Supervision and Scholarly Writing: Writing to Learn - Learning to Write

This paper describes an action research project on postgraduate students’ scholarly writing in which I employed reflective approaches to examine and enhance my postgraduate supervisory practice. My reflections on three distinct cycles of supervision illustrate a shift in thinking about scholarly writing and an evolving understanding of how to support postgraduate students’ writing. These understandings provide the foundation for a future-oriented fourth cycle of supervisory practice, which is characterised by three principles, namely the empowerment of students as writers, the technological context of contemporary writing, and ethical issues in writing

Doppler coherence imaging and tomography of flows in tokamak plasmas

This article describes the results of spatial heterodyne Doppler "coherence imaging" of carbon ion flows in the divertor region of the DIII-D tokamak. Spatially encoded interferometric projections of doubly ionized carbon emission at 465 nm have been demodulated and tomographically inverted to obtain the spatial distribution of the carbon ion parallel flow and emissivity. The operating principles of the new instruments are described, and the link between measured properties and line integrals of the flow field are established. An iterative simultaneous arithmetic reconstruction procedure is applied to invert the interferometric phase shift projections, and the reconstructed parallel flow field amplitudes are found to be in reasonable agreement with UEDGE modeling

The cancer translational research informatics platform

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Despite the pressing need for the creation of applications that facilitate the aggregation of clinical and molecular data, most current applications are proprietary and lack the necessary compliance with standards that would allow for cross-institutional data exchange. In line with its mission of accelerating research discoveries and improving patient outcomes by linking networks of researchers, physicians, and patients focused on cancer research, caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™) has sponsored the creation of the caTRIP (Cancer Translational Research Informatics Platform) tool, with the purpose of aggregating clinical and molecular data in a repository that is user-friendly, easily accessible, as well as compliant with regulatory requirements of privacy and security.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>caTRIP has been developed as an N-tier architecture, with three primary tiers: domain services, the distributed query engine, and the graphical user interface, primarily making use of the caGrid infrastructure to ensure compatibility with other tools currently developed by caBIG. The application interface was designed so that users can construct queries using either the Simple Interface via drop-down menus or the Advanced Interface for more sophisticated searching strategies to using drag-and-drop. Furthermore, the application addresses the security concerns of authentication, authorization, and delegation, as well as an automated honest broker service for deidentifying data.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Currently being deployed at Duke University and a few other centers, we expect that caTRIP will make a significant contribution to further the development of translational research through the facilitation of its data exchange and storage processes.</p

Easing into the Academy: Using Technology to Foster Cross-Institutional Critical Friendships

This article addresses the ways in which early career teacher educators can support each other as they enter the academic community. By utilizing technology as an instrument to engage in a cross-country critical friendship, the authors were able to engage in a dialogue that grew out of mutual interests and concerns. Through critical reflection, they were able to address the question: How can we, two early-career teacher educators, push ourselves and one another to more critically examine our teaching practices? In doing so, each “new educator” grew more confident in claiming one\u27s voice as a sustainable critical friendship emerged

Preparation for propagation and absorption experiments in MTX

Preparatory calculations of microwave transmission through the MTX access duct, propagation of the waves through the plasma and the resulting power deposition profile on a calorimeter located on the tokamak inside wall have been performed. The microwave transmission calculations include the relative phase slippage of waveguide modes in the duct to determine the spatial structure of the wavefront at the duct exist. Ray-tracing calculations show substantial spreading of the beam in the poloidal direction at densities above 1.5 /times/ 10/sup 20/ m/sup /minus/3/, well within the range of the experiments. Initial experiments with low or high toroidal field (cyclotron resonance outside the plasma) will investigate both diffraction and refraction effects, without absorption. Estimates of the fractional absorption of the beam in the initial experiments with the cyclotron resonance at the plasma axis have also been made. 4 refs., 3 figs

Edge localized mode control with an edge resonant magnetic perturbation

A low amplitude (δbr∕BT=1 part in 5000) edge resonantmagnetic field perturbation with toroidalmode number n=3 and poloidal mode numbers between 8 and 15 has been used to suppress most large type I edge localized modes(ELMs) without degrading core plasma confinement. ELMs have been suppressed for periods of up to 8.6 energy confinement times when the edge safety factor q95 is between 3.5 and 4. The large ELMs are replaced by packets of events (possibly type II ELMs) with small amplitude, narrow radial extent, and a higher level of magnetic field and density fluctuations, creating a duty cycle with long “active” intervals of high transport and short “quiet” intervals of low transport. The increased transport associated with these events is less impulsive and slows the recovery of the pedestal profiles to the values reached just before the large ELMs without the n=3 perturbation. Changing the toroidal phase of the perturbation by 60° with respect to the best ELM suppression case reduces the ELM amplitude and frequency by factors of 2–3 in the divertor, produces a more stochastic response in the H-mode pedestal profiles, and displays similar increases in small scale events, although significant numbers of large ELMs survive. In contrast to the best ELM suppression case where the type I ELMs are also suppressed on the outboard midplane, the midplane recycling increases until individual ELMs are no longer discernable. The ELM response depends on the toroidal phase of the applied perturbation because intrinsic error fields make the target plasma nonaxisymmetric, and suggests that at least some of the variation in ELM behavior in a single device or among different devices is due to differences in the intrinsic error fields in these devices. These results indicate that ELMs can be suppressed by small edge resonantmagnetic field perturbations. Extrapolation to next-step burning plasma devices will require extending the regime of operation to lower collisionality and understanding the physical mechanism responsible for the ELM suppression.This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant Nos. DE-FC02-04ER54698, DE-FG02- 04ER54758, DE-FG03-01ER54615, W-7405-ENG-48, DEFG03-96ER54373, DE-FG02-89ER53297, DE-AC05- 00OR22725, and DE-AC04-94AL85000

Comprehensive Measurements and Modeling of SOL, and Core Plasma Fueling and Carbon Sources in DIII-D

Plasma boundary modeling of low density, low confinement plasmas in DIII-D has been benchmarked against a comprehensive set of measurements and indicates that recycling of deuterium ions at the divertor targets, and chemical sputtering at the divertor target plates and walls, can explain the poloidal core fueling profile and core carbon density. Key measurements included the 2-D intensity distribution of deuterium neutral and low-charge state carbon emission in the divertor and around the midplane of the high-field scrape-off layer (SOL). Chemical sputtering plays an important role in producing carbon at the divertor targets and walls, and was found to be a prerequisite to reproduce the measured emission distribution