Supporting induction: relationships count

This article examines the structural changes to the induction of teachers in Scotland using the perceptions of a group of final year student teachers. This group would be the first probationer teachers to experience revised arrangements for new teacher induction in 37 years. Their preferences and concerns are highlighted, as the new procedures roll out in schools nationwide, in an attempt to stress the importance of relationships to the success of the induction scheme. The argument put forward in this article is based on the notion that personal intelligence is central to effective relationships and therefore crucially important in the context of this mentoring relationship. The views of our sample provide evidence to suggest that the quality of interactions between the mentor and the probationer teacher are paramount in providing a good induction experience. These views are substantiated by experiences in England and in induction literature elsewhere. A synthesis of this evidence is used to make recommendations for those involved in supporting induction in schools, local authorities or teacher education institutions

Game Theoretical Interactions of Moving Agents

Game theory has been one of the most successful quantitative concepts to describe social interactions, their strategical aspects, and outcomes. Among the payoff matrix quantifying the result of a social interaction, the interaction conditions have been varied, such as the number of repeated interactions, the number of interaction partners, the possibility to punish defective behavior etc. While an extension to spatial interactions has been considered early on such as in the "game of life", recent studies have focussed on effects of the structure of social interaction networks. However, the possibility of individuals to move and, thereby, evade areas with a high level of defection, and to seek areas with a high level of cooperation, has not been fully explored so far. This contribution presents a model combining game theoretical interactions with success-driven motion in space, and studies the consequences that this may have for the degree of cooperation and the spatio-temporal dynamics in the population. It is demonstrated that the combination of game theoretical interactions with motion gives rise to many self-organized behavioral patterns on an aggregate level, which can explain a variety of empirically observed social behaviors

Onset of Superfluidity in 4He Films Adsorbed on Disordered Substrates

We have studied 4He films adsorbed in two porous glasses, aerogel and Vycor, using high precision torsional oscillator and DC calorimetry techniques. Our investigation focused on the onset of superfluidity at low temperatures as the 4He coverage is increased. Torsional oscillator measurements of the 4He-aerogel system were used to determine the superfluid density of films with transition temperatures as low as 20 mK. Heat capacity measurements of the 4He-Vycor system probed the excitation spectrum of both non-superfluid and superfluid films for temperatures down to 10 mK. Both sets of measurements suggest that the critical coverage for the onset of superfluidity corresponds to a mobility edge in the chemical potential, so that the onset transition is the bosonic analog of a superconductor-insulator transition. The superfluid density measurements, however, are not in agreement with the scaling theory of an onset transition from a gapless, Bose glass phase to a superfluid. The heat capacity measurements show that the non-superfluid phase is better characterized as an insulator with a gap.Comment: 15 pages (RevTex), 21 figures (postscript

A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata

Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat

Risk profiles and one-year outcomes of patients with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation in India: Insights from the GARFIELD-AF Registry.

BACKGROUND: The Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF) is an ongoing prospective noninterventional registry, which is providing important information on the baseline characteristics, treatment patterns, and 1-year outcomes in patients with newly diagnosed non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF). This report describes data from Indian patients recruited in this registry. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 52,014 patients with newly diagnosed AF were enrolled globally; of these, 1388 patients were recruited from 26 sites within India (2012-2016). In India, the mean age was 65.8 years at diagnosis of NVAF. Hypertension was the most prevalent risk factor for AF, present in 68.5% of patients from India and in 76.3% of patients globally (P < 0.001). Diabetes and coronary artery disease (CAD) were prevalent in 36.2% and 28.1% of patients as compared with global prevalence of 22.2% and 21.6%, respectively (P < 0.001 for both). Antiplatelet therapy was the most common antithrombotic treatment in India. With increasing stroke risk, however, patients were more likely to receive oral anticoagulant therapy [mainly vitamin K antagonist (VKA)], but average international normalized ratio (INR) was lower among Indian patients [median INR value 1.6 (interquartile range {IQR}: 1.3-2.3) versus 2.3 (IQR 1.8-2.8) (P < 0.001)]. Compared with other countries, patients from India had markedly higher rates of all-cause mortality [7.68 per 100 person-years (95% confidence interval 6.32-9.35) vs 4.34 (4.16-4.53), P < 0.0001], while rates of stroke/systemic embolism and major bleeding were lower after 1 year of follow-up. CONCLUSION: Compared to previously published registries from India, the GARFIELD-AF registry describes clinical profiles and outcomes in Indian patients with AF of a different etiology. The registry data show that compared to the rest of the world, Indian AF patients are younger in age and have more diabetes and CAD. Patients with a higher stroke risk are more likely to receive anticoagulation therapy with VKA but are underdosed compared with the global average in the GARFIELD-AF. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION-URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01090362

Spatial Games with Adaptive Tit-for-Tats

. This paper presents an adaptive tit-for-tat strategy and a study of its behavior in spatial IPD games. The adaptive tit-for-tat strategy is shown elsewhere to demonstrate high performance in IPD tournaments or individual IPD games with other types of strategies, and obtains higher scores than the pure tit-for-tat strategy. In spatial IPD games, the strategy exhibits stability and resistance to perturbations, and those properties are more pronounced in variations of the spatial game model that induce some degree of &quot;noise&quot; : probabilistic winning, spatial irregularity and continuous time. The adaptive titfor -tat strategy is also compared to pure tit-for-tat and found to be more stable and predominant in perturbed environments. 1 Introduction A major research theme in theoretical biology and evolutionary computation is the emergence and evolution of cooperative behavior between selfish agents. The cooperation problem states that each agent has a strong personal incentive to..

Emergence of Structure and Stability in the Prisoner’s Dilemma on Networks

Abstract. We study a population of individuals playing the prisoner&apos;s dilemma game. Individual strategies are invariable but the network of relationships between players is allowed to change over time following simple rules based on the players &apos; degree of satisfaction. In the long run, cooperators tend to cluster together in order to maintain a high average payo and to protect themselves from exploiting defectors. We investi-gated both synchronous and asynchronous network dynamics, observing that asynchronous update leads to more stable states, and is more tol-erant to various kinds of perturbations in the system.