Magnetic structure and phase diagram of TmB4

Magnetic structure of single crystalline TmB4 has been studied by magnetization, magnetoresistivity and specific heat measurements. A complex phase diagram with different antiferromagnetic (AF) phases was observed below TN1 = 11.7 K. Besides the plateau at half-saturated magnetization (1/2 MS), also plateaus at 1/9, 1/8 and 1/7 of MS were observed as function of applied magnetic field B//c. From additional neutron scattering experiments on TmB4, we suppose that those plateaus arise from a stripe structure which appears to be coherent domain boundaries between AF ordered blocks of 7 or 9 lattice constants. The received results suggest that the frustration among the Tm3+ magnetic ions, which maps to a geometrically frustrated Shastry-Sutherland lattice lead to strong competition between AF and ferromagnetic (FM) order. Thus, stripe structures in intermediate field appear to be the best way to minimize the magnetostatic energy against other magnetic interactions between the Tm ions combined with very strong Ising anisotropy.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, conference contribution - CSMAG 0

Social capital: A vital ingredient for retaining foreign language teachers

Introduction A major source of concern across a number of English-speaking countries is the loss of language teachers from the profession. In a global era where the ability to engage across languages and cultures is seen as vital for international engagement, this poses a significant problem as teacher shortages continue to challenge the efficacy of language education programs. And yet, there are very few large-scale studies which investigate the career attrition of foreign language teachers. The Australian mixed methods study reported here investigated the relationship between social capital and the career retention of 227 foreign language teachers. Results The findings expand our understanding of language teacher attrition, by showing that teachers who felt professionally valued and who had strong relationships with their colleagues and administrative leaders were less likely to leave language teaching. It was also found that social bonds with other foreign language teachers were an important form of social capital proactively sought by many language teachers, to help them overcome their professional isolation and thus maintain their professional standards. However, these strong social bonds were found to play a role in promoting language teacher attrition, as they provide teachers with a ladder to other career opportunities. Conclusions This study concludes that some language teachers are lacking in social capital, and that this lack of social capital is a key driver in career attrition. Therefore, there is a need to develop policies, and engage in practices, which facilitate and encourage the further development of language teachers' social capital. The conclusion of this paper explores ways to move forward to improve the retention of language teachers

Language teacher supply: A content analysis of newspaper coverage across the 'Anglobubble'

In the monolingual English-speaking world referred to as the ‘Anglobubble’, governments are finally recognising the advantages of a citizenry able to engage in and between multiple languages and cultures. As a result, increased efforts are being made to introduce and expand educational programs to teach languages. Thus, now more than ever, an appropriate language teacher supply is needed to support the internationalisation process of citizens. However, a language teacher supply crisis is emerging. The content analysis study reported here, explored how the issue of language teacher supply was portrayed in print-based newspaper media from six English-speaking countries between 2010 and 2015. The findings indicate that there is an ongoing crisis with the supply of language teachers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Further, in areas where language education is being propelled by top-down political agendas, sustainable progress is limited. Attention is focused on a small number of ‘popular’ languages, with indigenous languages all but forgotten. In contrast, in areas where grass-roots community movements are present, actions are being undertaken to find genuine and sustainable solutions. This is also bringing a more positive media discourse, and, as such, increased social awareness of and value for language education

Sim-to-real reinforcement learning for deformable object manipulation

We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but in- teraction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large con- figuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling ap- proaches require significant engineering work. Perhaps then, bypassing the need for explicit modelling and instead learning the control in an end-to-end manner serves as a better approach? Despite the growing interest in the use of end-to-end robot learning approaches, only a small amount of work has focused on their ap- plicability to deformable object manipulation. Moreover, due to the large amount of data needed to learn these end-to-end solutions, an emerging trend is to learn control policies in simulation and then transfer them over to the real world. To- date, no work has explored whether it is possible to learn and transfer deformable object policies. We believe that if sim-to-real methods are to be employed fur- ther, then it should be possible to learn to interact with a wide variety of objects, and not only rigid objects. In this work, we use a combination of state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms to solve the problem of manipulating de- formable objects (specifically cloth). We evaluate our approach on three tasks — folding a towel up to a mark, folding a face towel diagonally, and draping a piece of cloth over a hanger. Our agents are fully trained in simulation with domain randomisation, and then successfully deployed in the real world without having seen any real deformable objects

Temas y personajes marginales en Andalucía la baja de Fernando Villalón

Despite the many myths that surround Fernando Villalón and his short literary activity, the Sevillian writer’s publications show us a most original collection, into which he very successfully incorporated with themes banished from literature, confirming his filiation as a poet of another lineage.A pesar de los muchos mitos que rodean a Fernando Villalón y de su corta actividad literaria, las publicaciones del escritor sevillano nos muestran un conjunto originalísimo, al que supo incorporar con gran acierto asuntos desterrados de la literatura que confirman su filiación como poeta de otro linaje

Proposal of novel single-phase power quality indicators considering subsynchronous frequency perturbations in voltage and current under non-sinusoidal conditions

This work pretends to reconsider power quality (PQ), in AC single-phase low voltage systems, considering perturbation sources with frequency components below the fundamental frequency in voltage and current signals. These perturbations induced by sources like Geomagnetic Induced Currents (GMC), Arc Furnaces, switching VSC, etc. [1]-[2],[30]-[32], can occur in a frequency range comprised between DC and the fundamental frequency of the system. Standard PQ indexes do not characterize properly these subsynchronous frequency perturbations (SFFP), [2]-[3] and this work pretends to analyze the spectra from 0 to 50Hz for voltage and current, proposing new formulation for some PQ as a function of SSFP, with the intention of explaining the observed degradation of the power quality in single-phase low voltage electric systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version