Students' Engagement during Collection of Attendance: An Experience of a Pilot Study

In many medical colleges in India, the annual intake for an undergraduate course is 250. Recording attendance of 250 students is a humongous task. It involves an average of 8.93 ± 1.06 minutes, which is approximately 15% of the total time of the one-hour lecture. During this time, students commonly sit idly while waiting for their roll number call. Interestingly, continuous calling of 250 roll numbers at a stretch is an additional voice stress to the teachers. With this background, we designed a program – students’ engagement during collection of attendance (SEdCA). A comprehension test about the lecture topic was conducted in five minutes, and the answer sheets were collected in the next three minutes. These answer sheets were then scanned (i.e., looked at all parts of answer sheets) for roll numbers and were recorded in the register. This method keeps the students engaged in an academic activity during the time of attendance recording. It also helps in reduction of voice stress to the teachers. This method of attendance collection may be adapted by institutions according to available logistics especially when their student’s strength is more than 250

Global NLO Analysis of Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions

Nuclear parton distribution functions (NPDFs) are determined by a global analysis of experimental measurements on structure-function ratios F_2^A/F_2^{A'} and Drell-Yan cross section ratios \sigma_{DY}^A/\sigma_{DY}^{A'}, and their uncertainties are estimated by the Hessian method. The NPDFs are obtained in both leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) of \alpha_s. As a result, valence-quark distributions are relatively well determined, whereas antiquark distributions at x>0.2 and gluon distributions in the whole x region have large uncertainties. The NLO uncertainties are slightly smaller than the LO ones; however, such a NLO improvement is not as significant as the nucleonic case.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps files, to be published in the AIP proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Neutrino Factories, Superbeams and Betabeams (NuFact07), Okayama, Japan, August 6 - 11, 2007. A code for calculating our nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties can be obtained from http://research.kek.jp/people/kumanos/nuclp.htm