BREAKFAST AND CLASSROOM BEHAVIOUR: AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY OF GRADE 3 STUDENTS IN A BILINGUAL DEMONSTRATION SCHOOL, IN THAILAND

This study investigated what students consumed for breakfast and their behaviours within the classroom. It attempted to determine whether there is a relationship with inappropriate, off-task or non-compliant behaviour of students and what they had consumed that morning. Recent literature suggests there is. This was observed using a time sampling, coding system. Breakfast Consumption was recorded by a self-completion questionnaire, using the Australian guide to healthy eating (AGHE) as a dietary guide. Correlational analysis was used to determine the relationship between breakfasts and behaviour, and ANOVA (analysis of variance) was used to determine if any significant relationships existed between each behaviour type and diet. The subjects were 23 Grade 3 students (19 boys, 4 girls) of a university affiliated bilingual school in Thailand. The coding of behaviour was done by trained professional observers using Revised Edition of School Observational Coding System (REDSOCS). The modified dietary recall questionnaire was administered at school over a period of 2 weeks. Upon reanalysis of the data there appeared to be a link between an unhealthy diet and off-task and non-compliant behaviours. However these data were not statistically significant. This study suggests that what is consumed in the morning may not have an important affect on students’ classroom behaviour. It is also possible that culture and socio economic factors may have obscured any effects. It is recommended that further research be done to see if these present findings would hold for more varied populations and other types of Thai schools

Conformational photoswitching of a synthetic peptide foldamer bound within a phospholipid bilayer

The dynamic properties of foldamers, synthetic molecules that mimic folded biomolecules, have mainly been explored in free solution.We report on the design, synthesis, and conformational behavior of photoresponsive foldamers bound in a phospholipid bilayer akin to a biological membrane phase. These molecules contain a chromophore, which can be switched between two configurations by different wavelengths of light, attached to a helical synthetic peptide that both promotes membrane insertion and communicates conformational change along its length. Light-induced structural changes in the chromophore are translated into global conformational changes, which are detected by monitoring the solid-state 19 F nuclear magnetic resonance signals of a remote fluorine-containing residue located 1 to 2 nanometers away. The behavior of the foldamers in the membrane phase is similar to that of analogous compounds in organic solvents

Assessing the EU’s ‘new approach’ to enlargement policy: The case of rule of law reform in Serbia

Rule of law is an important European Union (EU) principle. The EU aspires to promote it externally, particularly in the context of EU enlargement. In new Member States such as Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, problems with rule of law ‘backsliding’ indicate that the rule of law was poorly embedded during previous accessions. Consequently, the EU’s ‘new approach’ has made rule of law reform central to the accession processes of Candidate States in the Western Balkans. Despite this policy shift, it remains unclear whether this new approach supports the construction of both formal rule of law institutions and corresponding norms and practices, or whether formal compliance is decoupled from a change in practice. This thesis analyses the EU’s new approach and its capacity to enact change by focusing on rule of law reforms in the Candidate State of Serbia. This thesis addresses two research questions: What are the key logics, imaginaries and interactions driving the delivery of rule of law reforms in Serbia? How effective is the EU’s approach for ensuring the institutionalisation of the rule of law in practice? To answer these questions, this thesis adopts a Cultural Political Economy approach. It analyses how key actors interact, understand, interpret and construct rule of law reforms. This analysis demonstrates the multiple understandings of rule of law that emerge and draws attention to the different political visions these understandings represent. The central argument of the thesis is that while the EU’s new approach increasingly draws actors’ attention to rule of law issues, it remains driven by a strategic logic. This reinforces the reproduction as opposed to contextualisation of its rule of law criteria, generates contestation and reinforces existing power relations. This leads to the partial institutionalisation of the rule of law in practice, while simultaneously creating contestation and resistance to reforms

Rural "exchange": an approach to multi-use and inter-disciplinary creation of space in a rural community environment

With the urbanization of Modern society, much emphasis has been placed on communities living in or around cities, while the communities living in the rural environment are left, on the whole, ignored. The polar development and historic culture of colonial city development has left the most fragile sect of developing nations, most without the development drivers so badly needed. The rapidly growing divide between the urban and the rural environment, is evident with the functions and forms within the buildings in such areas. The common trait of transplanting an urban system of function and building into a rural environment needs to be addressed. Using a building as a catalyst of development and place-making in a certain area, to a certain community, is explored in this thesis. While the building acts as a agent for, and with the community, it is also a connection to the urbanization environment. The space ‘in-between’ is explored, bring the rural and urban in connection to each other , both in form, function and connections. The building forms an envelope, in-which program is placed, yet the connections of those functions create ‘exchanges’, in the sense of physical space, rural-urban connections and personality inter-changes, all which reduces overall size of form, and creating a truly diverse and multi-use platform on which the community can connec

The dependence of radiative forcing and feedback on evolving patterns of surface temperature change in climate models

Experiments with CO2 instantaneously quadrupled and then held constant are used to show that the relationship between the global-mean net heat input to the climate system and the global-mean surface-air-temperature change is nonlinear in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs). The nonlinearity is shown to arise from a change in strength of climate feedbacks driven by an evolving pattern of surface warming. In 23 out of the 27 AOGCMs examined the climate feedback parameter becomes significantly (95% confidence) less negative – i.e. the effective climate sensitivity increases – as time passes. Cloud feedback parameters show the largest changes. In the AOGCM-mean approximately 60% of the change in feedback parameter comes from the topics (30N-30S). An important region involved is the tropical Pacific where the surface warming intensifies in the east after a few decades. The dependence of climate feedbacks on an evolving pattern of surface warming is confirmed using the HadGEM2 and HadCM3 atmosphere GCMs (AGCMs). With monthly evolving sea-surface-temperatures and sea-ice prescribed from its AOGCM counterpart each AGCM reproduces the time-varying feedbacks, but when a fixed pattern of warming is prescribed the radiative response is linear with global temperature change or nearly so. We also demonstrate that the regression and fixed-SST methods for evaluating effective radiative forcing are in principle different, because rapid SST adjustment when CO2 is changed can produce a pattern of surface temperature change with zero global mean but non-zero change in net radiation at the top of the atmosphere (~ -0.5 Wm-2 in HadCM3)

Learning to reason over visual objects

A core component of human intelligence is the ability to identify abstract patterns inherent in complex, high-dimensional perceptual data, as exemplified by visual reasoning tasks such as Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Motivated by the goal of designing AI systems with this capacity, recent work has focused on evaluating whether neural networks can learn to solve RPM-like problems. Previous work has generally found that strong performance on these problems requires the incorporation of inductive biases that are specific to the RPM problem format, raising the question of whether such models might be more broadly useful. Here, we investigated the extent to which a general-purpose mechanism for processing visual scenes in terms of objects might help promote abstract visual reasoning. We found that a simple model, consisting only of an object-centric encoder and a transformer reasoning module, achieved state-of-the-art results on both of two challenging RPM-like benchmarks (PGM and I-RAVEN), as well as a novel benchmark with greater visual complexity (CLEVR-Matrices). These results suggest that an inductive bias for object-centric processing may be a key component of abstract visual reasoning, obviating the need for problem-specific inductive biases.Comment: ICLR 202

Ministry emphasises quality of medical training

One proposed mechanism of tumour escape from immune surveillance is tumour up-regulation of the cell surface ligan FasL, whichcan lead to apoptosis of Fas receptor (Fas) positive lymphocytes. Based upon this `coun-- rattack', we have developed a mathematical model inelAin tumour cell--lymphocyte ineA-- ction cell surface expression of Fas/FasL,an d their secreted soluble forms. The model predicts that (a) the production of soluble forms of Fas an d FasL will lead to thedown regulation of theimmun respon --fi (b) matrix metallopr otein se (MMP)ink'PTfiA ion should lead toin'x# sed membran FasLan result in a higher rate of Fas-mediated apoptosis for lymphocytesthan for tumour cells. Recen studieson can--# patient len support for theseprediction s. TheclinP-- l implication are two-fold. Firstly, the use of broad spectrum MMPin'#x tors asan`fi-- n`fi--'` cagenP may be compromised by their adverse e#ecton tumour FasL up-regulation Also, Fas/FasL insL action may havean impact on the outcome ofnA--x`#B onA in immunBB`fiAw`P-- ic trialssin` the finA common pathway of all these approaches is thetran - duction of deathsign-- swithin the tumour cell