Preparation of assessment, learning and teaching materials for dyslexic students that benefit all students: presentation of results from an empirical study

The purpose of this paper is to present results from empirical research with dyslexic students in Higher Education that focuses on the impact of dyslexia on the study of computing. HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) statistics suggest that Computer Science is one of the subjects to which dyslexic students are attracted. This study was motivated by the question as to whether there might be anything particular about the discipline of computer programming that makes it either beneficial or problematic for dyslexic students. In addition, we were also interested in dyslexic students' general experience of assessment, learning and teaching, as well as their views of proposed accessibility guidelines. The Greek word 'dyslexia' means 'difficulty with words'. The British Dyslexia Association (2007) describes dyslexia as “a combination of abilities and difficulties that affect the learning process in one or more of reading, spelling and writing”. Dyslexic students are a substantial and growing proportion of the overall student population, for whom learning materials should be made accessible. It is argued that good practice in approaches in assessment learning and teaching for disabled students is generally good practice for all students (Brown, Adams, 2006). Many of the adjustments, such as well prepared handouts, instructions given in writing as well as verbally, notes put on-line, and variety and flexibility in forms of assessment, are simply good teaching and learning practices from which all students can benefit

Comment on and Erratum to "Pressure of Hot QCD at Large N_f"

We repeat and correct the recent calculation of the thermodynamic potential of hot QCD in the limit of large number N_f of fermions. The new result for the thermal pressure turns out to agree significantly better with results obtained from perturbation theory at small coupling. For large coupling, a nonmonotonic behaviour is reproduced, but the pressure of the strongly coupled theory does not exceed the free pressure as long as the Landau pole ambiguity remains negligible numerically.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, JHEP3; v2: version accepted for publication in JHEP (title changed, 1 footnote added, 1 reference updated, content otherwise unchanged

Sphaleron Transition Rate in Presence of Dynamical Fermions

We investigate the effect of dynamical fermions on the sphaleron transition rate at finite temperature for the Abelian Higgs model in one spatial dimension. The fermion degrees of freedom are included through bosonization. Using a numerical simulation, we find that massless fermions do not change the rate within the measurement accuracy. Surprisingly, the exponential dependence of the sphaleron energy on the Yukawa coupling is not borne out by the transition rate, which shows a very weak dependence on the fermion mass.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX, psfi

Next-to-Leading Order Shear Viscosity in lambda phi^4 Theory

We show that the shear viscosity of lambda phi^4 theory is sensitive at next-to-leading order to soft physics, which gives rise to subleading corrections suppressed by only a half power of the coupling, eta = [3033.54 + 1548.3 m_{th}/T] N T^3]/[ (N+2)/3 lambda^2], with m^2_th=(N+2)/72 lambda T^2. The series appears to converge about as well (or badly) as the series for the pressure.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Typos fixed, tiny change in discussio

Limits on Lorentz Violation from the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays

We place several new limits on Lorentz violating effects, which can modify particles' dispersion relations, by considering the highest energy cosmic rays observed. Since these are hadrons, this involves considering the partonic content of such cosmic rays. We get a number of bounds on differences in maximum propagation speeds, which are typically bounded at the 10^{-21} level, and on momentum dependent dispersion corrections of the form v = 1 +- p^2/Lambda^2, which typically bound Lambda > 10^{21} GeV, well above the Planck scale. For (CPT violating) dispersion correction of the form v = 1 + p/Lambda, the bounds are up to 15 orders of magnitude beyond the Planck scale.Comment: 24 pages, no figures. Added references, very slight changes. Version published in Physical Review

Heavy Rainfall Warning Assessment Tool User Guide. Version 1.2

This report is a User Guide to a PC tool for assessing Heavy Rainfall Warnings. Development of the PC tool formed an important operational output of the Environment Agency and Met Office funded project: "Development of Rainfall Forecast Performance Monitoring Criteria. Phase 1: Development of Methodology and Algorithms" (Jones et al., 2003). The Heavy Rainfall Warning (HRW) Assessment Tool is a toolkit for Microsoft Excel. The tool allows the user to configure an assessment framework for a particular format of Heavy Rainfall Warning, enter and save data for forecasts and ground-truths, and generate a range of performance measures and other statistics for new and previously saved data. Summary tables are presented using Excel's PivotTable feature, from which charts can also be generated. Performance measures are provided to assess forecasts of heavy rainfall in continuous variable, categorical and probability form: these include bias, rmse, R-squared Efficiency, skill scores and the Continuous Brier Score

Effect of reheating on electroweak baryogenesis

The latent heat released during the expansion of bubbles in the electroweak phase transition reheats the plasma and causes the bubble growth to slow down. This decrease of the bubble wall velocity affects the result of electroweak baryogenesis. Since the efficiency of baryogenesis peaks for a wall velocity $\sim 10^{-2}$, the resulting baryon asymmetry can either be enhanced or suppressed, depending on the initial value of the wall velocity. We calculate the evolution of the phase transition taking into account the release of latent heat. We find that, although in the SM the baryon production is enhanced by this effect, in the MSSM it causes a suppression to the final baryon asymmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. References added. Revised version to be published in Phys.Rev.