Supporting and enabling scholarship: developing and sharing expertise in online learning and teaching

In a highly competitive, rapidly changing higher education market, universities need to be able to generate pedagogical expertise quickly and ensure that it is applied to practice. Since teaching approaches are constantly evolving, partly responding to emerging learning technologies, there is a need to foster ways to keep abreast on an ongoing basis. This paper explores how a small-scale project, the Teaching Online Panel (TOP), used scholarship investigations and a bottom-up approach to enhance one particular aspect of academic practice ? online learning and teaching. The experiences of TOP are useful for identifying: - how a scholarship approach can help develop academic expertise - its contribution to enhancing understanding of staff?s different roles in the University - ways of developing the necessary supportive network for those undertaking such scholarship - the effectiveness of staff development which is peer-led rather than imposed from above - how practical examples can stimulate practice development - the relevance of literature on communities of practice and landscapes of practice for scholarship - the important role of ?brokers? to facilitate the dissemination of scholarship findings - the benefits to the brokers? own professional roles - the challenges of sustaining such an approach and lessons learnt. This study has relevance for those involved in supporting scholarship or delivering staff development in Higher Education

A Limnological Study of Ricks Pond and the Gulpha Creek Drainage in Garland County, Arkansas

A limnological investigation of Ricks Pond and the Gulpha Creek drainage of Garland County, Arkansas was conducted between 1 June 1978, and 21 August 1978. Water samples taken from ten stations on three different dates indicated that the stream and pond systems were typical in water quality characteristics of other small, high gradient streams and impoundments in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. In Ricks Pond, thermal stratification occurred along with the development of an oxygen deficient zone below a depth of one meter. Other water quality parameters indicated that Ricks Pond is a moderately productive ecosystem, with the productivity limited by the nitrogen species. The fecal coliform bacterial counts were very low, indicating no direct input of excessive amounts of fecal matter into the system during the present study. However, a Hot Springs city sewer line runs through the pond, and two manholes emerge from the pond\u27s surface. The possibility exists that this sewer line could discharge raw sewage into Ricks Pond during periods of high water. A biological investigation was also conducted in the study area, and lists of the phytoplankton, periphyton, higher aquatic vegetation, zooplankton, benthic macroinvertebrates, and fishes are presented. Twenty-seven species of fishes were collected from the Gulpha Creek drainage, and no rare or endangered forms were found. Ricks Pond is best-suited for the establishment of a put- and-take fishery for channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus. The following recommendations were made for the establishment of such a fishery: (1) Renovation of the pond by draining and deepening it; (2) Removal of the sewer line from the pond; (3) Stocking of catchable size channel catfish at the rate of approximately 300-400 pounds per acre; (4) Periodic monitoring of the water quality

Precedings of Arkansas Lakes Symposium Limnological Studies of Lake Chicot, Arkansas

Lake Chicot is an oxbow lake that was created more than 600 years ago by the meandering of the Mississippi River. It is located in Chicot county in southeastern Arkansas adjacent to the present Mississippi River. As the largest natural lake in Arkansas it earned an early reputation for its good fishing and recreational value. Development of a levee system forced the enlargement of the lakes watershed to its present 350 square miles. Initially this alteration affected only the volume flow through the lake, drastically reducing the water residence time. Because the watershed was located in one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world, the land, predominantly comprised of clay and fine silts, quickly became more intensively farmed. The use of agricultural chemicals increased, large amounts of sediments were produced and the lake began to become severely impacted by this activity

HARD: Hard Augmentations for Robust Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a simple and successful method to transfer knowledge from a teacher to a student model solely based on functional activity. However, current KD has a few shortcomings: it has recently been shown that this method is unsuitable to transfer simple inductive biases like shift equivariance, struggles to transfer out of domain generalization, and optimization time is magnitudes longer compared to default non-KD model training. To improve these aspects of KD, we propose Hard Augmentations for Robust Distillation (HARD), a generally applicable data augmentation framework, that generates synthetic data points for which the teacher and the student disagree. We show in a simple toy example that our augmentation framework solves the problem of transferring simple equivariances with KD. We then apply our framework in real-world tasks for a variety of augmentation models, ranging from simple spatial transformations to unconstrained image manipulations with a pretrained variational autoencoder. We find that our learned augmentations significantly improve KD performance on in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation. Moreover, our method outperforms even state-of-the-art data augmentations and since the augmented training inputs can be visualized, they offer a qualitative insight into the properties that are transferred from the teacher to the student. Thus HARD represents a generally applicable, dynamically optimized data augmentation technique tailored to improve the generalization and convergence speed of models trained with KD

Fission studies with 140 MeV α\bm{\alpha}-Particles

Binary fission induced by 140 MeV $\alpha$-particles has been measured for $^{\rm nat}$Ag, $^{139}$La, $^{165}$Ho and $^{197}$Au targets. The measured quantities are the total kinetic energies, fragment masses, and fission cross sections. The results are compared with other data and systematics. A minimum of the fission probability in the vicinity $Z^2/A=24$ is observed.Comment: 4 figures, 2 table

The VLQ Calorimeter of H1 at HERA: A Highly Compact Device for Measurements of Electrons and Photons under Very Small Scattering Angles

In 1998, the detector H1 at HERA has been equipped with a small backward spectrometer, the Very Low Q^2 (VLQ) spectrometer comprising a silicon tracker, a tungsten - scintillator sandwich calorimeter, and a Time-of-Flight system. The spectrometer was designed to measure electrons scattered under very low angles, equivalent to very low squared four - momentum transfers Q^2, and high energy photons with good energy and spatial resolution. The VLQ was in operation during the 1999 and 2000 run periods. This paper describes the design and construction of the VLQ calorimeter, a compact device with a fourfold projective energy read-out, and its performance during test runs and in the experiment.Comment: 32 pages, 25 figures, 2 tables (To be submitted to Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A

In-Stream Monitoring of Sediments and Water in the Lower Ouachita River for Site Impact to Aquatic Biota

Reported reduced sportfish densities in the main channel of the Ouachita River prompted an investigation, beginning in 1990, into potential causes of ongoing impairment to aquatic biota. In-stream monitoring that incorporated toxicity testing of sediments and water was conducted to discern potential sources of contaminants that might be related to the suboptimal fishery populations. Organisms selected to evaluate chronic impairment included larval fish, clams, midges and water fleas. The fathead minnow {Pimephales promelas) and cladoceran (Ceriodaphnia dubid) were used to estimate patterns of toxicity associated with water from seven designated reaches and selected tributaries of the Ouachita River. Larval survival and growth tests were conducted using the fathead minnow, while survival and reproduction were assessed for the cladoceran. An enzyme assay using the Asian clam (Corbicula fluminea), and growth and survival tests with Chironomus tentans were used to evaluate ambient sediment toxicity within these same reaches and tributaries. Ambient toxicity was rarely observed in the mainstem of the River and, moreover, represented intermittent events. However, impaired growth in larval fish, poor reproduction in cladocera, and reduced enzyme activity in clams were evident for several tributaries. Results of 10-day whole sediment tests showed significant growth reductions in C. tentans exposed to sediments collected from West and East Two bayous, Smackover and Coffee creeks. These results suggest there is intermittent impairment in tributaries of the Ouachita River due to ambient water and sediment conditions that are aside from current concerns for mercury contamination

Final Report: Buffalo National River Ecosystems

The objective of this study was to sample the Buffalo River on a seasonal basis for a year, in order to determine whether any potential water quality problems existed