Researching professional practice: The integrated practice perspectives model and continuing education.

The Integrated Practice Perspectives model reframes previous efforts to link education with professional practice by using theories of situated cognition and learning. Reframing allows other variables in professional performance to be identified, performance to be more thoroughly linked to social and cultural contexts, and a more integrative and deeper conceptualization of professional practice and context to be developed

Consumer Perception of Bread Quality

Bread contains a wide range of important nutritional components which provide a positive effect on human health. However, the consumption of bread in Belgium is declining during the last decades. This is due to factors such as changing eating patterns and a increasing choice of substitutes like breakfast cereals and fast foods. The aim of this study is to investigate consumer’s quality perception of bread towards sensory, health and nutrition attributes. Consumer’s quality perception of bread seams to be determined by sensory and health attributes. Three clusters of consumers are identified based on these attributes. In the first cluster, consumers’ quality perception of bread is not dependent on the health attributes it embraces, but to some extent on sensory attributes. For the second cluster, both health and sensory attributes appear to influence quality perception. In the third cluster only sensory attributes appear to be important in determining quality perception, though in a negative direction. The results of this study will possibly help health professionals and policy makers to systematically inform the consumers about the positive effects of bread and its components. Furthermore, firms can use the result to build up a tailor-made marketing strategy.Consumer, Quality perception, Bread, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Fibre Optic Sensors for the Structural Health Monitoring of Building Structures

AbstractIn this work different fibre optic sensors for the structural health monitoring of civil engineering structures are reported. A fibre optic crack sensor and two different fibre optic moisture sensors have been designed to detect the moisture ingress in concrete based building structures. Moreover, the degeneration of the mechanical properties of optical glass fibre sensors and hence their long-term stability and reliability due to the mechanical and chemical impact of the concrete environment is discussed as well as the advantage of applying a fibre optic sensor system for the structural health monitoring of sewerage tunnels is demonstrated

Ultrafast lithium diffusion in bilayer graphene

Solids that simultaneously conduct electrons and ions are key elements for the mass transfer and storage required in battery electrodes. Single-phase materials with a high electronic and high ionic conductivity at room temperature are hard to come by, and therefore multiphase systems with separate ion and electron channels have been put forward instead. Here we report on bilayer graphene as a single-phase mixed conductor that demonstrates Li diffusion faster than in graphite and even surpassing the diffusion of sodium chloride in liquid water. To measure Li diffusion, we have developed an on-chip electrochemical cell architecture in which the redox reaction that forces Li intercalation is localized only at a protrusion of the device so that the graphene bilayer remains unperturbed from the electrolyte during operation. We performed time-dependent Hall measurements across spatially displaced Hall probes to monitor the in-plane Li diffusion kinetics within the graphene bilayer and measured a diffusion coefficient as high as 7 × 10 -5 â €...cm 2 s -1

Probing Exfoliated Graphene Layers and Their Lithiation with Microfocused X-rays

X-ray diffraction is measured on individual bilayer and multilayer graphene single-crystals and combined with electrochemically induced lithium intercalation. In-plane Bragg peaks are observed by grazing incidence diffraction. Focusing the incident beam down to an area of about 10 μm × 10 μm, individual flakes are probed by specular X-ray reflectivity. By deploying a recursive Parratt algorithm to model the experimental data, we gain access to characteristic crystallographic parameters of the samples. Notably, it is possible to directly extract the bi/multilayer graphene c-axis lattice parameter. The latter is found to increase upon lithiation, which we control using an on-chip peripheral electrochemical cell layout. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of in situ X-ray diffraction on individual, micron-sized single crystallites of few- and bilayer two-dimensional materials

Progesterone Inhibits Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition in Endometrial Cancer

