Promoting the concept of competency maps and interprofessional assessments linked to e-portfolios to enhance the student learning experience in preparation for work based learning, employability and life long learning.

Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) is a collaborative Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) comprising five Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with proven reputations for excellence in learning and teaching in Health and Social Care (H&SC): the University of Bradford, the University of Huddersfield, the University of Leeds (lead site); Leeds Metropolitan University, and York St John University. There are 16 professions across the partnership from Audiology to Social Work, and a wide range of partners including NHS Yorkshire and the Humber and commercial partners who are working towards a framework of interprofessional assessment of common competences in the H&SC professions. The focus of this paper is the development of the common competency maps for communication, teamwork, and ethical practice along with a set of standardised tools to assess these across the sixteen professional groups. The aim of the ALPS CETL is to ensure that students graduating from courses in H&SC are fully equipped to perform confidently and competently at the start of their professional careers. Fundamental to the care of service users within modern Health and Social Care are key skills commonly utilised by the range of professionals involved in ALPS. Key skills and learning outcomes vary across the 16 pre-registration H&SC courses but central to the practice of all of the professional groups represented by ALPS is a high level of professional competence in communication, teamwork and ethical practice. In order to make explicit this pretext it was decided that mapping these common skills would enable students to navigate their way through the professional competencies allowing them to gain confidence and competence in practice settings. ALPS worked with a commercial partner, MyKnowledgeMap Ltd. (MKM), to facilitate this process which resulted in interactive and creative competency maps from which multiprofessional assessment tools were derived for students to validate their skills in their practice placements. ALPS has developed a shared services platform that enables these common assessment tools to be delivered onto mobile devices used by the students in their practice placements. Central to the ALPS process was the development of an e-portfolio tool to which the student could publish their completed tools and any relevent supporting documents and gain feedback from their tutor back at their University, further perpetuating the learning process and enabling the tutor to evaluate the students progress. This paper discusses how these processes championed by ALPS can be transferred and shared across professions and describes the challenges, benefits and future potential of this approach aimed at enhancing the students ability to learn and produce effective assessments in practice settings

Comparison of forest attributes derived from two terrestrial lidar systems.

Abstract Terrestrial lidar (TLS) is an emerging technology for deriving forest attributes, including conventional inventory and canopy characterizations. However, little is known about the influence of scanner specifications on derived forest parameters. We compared two TLS systems at two sites in British Columbia. Common scanning benchmarks and identical algorithms were used to obtain estimates of tree diameter, position, and canopy characteristics. Visualization of range images and point clouds showed clear differences, even though both scanners were relatively high-resolution instruments. These translated into quantifiable differences in impulse penetration, characterization of stems and crowns far from the scan location, and gap fraction. Differences between scanners in estimates of effective plant area index were greater than differences between sites. Both scanners provided a detailed digital model of forest structure, and gross structural characterizations (including crown dimensions and position) were relatively robust; but comparison of canopy density metrics may require consideration of scanner attributes

Extending the concept of the ALPS CETL competency mapping and interprofessional assessments processes to enhance student learning and employability skills beyond Health and Social Care

This paper discusses how the development of the ALPS common competency maps for communication, teamwork and ethical practice has led to the adoption of this process by other Faculties and how associated interprofessional assessment and e portfolios have been accepted by practice educators and institution

Lagrangian Floer superpotentials and crepant resolutions for toric orbifolds

We investigate the relationship between the Lagrangian Floer superpotentials for a toric orbifold and its toric crepant resolutions. More specifically, we study an open string version of the crepant resolution conjecture (CRC) which states that the Lagrangian Floer superpotential of a Gorenstein toric orbifold $\mathcal{X}$ and that of its toric crepant resolution $Y$ coincide after analytic continuation of quantum parameters and a change of variables. Relating this conjecture with the closed CRC, we find that the change of variable formula which appears in closed CRC can be explained by relations between open (orbifold) Gromov-Witten invariants. We also discover a geometric explanation (in terms of virtual counting of stable orbi-discs) for the specialization of quantum parameters to roots of unity which appears in Y. Ruan's original CRC ["The cohomology ring of crepant resolutions of orbifolds", Gromov-Witten theory of spin curves and orbifolds, 117-126, Contemp. Math., 403, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2006]. We prove the open CRC for the weighted projective spaces $\mathcal{X}=\mathbb{P}(1,\ldots,1,n)$ using an equality between open and closed orbifold Gromov-Witten invariants. Along the way, we also prove an open mirror theorem for these toric orbifolds.Comment: 48 pages, 1 figure; v2: references added and updated, final version, to appear in CM

SuperNeurons: Dynamic GPU Memory Management for Training Deep Neural Networks

Going deeper and wider in neural architectures improves the accuracy, while the limited GPU DRAM places an undesired restriction on the network design domain. Deep Learning (DL) practitioners either need change to less desired network architectures, or nontrivially dissect a network across multiGPUs. These distract DL practitioners from concentrating on their original machine learning tasks. We present SuperNeurons: a dynamic GPU memory scheduling runtime to enable the network training far beyond the GPU DRAM capacity. SuperNeurons features 3 memory optimizations, \textit{Liveness Analysis}, \textit{Unified Tensor Pool}, and \textit{Cost-Aware Recomputation}, all together they effectively reduce the network-wide peak memory usage down to the maximal memory usage among layers. We also address the performance issues in those memory saving techniques. Given the limited GPU DRAM, SuperNeurons not only provisions the necessary memory for the training, but also dynamically allocates the memory for convolution workspaces to achieve the high performance. Evaluations against Caffe, Torch, MXNet and TensorFlow have demonstrated that SuperNeurons trains at least 3.2432 deeper network than current ones with the leading performance. Particularly, SuperNeurons can train ResNet2500 that has $10^4$ basic network layers on a 12GB K40c.Comment: PPoPP '2018: 23nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programmin

Chimeric piggyBac transposases for genomic targeting in human cells.

Integrating vectors such as viruses and transposons insert transgenes semi-randomly and can potentially disrupt or deregulate genes. For these techniques to be of therapeutic value, a method for controlling the precise location of insertion is required. The piggyBac (PB) transposase is an efficient gene transfer vector active in a variety of cell types and proven to be amenable to modification. Here we present the design and validation of chimeric PB proteins fused to the Gal4 DNA binding domain with the ability to target transgenes to pre-determined sites. Upstream activating sequence (UAS) Gal4 recognition sites harbored on recipient plasmids were preferentially targeted by the chimeric Gal4-PB transposase in human cells. To analyze the ability of these PB fusion proteins to target chromosomal locations, UAS sites were randomly integrated throughout the genome using the Sleeping Beauty transposon. Both N- and C-terminal Gal4-PB fusion proteins but not native PB were capable of targeting transposition nearby these introduced sites. A genome-wide integration analysis revealed the ability of our fusion constructs to bias 24% of integrations near endogenous Gal4 recognition sequences. This work provides a powerful approach to enhance the properties of the PB system for applications such as genetic engineering and gene therapy

A discursive psychology analysis of emotional support for men with colorectal cancer

Recent research into both masculinity and health, and the provision of social support for people with cancer has focussed upon the variations that may underlie broad assumptions about masculine health behaviour. The research reported here pursues this interest in variation by addressing the discursive properties of talk about emotional support, by men with colorectal cancer - an understudied group in the social support and cancer literature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight men with colorectal cancer, and the transcripts analysed using an intensive discursive psychology approach. From this analysis two contrasting approaches to this group of men’s framing of emotional support in the context of cancer are described. First, talk about cancer was positioned as incompatible with preferred masculine identities. Second, social contact that affirms personal relationships was given value, subject to constraints arising from discourses concerning appropriate emotional expression. These results are discussed with reference to both the extant research literature on masculinity and health, and their clinical implications, particularly the advice on social support given to older male cancer patients, their families and friends

Precision surveying using very long baseline interferometry

Radio interferometry measurements were used to measure the vector baselines between large microwave radio antennas. A 1.24 km baseline in Massachusetts between the 36 meter Haystack Observatory antenna and the 18 meter Westford antenna of Lincoln Laboratory was measured with 5 mm repeatability in 12 separate experiments. Preliminary results from measurements of the 3,928 km baseline between the Haystack antenna and the 40 meter antenna at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California are presented