A vision about lifelong learning and its barriers

Around 25 years ago, some researchers argued for moving towards innovative learning models characterized by being more personalized and where the students would have a more active role in deciding what to learn, when to learn and how to learn. Nowadays, there is a need for a flexible, efficient, universal and lifelong education. Lifelong learning is fully integrated into our society and, from the student point of view, it is very different from regular learning. Among these differences there is the maturity of students, the fact that the domains of interest are much broader, the way how learning occurs at different depths, the fact that the topics to study may be related both to work, family and leisure, and that students have little availability due to their necessity to conciliate home, work, leisure and learning. Lifelong learning requires personalized models that adapt to students'' needs and constraints, but lifelong learners keep suffering from models that are neither adapted to their necessities, nor to the needs of society. This paper reflects on the actual situation of lifelong learning, analyses some of the relevant literature and discusses the challenges to conceptualize, from a transdisciplinary point of view, innovative e-learning models that promote self-determination of students

Improving the quality of life of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease through virtual communities of practice: a quasiexperimental study

Caring for a person with dementia burdens family caregivers, and there is a close negative relationship between this burden and their quality of life (QoL). Research suggests that caregivers’ main needs are information and training about the disease and support from others experiencing the same situation, and Internet interventions hold considerable promise for meeting these needs. Virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) are Internet frameworks to share knowledge where members collaborate and achieve a sense of trust in the community. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of participating in a VCoP (developed through an App) on the QoL of caregivers to people with Alzheimer’s. Results show QoL before and after the intervention changed significantly. The impact of VCoP on caregivers’ overall QoL is moderated by age and relation with the person with Alzheimer’s, specifically those over 65, and spouses. VCoPs allow interaction and knowledge sharing among caregivers which provide them mainly with information and support from peers helping them to meet their needs. Furthermore, caregivers’ QoL did not decrease when their relative deteriorated functionally, which could be due to the participation in VCoP. Although we found significant pre- and post differences in caregivers’ health literacy, we must report the ambiguous result that this variable only impacts on QoL’s physical domain. Participants also reported that they had a positive experience because the App was perceived to be a useful tool, because they could manage their own participation and they met peers and felt less lonely. Results suggest that participation in a VCoP impacts positively on caregivers’ QoL

Variable order Mittag-Leffler fractional operators on isolated time scales and application to the calculus of variations

We introduce new fractional operators of variable order on isolated time scales with Mittag-Leffler kernels. This allows a general formulation of a class of fractional variational problems involving variable-order difference operators. Main results give fractional integration by parts formulas and necessary optimality conditions of Euler-Lagrange type.Comment: This is a preprint of a paper whose final and definite form is with Springe

From Nuevo León to the USA and Back Again: Transnational Students in Mexico

The movement of Mexicans to the United States is both longstanding and long studied and from that study we know that for many newcomers the attachment to the receiving community is fraught and tentative. The experience of immigrant children in U.S. schools is also relatively well studied and reveals challenges of intercultural communication as well as concurrent and contradictory features of welcome and unwelcome. What is less well known, in the study of migration generally and of transnational students in particular, is how students moving in a less common direction — from the U.S. to Mexico — experience that movement. Based on visits to 173 randomly selected classrooms in the state of Nuevo León Mexico, this study shares survey and interview data from 208 of the 242 students encountered who had previous experience attending school in the United States

