Studying ICT supported pedagogical practices

During the past decade there has been an exponential growth in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) and this has made pervasive impacts both on the society and on our daily lives. It is thus not surprising to find increasing interest, attention and investment put into the use of ICT in education all around the world. In addition to efforts to make use of ICT to improve learning, the emergence of the knowledge economy has also brought about in recent years a much greater emphasis on education and a number of masterplans in ICT in education has been produced in many countries. Such masterplans detailed not only strategies for implementation but more importantly embedded the plans within a broader framework of education reform that aimed to develop students’ capacities for self-learning, problem-solving, information seeking and analysis, critical thinking and the ability to communicate, collaborate and learn via the internet, abilities that figured much less importantly in the school curricula before. In this context, a new term, “emerging pedagogical practice”, was used in SITES (the Second International Information Technology in Education Study, conducted under the auspices of the IEA) (Pelgrum, 1999) to highlight the changing pedagogical goals and practices that has resulted from the use of ICT in education, as opposed to those uses that just aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of “traditionally important pedagogical practices”. However, the concept of “emerging pedagogical practice” as depicted in the SITES Module 1 (M1) report is still rather vague. When schools have access to computers and the Internet to support teaching and learning, how would teachers and students make use of them? What impact has ICT made on classroom practices? What changes, if any, has ICT made on the roles of teachers and students and the interactions between them? Has the introduction of ICT in schools brought about the desired education reforms envisaged in the ICT in education masterplans or are these wishful optimisms? Are there more effective models of ICT implementation in schools, and if so what are their characteristics? In conjunction with the SITES M1 Hong Kong study, we have conducted a study of good practices in the use of ICT for teaching and learning using the case studies approach. The main goal of this extension study was to explore the above questions in the context of good practices as commonly recognized by members of the education community, and to develop ways of disseminating such good practices. This paper describes the conceptual framework and methodology used in this study and reports briefly on some key findings from the study. The research methodology used in this Study is based on a model of pedagogical practice that is couched within a broad curriculum framework where the pedagogical practice is the implemented curriculum. There are two parts to the research. The first part is to investigate and to build models of pedagogical practices involving use of ICT. Here the assumption (substantiated by observations) is that the way ICT is incorporated into classrooms is very much dictated by the teachers’ general beliefs and approaches to education. The second component of the methodology deals with the models (strategies) of educational change used in different schools in introducing ICT across the curriculum and to explore if particular models of pedagogical practice is linked with specific school implementation strategies.published_or_final_versio

Enhancement and suppression of tunneling by controlling symmetries of a potential barrier

We present a class of 2D systems which shows a counterintuitive property that contradicts a semi classical intuition: A 2D quantum particle "prefers" tunneling through a barrier rather than traveling above it. Viewing the one particle 2D system as the system of two 1D particles, it is demonstrated that this effect occurs due to a specific symmetry of the barrier that forces excitations of the interparticle degree of freedom that, in turn, leads to the appearance of an effective potential barrier even though there is no "real" barrier. This phenomenon cannot exist in 1D.Comment: 10 pages and 7 figure

Fast and Accurate Camera Covariance Computation for Large 3D Reconstruction

Estimating uncertainty of camera parameters computed in Structure from Motion (SfM) is an important tool for evaluating the quality of the reconstruction and guiding the reconstruction process. Yet, the quality of the estimated parameters of large reconstructions has been rarely evaluated due to the computational challenges. We present a new algorithm which employs the sparsity of the uncertainty propagation and speeds the computation up about ten times \wrt previous approaches. Our computation is accurate and does not use any approximations. We can compute uncertainties of thousands of cameras in tens of seconds on a standard PC. We also demonstrate that our approach can be effectively used for reconstructions of any size by applying it to smaller sub-reconstructions.Comment: ECCV 201

Controlling the topological sector of magnetic solitons in exfoliated Cr1/3_{1/3}NbS2_2 crystals

We investigate manifestations of topological order in monoaxial helimagnet Cr$_{1/3}$NbS$_2$ by performing transport measurements on ultra-thin crystals. Upon sweeping the magnetic field perpendicularly to the helical axis, crystals thicker than one helix pitch (48 nm) but much thinner than the magnetic domain size ($\sim$1 $\mu$m) are found to exhibit sharp and hysteretic resistance jumps. We show that these phenomena originate from transitions between topological sectors with different number of magnetic solitons. This is confirmed by measurements on crystals thinner than 48 nm --in which the topological sector cannot change-- that do not exhibit any jump or hysteresis. Our results show the ability to deterministically control the topological sector of finite-size Cr$_{1/3}$NbS$_2$ and to detect inter-sector transitions by transport measurements.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Improvement of Subjective Well-Being by Ranolazine in Patients with Chronic Angina and Known Myocardial Ischemia (IMWELL Study)

