Engaging with the public in public engagement with research

Though there is now growing commitment to publicly engaged research, the role and definition of the public in such processes is wide-ranging, contested, and often rather vague. This article addresses this problem by showing that, although there is no single agreed upon theory or way of being public, it is still possible and very important to develop clear, public-centric, understandings of engaged research practice. The article introduces a multi-dimensional framework based on the theoretical literature on the ‘public’, and demonstrates – in the context of a recent engaged research project – how it possible to conceptualise, design and evaluate context-specific formations of the public. Starting from an understanding of publics as mediated and dynamic entities, the article seeks to illuminate some of the choices that researchers face and how the framework can help them navigate these. This article is for all those interested in what it means to address, support and account for an engaged public in contemporary settings

Stepping through the orientation looking glass: A staged approach for postgraduate students

Postgraduate coursework is now delivered to a largely mature age study population, in what may be an unfamiliar mix of online and distance learning to many students. This paper reports on a novel approach to student orientation in this new environment. Orientation is conceptualised as a process of transition between the domain of everyday life and the domain of academic study over a period of time commencing prior to enrolment and continuing into formal studies. A schema addressing three dimensions (interpersonal, technical and reflective) was constructed and operationalised as a staged orientation plan (GettingOnTrack). Students are able to move through the three stages participating in activities which align with their needs before, during and after enrolment. This builds on critical concerns reported in earlier literature, highlighting the need for an extended time line and authentic learning tasks in a risk free environment

Aerodynamic Power Control for Multirotor Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, a new motor control input and controller for small-scale electrically powered multirotor aerial vehicles is proposed. The proposed scheme is based on controlling aerodynamic power as opposed to the rotor speed of each motor-rotor system. Electrical properties of the brushless direct current motor are used to both estimate and control the mechanical power of the motor system which is coupled with aerodynamic power using momentum theory analysis. In comparison to current state-of-the-art motor control for multirotor aerial vehicles, the proposed approach is robust to unmodelled aerodynamic effects such as wind disturbances and ground effects. Theory and experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed motor control.This work was supported by Australian Research Council through Discovery Grant DP120100316 and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (MSIP) (No. 2009-0083495, 2013-013911)

A Nonlinear Adaptive Filter for Gyro Thermal Bias Error Cancellation

Deterministic errors in angular rate gyros, such as thermal biases, can have a significant impact on spacecraft attitude knowledge. In particular, thermal biases are often the dominant error source in MEMS gyros after calibration. Filters, such as J\,fEKFs, are commonly used to mitigate the impact of gyro errors and gyro noise on spacecraft closed loop pointing accuracy, but often have difficulty in rapidly changing thermal environments and can be computationally expensive. In this report an existing nonlinear adaptive filter is used as the basis for a new nonlinear adaptive filter designed to estimate and cancel thermal bias effects. A description of the filter is presented along with an implementation suitable for discrete-time applications. A simulation analysis demonstrates the performance of the filter in the presence of noisy measurements and provides a comparison with existing techniques

Lactococcal 949 group phages recognize a carbohydrate receptor on the host cell surface

Lactococcal bacteriophages represent one of the leading causes of dairy fermentation failure and product inconsistencies. A new member of the lactococcal 949 phage group, named WRP3, was isolated from cheese whey from a Sicilian factory in 2011. The genome sequence of this phage was determined, and it constitutes the largest lactococcal phage genome currently known, at 130,008 bp. Detailed bioinformatic analysis of the genomic region encoding the presumed initiator complex and baseplate of WRP3 has aided in the functional assignment of several open reading frames (ORFs), particularly that for the receptor binding protein required for host recognition. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the 949 phages target cell wall phospho-polysaccharides as their receptors, accounting for the specificity of the interactions of these phages with their lactococcal hosts. Such information may ultimately aid in the identification of strains/strain blends that do not present the necessary saccharidic target for infection by these problematic phages

Detecting Lactococcus lactis prophages by Mitomycin C-mediated induction coupled to flow cytometry analysis

Most analyzed Lactococcus lactis strains are predicted to harbor one or more prophage genomes within their chromosome; however, the true extent of the inducibility and functionality of such prophages cannot easily be deduced from sequence analysis alone. Chemical treatment of lysogenic strains with Mitomycin C is known to cause induction of temperate phages, though it is not always easy to clearly identify a lysogenic strain or to measure the number of released phage particles. Here, we report the application of flow cytometry as a reliable tool for the detection and enumeration of released lactococcal prophages using the green dye SYTO-9

The halo model as a versatile tool to predict intrinsic alignments

Intrinsic alignments (IAs) of galaxies are an important contaminant for cosmic shear studies, but the modelling is complicated by the dependence of the signal on the source galaxy sample. In this paper, we use the halo model formalism to capture this diversity and examine its implications for Stage-III and Stage-IV cosmic shear surveys. We account for the different IA signatures at large and small scales, as well as for the different contributions from central/satellite and red/blue galaxies, and we use realistic mocks to account for the characteristics of the galaxy populations as a function of redshift. We inform our model using the most recent observational findings: we include a luminosity dependence at both large and small scales and a radial dependence of the signal within the halo. We predict the impact of the total IA signal on the lensing angular power spectra, including the current uncertainties from the IA best-fits to illustrate the range of possible impact on the lensing signal: the lack of constraints for fainter galaxies is the main source of uncertainty for our predictions of the IA signal. We investigate how well effective models with limited degrees of freedom can account for the complexity of the IA signal. Although these lead to negligible biases for Stage-III surveys, we find that, for Stage-IV surveys, it is essential to at least include an additional parameter to capture the redshift dependence