The development of a rich multimedia training environment for crisis management: using emotional affect to enhance learning

PANDORA is an EU FP7-funded project developing a novel training and learning environment for Gold Commanders, individuals who carry executive responsibility for the services and facilities identified as strategically critical e.g. Police, Fire, in crisis management strategic planning situations. A key part of the work for this project is considering the emotional and behavioural state of the trainees, and the creation of more realistic, and thereby stressful, representations of multimedia information to impact on the decision-making of those trainees. Existing training models are predominantly paper-based, table-top exercises, which require an exercise of imagination on the part of the trainees to consider not only the various aspects of a crisis situation but also the impacts of interventions, and remediating actions in the event of the failure of an intervention. However, existing computing models and tools are focused on supporting tactical and operational activities in crisis management, not strategic. Therefore, the PANDORA system will provide a rich multimedia information environment, to provide trainees with the detailed information they require to develop strategic plans to deal with a crisis scenario, and will then provide information on the impacts of the implementation of those plans and provide the opportunity for the trainees to revise and remediate those plans. Since this activity is invariably multi-agency, the training environment must support group-based strategic planning activities and trainees will occupy specific roles within the crisis scenario. The system will also provide a range of non-playing characters (NPC) representing domain experts, high-level controllers (e.g. politicians, ministers), low-level controllers (tactical and operational commanders), and missing trainee roles, to ensure a fully populated scenario can be realised in each instantiation. Within the environment, the emotional and behavioural state of the trainees will be monitored, and interventions, in the form of environmental information controls and mechanisms impacting on the stress levels and decisionmaking capabilities of the trainees, will be used to personalise the training environment. This approach enables a richer and more realistic representation of the crisis scenario to be enacted, leading to better strategic plans and providing trainees with structured feedback on their performance under stress

Formation of the Galactic globular clusters with He-rich stars in low-mass halos virialized at high redshift

Recent observations have reported that the Galactic globular clusters (GCs) with unusually extended horizontal-branch (EHB) morphologies show a significantly lower velocity dispersion compared with that of the entire Galactic GC system. We consider that the observed distinctive kinematics of GCs with EHB has valuable information on the formation epochs of GCs and accordingly discuss this observational result based on cosmological N-body simulations with a model of GC formation. We assume that GCs in galaxies were initially formed in low-mass halos at high redshifts and we investigate final kinematics of GCs in their host halos at $z=0$. We find that GCs formed in halos virialized at z>10 show lower velocity dispersions on average than those formed at z>6 for halos with GCs at z=0. We thus suggest that the origin of the observed lower velocity dispersion for the Galactic GCs with EHBs is closely associated with earlier formation epochs (z>10) of halos initially hosting the GCs in the course of the Galaxy formation. Considering that the origin of EHBs can be due to the presence of helium-enhanced second-generation stars in GCs, we discuss the longstanding second parameter problem of GCs in the context of different degrees of chemical pollution in GC-forming gas clouds within low-mass halos virialized at different redshifts.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted by MNRAS Letter

Influence of cell surface and nanomechanical properties on the flocculation ability of industrial <i>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</i> strains

In the past few years, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has provided novel information on the ultrastructural and nanomechanical properties of yeast cell walls that play a major role in determining the flocculation characteristics of the yeasts. In this study, we used AFM to visualize at the nanoscale the cell surface topography and to determine cell wall nanomechanical properties (e.g. elasticity) of different strains of S. cerevisiae employed for brewing, winemaking and fuel alcohol production. Cell surface topography was found to correlate with the flocculation behaviour of these strains during their late stationary phase, with the cell surface of flocculent cells being rougher than that of weakly flocculent cells. The elastic modulus of the yeast cell walls showed that weakly flocculent strains had a more rigid cell wall than highly flocculent strains. This difference in elasticity seemed to have an effect on the adhesive properties of the yeast cell walls, with weakly flocculent yeasts displaying higher adhesion energy than the highly flocculent strains. These findings seem to indicate that yeast cell surface nanomechanical properties play an important role in governing flocculation

The impact of expanding advanced level secondary school students' awareness and use of metacognitive learning strategies on confidence and proficiency in foreign language speaking skills

In an increasingly multilingual world, the question of how to improve foreign language speaking skills of pupils in British schools is of paramount importance to language teachers and policy makers today. This paper examines how an explicit focus on metacognitive strategy use within secondary school foreign language lessons impacts pupils' confidence and proficiency in speaking. The small-scale action research study was conducted with a class of five Year Twelve (age 16-17) Advanced Level learners of French in a secondary school in England. While all of the pupils generally achieved well in the reading, writing and listening aspects of the course, they performed considerably less well in speaking tasks. The primary aim of this study was therefore to introduce the students to a range of metacognitive learning strategies with a view to improving their confidence and proficiency in speaking. Data was collected from questionnaires, interviews, strategy checklists and assessment marks collected both before and after a six-week period of strategy instruction. The findings indicate that the use of learning strategies seems to have had a positive impact on pupils' confidence and proficiency in speaking and after the intervention the participants reported an increase in how much they both valued and used a range of metacognitive strategies.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09571736.2015.1010448#.VTEcyS6fbe5