Good images, effective messages? Working with students and educators on academic practice understanding

Work at Northumbria University has focussed on activity that extends opportunities for students to engage directly with the skills development necessary for sound academic practice. This has included highly visual campaigns on the "Plagiarism trap", providing access to Turnitin plagiarism detection software, guides and sessions to highlight use of associated referencing tools. Sessions on a variety of topics, such as supporting study skills and reading originality reports, have been provided for students on taught, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This provision has included students working on collaborative partners' sites and also those on research programmes. Alongside the activities with students, "designing out" approaches have been embedded in staff development within the educator community at Northumbria. Formative use of Turnitin is integrated throughout programmes and academic practice development is formally recognised within the University Learning and Teaching Strategy's focus on information literacy. This article outlines and reviews these activities in a critical institutional context and evaluates responses from a variety of students and educators to determine how effective these measures have been

A Relation Between Approaches to Integrability in Superconformal Yang-Mills Theory

We make contact between the infinite-dimensional non-local symmetry of the typeIIB superstring on AdS5xS5 worldsheet theory and a non-abelian infinite-dimensional symmetry algebra for the weakly coupled superconformal gauge theory. We explain why the planar limit of the one-loop dilatation operator is the Hamiltonian of a spin chain, and show that it commutes with the g*2 N = 0 limit of the non-abelian charges.Comment: 19 pages, harvma

Multicloud solutions with massless and massive monopoles

Certain spontaneously broken gauge theories contain massless magnetic monopoles. These are realized classically as clouds of non-Abelian fields surrounding one or more massive monopoles. In order to gain a better understanding of these clouds, we study BPS solutions with four massive and six massless monopoles in an SU(6) gauge theory. We develop an algebraic procedure, based on the Nahm construction, that relates these solutions to previously known examples. Explicit implementation of this procedure for a number of limiting cases reveals that the six massless monopoles condense into four distinct clouds, of two different types. By analyzing these limiting solutions, we clarify the correspondence between clouds and massless monopoles, and infer a set of rules that describe the conditions under which a finite size cloud can be formed. Finally, we identify the parameters entering the general solution and describe their physical significance.Comment: 58 pages, 5 figure

An assessment of animal welfare impacts in wild Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) management

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) are considered one of the most significant vertebrate pests globally, because of their impacts on human and animal health. There are legal and moral obligations to minimise the impacts of wildlife management on animal welfare, yet there are few data on the relative welfare impacts of rat trapping and baiting methods used in the UK with which to inform management decisions. Two stakeholder workshops were facilitated to assess the relative welfare impacts of six lethal rat management methods using a welfare assessment model. Fifteen stakeholders including experts in wildlife management, rodent management, rodent biology, animal welfare science, and veterinary science and medicine, participated. The greatest welfare impacts were associated with three baiting methods, anticoagulants, cholecalciferol and non-toxic cellulose baits (severe to extreme impact for days), and with capture on a glue trap (extreme for hours) with concussive killing (mild to moderate for seconds to minutes); these methods should be considered last resorts from a welfare perspective. Lower impacts were associated with cage trapping (moderate to severe for hours) with concussive killing (moderate for minutes). The impact of snap trapping was highly variable (no impact to extreme for seconds to minutes). Snap traps should be regulated and tested to identify those that cause rapid unconsciousness; such traps might represent the most welfare-friendly option assessed for killing rats. Our results can be used to integrate consideration of rat welfare alongside other factors, including cost, efficacy, safety, non-target animal welfare and public acceptability when selecting management methods. We also highlight ways of reducing welfare impacts and areas where more data are needed

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02

Star clusters near and far; tracing star formation across cosmic time

© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00690-x.Star clusters are fundamental units of stellar feedback and unique tracers of their host galactic properties. In this review, we will first focus on their constituents, i.e.\ detailed insight into their stellar populations and their surrounding ionised, warm, neutral, and molecular gas. We, then, move beyond the Local Group to review star cluster populations at various evolutionary stages, and in diverse galactic environmental conditions accessible in the local Universe. At high redshift, where conditions for cluster formation and evolution are more extreme, we are only able to observe the integrated light of a handful of objects that we believe will become globular clusters. We therefore discuss how numerical and analytical methods, informed by the observed properties of cluster populations in the local Universe, are used to develop sophisticated simulations potentially capable of disentangling the genetic map of galaxy formation and assembly that is carried by globular cluster populations.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Meta-analysis of type 2 Diabetes in African Americans Consortium

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is more prevalent in African Americans than in Europeans. However, little is known about the genetic risk in African Americans despite the recent identification of more than 70 T2D loci primarily by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in individuals of European ancestry. In order to investigate the genetic architecture of T2D in African Americans, the MEta-analysis of type 2 DIabetes in African Americans (MEDIA) Consortium examined 17 GWAS on T2D comprising 8,284 cases and 15,543 controls in African Americans in stage 1 analysis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) association analysis was conducted in each study under the additive model after adjustment for age, sex, study site, and principal components. Meta-analysis of approximately 2.6 million genotyped and imputed SNPs in all studies was conducted using an inverse variance-weighted fixed effect model. Replications were performed to follow up 21 loci in up to 6,061 cases and 5,483 controls in African Americans, and 8,130 cases and 38,987 controls of European ancestry. We identified three known loci (TCF7L2, HMGA2 and KCNQ1) and two novel loci (HLA-B and INS-IGF2) at genome-wide significance (4.15 × 10(-94)<P<5 × 10(-8), odds ratio (OR)  = 1.09 to 1.36). Fine-mapping revealed that 88 of 158 previously identified T2D or glucose homeostasis loci demonstrated nominal to highly significant association (2.2 × 10(-23) < locus-wide P<0.05). These novel and previously identified loci yielded a sibling relative risk of 1.19, explaining 17.5% of the phenotypic variance of T2D on the liability scale in African Americans. Overall, this study identified two novel susceptibility loci for T2D in African Americans. A substantial number of previously reported loci are transferable to African Americans after accounting for linkage disequilibrium, enabling fine mapping of causal variants in trans-ethnic meta-analysis studies.Peer reviewe

Operation and performance of the ATLAS semiconductor tracker

The semiconductor tracker is a silicon microstrip detector forming part of the inner tracking system of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The operation and performance of the semiconductor tracker during the first years of LHC running are described. More than 99% of the detector modules were operational during this period, with an average intrinsic hit efficiency of (99.74±0.04)%. The evolution of the noise occupancy is discussed, and measurements of the Lorentz angle, δ-ray production and energy loss presented. The alignment of the detector is found to be stable at the few-micron level over long periods of time. Radiation damage measurements, which include the evolution of detector leakage currents, are found to be consistent with predictions and are used in the verification of radiation background simulations