3,663 research outputs found
Engaging Student Veterans as Researchers: Libraries Initiating Campus Collaborations
Student veteran enrollment in higher education has increased significantly following the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Molina & Morse, 2015). The professional literature of academic libraries includes several examples of outreach to this growing population, most of which involve marketing to student veterans differently, customizing existing services and spaces for student veterans, and honoring student veterans for their military service. But reaching out to student veterans can be difficult. Student veterans frequently have work and family responsibilities competing for their time and attention, and, as outreach librarian and former Army sergeant Sarah LeMire notes in her 2015 ACRL contributed paper, they are often reluctant to participate in programs that make them seem more needy than other students. We expanded our library’s outreach to student veterans by hosting a symposium for student veterans to present their research projects. This approach is distinctive insofar as we address potential participants foremost as competent researchers, emphasizing their strengths rather than their needs. We also collaborated with various campus offices to integrate student veteran researchers into campus-wide research showcase events. This paper shares strategies for working with student veteran researchers and for securing buy-in among relevant campus stakeholders
A Transition State Theory for Calculating Hopping Times and Diffusion in Highly Confined Fluids
Monte Carlo simulation is used to study the dynamical crossover from single
file diffusion to normal diffusion in fluids confined to narrow channels. We
show that the long time diffusion coefficients for a series of systems
involving hard and soft interaction potentials can be described in terms of a
hopping time that measures the time it takes for a particle to escape the cage
formed by its neighbors in the pore. Free energy barriers for the particle
hopping process are calculated and used to show that transition state theory
effectively describes the hopping time for all the systems studied, over a
range of pore diameters. Our work suggests that the combination of hopping
times and transition state theory offers a useful and general framework to
describe the dynamics of these highly confined fluids.Comment: 6 figure
On the potential of the EChO mission to characterise gas giant atmospheres
Space telescopes such as EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) and
JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) will be important for the future study of
extrasolar planet atmospheres. Both of these missions are capable of performing
high sensitivity spectroscopic measurements at moderate resolutions in the
visible and infrared, which will allow the characterisation of atmospheric
properties using primary and secondary transit spectroscopy. We use the NEMESIS
radiative transfer and retrieval tool (Irwin et al. 2008, Lee et al. 2012) to
explore the potential of the proposed EChO mission to solve the retrieval
problem for a range of H2-He planets orbiting different stars. We find that
EChO should be capable of retrieving temperature structure to ~200 K precision
and detecting H2O, CO2 and CH4 from a single eclipse measurement for a hot
Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star and a hot Neptune orbiting an M star, also
providing upper limits on CO and NH3. We provide a table of retrieval
precisions for these quantities in each test case. We expect around 30
Jupiter-sized planets to be observable by EChO; hot Neptunes orbiting M dwarfs
are rarer, but we anticipate observations of at least one similar planet.Comment: 22 pages, 30 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Magnetic phase transitions in Ta/CoFeB/MgO multilayers
We study thin films and magnetic tunnel junction nanopillars based on
Ta/CoFeB/MgO multilayers by electrical transport and
magnetometry measurements. These measurements suggest that an ultrathin
magnetic oxide layer forms at the CoFeB/MgO interface. At
approximately 160 K, the oxide undergoes a phase transition from an insulating
antiferromagnet at low temperatures to a conductive weak ferromagnet at high
temperatures. This interfacial magnetic oxide is expected to have significant
impact on the magnetic properties of CoFeB-based multilayers used in spin
torque memories
Exoplanet atmospheres with EChO: spectral retrievals using EChOSim
We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Exoplanet Characterisation
Observatory mission concept for constraining the atmospheric properties of hot
and warm gas giants and super Earths. Synthetic primary and secondary transit
spectra for a range of planets are passed through EChOSim (Waldmann & Pascale
2014) to obtain the expected level of noise for different observational
scenarios; these are then used as inputs for the NEMESIS atmospheric retrieval
code and the retrieved atmospheric properties (temperature structure,
composition and cloud properties) compared with the known input values,
following the method of Barstow et al. (2013a). To correctly retrieve the
temperature structure and composition of the atmosphere to within 2 {\sigma},
we find that we require: a single transit or eclipse of a hot Jupiter orbiting
a sun-like (G2) star at 35 pc to constrain the terminator and dayside
atmospheres; 20 transits or eclipses of a warm Jupiter orbiting a similar star;
10 transits/eclipses of a hot Neptune orbiting an M dwarf at 6 pc; and 30
transits or eclipses of a GJ1214b-like planet.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, 1 table. Accepted by Experimental Astronomy.
