Project accelerate: increasing STEM opportunities for underserved high school students

Project Accelerate is a NSF-funded project aimed at helping prepare underserved high school students for the AP Physics 1 exam. The students attend schools that do not offer AP Physics 1. All Project Accelerate students are enrolled in a scaffolded small private online course (SPOC) that takes them through the physics material in an interactive way. A significant fraction of the students, including all those in the Boston area, also attend weekly 2.5-hour sessions on campus to do hands-on lab activities and recitation exercises. These sessions are led by undergraduate students who have pedagogical training. Our data indicate that Project Accelerate participants do at least as well on the AP Physics exam as similar students who take an AP Physics 1 through a traditional classroom-based course. One of the main goals of Project Accelerate is to give underserved students access to a rigorous science course, helping these students to build a solid foundation for a possible undergraduate degree in STEM. We also present evidence that successfully completing Project Accelerate makes students more likely to pursue further opportunities in STEM.Published versio

Pathogen exclusion from eco-epidemiological systems

Increasing concerns about the changing environment and the emergence of pathogens that cross species boundaries have added to the urgency of understanding the dynamics of complex ecological systems infected by pathogens. Of particular interest is the often counterintuitive way in which infection and predation interact and the consequent difficulties in designing control strategies to manage the system. To understand the mechanisms involved, we focus on the pathogen exclusion problem, using control maps (on which the network of exclusion thresholds are plotted) in order to readily identify which exclusion strategies will work and why others will not. We apply this approach to the analysis of parasite exclusion in two game bird ecologies. For higher dimensions, we propose a computational scheme that will generate the optimal exclusion strategy, taking into account all operational constraints on the pathogen invasion matrix, populations, and controls. The situation is further complicated when external forcing distorts pathogen thresholds. This distortion is highly sensitive to the lags between forcing components, a sensitivity that can be exploited by management using correctly lagged cyclically varying controls to reduce the effort involved in pathogen exclusion

Exclusion of generalist pathogens in multihost communities

Knowing how to control a pathogen that infects more than one host species is of increasing importance because the incidence of such infections grows with continuing environmental change. Of concern are infections transmitted from wildlife to humans or livestock. To determine which options are available to control a pathogen in these circumstances, we analyze the pathogen invasion matrix for the multihost susceptible-infected-susceptible model. We highlight the importance of both community structure and the column sum or row sum index, an indicator of both force of infection and community stability. We derive a set of guidelines for constructing culling strategies and suggest a hybrid strategy that has the advantages of both the bottom-up and the top-down approaches, which we study in some detail. The analysis holds for an arbitrary number of host species, enabling the analysis of large-scale ecological systems and systems with spatial dimensions. We test the robustness of our methods by making two changes in the structure of the underlying dynamic model, adding direct competition and introducing frequency-dependent infection transmission. In particular, we show that the introduction of an additional host can eliminate the pathogen rather than eliminate the resident host. The discussion is illustrated with a reference to bovine tuberculosis

Technology entrepreneurship research opportunities: insights from across Europe

Over the last two decades, the phenomenon of technology entrepreneurship has attracted the interest of researchers and policy makers due to its significant impact upon economic progress. Several authors define technology entrepreneurship as the interface of two well-established, but related fields—entrepreneurship and technological innovation. In this vein, technological opportunities can be recognized and exploited by individuals through new venture creation yet equally can be pursued by individuals or groups within existing public or private organizations. This special section provides a more fine grained understanding of technology entrepreneurship by considering interactions across these individual and organizational levels. We present three studies, empirically grounded within the specific and distinct policy contexts of Spain, Italy and the UK, that reveal new insights on the determinants of technology entrepreneurship. In this introductory paper, we consider the themes and contributions of these papers and provide an agenda for further research outlining a greater use of multi-level approaches to further our understanding of technology entrepreneurship

The architecture of cultural enterprise: a study of design reflexivity in action

The cultural industries have an increasingly important role to play in policies addressing the UK's present and future economic competitiveness. Researching how entrepreneurial activity leads to the creation and maintenance of cultural enterprises is central to understanding the value added by such organisations. The present research contributes to our understanding of these important issues. An ethnographic approach, which is defined here as a set of methods for conducting field work (e.g., participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and a methodology for textual representations of social activity, is adopted to explore design thinking in action. The study aims at developing existing analyses which claim that contemporary production is becoming more design intensive and therefore reliant upon individuals and organisations supplying knowledge about design. This heightened awareness about the value of design for business is defined as design reflexivity, although the term is not used to indicate an epochal shift in capitalist production. Instead, design thinking is represented as central to the modem institutionalisation of knowledge. By adopting the concept of identity work, the research addresses the importance of the role of the cultural entrepreneur to the contemporary organisation of work. Empirical material, comprised of interview transcripts and field notes, is examined to understand how research participants engaged with the role of owner-founder of a design business. By 'limiting' the research to individuals located in an inner-city area and the design sub-field of the cultural industries, the research presents localised interpretations of the typical process of cultural enterprise. The metaphor of architecture is adopted to describe the act of arranging the voices of research participants through the application of an analytical model comprised of three phases. This phased analysis is not over-privileged above the participants' accounts, but to organise empirical materials which show how research participants accounted for their engagement with contemporary role of the designer (articulation); the limitations and opportunities of place and time (emplacement) and the accumulation of economic wealth comprised of tangible and intangible property (entanglement). The research connects the research participant's entrepreneurial organisation of design reflexivity together with analyses of the centrality of reflexive knowledge to study one area of knowledge intensive contemporary production

