Lecturer Attitudes Towards Teacher Trainees in a New South Wales College - 1955 and 1985

All who have worked in teacher education institutions for any length of time will know that significant changes have occurred in the way in which lecturers relate to their students and the sorts of behaviour which they expect from them. One hears lecturers speak of the good old days , especially when irritated by some particularly liberal student behaviour or some seemingly cavalier student attitude, but it would be unusual to find someone who genuinely believes that the old days were better than the new . It occurred to us that it would be an interesting exercise to look at some of the changes which have taken place in lecturer-student relationships over the years. We have chosen Armidale College of AdYanced Education as the subject of our discussion. simply because of our long association with it. No doubt, peculiarities of this College, especially in its residential aspects, would not apply to some other institutions but we feel that the general trends and directions we discuss will be common to all teacher education institutions in New South Wales and, quite possibly, to others throughout Australia. The year 1955, apart from being a neat thirty years (or one generation) from the present, also has a special significance. Both of us were at the College in that year, one as a lecturer and the other as a student. W\u27e have both been closely associated with it in one way or another ever since and the observations we make are based on first hand experience. In our discussion, we concentrate on four aspects of the past and present functioning of Armidale College. We examine each of these aspects in turn and then try to offer some possible explanations for the changes that have taken place over the last thirty years

Random pinning limits the size of membrane adhesion domains

Theoretical models describing specific adhesion of membranes predict (for certain parameters) a macroscopic phase separation of bonds into adhesion domains. We show that this behavior is fundamentally altered if the membrane is pinned randomly due to, e.g., proteins that anchor the membrane to the cytoskeleton. Perturbations which locally restrict membrane height fluctuations induce quenched disorder of the random-field type. This rigorously prevents the formation of macroscopic adhesion domains following the Imry-Ma argument [Y. Imry and S. K. Ma, Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1399 (1975)]. Our prediction of random-field disorder follows from analytical calculations, and is strikingly confirmed in large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. These simulations are based on an efficient composite Monte Carlo move, whereby membrane height and bond degrees of freedom are updated simultaneously in a single move. The application of this move should prove rewarding for other systems also.Comment: revised and extended versio

Obesity-induced changes in lipid mediators persist after weight loss.

BackgroundObesity induces significant changes in lipid mediators, however, the extent to which these changes persist after weight loss has not been investigated.Subjects/methodsWe fed C57BL6 mice a high-fat diet to generate obesity and then switched the diet to a lower-fat diet to induce weight loss. We performed a comprehensive metabolic profiling of lipid mediators including oxylipins, endocannabinoids, sphingosines and ceramides in key metabolic tissues (including adipose, liver, muscle and hypothalamus) and plasma.ResultsWe found that changes induced by obesity were largely reversible in most metabolic tissues but the adipose tissue retained a persistent obese metabolic signature. Prostaglandin signaling was perturbed in the obese state and lasting increases in PGD2, and downstream metabolites 15-deoxy PGJ2 and delta-12-PGJ2 were observed after weight loss. Furthermore expression of the enzyme responsible for PGD2 synthesis (hematopoietic prostaglandin D synthase, HPGDS) was increased in obese adipose tissues and remained high after weight loss. We found that inhibition of HPGDS over the course of 5 days resulted in decreased food intake in mice. Increased HPGDS expression was also observed in human adipose tissues obtained from obese compared with lean individuals. We then measured circulating levels of PGD2 in obese patients before and after weight loss and found that while elevated relative to lean subjects, levels of this metabolite did not decrease after significant weight loss.ConclusionsThese results suggest that lasting changes in lipid mediators induced by obesity, still present after weight loss, may play a role in the biological drive to regain weight

Quantifying structure in networks

We investigate exponential families of random graph distributions as a framework for systematic quantification of structure in networks. In this paper we restrict ourselves to undirected unlabeled graphs. For these graphs, the counts of subgraphs with no more than k links are a sufficient statistics for the exponential families of graphs with interactions between at most k links. In this framework we investigate the dependencies between several observables commonly used to quantify structure in networks, such as the degree distribution, cluster and assortativity coefficients.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure

Accelerated Born-Infeld Metrics in Kerr-Schild Geometry

We consider Einstein Born-Infeld theory with a null fluid in Kerr-Schild Geometry. We find accelerated charge solutions of this theory. Our solutions reduce to the Plebanski solution when the acceleration vanishes and to the Bonnor-Vaidya solution as the Born-Infeld parameter b goes to infinity. We also give the explicit form of the energy flux formula due to the acceleration of the charged sources.Comment: Latex file (12 pp