The final publication will shortly be available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10686-014-9397-
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The Index Of Narrative Microstructure: A Clinical Tool For Analyzing School-Age Children's Narrative Performances
Purpose: This research was conducted to develop a clinical tool-the Index of Narrative Microstructure (INMIS)-that would parsimoniously account for important microstructural aspects of narrative production for school-age children. The study provides field test age- and grade-based INMIS values to aid clinicians in making normative judgments about microstructural aspects of pupils' narrative performance. Method: Narrative samples using a single-picture elicitation context were collected from 250 children age 5-12 years and then transcribed and segmented into T-units. A T-unit consists of a single main clause and any dependent constituents. The narrative transcripts were then coded and analyzed to document a comprehensive set of microstructural indices. Results: Factor analysis indicated that narrative microstructure consisted of 2 moderately related factors. The Productivity factor primarily comprised measures of word output, lexical diversity, and T-unit output. The Complexity factor comprised measures of syntactic organization, with mean length of T-units in words and proportion of complex T-units loading most strongly. Principal components analysis was used to provide a linear combination of 8 variables to approximate the 2 factors. Formulas for calculating a student's performance on the 2 factors using 8 narrative measures are provided. Conclusions: This study provided a method for professionals to calculate INMIS scores for narrative Productivity and Complexity for comparison against field test data for age (5- to 12-year-old) or grade (kindergarten to Grade 6) groupings. INMIS scores complement other tools in evaluating a child's narrative performance specifically and language abilities more generally.Communication Sciences and Disorder
Correct composition of dephased behavioural models
This research is supported by EPSRC grant EP/M014290/1.Scenarios of execution are commonly used to specify partial behaviour and interactions between different objects and components in a system. To avoid overall inconsistency in specifications, various automated methods have emerged in the literature to compose (behavioural) models. In recent work, we have shown how the theorem prover Isabelle can be combined with the constraint solver Z3 to efficiently detect inconsistencies in two or more behavioural models and, in their absence, generate the composition. Here, we extend our approach further and show how to generate the correct composition (as a set of valid traces) of dephased models. This work has been inspired by a problem from a medical domain where different care pathways (for chronic conditions) may be applied to the same patient with different starting points.Postprin
Personality, Resilience, Self-Regulation and Cognitive Ability Relevant to Teacher Selection
The current study uses social judgment theory to inform the design of processes to be used in selecting teachers for training programs. Developing a comprehensive selection process to identify individuals who are likely to succeed as teachers is a mechanism for improving teacher quality and raising the profile of the profession. The design of such a process requires the identification of qualities of effective teaching that can be assessed at selection, and their relative importance. Six psychological constructs are identified from previous literature that are likely to differentiate between teaching candidates – Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Resilience, Self-Regulation and Cognitive Ability. 90 participants judged the likely success of 35 hypothetical teaching candidates. All included constructs were positively related to candidate selection, with Cognitive Ability the most valued attribute. Individuals clustered into three groups – one characterized by a dominant preference for candidates with high cognitive ability, another characterized by a relative preference for people with high personality scores, agreeableness in particular, and a third characterized by a strong preference for candidates with high self-regulation and resilience. Further research is required to validate the current findings; however, they lend support to the use of all six constructs in teacher selection, particularly cognitive ability
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