A framework for understanding the quantitative demands of higher education

For many students entering higher education in South Africa there is an articulation gap between the demands of the curriculum and their competencies. This mismatch is particularly critical in the area of quantitative literacy (mathematical literacy, numeracy) and if not addressed, has negative consequences for equity of outcomes for higher education. There is a need to make explicit the quantitative literacy demands of the curriculum so that they can be examined critically and addressed by educational interventions and other curriculum changes. We describe our approach to characterizing the quantitative literacy demands in curricula in disciplines, by presenting a framework for analysing aspects of quantitative literacy events in the curriculum. This is useful for helping educators to recognize the demands on students' quantitative literacy (and assumptions about students' competencies) that are often implicit in their curricula, for the purpose of informing the design of education interventions and for developing test constructs

Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination

When a glass is lifted from a tray, there is a challenge for the waiter. He must quickly compensate for the reduction in the weight of the tray to keep it balanced. This compensation is easily achieved if the waiter lifts the glass himself. Because he has, himself, initiated the action, he can predict the timing and the magnitude of the perturbation of the tray and respond (via the holding hand) accordingly. In this study, we examined coordination when either one or two people hold the tray while either one of them or a third person removes the glass. Our results show that there is exquisite coordination between the two people holding the tray. We suggest that this coordination depends upon the haptic link provided by the rigid platform that both people are holding. We conclude that the guest at a reception should not lift his drink from the waiter’s tray until they have the waiter’s attention but, if too thirsty to wait, should lend a hand holding the tray

A new method to prevent degradation of lithium–oxygen batteries: reduction of superoxide by viologen

Lithium–oxygen battery development is hampered by degradation reactions initiated by superoxide, which is formed in the pathway of oxygen reduction to peroxide. This work demonstrates that the superoxide lifetime is drastically decreased upon addition of ethyl viologen, which catalyses the reduction of superoxide to peroxide

Forty years on: Uta Frith's contribution to research on autism and dyslexia, 1966–2006

Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour

Academic and quantitative literacy in higher education: Relationship with cognate school-leaving subjects

Academic and quantitative literacies (AQL) are essential to success in higher education. These literacies are largely not explicitly taught, but acquired indirectly, mostly through practices in various school subjects. The National Benchmark Tests (NBT) Project assesses students’ AQL competencies to assist in identifying students who need support, with placement into appropriate programmes and with curriculum development. We analyse the performance on the NBT AQL test of students who took the school-leaving examinations in Mathematics, Mathematical Literacy, English Home Language and English First Additional Language. We use the subject choice as a representation of the level of a candidate’s quantitative competence and language proficiency respectively, and investigate the relative contributions made by these subject choices to a student’s AQL. Students who paired Mathematics with English as Home Language subject had the statistically significant highest mean AQL score and those who took both English First Additional Language and Mathematical Literacy had the lowest. Language competence has a stronger effect than mathematical competence on AQL. Students who took the subject combination Mathematics and English Home Language at school are better prepared for the academic demands of higher education than their counterparts who took the alternate subjects. Treating these subjects as equivalent to English Home Language and Mathematics for admissions purposes ignores the differences in preparedness of these students

Casein kinase 1 family proteins promote Slimb-dependent Expanded degradation

Hippo signalling integrates diverse stimuli related to epithelial architecture to regulate tissue growth and cell fate decisions. The Hippo kinase cascade represses the growth-promoting transcription co-activator Yorkie. The FERM protein Expanded is one of the main upstream Hippo signalling regulators i

Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Learning Data Sets

Artificial Intelligence has the capacity to amplify and perpetuate societal biases and presents profound ethical implications for society. Gender bias has been identified in the context of employment advertising and recruitment tools, due to their reliance on underlying language processing and recommendation algorithms. Attempts to address such issues have involved testing learned associations, integrating concepts of fairness to machine learning and performing more rigorous analysis of training data. Mitigating bias when algorithms are trained on textual data is particularly challenging given the complex way gender ideology is embedded in language. This paper proposes a framework for the identification of gender bias in training data for machine learning.The work draws upon gender theory and sociolinguistics to systematically indicate levels of bias in textual training data and associated neural word embedding models, thus highlighting pathways for both removing bias from training data and critically assessing its impact.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 Tables, Presented as Bias2020 workshop (as part of the ECIR Conference) - http://bias.disim.univaq.i

Neural correlates of mentalizing-related computations during strategic interactions in humans

Competing successfully against an intelligent adversary requires the ability to mentalize an opponent's state of mind to anticipate his/her future behavior. Although much is known about what brain regions are activated during mentalizing, the question of how this function is implemented has received little attention to date. Here we formulated a computational model describing the capacity to mentalize in games. We scanned human subjects with functional MRI while they participated in a simple two-player strategy game and correlated our model against the functional MRI data. Different model components captured activity in distinct parts of the mentalizing network. While medial prefrontal cortex tracked an individual's expectations given the degree of model-predicted influence, posterior superior temporal sulcus was found to correspond to an influence update signal, capturing the difference between expected and actual influence exerted. These results suggest dissociable contributions of different parts of the mentalizing network to the computations underlying higher-order strategizing in humans