32,693 research outputs found
Changing academic practice at a UK research-intensive university through supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)
Over the past decade, there have been many changes in Higher Education in the UK. Alongside increased student participation and widening access, the government has called for universities to professionally develop teachers in Higher Education and recognise the role of learning and teaching in the sector. The University of Glasgow has responded to this changing agenda in a number of ways. At the institutional level, the University launched its first comprehensive Learning and Teaching Strategy in 2006. At the same time it also appointed Associate Deans of Learning and Teaching in each Faculty. Another initiative has been the introduction of a âteachingâ career track, through the establishment of a new category of academic staff, the University Teacher, with promotion procedures supporting career development up to Professorial level. Rather than engaging in research (one of the main academic roles of the lecturer, associate professor in US terms), University Teachers must engage in scholarship, in addition to their teaching and administration duties. The establishment of a Learning and Teaching Centre responsible for supporting the University in the implementation of its Learning and Teaching Strategy has also consolidated and initiated a number of activities that all aim to enhance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Glasgow.
These initiatives have wrought changes at an institutional level and are contributing to changing academic practice. In particular, the term âScholarship of Teaching and Learningâ, once unheard of at the institution is increasingly being recognised as a valid form of academic activity and increasing numbers of academic staff are engaging in it.
This paper will outline some of these changes and offer reflections on their impact on SoTL and academic practice
Coarse-grained strain dynamics and backwards/forwards dispersion
A Particle Tracking Velocimetry experiment has been performed in a turbulent
flow at intermediate Reynolds number. We present experimentally obtained
stretching rates for particle pairs in the inertial range. When compensated by
a characteristic time scale for coarse-grained strain we observe constant
stretching. This indicates that the process of material line stretching taking
place in the viscous subrange has its counterpart in the inertial subrange. We
investigate both forwards and backwards dispersion. We find a faster backwards
stretching and relate it to the problem of relative dispersion and its time
asymmetry.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figue
3-Body Dynamics in a (1+1) Dimensional Relativistic Self-Gravitating System
The results of our study of the motion of a three particle, self-gravitating
system in general relativistic lineal gravity is presented for an arbitrary
ratio of the particle masses. We derive a canonical expression for the
Hamiltonian of the system and discuss the numerical solution of the resulting
equations of motion. This solution is compared to the corresponding
non-relativistic and post-Newtonian approximation solutions so that the
dynamics of the fully relativistic system can be interpretted as a correction
to the one-dimensional Newtonian self-gravitating system. We find that the
structure of the phase space of each of these systems yields a large variety of
interesting dynamics that can be divided into three distinct regions: annulus,
pretzel, and chaotic; the first two being regions of quasi-periodicity while
the latter is a region of chaos. By changing the relative masses of the three
particles we find that the relative sizes of these three phase space regions
changes and that this deformation can be interpreted physically in terms of the
gravitational interactions of the particles. Furthermore, we find that many of
the interesting characteristics found in the case where all of the particles
share the same mass also appears in our more general study. We find that there
are additional regions of chaos in the unequal mass system which are not
present in the equal mass case. We compare these results to those found in
similar systems.Comment: latex, 26 pages, 17 figures, high quality figures available upon
request; typos and grammar correcte
N-body Gravity and the Schroedinger Equation
We consider the problem of the motion of bodies in a self-gravitating
system in two spacetime dimensions. We point out that this system can be mapped
onto the quantum-mechanical problem of an N-body generalization of the problem
of the H molecular ion in one dimension. The canonical gravitational
N-body formalism can be extended to include electromagnetic charges. We derive
a general algorithm for solving this problem, and show how it reduces to known
results for the 2-body and 3-body systems.Comment: 15 pages, Latex, references added, typos corrected, final version
that appears in CQ
Persistence of Tripartite Nonlocality for Non-inertial Observers
We consider the behaviour of bipartite and tripartite non-locality between
fermionic entangled states shared by observers, one of whom uniformly
accelerates. We find that while fermionic entanglement persists for arbitrarily
large acceleration, the Bell/CHSH inequalities cannot be violated for
sufficiently large but finite acceleration. However the Svetlichny inequality,
which is a measure of genuine tripartite non-locality, can be violated for any
finite value of the acceleration.Comment: 4 pages, pdflatex, 2 figure
Statistical Mechanics of Relativistic One-Dimensional Self-Gravitating Systems
We consider the statistical mechanics of a general relativistic
one-dimensional self-gravitating system. The system consists of -particles
coupled to lineal gravity and can be considered as a model of
relativistically interacting sheets of uniform mass. The partition function and
one-particle distitrubion functions are computed to leading order in
where is the speed of light; as results for the
non-relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system are recovered. We find
that relativistic effects generally cause both position and momentum
distribution functions to become more sharply peaked, and that the temperature
of a relativistic gas is smaller than its non-relativistic counterpart at the
same fixed energy. We consider the large-N limit of our results and compare
this to the non-relativistic case.Comment: latex, 60 pages, 22 figure
Exact Solution for the Metric and the Motion of Two Bodies in (1+1) Dimensional Gravity
We present the exact solution of two-body motion in (1+1) dimensional dilaton
gravity by solving the constraint equations in the canonical formalism. The
determining equation of the Hamiltonian is derived in a transcendental form and
the Hamiltonian is expressed for the system of two identical particles in terms
of the Lambert function. The function has two real branches which join
smoothly onto each other and the Hamiltonian on the principal branch reduces to
the Newtonian limit for small coupling constant. On the other branch the
Hamiltonian yields a new set of motions which can not be understood as
relativistically correcting the Newtonian motion. The explicit trajectory in
the phase space is illustrated for various values of the energy. The
analysis is extended to the case of unequal masses. The full expression of
metric tensor is given and the consistency between the solution of the metric
and the equations of motion is rigorously proved.Comment: 34 pages, LaTeX, 16 figure
Study to document low thrust trajectory optimization programs HILTOP and ASTOP
Detailed documentation of the HILTOP and ASTOP computer programs is presented along with results of the analyses of the possible extension of the HILTOP program and results of an extra-ecliptic mission study performed with HILTOP
Two-dimensional gravitation and Sine-Gordon-Solitons
Some aspects of two-dimensional gravity coupled to matter fields, especially
to the Sine-Gordon-model are examined. General properties and boundary
conditions of possible soliton-solutions are considered. Analytic
soliton-solutions are discovered and the structure of the induced space-time
geometry is discussed. These solutions have interesting features and may serve
as a starting point for further investigations.Comment: 23 pages, latex, references added, to appear in Phys.Rev.
Pair Production of Topological anti de Sitter Black Holes
The pair creation of black holes with event horizons of non-trivial topology
is described. The spacetimes are all limiting cases of the cosmological
metric. They are generalizations of the dimensional black hole and have
asymptotically anti de Sitter behaviour. Domain walls instantons can mediate
their pair creation for a wide range of mass and charge.Comment: 4 pages, uses late
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