National staff development model for LSC staff, IAG staff and partnership staff: research report, quality development

This report outlines the findings and recommendations resulting from a national Quality Development Fund (QDF) project commissioned by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) in July 2002. The aim of the project was to produce a development and training programme aimed at information advice and guidance (IAG) staff. Outputs from the project include a staff development framework on compact disk (CD), detailing the skills and knowledge required in various work areas within the IAG initiative and correlating these with specific training and development opportunities. This report also lists eight recommendations for further improvement put forward by the project team. This report is of interest to IAG managers and coordinators in local Learning and Skills Councils (local LSCs), IAG partnerships and other IAG organisations. The absence of a prescribed IAG staff development and competence model has meant that local partnerships have been empowered to come up with their own definitions of ‘competence’ and ‘experience’ locally. This flexibility has been enhanced by the promulgation of the matrix standard and its predecessor which state that ‘staff competence and the support they are given are sufficient to deliver the service’ but intentionally does not define what competencies are required to deliver IAG. The aim of this project was to develop a comprehensive competence-based training pack for IAG delivery staff, front-line and support staff in delivery organisations, IAG coordinators/ managers and LSC staff involved in the initiative

Local information, advice and guidance for adults in England: towards a national framework

"Starting from April 1999, the Government ... intends to work on a partnership basis with local providers of [learning opportunity] information, advice and guidance (IAG) services in England to bring about significant improvements in the quality and coverage of local services... The overall aim is to ensure that a local information and advice service of reliable quality is available to adult learners and potential learners who live in every part of England... Beyond setting out the Government’s broad objectives for the development of IAG services, the purpose of this paper is to initiate a dialogue with providers and other interested parties about how those objectives can best be brought about." - Page 1. Consultation responses closed 12/02/1999

Beyond 100: The Next Century in Geodesy

This open access book contains 30 peer-reviewed papers based on presentations at the 27th General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG). The meeting was held from July 8 to 18, 2019 in Montreal, Canada, with the theme being the celebration of the centennial of the establishment of the IUGG. The centennial was also a good opportunity to look forward to the next century, as reflected in the title of this volume. The papers in this volume represent a cross-section of present activity in geodesy, and highlight the future directions in the field as we begin the second century of the IUGG. During the meeting, the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) organized one Union Symposium, 6 IAG Symposia, 7 Joint Symposia with other associations, and 20 business meetings. In addition, IAG co-sponsored 8 Union Symposia and 15 Joint Symposia. In total, 3952 participants registered, 437 of them with IAG priority. In total, there were 234 symposia and 18 Workshops with 4580 presentations, of which 469 were in IAG-associated symposia. ; This volume will publish papers based on International Association of Geodesy (IAG) -related presentations made at the International Association of Geodesy at the 27th IUGG General Assembly, Montreal, July 2019. It will include papers associated with all of the IAG and joint symposia from the meeting, which span all aspects of modern geodesy, and linkages to earth and environmental sciences. It continues the long-running IAG Symposia Series

Expression of an Androgenic Gland-Specific Insulin-Like Peptide during the Course of Prawn Sexual and Morphotypic Differentiation

The crustacean male-specific androgenic gland (AG) regulates sexual differentiation. In the prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii, silencing an AG-specific insulin-like encoding transcript (Mr-IAG) inhibited the development of male sexual characters, suggesting that Mr-IAG is a key androgenic hormone. We used recombinant pro-Mr-IAG peptide to generate antibodies that recognized the peptide in AG cells and extracts, as verified by mass spectrometry. We revealed the temporal expression pattern of Mr-IAG and studied its relevance to the timetable of sex differentiation processes in juveniles and after puberty. Mr-IAG was expressed from as early as 20 days after metamorphosis, prior to the appearance of external male sexual characters. Mr-IAG expression was lower in the less reproductively active orange-clawed males than in both the dominant blue-clawed males and the actively sneak mating small males. These results suggest a role for Mr-IAG both in the timing of male sexual differentiation and in regulating reproductive strategies

Ecosystem Benefits of Invasive Annual Grass Removal

Invasive winter annual grasses (IAGs) are altering rangeland ecosystems across millions of hectares in the western US. These winter annuals outcompete native plants for soil moisture and nutrients, leading to devastating impacts on ecosystem functions. The IAG seedbank is short-lived and often does not persist beyond 3 years. Past tools for IAG control have only provided short-term control or caused injury to the native plant community, making it difficult for researchers to assess the ecosystem benefits of IAG removal. A newer herbicide option, indaziflam, provides IAG control for three or more years. Indaziflam’s extended soil residual control and tolerance of perennial species creates the opportunity to deplete the IAG seedbank, allowing time for remnant plant communities to recover. Research has been conducted on sites across the western US where IAGs were managed using indaziflam. Long-term IAG management has led to increases in native plant cover and biomass as well as greater biodiversity within the native plant community. The shift from an IAG dominated community to a healthy native plant community has resulted in improved pollinator and wildlife habitat in these sites. By changing the management paradigm to target the IAG seedbank, land managers can achieve long-term restoration

IAG: Induction-Augmented Generation Framework for Answering Reasoning Questions

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), by incorporating external knowledge with parametric memory of language models, has become the state-of-the-art architecture for open-domain QA tasks. However, common knowledge bases are inherently constrained by limited coverage and noisy information, making retrieval-based approaches inadequate to answer implicit reasoning questions. In this paper, we propose an Induction-Augmented Generation (IAG) framework that utilizes inductive knowledge along with the retrieved documents for implicit reasoning. We leverage large language models (LLMs) for deriving such knowledge via a novel prompting method based on inductive reasoning patterns. On top of this, we implement two versions of IAG named IAG-GPT and IAG-Student, respectively. IAG-GPT directly utilizes the knowledge generated by GPT-3 for answer prediction, while IAG-Student gets rid of dependencies on GPT service at inference time by incorporating a student inductor model. The inductor is firstly trained via knowledge distillation and further optimized by back-propagating the generator feedback via differentiable beam scores. Experimental results show that IAG outperforms RAG baselines as well as ChatGPT on two Open-Domain QA tasks. Notably, our best models have won the first place in the official leaderboards of CSQA2.0 (since Nov 1, 2022) and StrategyQA (since Jan 8, 2023)

Revolutionizing Pharmaceuticals: Generative Artificial Intelligence as a bibliographic assistant

[EN]Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) has exploded into biomedical and pharmaceutical research, fundamentally transforming the way scientists approach literature review, experiment design, and reagent and antibody selection. This article explores how IAG, supported by advanced machine learning and natural language processing models, has revolutionized these processes. The IAG streamlines literature review, extracting relevant information, identifying emerging patterns and trends in the scientific literature, and generating innovative hypotheses. It also acts as an advanced search tool, allowing researchers to quickly access accurate information in an ocean of data. A prominent example of this application is BenchSci, a platform that uses the IAG to recommend reagents and antibodies based on real experimental data and scientific literature. This integration of IAG into experimental design promises to accelerate research, reduce costs, and improve the precision of experiments. Together, the IAG is presented as a catalyst for discoveries in pharmaceutical and biomedical research, offering unprecedented potential to advance the understanding and treatment of diseases, and improve decision-making in the industry

A toolkit for assessing local skills demand and supply

The toolkit has been designed to help identify local skills priorities. It helps providers and LEPs to identify skills policy priorities that respond and identify local market opportunities and to supply Information Advice and Guidance (IAG) in an accessible format

Idealizing History. A Critical Assessment of Kant’s Historiography in Idea for a Universal History

This essay analyzes Kant’s conception of historiography in Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (henceforth; IAG). In IAG, Kant presents history as the necessary progression of the human race towards the full development of its rational- and moral capacities, in accordance with a hidden plan of nature, which can only be realized after the establishment of a universal cosmopolitan condition. However, because Kant is unclear how moral and historical progress is possible, it remains unclear how to interpret his arguments and, consequently, how to write a history in line with IAG. In this essay, I attempt to answer this question by interpreting IAG in line with another Kantian text, Was ist Aufklärung? This analysis will not only show Kant’s arguments in IAG to be inconsistent, but moreover that his proposal for a universal history is of unconvincing utility