Background: Every year approximately 74,000 women die of endometrial cancer, mainly due to recurrent or metastatic disease. The presence of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) as well as progesterone receptor (PR) positivity has been correlated with improved prognosis. This study describes two mechanisms by which progesterone inhibits metastatic spread of endometrial cancer: by stimulating T-cell infiltration and by inhibiting epithelial-to-mesenchymal cell transition (EMT). Methodology and Principal Findings: Paraffin sections from patients with (n = 9) or without (n = 9) progressive endometrial cancer (recurrent or metastatic disease) were assessed for the presence of CD4+ (helper), CD8+ (cytotoxic) and Foxp3+ (regulatory) T-lymphocytes and PR expression. Progressive disease was observed to be associated with significant loss of TILs and loss of PR expression. Frozen tumor samples, used for genome-wide expression analysis, showed significant regulation of pathways Conclusion: Intact progesterone signaling in non-progressive endometrial cancer seems to be an important factor stimulating immunosurveilance and inhibiting transition from an epithelial to a more mesenchymal, more invasive phenotype

Fibre Optic Sensors for the Structural Health Monitoring of Building Structures

In this work different fibre optic sensors for the structural health monitoring of civil engineering structures are reported. A fibre optic crack sensor and two different fibre optic moisture sensors have been designed to detect the moisture ingress in concrete based building structures. Moreover, the degeneration of the mechanical properties of optical glass fibre sensors and hence their long-term stability and reliability due to the mechanical and chemical impact of the concrete environment is discussed as well as the advantage of applying a fibre optic sensor system for the structural health monitoring of sewerage tunnels is demonstrated

A snake-based scheme for path planning and control with constraints by distributed visual sensors

YesThis paper proposes a robot navigation scheme using wireless visual sensors deployed in an environment. Different from the conventional autonomous robot approaches, the scheme intends to relieve massive on-board information processing required by a robot to its environment so that a robot or a vehicle with less intelligence can exhibit sophisticated mobility. A three-state snake mechanism is developed for coordinating a series of sensors to form a reference path. Wireless visual sensors communicate internal forces with each other along the reference snake for dynamic adjustment, react to repulsive forces from obstacles, and activate a state change in the snake body from a flexible state to a rigid or even to a broken state due to kinematic or environmental constraints. A control snake is further proposed as a tracker of the reference path, taking into account the robot’s non-holonomic constraint and limited steering power. A predictive control algorithm is developed to have an optimal velocity profile under robot dynamic constraints for the snake tracking. They together form a unified solution for robot navigation by distributed sensors to deal with the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a robot and to react to dynamic changes in advance. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the capability of a wireless sensor network to carry out low-level control activities for a vehicle.Royal Society, Natural Science Funding Council (China

State of the Art Report: Verified Computation

This report describes the state of the art in verifiable computation. The problem being solved is the following: The Verifiable Computation Problem (Verifiable Computing Problem) Suppose we have two computing agents. The first agent is the verifier, and the second agent is the prover. The verifier wants the prover to perform a computation. The verifier sends a description of the computation to the prover. Once the prover has completed the task, the prover returns the output to the verifier. The output will contain proof. The verifier can use this proof to check if the prover computed the output correctly. The check is not required to verify the algorithm used in the computation. Instead, it is a check that the prover computed the output using the computation specified by the verifier. The effort required for the check should be much less than that required to perform the computation. This state-of-the-art report surveys 128 papers from the literature comprising more than 4,000 pages. Other papers and books were surveyed but were omitted. The papers surveyed were overwhelmingly mathematical. We have summarised the major concepts that form the foundations for verifiable computation. The report contains two main sections. The first, larger section covers the theoretical foundations for probabilistically checkable and zero-knowledge proofs. The second section contains a description of the current practice in verifiable computation. Two further reports will cover (i) military applications of verifiable computation and (ii) a collection of technical demonstrators. The first of these is intended to be read by those who want to know what applications are enabled by the current state of the art in verifiable computation. The second is for those who want to see practical tools and conduct experiments themselves.Comment: 54 page

Principals in Programming Languages: Technical Results

This is the companion technical report for ``Principals in Programming Languages'' [20]. See that document for a more readable version of these results. In this paper, we describe two variants of the simply typed $\lambda$-calculus extended with a notion of {\em principal}. The results are languages in which intuitive statements like ``the client must call $\mathtt{open}$ to obtain a file handle'' can be phrased and proven formally. The first language is a two-agent calculus with references and recursive types, while the second language explores the possibility of multiple agents with varying amounts of type information. We use these calculi to give syntactic proofs of some type abstraction results that traditionally require semantic arguments