The inclusive teacher educator: spaces for civic engagement

This paper is concerned with the teacher educator who is aspiring to be inclusive. It considers the obligations which arise within Higher Education Institutions and the extent to which these contribute to a loss of civic engagement and a lack of capacity to pursue inclusion, social justice and equity. The paper argues that this need not be the case and a reorientation for teacher educators is offered which affords teacher educators opportunities to, in Bourdieu’s (1998) terms, ‘play seriously’. This reorientation is in relation to three significant spaces – the ontological, the aesthetic and the epiphanic – and it is argued that operating within these spaces could enable new practices of inclusive teacher education to emerge

PhenoFam-gene set enrichment analysis through protein structural information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the current technological advances in high-throughput biology, the necessity to develop tools that help to analyse the massive amount of data being generated is evident. A powerful method of inspecting large-scale data sets is gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and investigation of protein structural features can guide determining the function of individual genes. However, a convenient tool that combines these two features to aid in high-throughput data analysis has not been developed yet. In order to fill this niche, we developed the user-friendly, web-based application, PhenoFam.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>PhenoFam performs gene set enrichment analysis by employing structural and functional information on families of protein domains as annotation terms. Our tool is designed to analyse complete sets of results from quantitative high-throughput studies (gene expression microarrays, functional RNAi screens, <it>etc</it>.) without prior pre-filtering or hits-selection steps. PhenoFam utilizes Ensembl databases to link a list of user-provided identifiers with protein features from the InterPro database, and assesses whether results associated with individual domains differ significantly from the overall population. To demonstrate the utility of PhenoFam we analysed a genome-wide RNA interference screen and discovered a novel function of plexins containing the cytoplasmic RasGAP domain. Furthermore, a PhenoFam analysis of breast cancer gene expression profiles revealed a link between breast carcinoma and altered expression of PX domain containing proteins.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>PhenoFam provides a user-friendly, easily accessible web interface to perform GSEA based on high-throughput data sets and structural-functional protein information, and therefore aids in functional annotation of genes.</p

Evolución del conductismo

New data on conditioning processes favor an eclecticism between the traditional nativist and environmentalist extremes in the analysis of behaviour. It is suggested that the theory of behaviour based on conditioning processes can be reconciled with the new data, but only by revising certain tacit behaviourist assumptions about the parameters of the conditioning processes, particularly instrumental or operant conditioning. Operant conditioning specifies how stimuli, responses, reinforcers, and drive states are woven into relationships that change and sustain an organism�s behaviour. The new data undermine traditional assumptions about each of those elements rather than about the form of their interrelationship. Because some of the assumptions fall under the heading of motivation, it is concluded that behaviourism appears to merge with the main lines of ethology as a more complete science of behaviour than either one alone has been.Los nuevos datos sobre los procesos de condicionamiento hablan a favor de una posición ecléctica entre las dos posturas extremas tradicionales en el análisis de la conducta: el innatismo y el ambientalismo. Se sugiere aquí que la teoría de la conducta basada en los procesos de condicionamiento puede reconciliarse con estos nuevos datos, pero sólo si se revisan ciertas suposiciones conductistas tácitas sobre parámetros de los procesos de condicionamiento y, sobre todo, del condicionamiento instrumental u operante. El condicionamiento operante especifica cómo se modifica y mantiene la conducta de un organismo en función de las relaciones que se establecen entre los estímulos, las respuestas, los reforzadores y los estados de impulso. Los nuevos datos minan los fundamentos en que se han basado los supuestos sobre estos elementos por separado, más que los que se refieren a los tipos de relaciones que se establecen entre ellos. Cabría clasificar a algunos de estos supuestos bajo el epígrafe de la motivación, por lo que se concluye que, por fin, se están reflejando en el conductivismo las sutilezas de la motivación, después de varias décadas en que no ha ocurrido así. Tras este refinamiento el coductivismo parece fundirse con las principales corrientes de la etología configurando una ciencia de la conducta más completa de lo que nunca una ciencia aislada ha podido ser