Measuring the response of human head and neck squamous cell carcinoma to irradiation in a microfluidic model allowing customized therapy

Radiotherapy is the standard treatment for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), however, radioresistance remains a major clinical problem despite significant improvements in treatment protocols. Therapeutic outcome could potentially be improved if a patient's tumour response to irradiation could be predicted ex vivo before clinical application. The present study employed a bespoke microfluidic device to maintain HNSCC tissue whilst subjecting it to external beam irradiation and measured the responses using a panel of cell death and proliferation markers. HNSCC biopsies from five newly-presenting patients [2 lymph node (LN); 3 primary tumour (PT)] were divided into parallel microfluidic devices and replicates of each tumour were subjected to single-dose irradiation (0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 Gy). Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release was measured and tissue sections were stained for cytokeratin (CK), cleaved-CK18 (cCK18), phosphorylated-H2AX (λH2AX) and Ki.67 by immunohistochemistry. In addition, fragmented DNA was detected using terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labelling (TUNEL). Compared with non.irradiated controls, higher irradiation doses resulted in elevated CK18-labelling index in two lymph nodes [15 Gy; 34.8% on LN1 and 31.7% on LN2 (p=0.006)] and a single laryngeal primary tumour (20 Gy; 31.5%; p=0.014). Significantly higher levels of DNA fragmentation were also detected in both lymph node samples and one primary tumour but at varying doses of irradiation, i.e., LN1 (20 Gy; 27.6%; p=0.047), LN2 (15 Gy; 15.3%; p=0.038) and PT3 (10 Gy; 35.2%; p=0.01). The λH2AX expression was raised but not significantly in the majority of samples. The percentage of Ki.67 positive nuclei reduced dose-dependently following irradiation. In contrast no significant difference in LDH release was observed between irradiated groups and controls. There is clear interand intra-patient variability in response to irradiation when measuring a variety of parameters, which offers the potential for the approach to provide clinically valuable information

Physarum polycephalum: Towards a biological controller

Microbial fuels cells (MFCs) are bio-electrochemical transducers that generate energy from the metabolism of electro-active microorganisms. The organism Physarum polycephalum is a slime mould, which has demonstrated many novel and interesting properties in the field of unconventional computation, such as route mapping between nutrient sources, maze solving and nutrient balancing. It is a motile, photosensitive and oxygen-consuming organism, and is known to be symbiotic with some, and antagonistic with other microbial species. In the context of artificial life, the slime mould would provide a biological mechanism (along with the microbial community) for controlling the performance and behaviour of artificial systems (MFCs, robots). In the experiments it was found that P. polycephalum did not generate significant amounts of power when inoculated in the anode. However, when P. polycephalum was introduced in the cathode of MFCs, a statistically significant difference in power output was observed

The architecture of cultural enterprise: a study of design reflexivity in action

The cultural industries have an increasingly important role to play in policies addressing the UK's present and future economic competitiveness. Researching how entrepreneurial activity leads to the creation and maintenance of cultural enterprises is central to understanding the value added by such organisations. The present research contributes to our understanding of these important issues. An ethnographic approach, which is defined here as a set of methods for conducting field work (e.g., participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and a methodology for textual representations of social activity, is adopted to explore design thinking in action. The study aims at developing existing analyses which claim that contemporary production is becoming more design intensive and therefore reliant upon individuals and organisations supplying knowledge about design. This heightened awareness about the value of design for business is defined as design reflexivity, although the term is not used to indicate an epochal shift in capitalist production. Instead, design thinking is represented as central to the modem institutionalisation of knowledge. By adopting the concept of identity work, the research addresses the importance of the role of the cultural entrepreneur to the contemporary organisation of work. Empirical material, comprised of interview transcripts and field notes, is examined to understand how research participants engaged with the role of owner-founder of a design business. By 'limiting' the research to individuals located in an inner-city area and the design sub-field of the cultural industries, the research presents localised interpretations of the typical process of cultural enterprise. The metaphor of architecture is adopted to describe the act of arranging the voices of research participants through the application of an analytical model comprised of three phases. This phased analysis is not over-privileged above the participants' accounts, but to organise empirical materials which show how research participants accounted for their engagement with contemporary role of the designer (articulation); the limitations and opportunities of place and time (emplacement) and the accumulation of economic wealth comprised of tangible and intangible property (entanglement). The research connects the research participant's entrepreneurial organisation of design reflexivity together with analyses of the centrality of reflexive knowledge to study one area of knowledge intensive contemporary production

Dialogue and the micro-processes of founder meaning-making during growth

This article draws upon dialogic theory to explore how meaning is co-constructed in dialogue as founding entrepreneurs devise strategies for venture growth. Drawing from a longitudinal study of the impact of a UK University business growth programme upon such strategies, we identify ways in which dialogue influences the meanings attributed to the adoption of, or resistance to, growth strategies. ‘Productive’ dialogue emerging from a diverse range of relevant voices encouraged founders to reflect upon the meanings given to current growth initiatives whilst devising future strategies. Conversely, founders could use ‘degenerative’ dialogue to block the voices of others in order to resist change and protect existing meanings. We contribute to debate by utilising dialogic theory as a conceptual tool to illustrate how business growth programmes shape the meanings founders apply to embrace, or resist strategic change, to effect venture growt