Do We See Eye to Eye? Moderators of Correspondence Between Student and Faculty Evaluations of Day-to-Day Teaching

Students and instructors show moderate levels of agreement about the quality of day-to-day teaching. In the present study, we replicated and extended this finding by asking how correspondence between student and instructor ratings is moderated by time of semester and student demographic variables. Participants included 137 students and 5 instructors. On 10 separate days, students and instructors rated teaching effectiveness and challenge level of the material. Multilevel modeling indicated that student and instructor ratings of teaching effectiveness converged overall, but more advanced students and Caucasian students converged more closely with instructors. Student and instructor ratings of challenge converged early but diverged later in the semester. These results extend our knowledge about the connection between student and faculty judgments of teaching

Examining the Impact of Climate Change Film as an Educational Tool

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of film in communicating issues related to climate change. While previous studies demonstrate an immediate effect of a film post-screening, this study also considered if a film can inspire long-term effects, and if supplemental educational information plays a role on participant understanding. Design/methodology/approach: Using surveys, we assessed undergraduate students’ climate change responses pre-, immediately-post, and 9-weeks post watching the climate change documentary The Human Element (Prod. Earth Vision Institute, 2018). In the 9-week interim before the final survey, half of the participants received weekly information on climate change via a custom website, while the other half served as a control. Nonparametric statistical tests were completed in SPSS to determine significant changes across all three surveys. Findings: Friedman tests and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests demonstrate statistically significant self-reported impacts on climate change responses such as of motivation, concern, and understanding immediately post-screening. At 9-weeks, 3 × 2 Mixed ANOVAs demonstrate that the group that received the website reported statistically significantly higher understanding than those in the control group. However, the website has no statistically significant effect on other responses like motivation and concern. Originality/value: These results highlight the important power of film’s visual appeals in framing climate change. We also show that there is a long term effect of film on participant understanding. The study also prompts questions about current models of climate change education, which emphasize objective understanding, often without viable support structures to help students’ concern and motivation to act

QUANTIFYING VARIABILITY IN COORDINATION DURING RUNNING

It has been suggested that within-participant variability in coordination may have a functional role to play in human movement. The purpose of this study was to compare the variability in coordination for one participant, quantified utilising two previously used techniques. Hip and knee flexion- xtension angles during the stance phase were calculated and interpolated to 100 data points, for 10 trials of running at 3.8 m/s. The standard deviation in continuous relative phase and coefficient of correspondence from vector coding were calculated at each data point. The two techniques gave similar indications of coordination variability in early stance, but were contradictory towards the end of stance. The results of this investigation suggest that authors conducting independent studies, using different analysis techniques, may draw conflicting conclusions about the variability in coordination

Analysis of Cardiac Ion Channels to Understand Arrhythmias Which Lead to Sudden Cardiac Death

There are 300,000-400,000 fatalities attributed to sudden cardiac death every year in the U.S. due to a lack of sufficient research on mechanisms causing arrhythmias1. Malfunctions with the ion channels in the heart may lead to lethal arrhythmias. The purpose of this work is to study ion channels and evaluate malfunctions relative to normally functioning hearts. Plasmid insertion in E. coli assayed whether functional ion channels reach the membrane, and confocal fluorescent microscopy was used to illuminate cellular functionality. In addition, genetic analysis was used to determine the extent of hereditary factors in sudden cardiac death. Genes that encode for the voltage-gated sodium, potassium, and calcium ion channels were analyzed at the genetic level using isolated DNA samples and traditional Sanger sequencing methods to identify mutations that may be responsible for sudden cardiac death syndromes. For example, Long QT syndrome, Short QT syndrome, and Brugada syndrome are caused by mutations in these ion channels. Once these mutations are identified, genetic engineering techniques can be used in the generation of new heart cells from the stem cells found in somatic tissue. Generation of such heart cells is important because it could lead to the development of personalized treatment for degenerative diseases such as heart failure in the future. Rubart, M. et al., Mechanisms of Sudden Cardiac Death, 2005. J. clin. invest. 115(9):2305-2315

A Time Purified Separated Antiproton Beam At The AGS

Physic

Inter-decadal variability of phytoplankton biomass along the coastal West Antarctic Peninsula

The West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) is a climatically sensitive region where periods of strong warming have caused significant changes in the marine ecosystem and food-web processes. Tight coupling between phytoplankton and higher trophic levels implies that the coastal WAP is a bottom-up controlled system, where changes in phytoplankton dynamics may largely impact other food-web components. Here, we analysed the inter-decadal time series of year-round chlorophyll-a (Chl) collected from three stations along the coastal WAP: Carlini Station at Potter Cove (PC) on King George Island, Palmer Station on Anvers Island and Rothera Station on Adelaide Island. There were trends towards increased phytoplankton biomass at Carlini Station (PC) and Palmer Station, while phytoplankton biomass declined significantly at Rothera Station over the studied period. The impacts of two relevant climate modes to the WAP, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode, on winter and spring phytoplankton biomass appear to be different among the three sampling stations, suggesting an important role of local-scale forcing than large-scale forcing on phytoplankton dynamics at each station. The inter-annual variability of seasonal bloom progression derived from considering all three stations together captured ecologically meaningful, seasonally co-occurring bloom patterns which were primarily constrained by water-column stability strength. Our findings highlight a coupled link between phytoplankton and physical and climate dynamics along the coastal WAP, which may improve our understanding of overall WAP food-web responses to climate change and variability

Energy loss of fast quarks in nuclei

We report an analysis of the nuclear dependence of the yield of Drell-Yan dimuons from the 800 GeV/c proton bombardment of $^2H$, C, Ca, Fe, and W targets. Employing a new formulation of the Drell-Yan process in the rest frame of the nucleus, this analysis examines the effect of initial-state energy loss and shadowing on the nuclear-dependence ratios versus the incident proton's momentum fraction and dimuon effective mass. The resulting energy loss per unit path length is $-dE/dz = 2.32 \pm 0.52\pm 0.5$ GeV/fm. This is the first observation of a nonzero energy loss of partons traveling in nuclear environment.Comment: 5 pages, including 4 figure