The metallography of fatigue in high strength alluminium alloys

Imperial Users onl

Student experiences and perceptions of digital literacy skills development: engaging learners by design?

In the current digital environment, it is vital for learners to develop digital literacy skills. The UK?s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (HE) requires graduates to demonstrate digital literacy. Employers consider these skills essential. With the high cost of HE in the UK, learners themselves also expect university courses to demonstrate relevance to the workplace. Nevertheless, some learners may not fully engage in digital literacy skills development, instead concentrating on the subject-specific content of their modules. The Faculty of Health & Social Care (FH&SC) at the UK?s Open University uses different approaches to digital literacy skills development, based on skills resources that are either ?generic? (usable by any FH&SC module) or module specific. By exploring student experiences of digital literacy skills development, we aim to understand what motivates learners to engage with the skills content of their module. We collected data from online questionnaires and interviews involving learners from three modules and present findings from an analysis of the quantitative questionnaire data, supported by qualitative interview data, where relevant. We look at learner perceptions and engagement in relation to the demographic factors gender, age, previous education, disability and financial status and whether these factors influence individual learner preferences for learning design, such as use of generic resources versus contextualisation of skills activities within the module. We aim to identify good practice in learning design and what demographic factors need to be considered to support individual learners appropriately, and so optimise engagement

Tracheid Differentiation in Southern Pines During the Dormant Season

The differentiation of last-formed xylem tracheids of loblolly (Pinus taeda) and slash (P. elliottii) pines was followed during the overwinter dormant period in the upper Piedmont of South Carolina. Tissue samples taken from the outer portion of the stem of a poletimber-sized tree of each species in November and March were examined microscopically and tracheid transverse cell-wall thickness was measured. Cell double-wall thickness was compared between the two dormant season samples and with that of the previous year's cells of the same radial file. The comparison of cell-wall thickness indicated that the last-formed latewood cells of the annual ring continued to deposit cell-wall material through March and quite possibly into the following spring

The VLQ Calorimeter of H1 at HERA: A Highly Compact Device for Measurements of Electrons and Photons under Very Small Scattering Angles

In 1998, the detector H1 at HERA has been equipped with a small backward spectrometer, the Very Low Q^2 (VLQ) spectrometer comprising a silicon tracker, a tungsten - scintillator sandwich calorimeter, and a Time-of-Flight system. The spectrometer was designed to measure electrons scattered under very low angles, equivalent to very low squared four - momentum transfers Q^2, and high energy photons with good energy and spatial resolution. The VLQ was in operation during the 1999 and 2000 run periods. This paper describes the design and construction of the VLQ calorimeter, a compact device with a fourfold projective energy read-out, and its performance during test runs and in the experiment.Comment: 32 pages, 25 figures, 2 tables (To be submitted to Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A

Comment on Breakup Densities of Hot Nuclei

In [1,2]the observed decrease in spectral peak energies of IMFs emitted from hot nuclei was interpreted in terms of a breakup density that decreased with increasing energy. Subsequently, Raduta et al. [3] performed MMM simulations that showed decreasing spectral peaks could be obtained at constant density. In this letter we examine this apparent inconsistency.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl