The effect of COVID-19 lockdown on design studio learning and architecture students' performance.

The first UK lockdown halted all facets of life and quickly became the greatest challenge the education system has ever faced. In order to continue teaching curriculums remote learning was promptly adopted as the emergency method as a substitute learning environment to continue teaching curriculums. Discussions surrounding the effectiveness of remote teaching emerged after the initial year of the lockdown with many studies worldwide surveying universities and student performance across all courses. Study findings claimed no change in performance however the lack of specific research and different pedagogies in architecture compared to typical lecture-based learning subjects suggests otherwise. This paper explores the adaptability of architecture in remote learning, in comparison to face-to-face, and its effect on students' academic performance. This study targeted British architecture-based students and their experience with remote learning surrounding the UK lockdowns and subsequent hybrid learning methods. The nuanced differences between architecture-based pedagogies were explored through an extensive literature review of fundamental, modern and current pedagogies. In a remote learning environment, the said pedagogies were affected, and design studio did not translate well to the remote teaching style. When surveyed, over ¾ of respondents established links between their performance and the lack of traditional face-to-face learning. There was a prevailing negative view of exclusively remote learning and a preference towards a hybrid approach. Despite this, many recognised the benefit of remote learning however only in scenarios such as lectures. Research concluded that the likely external factors, economic and digital poverty, appeared ineffectual according to respondents. Findings suggest potential damage to academic performance within architecture disciplines and in wider applied learning disciplines. Future predictions surrounding higher education see technologically based pedagogies taking precedent as the benefits surrounding hybrid learning have been discovered with its flexibility and accessibility to students and educators

Prospectus, August 4, 2010

COLLEGE FOR KIDS LENDS A LEARNING HAND; The so-called gap year between high school and college is just what some students need; Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird; Prospectus Pick: Inception; Growing number people growing their own groceries; Digital alarmists are wrong; Plugging a Web tax loophole; A Parkland student’s farewell; Climate change could affect migration to the U.S.; State Fair rides: Thrills, chills and chaos theory made real; Blogging tips for those who love to share their love of food; The past week in sports; Dorm do\u27s and don\u27tshttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2010/1018/thumbnail.jp

Molecular Dynamics for Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is the field concerned with the design, engineering, and construction of organisms and biomolecules. Biomolecules such as proteins are nature's nano-bots, and provide both a shortcut to the construction of nano-scale tools and insight into the design of abiotic nanotechnology. A fundamental technique in protein engineering is protein fusion, the concatenation of two proteins so that they form domains of a new protein. The resulting fusion protein generally retains both functions, especially when a linker sequence is introduced between the two domains to allow them to fold independently. Fusion proteins can have features absent from all of their components; for example, FRET biosensors are fusion proteins of two fluorescent proteins with a binding domain. When the binding domain forms a complex with a ligand, its dynamics translate the concentration of the ligand to the ratio of fluorescence intensities via FRET. Despite these successes, protein engineering remains laborious and expensive. Computer modelling has the potential to improve the situation by enabling some design work to occur virtually. Synthetic biologists commonly use fast, heuristic structure prediction tools like ROSETTA, I-TASSER and FoldX, despite their inaccuracy. By contrast, molecular dynamics with modern force fields has proven itself accurate, but sampling sufficiently to solve problems accurately and quickly enough to be relevant to experimenters remains challenging. In this thesis, I introduce molecular dynamics to a structural biology audience, and discuss the challenges and theory behind the technique. With this knowledge, I introduce synthetic biology through a review of fluorescent sensors. I then develop a simple computational tool, Rangefinder, for the design of one variety of these sensors, and demonstrate its ability to predict sensor performance experimentally. I demonstrate the importance of the choice of linker with yet another sensor whose performance depends critically thereon. In chapter 6, I investigate the structure of a conserved, repeating linker sequence connecting two domains of the malaria circumsporozoite protein. Finally, I develop a multi-scale enhanced sampling molecular dynamics approach to predicting the structure and dynamics of fusion proteins. It is my hope that this work contributes to the structural biology community's understanding of molecular dynamics and inspires new techniques developed for protein engineering

Conditions for Competition: Assessing the Competitive Dynamics of US Counties

Research in public policy examines specific theories that drive policy adoption among jurisdictions. One of these theories, referred to in the economics literature as economic competition (or strategic competition), posits that local governments may engage in competition with one another because of the potential interjurisdictional economic spillover effects of certain fiscal policies. In this article, sales tax rates, a common, yet overlooked, policy instrument in the policy literature is examined to determine if sales tax rates drive competition among counties. Testing several hypotheses, this study finds that sales tax rate increases can exacerbate competition among counties. However, this relationship is conditional on the per capita county income; more specifically, poorer counties are more vulnerable to the effects of economic competition than wealthier counties. Furthermore, many other processes influence sales tax increases, depending on how the process is modeled. Thus, economic competition is a multidimensional process shaped by a multitude of factors

Static Malware Family Clustering via Structural and Functional Characteristics

Static and dynamic analyses are the two primary approaches to analyzing malicious applications. The primary distinction between the two is that the application is analyzed without execution in static analysis, whereas the dynamic approach executes the malware and records the behavior exhibited during execution. Although each approach has advantages and disadvantages, dynamic analysis has been more widely accepted and utilized by the research community whereas static analysis has not seen the same attention. This study aims to apply advancements in static analysis techniques to demonstrate the identification of fine-grained functionality, and show, through clustering, how malicious applications may be grouped into associated family types. The scope of this research is focused on malicious software utilizing the Portable Executable (“PE”) file format for Microsoft Windows operating systems

Effects of Normobaric Hypoxia on Oculomotor Dynamics of Aviator Students during a Simulated Flight Task

Hypoxia occurs when the body\u27s tissues are unable to obtain adequate oxygen supply and is the primary environmental factor present when pilots are exposed to increasing altitude levels. Hypoxia leads to impaired vision, cognition, and motor control function, which can negatively affect performance and become deadly if a pilot becomes incapacitated. Thus, objective identification of early-onset hypoxia is critical to increase the time of useful consciousness and prevent physiological episodes. Of the few studies utilizing eye-tracking, there is disagreement and mixed results concerning saccadic eye metrics as a means to measure and detect hypoxia. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate saccadic velocity changes driven by acute normobaric hypoxia. Using a noninvasive infrared-based eye-tracking device, we recorded saccadic average peak velocity during flight tasks at simulated altitudes of 0 ft, 12,500 ft, and 19,000 ft. No changes were observed in saccadic average peak velocity among different altitude exposures. As time on task increased, saccadic average peak velocity decreased, suggesting that eye metrics can serve as an indicator of mental fatigue