Introduction: We aimed to assess if ranolazine would improve angina symptoms among patients with documented myocardial ischemia. Methods: Eligible subjects had chronic stable angina and at least one coronary stenosis with fractional flow reserve (FFR) ≤0.80 or at least one chronic total occlusion (CTO) without attempted revascularization. Subjects were randomized to oral ranolazine 500 mg twice daily for 1 week, then ranolazine 1000 mg twice daily for 15 weeks versus matching placebo. The primary end point was change in angina at 16 weeks as assessed by the Seattle Angina Questionnaire (SAQ). Results: Between September 2014 and January 2016, 25 subjects were randomized to ranolazine versus 25 to placebo. The most common reason for eligibility was CTO (72%), while the remainder had myocardial ischemia documented by low FFR. The mean FFR was 0.57 ± 0.12. Sixty-eight percent of subjects were on two or more anti-angina medications at baseline. Study medication was discontinued in 32% (eight of 25) of the ranolazine group versus 36% (nine of 25) of the placebo group. By intention-to-treat, 46 subjects had baseline and follow-up SAQ data completed. Ranolazine was not associated with an improvement in angina compared with placebo at 16 weeks. The results were similar among 33 subjects that completed study medication. The incidence of ischemia-driven hospitalization or catheterization was 12% (three of 25) of the ranolazine group versus 20% (five of 25) in the placebo group (p \u3e 0.05). Conclusions: In subjects with chronic stable angina and documented myocardial ischemia, ranolazine did not improve angina symptoms at 16 weeks

Control over phase separation and nucleation using a laser-tweezing potential

Control over the nucleation of new phases is highly desirable but elusive. Even though there is a long history of crystallization engineering by varying physicochemical parameters, controlling which polymorph crystallizes or whether a molecule crystallizes or forms an amorphous precipitate is still a poorly understood practice. Although there are now numerous examples of control using laser-induced nucleation, the absence of physical understanding is preventing progress. Here we show that the proximity of a liquid–liquid critical point or the corresponding binodal line can be used by a laser-tweezing potential to induce concentration gradients. A simple theoretical model shows that the stored electromagnetic energy of the laser beam produces a free-energy potential that forces phase separation or triggers the nucleation of a new phase. Experiments in a liquid mixture using a low-power laser diode confirm the effect. Phase separation and nucleation using a laser-tweezing potential explains the physics behind non-photochemical laser-induced nucleation and suggests new ways of manipulating matter

Phenotypical analysis of lymphocytes using flow cytometry in dermatomyositis with and without interstitial pneumonia

ArticleJOURNAL OF NEUROIMMUNOLOGY. 178 Supple 1. 233 (2006)journal articl

Towards 5D Grand Unification without SUSY Flavor Problem

We consider the renormalization group approach to the SUSY flavor problem in the supersymmetric SU(5) model with one extra dimension. In higher dimensional SUSY gauge theories, it has been recently shown that power corrections due to the Kaluza-Klein states of gauge fields run the soft masses generated at the orbifold fixed point to flavor conserving values in the infra-red limit. In models with GUT breaking at the brane where the GUT scale can be larger than the compactification scale, we show that the addition of a bulk Higgs multiplet, which is necessary for the successful unification, is compatible with the flavor universality achieved at the compactification scale.Comment: JHEP style file of 35 pages with 3 figures, Version to appear in JHE

SU(7) Unification of SU(3)_C*SU(4)_W* U(1)_{B-L}

We propose the SUSY SU(7) unification of the SU(3)_C* SU(4)_W* U(1)_{B-L} model. Such unification scenario has rich symmetry breaking chains in a five-dimensional orbifold. We study in detail the SUSY SU(7) symmetry breaking into SU(3)_C* SU(4)_W* U(1)_{B-L} by boundary conditions in a Randall-Sundrum background and its AdS/CFT interpretation. We find that successful gauge coupling unification can be achieved in our scenario. Gauge unification favors low left-right and unification scales with tree-level \sin^2\theta_W=0.15. We use the AdS/CFT dual of the conformal supersymmetry breaking scenario to break the remaining N=1 supersymmetry. We employ AdS/CFT to reproduce the NSVZ formula and obtain the structure of the Seiberg duality in the strong coupling region for 3/2N_c<N_F<3N_C. We show that supersymmetry is indeed broken in the conformal supersymmetry breaking scenario with a vanishing singlet vacuum expectation value.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figure