Peer review of teamwork for encouraging equal commitment to the group effort

An important graduate attribute is the ability to work in teams, so many university courses incorporate this as part of the learning experience. However, it is inevitable that in some teams there will be members who do not contribute as much to the overall effort as others, leading to frustration in those members who carry the majority of the burden. When there are students enrolled in distance-education mode, this can be exacerbated because many of the teams cannot meet face-to-face, so it can be difficult to exert sufficient influence to force problematic individuals to amend their behaviour. In an effort to mitigate against this problem, self and peer assessment was used for both team assignments in a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) course and the results of the peer assessment were used to scale the team mark for the corresponding assignment to obtain individual grades. After submitting their final assignment, a survey instrument was used to investigate the success of this process. The students overwhelmingly supported the idea of distributing marks based on the value of the individual’s contribution because in many teams it had the desired effect of motivating underperforming members to involve themselves more in the second assignment. There was some dissatisfaction about the process used to distribute marks, which the authors will attempt to address by providing better scaffolding in subsequent uses of the software tool. Regardless of these difficulties, we found that a transparent mechanism for distributing team marks to individual grades is beneficial for encouraging equal commitment to the team effort by all team members

Investigating invisible writing practices in the engineering curriculum using practice architectures

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of engineering academics’ perceptions of writing practices in the curriculum, and the extent to which these practices are visible to their students and to the academics. This paper draws on research from an ongoing study into the invisibility of writing practices in the engineering curriculum using a practice architectures lens. The paper uses examples from the sites of practice of two participants in the study to argue that prevailing practices in engineering education constrain more than enable the development and practice of writing in the engineering curriculu

Physical inactivity is a strong risk factor for stroke in the oldest old: Findings from a multi-ethnic population (the Northern Manhattan Study)

Background The fastest growing segment of the population is those age ≥80 who have the highest stroke incidence. Risk factor management is complicated by polypharmacy-related adverse events. Aims To characterize the impact of physical inactivity for stroke by age in a multi-ethnic prospective cohort study (NOMAS, n = 3298). Methods Leisure time physical activity was assessed by a validated questionnaire and our primary exposure was physical inactivity (PI). Participants were followed annually for incident stroke. We fit Cox-proportional hazard models to calculate hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals (HR 95% CI) for the association of PI and other risk factors with risk of stroke including two-way interaction terms between the primary exposures and age (<80 vs. ≥80). Results The mean age was 69 ± 10.3 years and 562 (17%) were ≥80 at enrolment. PI was common in the cohort (40.8%). Over a median of 14 years, we found 391 strokes. We found a significant interaction of age ≥80 on the risk of stroke with PI (p = 0.03). In stratified models, PI versus any activity (adjusted HR 1.60, 95%CI 1.05–2.42) was associated with an increased risk of stroke among those ≥80. Conclusion Physical inactivity is a treatable risk factor for stroke among those older than age 80. Improving activity may reduce the risk of stroke in this segment of the population

Reexamination of the Direct Electrochemical Reduction of S ‐Nitrosothiols

We report here on the electrochemical reduction of S ‐nitrosothiol species (RSNO). Nitric oxide (NO) is the reported common product from electrochemically reduced RSNOs at physiological pH. However, studies here at pH 7.4 show that during the reduction of RSNOs (−0.6 V to −0.9 V, vs. Ag/AgCl), no significant amount of NO is detected. Gas analysis suggests RSNO are reduced to nitrous oxide (N 2 O) at pH 7.4 and can only be converted back to NO at more oxidizing voltages. Interestingly, at pH 4.0, a direct one‐electron reduction of RSNOs appears to occur and generates significant amounts of NO from RSNO species.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97455/1/elan_201200445_sm_miscellaneous_information.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97455/2/914_ftp.pd

Design Development of a Combined Deployment and Pointing System for the International Space Station Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer Telescope

This paper describes the design of a unique suite of mechanisms which make up the Deployment and Pointing System (DAPS) for the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER/SEXTANT) instrument, an X-Ray telescope, which will be mounted on the International Space Station (ISS). The DAPS system uses 4 stepper motor actuators to deploy the telescope box, latch it in the deployed position, and allow it to track sky targets. The DAPS gimbal architecture provides full-hemisphere coverage, and is fully re-stowable. The compact design of the mechanism allowed the majority of total instrument volume to be used for science. Override features allow DAPS to be stowed by ISS robotics

Ocean chlorofluorocarbon and heat uptake during the twentieth century in the CCSM3

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 19 (2006): 2366–2381, doi:10.1175/JCLI3758.1.An ensemble of nine simulations for the climate of the twentieth century has been run using the Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3). Three of these runs also simulate the uptake of chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11) into the ocean using the protocol from the Ocean Carbon Model Intercomparison Project (OCMIP). Comparison with ocean observations taken between 1980 and 2000 shows that the global CFC-11 uptake is simulated very well. However, there are regional biases, and these are used to identify where too much deep-water formation is occurring in the CCSM3. The differences between the three runs simulating CFC-11 uptake are also briefly documented. The variability in ocean heat content in the 1870 control runs is shown to be only a little smaller than estimates using ocean observations. The ocean heat uptake between 1957 and 1996 in the ensemble is compared to the recent observational estimates of the secular trend. The trend in ocean heat uptake is considerably larger than the natural variability in the 1870 control runs. The heat uptake down to 300 m between 1957 and 1996 varies by a factor of 2 across the ensemble. Some possible reasons for this large spread are discussed. There is much less spread in the heat uptake down to 3 km. On average, the CCSM3 twentieth-century ensemble runs take up 25% more heat than the recent estimate from ocean observations. Possible explanations for this are that the model heat uptake is calculated over the whole ocean, and not just in the regions where there are many observations and that there is no parameterization of the indirect effects of aerosols in CCSM3.Support provided by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the Earth Simulator Center of the Japan Agency for Marine- Earth Science and Technology

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead