Cascading Conversations Across Professional Development Open Courses and Community in Teaching and Learning in Irish Higher Education: Embedding and Sustaining the National Perspective from Within.

This study is aimed atteaching and learning staff,academic leaders/senior managers, educational/academic developers, and will offer an opportunity to explore together the long-term vision of a valued and informed teaching and learning culture in Irish higher education and the impact of national conversations on professional development in teaching and learning.The momentum in PD offered by the success of the Open Courses, the sudden national move to online/remote teaching and learning in recent months, and the evolving education policy context (in Ireland), have combined to present a unique opportunity to make strategic forward motion regarding teaching and learning enhancement.By the end of this session, delegates will be able to: •Critically discuss the Irish framework of professional development of all who teach in higher education and the national conversations taking place on teaching and learning pre-and-during covid times.•Explore the approach taken to implementing a suite of 20 flexible open-access professional development (PD) Open Courses for national recognition.•Challenge current conversations around professional development, in particular on their ability or inability to empower academics to make a difference to individual practice and collective T&L responsibility.•Reflect on lessons learnt from this work including how this PD initiative can encourage the HE community to consider how top-down initiatives influence informal T&L conversationsand vice vers

Partnering through Open Courses: A National Model for Sustaining Engagement and Community with the PD Framework for all who Teach in Irish Higher Education.

Throughout 2019-20, the National Forum have embraced workingin partnership with higher education institutions and organisations to grow its nationally recognised Open Courses suite of professional development (PD) opportunities for the sector. These have involved forging partnerships in the development of Open Courses with AHEAD and UCD in the large-scale implementation of Universal Design of Learning(UDL), IUA Campus Engage in Community Engagement Learning and initial work taking place with QQI on the Professional Standards Framework.These new partnerships have evolved on the basis of the success of the integration of nationally recognised digital badgesinto the Open Courses platform. This national-level badge ecosystem, in existence since 2017, and developed for all academic and professional staff who have a teaching role,consistsof 15 courses on popular teaching and learning topicsmade availablein three delivery modes: face-to-face/blended; fully online; self-study.Such PD opportunitiesoffer participants adynamic blend of autonomous study and live networking opportunities, with authentic professional instruction that can be appliedimmediately in theirteaching and learning practice.The integrated suite of Open Courses wasdesigned as an entry route to staff engagement with the PD Framework1as well as enhancing PDthrough digital badging. The key to understanding these credentials is not so much the technology or the badging, it is more the PD pathways that national recognition can provide

The proposed Caroline ESA M3 mission to a Main Belt Comet

We describe Caroline, a mission proposal submitted to the European Space Agency in 2010 in response to the Cosmic Visions M3 call for medium-sized missions. Caroline would have travelled to a Main Belt Comet (MBC), characterizing the object during a flyby, and capturing dust from its tenuous coma for return to Earth. MBCs are suspected to be transition objects straddling the traditional boundary between volatile–poor rocky asteroids and volatile–rich comets. The weak cometary activity exhibited by these objects indicates the presence of water ice, and may represent the primary type of object that delivered water to the early Earth. The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals. Caroline was ultimately not selected by the European Space Agency during the M3 call; we briefly reflect on the pros and cons of the mission as proposed, and how current and future mission MBC mission proposals such as Castalia could best be approached

Atmospheric Sampling on Ascension Island Using Multirotor UAVs

As part of an NERC-funded project investigating the southern methane anomaly, a team drawn from the Universities of Bristol, Birmingham and Royal Holloway flew small unmanned multirotors from Ascension Island for the purposes of atmospheric sampling. The objective of these flights was to collect air samples from below, within and above a persistent atmospheric feature, the Trade Wind Inversion, in order to characterise methane concentrations and their isotopic composition. These parameters allow the methane in the different air masses to be tied to different source locations, which can be further analysed using back trajectory atmospheric computer modelling. This paper describes the campaigns as a whole including the design of the bespoke eight rotor aircraft and the operational requirements that were needed in order to collect targeted multiple air samples up to 2.5 km above the ground level in under 20 min of flight time. Key features of the system described include real-time feedback of temperature and humidity, as well as system health data. This enabled detailed targeting of the air sampling design to be realised and planned during the flight mission on the downward leg, a capability that is invaluable in the presence of uncertainty in the pre-flight meteorological data. Environmental considerations are also outlined together with the flight plans that were created in order to rapidly fly vertical transects of the atmosphere whilst encountering changing wind conditions. Two sampling campaigns were carried out in September 2014 and July 2015 with over one hundred high altitude sampling missions. Lessons learned are given throughout, including those associated with operating in the testing environment encountered on Ascension Island

Transient reduction in erythrocyte membrane sialoglycoprotein associated with the presence of elliptocytes

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73806/1/j.1365-2141.1988.00477.x.pd

Physical model of near-Earth asteroid (1917) Cuyo from ground-based optical and thermal-IR observations

Context: The near-Earth asteroid (1917) Cuyo was subject to radar and lightcurve observations during a close approach in 1989, and observed up until 2008. It was selected as one of our ESO Large Programme targets, aimed at observational detections of the YORP effect through long-term lightcurve monitoring and physical modelling of near-Earth asteroids. Aims: We aimed to constrain physical properties of Cuyo: shape, spin-state, and spectroscopic & thermophysical properties of the surface. Methods: We acquired photometric lightcurves of Cuyo spanning the period between 2010 and 2013, which we combined with published lightcurves from 1989-2008. Our thermal-infrared observations were obtained in 2011. Rotationally-resolved optical spectroscopy data were acquired in 2011 and combined with all available published spectra to investigate any surface material variegation. Results: We developed a convex lightcurve-inversion shape of Cuyo that suggests the presence of an equatorial ridge, typical for an evolved system close to shedding mass due to fast rotation. We determine limits of YORP strength through lightcurve-based spin-state modelling, including both negative and positive acceleration values, between -0.7x10-8 rad day-2 and 1.7x10-8 rad day-2. Thermo-physical modelling with the ATPM provides constraints on the geometric albedo, PV = 0.24 ± 0.07, the effective diameter Deff = 3.15 ± 0.08 km, the thermal inertia, 44 ±- 9 J m-2s-1/2K-1, and a roughness fraction of 0.52 ± 0.26. This enabled a YORP strength prediction of (-6.39 ± 0.96)x10-10 rad day-2. We also see evidence of surface compositional variation. Conclusions: The low value of YORP predicted by means of thermophysical analysis, consistent with the results of the lightcurve study, might be due to the self-limiting properties of rotational YORP, possibly involving movement of sub-surface and surface material. This may also be consistent with the surface compositional variation that we see. The physical model of Cuyo can be used to investigate cohesive forces as a way to explain why some targets survive rotation rates faster than the fission limit