curriculum design) and process (delivery methods)

Insight into stability of CotA laccase from the spore coat of Bacillus subtilis

The axial ligand of the catalytic mononuclear T1 copper site (Met(502)) of the CotA laccase was replaced by a leucine or phenylalanine residue to increase the redox potential of the enzyme. These mutations led to an increase in the redox potential by approx. 100 mV relative to the wild-type enzyme but the catalytic constant k(cat) in the mutant enzymes was severely compromised. This decrease in the catalytic efficiency was unexpected as the X-ray analysis of mutants has shown that replacement of methionine ligand did not lead to major structural changes in the geometry of the T1 Centre or in the overall fold of the enzyme. However, the mutations have a profound impact on the thermodynamic stability of the enzyme. The fold of the enzyme has become unstable especially with the introduction of the larger phenylalanine residue and this instability should be related to the decrease in the catalytic efficiency. The instability of the fold for the mutant proteins resulted in the accumulation of an intermediate state, partly unfolded, in-between native and unfolded states. Quenching of tryptophan fluorescence by acrylamide has further revealed that the intermediate state is partly unfolded.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Strategies for the evolution of sex

We find that the hypothesis made by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley [Theory in Biosc., 119, 166 (2000)] for the evolution of sex, namely a strategy devised to escape extinction due to too many deleterious mutations, is sufficient but not necessary for the successful evolution of a steady state population of sexual individuals within a finite population. Simply allowing for a finite probability for conversion to sex in each generation also gives rise to a stable sexual population, in the presence of an upper limit on the number of deleterious mutations per individual. For large values of this probability, we find a phase transition to an intermittent, multi-stable regime. On the other hand, in the limit of extremely slow drive, another transition takes place to a different steady state distribution, with fewer deleterious mutations within the asexual population.Comment: RevTeX, 11 pages, multicolumn, including 12 figure

Anomalous diffusion with absorption: Exact time-dependent solutions

Recently, analytical solutions of a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation describing anomalous diffusion with an external linear force were found using a non extensive thermostatistical Ansatz. We have extended these solutions to the case when an homogeneous absorption process is also present. Some peculiar aspects of the interrelation between the deterministic force, the nonlinear diffusion and the absorption process are discussed.Comment: RevTex, 16 pgs, 4 figures. Accepted in Physical Review

Classical Infinite-Range-Interaction Heisenberg Ferromagnetic Model: Metastability and Sensitivity to Initial Conditions

A N-sized inertial classical Heisenberg ferromagnet, which consists in a modification of the well-known standard model, where the spins are replaced by classical rotators, is studied in the limit of infinite-range interactions. The usual canonical-ensemble mean-field solution of the inertial classical $n$-vector ferromagnet (for which $n=3$ recovers the particular Heisenberg model considered herein) is briefly reviewed, showing the well-known second-order phase transition. This Heisenberg model is studied numerically within the microcanonical ensemble, through molecular dynamics.Comment: 18 pages text, and 7 EPS figure

Energetic particle influence on the Earth's atmosphere

This manuscript gives an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the effects of energetic particle precipitation (EPP) onto the whole atmosphere, from the lower thermosphere/mesosphere through the stratosphere and troposphere, to the surface. The paper summarizes the different sources and energies of particles, principally galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), solar energetic particles (SEPs) and energetic electron precipitation (EEP). All the proposed mechanisms by which EPP can affect the atmosphere are discussed, including chemical changes in the upper atmosphere and lower thermosphere, chemistry-dynamics feedbacks, the global electric circuit and cloud formation. The role of energetic particles in Earth’s atmosphere is a multi-disciplinary problem that requires expertise from a range of scientific backgrounds. To assist with this synergy, summary tables are provided, which are intended to evaluate the level of current knowledge of the effects of energetic particles on processes in the entire atmosphere

Star clusters near and far; tracing star formation across cosmic time

© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00690-x.Star clusters are fundamental units of stellar feedback and unique tracers of their host galactic properties. In this review, we will first focus on their constituents, i.e.\ detailed insight into their stellar populations and their surrounding ionised, warm, neutral, and molecular gas. We, then, move beyond the Local Group to review star cluster populations at various evolutionary stages, and in diverse galactic environmental conditions accessible in the local Universe. At high redshift, where conditions for cluster formation and evolution are more extreme, we are only able to observe the integrated light of a handful of objects that we believe will become globular clusters. We therefore discuss how numerical and analytical methods, informed by the observed properties of cluster populations in the local Universe, are used to develop sophisticated simulations potentially capable of disentangling the genetic map of galaxy formation and assembly that is carried by globular cluster populations.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

23rd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference: summary of sessions EX/C and ICC

An overview is given of recent experimental results in the areas of innovative confinement concepts, operational scenarios and confinement experiments as presented at the 2010 IAEA Fusion Energy Conference. Important new findings are presented from fusion devices worldwide, with a strong focus towards the scientific and technical issues associated with ITER and W7-X devices, presently under construction

Study of Z → llγ decays at √s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents a study of Z → llγ decays with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The analysis uses a proton–proton data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.2 fb−1 collected at a centre-ofmass energy √s = 8 TeV. Integrated fiducial cross-sections together with normalised differential fiducial cross-sections, sensitive to the kinematics of final-state QED radiation, are obtained. The results are found to be in agreement with stateof-the-art predictions for final-state QED radiation. First measurements of Z → llγ γ decays are also reported

Software performance of the ATLAS track reconstruction for LHC run 3

Charged particle reconstruction in the presence of many simultaneous proton–proton (pp) collisions in the LHC is a challenging task for the ATLAS experiment’s reconstruction software due to the combinatorial complexity. This paper describes the major changes made to adapt the software to reconstruct high-activity collisions with an average of 50 or more simultaneous pp interactions per bunch crossing (pileup) promptly using the available computing resources. The performance of the key components of the track reconstruction chain and its dependence on pile-up are evaluated, and the improvement achieved compared to the previous software version is quantified. For events with an average of 60 pp collisions per bunch crossing, the updated track reconstruction is twice as fast as the previous version, without significant reduction in reconstruction efficiency and while reducing the rate of combinatorial fake tracks by more than a factor two