Taking boys seriously: a longitudinal study of adolescent male school-life experiences in Northern Ireland

This report presents the findings of a five year longitudinal study (2006-2011) carried out by The Centre for Young Men’s Studies at the University of Ulster and funded by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice. The research was initiated in response to concerns about boys’ educational underachievement and wider concerns about boys’ health and well-being. The study annually tracked the same 378 adolescent boys aged 11-16 across nine post-primary schools in Northern Ireland

A Report of the Geology of the Golden Sunlight Mining District

This paper is a report of a geological survey made of an area of approximately fifty square miles lying Northeast of Whitehall, Montana, in the region of the Golden Sun­light Mine. The survey was made by a field party consisting of twenty-three members of the senior class of the Montana School of Mines

Quand des processus administratifs limitent l’accès aux médicaments chez les étudiants

Étude de cas / Case studyLe processus d’inscription au régime public d’assurance médicaments du Québec ne permet pas aux étudiants de moins de 25 ans de s’inscrire par eux-mêmes. Cette situation peut limiter l’accès aux traitements médicamenteux ainsi que l’autonomie de certains jeunes.The registration process of the Quebec public drug insurance plan does not permit students under 25 to register by themselves. This situation may limit access to drug treatments and the autonomy of some young people

Developing an ‘outdoor-inspired’ indoor experiential mathematical activity

The issue of poor retention and achievement rates is one that plagues many British universities. While well documented and researched, there is still need for innovative practices to address this problem. This article outlines the theoretical underpinning of the Activity Guide, a tool the authors developed to support mathematics departments in order to make the transition to university easier for students and thus increase retention and attainment. Some of the topics covered here include reflective practise, experiential learning and independence; topics adapted from an outdoor frontier education course that had been specifically tailored by the authors to target and develop study skills particularly important for mathematics subjects. To allow for transferability and use by the entire higher education mathematics community the Activity Guide was produced to bring a similar course on university campuses, or even in classrooms, to better cater for resources and the scale the institutions’ facilities allow. The Activity Guide contains all that lecturers will need to plan, set up and deliver a range of activities to their students

Altered Cortical Microarchitecture and Bone Metabolism in Patients with Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance

Patients with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) are at increased fracture risk, and we have previously shown that MGUS patients have altered trabecular bone microarchitecture compared with controls. However, there are no data on whether the porosity of cortical bone, which may play a greater role in bone strength and the occurrence of fractures, is increased in MGUS. Thus, we studied cortical porosity and bone strength (apparent modulus) using high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography imaging of the distal radius in 50 MGUS patients and 100 age-, gender-, and body mass index–matched controls. Compared with controls, MGUS patients had both significantly higher cortical porosity (+16.8%; P < .05) and lower apparent modulus (–8.9%; P < .05). Despite their larger radial bone size, MGUS patients have significantly increased cortical bone porosity and reduced bone strength relative to controls. This increased cortical porosity may explain the increased fracture risk seen in MGUS patients

Mapping genomic and transcriptomic alterations spatially in epithelial cells adjacent to human breast carcinoma.

Almost all genomic studies of breast cancer have focused on well-established tumours because it is technically challenging to study the earliest mutational events occurring in human breast epithelial cells. To address this we created a unique dataset of epithelial samples ductoscopically obtained from ducts leading to breast carcinomas and matched samples from ducts on the opposite side of the nipple. Here, we demonstrate that perturbations in mRNA abundance, with increasing proximity to tumour, cannot be explained by copy number aberrations. Rather, we find a possibility of field cancerization surrounding the primary tumour by constructing a classifier that evaluates where epithelial samples were obtained relative to a tumour (cross-validated micro-averaged AUC = 0.74). We implement a spectral co-clustering algorithm to define biclusters. Relating to over-represented bicluster pathways, we further validate two genes with tissue microarrays and in vitro experiments. We highlight evidence suggesting that bicluster perturbation occurs early in tumour development

Ionospheric ion temperature climate and upper atmospheric long-term cooling

It is now recognized that Earth's upper atmosphere is experiencing a long-term cooling over the past several solar cycles. The potential impact of the cooling on societal activities is significant, but a fundamental scientific question exists regarding the drivers of the cooling. New observations and analyses provide crucial advances in our knowledge of these important processes. We investigate ionospheric ion temperature climatology and long-term trends using up-to-date large and consistent ground-based data sets as measured by multiple incoherent scatter radars (ISRs). The very comprehensive view provided by these unique observations of the upper atmospheric thermal status allows us to address drivers of strong cooling previously observed by ISRs. We use observations from two high-latitude sites at Sondrestrom (invariant latitude 73.2°N) from 1990 to 2015 and Chatanika/Poker Flat (invariant latitude 65.9°N) over the span of 1976–2015 (with a gap from 1983 to 2006). Results are compared to conditions at the midlatitude Millstone Hill site (invariant latitude 52.8°N) from 1968 to 2015. The aggregate radar observations have very comparable and consistent altitude dependence of long-term trends. In particular, the lower F region (<275 km) exhibits dayside cooling trends that are significantly higher (−3 to −1 K/yr at 250 km) than anticipated from model predictions given the anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gases. Above 275 km, cooling trends continue to increase in magnitude but values are strongly dependent on magnetic latitude, suggesting the presence of significant downward influences from nonneutral atmospheric processes.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Awards AGS-1042569 and AGS-1343056

Face Detection on Embedded Systems

Over recent years automated face detection and recognition (FDR) have gained significant attention from the commercial and research sectors. This paper presents an embedded face detection solution aimed at addressing the real-time image processing requirements within a wide range of applications. As face detection is a computationally intensive task, an embedded solution would give rise to opportunities for discrete economical devices that could be applied and integrated into a vast majority of applications. This work focuses on the use of FPGAs as the embedded prototyping technology where the thread of execution is carried out on an embedded soft-core processor. Custom instructions have been utilized as a means of applying software/hardware partitioning through which the computational bottlenecks are moved to hardware. A speedup by a factor of 110 was achieved from employing custom instructions and software optimizations

(NON)-DETERMINING THE ORIGINAL SPEAKER: REPORTATIVE PARTICLES VERSUS VERBS

This work argues that the Basque reportative particle omen contributes to the propositional contents of the utterance, and it is not an illocutionary force indicator, contrary to what seems to be suggested by the standard view on omen. The results of the application of the assent/dissent test for the case of omen show that subjects not only accept a rejection of the reported content (p), but also a rejection of the evidential content (pomen) itself. The results are similar to those of the verb esan ‘to say’. It is, then, proposed that the difference between these two elements can be explained by distinguishing between the contents of the utterances (with Korta & Perry 2007, 2011), regarding the (non-)articulation of the original speaker