Status and Recent Results of the Acoustic Neutrino Detection Test System AMADEUS

The AMADEUS system is an integral part of the ANTARES neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. The project aims at the investigation of techniques for acoustic neutrino detection in the deep sea. Installed at a depth of more than 2000m, the acoustic sensors of AMADEUS are based on piezo-ceramics elements for the broad-band recording of signals with frequencies ranging up to 125kHz. AMADEUS was completed in May 2008 and comprises six "acoustic clusters", each one holding six acoustic sensors that are arranged at distances of roughly 1m from each other. The clusters are installed with inter-spacings ranging from 15m to 340m. Acoustic data are continuously acquired and processed at a computer cluster where online filter algorithms are applied to select a high-purity sample of neutrino-like signals. 1.6 TB of data were recorded in 2008 and 3.2 TB in 2009. In order to assess the background of neutrino-like signals in the deep sea, the characteristics of ambient noise and transient signals have been investigated. In this article, the AMADEUS system will be described and recent results will be presented.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures. Proceedings of ARENA 2010, the 4th International Workshop on Acoustic and Radio EeV Neutrino Detection Activitie

The ANTARES Telescope Neutrino Alert System

The ANTARES telescope has the capability to detect neutrinos produced in astrophysical transient sources. Potential sources include gamma-ray bursts, core collapse supernovae, and flaring active galactic nuclei. To enhance the sensitivity of ANTARES to such sources, a new detection method based on coincident observations of neutrinos and optical signals has been developed. A fast online muon track reconstruction is used to trigger a network of small automatic optical telescopes. Such alerts are generated for special events, such as two or more neutrinos, coincident in time and direction, or single neutrinos of very high energy.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures submitted to Astroparticle Physic

Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope

The data taken with the ANTARES neutrino telescope from 2007 to 2010, a total live time of 863 days, are used to measure the oscillation parameters of atmospheric neutrinos. Muon tracks are reconstructed with energies as low as 20 GeV. Neutrino oscillations will cause a suppression of vertical upgoing muon neutrinos of such energies crossing the Earth. The parameters determining the oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos are extracted by fitting the event rate as a function of the ratio of the estimated neutrino energy and reconstructed flight path through the Earth. Measurement contours of the oscillation parameters in a two-flavour approximation are derived. Assuming maximum mixing, a mass difference of $\Delta m_{32}^2=(3.1\pm 0.9)\cdot 10^{-3}$ eV$^2$ is obtained, in good agreement with the world average value.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Acoustic and optical variations during rapid downward motion episodes in the deep north-western Mediterranean Sea

An Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) was moored at the deep-sea site of the ANTARES neutrino telescope near Toulon, France, thus providing a unique opportunity to compare high-resolution acoustic and optical observations between 70 and 170 m above the sea bed at 2475 m. The ADCP measured downward vertical currents of magnitudes up to 0.03 m s-1 in late winter and early spring 2006. In the same period, observations were made of enhanced levels of acoustic reflection, interpreted as suspended particles including zooplankton, by a factor of about 10 and of horizontal currents reaching 0.35 m s-1. These observations coincided with high light levels detected by the telescope, interpreted as increased bioluminescence. During winter 2006 deep dense-water formation occurred in the Ligurian subbasin, thus providing a possible explanation for these observations. However, the 10-20 days quasi-periodic episodes of high levels of acoustic reflection, light and large vertical currents continuing into the summer are not direct evidence of this process. It is hypothesized that the main process allowing for suspended material to be moved vertically later in the year is local advection, linked with topographic boundary current instabilities along the rim of the 'Northern Current'.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

A First Search for coincident Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos using LIGO, Virgo and ANTARES data from 2007

We present the results of the first search for gravitational wave bursts associated with high energy neutrinos. Together, these messengers could reveal new, hidden sources that are not observed by conventional photon astronomy, particularly at high energy. Our search uses neutrinos detected by the underwater neutrino telescope ANTARES in its 5 line configuration during the period January - September 2007, which coincided with the fifth and first science runs of LIGO and Virgo, respectively. The LIGO-Virgo data were analysed for candidate gravitational-wave signals coincident in time and direction with the neutrino events. No significant coincident events were observed. We place limits on the density of joint high energy neutrino - gravitational wave emission events in the local universe, and compare them with densities of merger and core-collapse events.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, science summary page at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S5LV_ANTARES/index.php. Public access area to figures, tables at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=p120000

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected