Fattening Lambs on Corn, Milo, Hegari, Wheat, and Oats, with Cottonseed Cake and Alfalfa

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Empirical evidence, evaluation criteria and challenges for the effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality tools for training operators of car service maintenance

The debate on effectiveness of virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) tools for training professionals and operators is long-running with prominent contributions arguing that there are several shortfalls of experimental approaches and assessment criteria reported within the literature. In the automotive context, although car-makers were pioneers in the use of VR/MR tools for supporting designers, researchers started only recently to explore the effectiveness of VR/MR systems as mean for driving external operators of service centres to acquire the procedural skills necessary for car maintenance processes. In fact, from 463 journal articles on VR/MR tools for training published in the last thirty years, we identified only eight articles in which researchers experimentally tested the effectiveness of VR/MR tools for training service operators’ skills. To survey the current findings and the deficiencies of these eight studies, we use two main drivers: i) a well-known framework of organizational training programmes, and ii) a list of eleven evaluation criteria widely applied by researchers of different fields for assessing the effectiveness of training carried out with VR/MR systems. The analysis that we present allows us to: i) identify a trend among automotive researchers of focusing their analysis only on car service operators’ performance in terms of time and errors, by leaving unexplored important pre- and post-training aspects that could affect the effectiveness of VR/MR tools to deliver training contents – e.g., people skills, previous experience, cibersickness, presence and engagement, usability and satisfaction and ii) outline the future challenges for designing and assessing VR/MR tools for training car service operators

Harvest: an open-source tool for the validation and improvement of peptide identification metrics and fragmentation exploration

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Protein identification using mass spectrometry is an important tool in many areas of the life sciences, and in proteomics research in particular. Increasing the number of proteins correctly identified is dependent on the ability to include new knowledge about the mass spectrometry fragmentation process, into computational algorithms designed to separate true matches of peptides to unidentified mass spectra from spurious matches. This discrimination is achieved by computing a function of the various features of the potential match between the observed and theoretical spectra to give a numerical approximation of their similarity. It is these underlying "metrics" that determine the ability of a protein identification package to maximise correct identifications while limiting false discovery rates. There is currently no software available specifically for the simple implementation and analysis of arbitrary novel metrics for peptide matching and for the exploration of fragmentation patterns for a given dataset.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present Harvest: an open source software tool for analysing fragmentation patterns and assessing the power of a new piece of information about the MS/MS fragmentation process to more clearly differentiate between correct and random peptide assignments. We demonstrate this functionality using data metrics derived from the properties of individual datasets in a peptide identification context. Using Harvest, we demonstrate how the development of such metrics may improve correct peptide assignment confidence in the context of a high-throughput proteomics experiment and characterise properties of peptide fragmentation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Harvest provides a simple framework in C++ for analysing and prototyping metrics for peptide matching, the core of the protein identification problem. It is not a protein identification package and answers a different research question to packages such as Sequest, Mascot, X!Tandem, and other protein identification packages. It does not aim to maximise the number of assigned peptides from a set of unknown spectra, but instead provides a method by which researchers can explore fragmentation properties and assess the power of novel metrics for peptide matching in the context of a given experiment. Metrics developed using Harvest may then become candidates for later integration into protein identification packages.</p

Gamification as transformative assessment in Higher Education

Gamification in education is still a very new concept in South Africa. Being a 21st-century invention, it has already established itself in the world within the environs of the corporate market, marketing, training and the social world. This article will first discuss gamification (and all its other designations) and its applications in general; thereafter, the focus will be on the application of gamification within the environment of education, and more specifically with an emphasis on assessment. The burning question for South Africa is whether gamification can enhance a module or course on the level of higher education so much that an educational institution cannot do without it anymore, knowing that we are working with students belonging to the ‘Digital Wisdom generation’. This article would like to open the way for the implementation of gamification as a transformative online assessment tool in higher educationChristian Spirituality, Church History and Missiolog

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton