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

A study of the temporal changes recorded by ERTS and their geological significance

The temporal changes that are recorded by ERTS were evaluated for an area around Bathurst Inlet in the North West Territories. The seasons represented by the images included: early winter, spring, early summer, summer, and fall. Numerous surface characteristics (vegetation, drainage patterns, surface texture, lineament systems and topographic relief, etc.) were used to relate the change in observable features with the different seasons. It was found that the time of year when an observation is made has a strong control over the amount and type of information that can be derived by an experienced interpreter. It was concluded that a detailed study of temporal changes is an important part of any ERTS interpretation for geology

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

The Grow-Shrink strategy for learning Markov network structures constrained by context-specific independences

Markov networks are models for compactly representing complex probability distributions. They are composed by a structure and a set of numerical weights. The structure qualitatively describes independences in the distribution, which can be exploited to factorize the distribution into a set of compact functions. A key application for learning structures from data is to automatically discover knowledge. In practice, structure learning algorithms focused on "knowledge discovery" present a limitation: they use a coarse-grained representation of the structure. As a result, this representation cannot describe context-specific independences. Very recently, an algorithm called CSPC was designed to overcome this limitation, but it has a high computational complexity. This work tries to mitigate this downside presenting CSGS, an algorithm that uses the Grow-Shrink strategy for reducing unnecessary computations. On an empirical evaluation, the structures learned by CSGS achieve competitive accuracies and lower computational complexity with respect to those obtained by CSPC.Comment: 12 pages, and 8 figures. This works was presented in IBERAMIA 201

Money and happiness : rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction

Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings? Here we test a rank hypothesis, according to which people gain utility from the ranked position of their income within a comparison group. The rank hypothesis contrasts with traditional reference income hypotheses, which suggest utility from income depends on comparison to a social group reference norm. We find that the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, while absolute income and reference income have no effect. Furthermore, individuals weight upward comparisons more than downward comparisons. According to the rank hypothesis, income and utility are not directly linked: Increasing an individual’s income will only increase their utility if ranked position also increases and will necessarily reduce the utility of others who will lose rank