Complex Kerr Geometry and Nonstationary Kerr Solutions

In the frame of the Kerr-Schild approach, we consider the complex structure of Kerr geometry which is determined by a complex world line of a complex source. The real Kerr geometry is represented as a real slice of this complex structure. The Kerr geometry is generalized to the nonstationary case when the current geometry is determined by a retarded time and is defined by a retarded-time construction via a given complex world line of source. A general exact solution corresponding to arbitrary motion of a spinning source is obtained. The acceleration of the source is accompanied by a lightlike radiation along the principal null congruence. It generalizes to the rotating case the known Kinnersley class of "photon rocket" solutions.Comment: v.3, revtex, 16 pages, one eps-figure, final version (to appear in PRD), added the relation to twistors and algorithm of numerical computations, English is correcte

Realistic spin glasses below eight dimensions: a highly disordered view

By connecting realistic spin glass models at low temperature to the highly disordered model at zero temperature, we argue that ordinary Edwards-Anderson spin glasses below eight dimensions have at most a single pair of physically relevant pure states at nonzero low temperature. Less likely scenarios that evade this conclusion are also discussed.Comment: 18 pages (RevTeX; 1 figure; to appear in Physical Review E

Network robustness and fragility: Percolation on random graphs

Recent work on the internet, social networks, and the power grid has addressed the resilience of these networks to either random or targeted deletion of network nodes. Such deletions include, for example, the failure of internet routers or power transmission lines. Percolation models on random graphs provide a simple representation of this process, but have typically been limited to graphs with Poisson degree distribution at their vertices. Such graphs are quite unlike real world networks, which often possess power-law or other highly skewed degree distributions. In this paper we study percolation on graphs with completely general degree distribution, giving exact solutions for a variety of cases, including site percolation, bond percolation, and models in which occupation probabilities depend on vertex degree. We discuss the application of our theory to the understanding of network resilience.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices

We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as "modularity" over possible divisions of a network. Here we show that this maximization process can be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix we call the modularity matrix, which plays a role in community detection similar to that played by the graph Laplacian in graph partitioning calculations. This result leads us to a number of possible algorithms for detecting community structure, as well as several other results, including a spectral measure of bipartite structure in networks and a new centrality measure that identifies those vertices that occupy central positions within the communities to which they belong. The algorithms and measures proposed are illustrated with applications to a variety of real-world complex networks.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, minor corrections in this versio

Ultra-Slow Vacancy-Mediated Tracer Diffusion in Two Dimensions: The Einstein Relation Verified

We study the dynamics of a charged tracer particle (TP) on a two-dimensional lattice all sites of which except one (a vacancy) are filled with identical neutral, hard-core particles. The particles move randomly by exchanging their positions with the vacancy, subject to the hard-core exclusion. In case when the charged TP experiences a bias due to external electric field ${\bf E}$, (which favors its jumps in the preferential direction), we determine exactly the limiting probability distribution of the TP position in terms of appropriate scaling variables and the leading large-N ($n$ being the discrete time) behavior of the TP mean displacement $\bar{{\bf X}}_n$; the latter is shown to obey an anomalous, logarithmic law $|\bar{{\bf X}}_n| = \alpha_0(|{\bf E}|) \ln(n)$. On comparing our results with earlier predictions by Brummelhuis and Hilhorst (J. Stat. Phys. {\bf 53}, 249 (1988)) for the TP diffusivity $D_n$ in the unbiased case, we infer that the Einstein relation $\mu_n = \beta D_n$ between the TP diffusivity and the mobility $\mu_n = \lim_{|{\bf E}| \to 0}(|\bar{{\bf X}}_n|/| {\bf E} |n)$ holds in the leading in $n$ order, despite the fact that both $D_n$ and $\mu_n$ are not constant but vanish as $n \to \infty$. We also generalize our approach to the situation with very small but finite vacancy concentration $\rho$, in which case we find a ballistic-type law $|\bar{{\bf X}}_n| = \pi \alpha_0(|{\bf E}|) \rho n$. We demonstrate that here, again, both $D_n$ and $\mu_n$, calculated in the linear in $\rho$ approximation, do obey the Einstein relation.Comment: 25 pages, one figure, TeX, submitted to J. Stat. Phy