Maximizing Your Faculty\u27s Scholarly Impact: Techniques to Increase Findability

Increasing the impact of faculty scholarship is consistently a top priority at law schools. Law librarians are uniquely positioned to offer a significant amount of assistance to faculty and law administration in achieving this goal and enhancing the reputation of the law school. Understanding the differences between the tools and techniques available to assist on this topic can be a complex endeavor. This program focused on providing the best strategies to increase the impact of faculty scholarship. Speakers discussed the various social media platforms available to upload scholarship, as well as how to increase findability in search results and take advantage of online identification tools such as ORCID and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Audience members shared successful techniques from their own institutions. Takeaways: 1) Participants will assess the benefits and drawbacks of social media platforms for faculty scholarship, such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, SSRN, and others. 2) Participants will compare techniques to make an academic article more findable online via Google and other search engines. 3) Participants will engage with one another and evaluate strategies to promote faculty scholarship and enhance their institution\u27s reputation

Multiplayer Cost Games with Simple Nash Equilibria

Multiplayer games with selfish agents naturally occur in the design of distributed and embedded systems. As the goals of selfish agents are usually neither equivalent nor antagonistic to each other, such games are non zero-sum games. We study such games and show that a large class of these games, including games where the individual objectives are mean- or discounted-payoff, or quantitative reachability, and show that they do not only have a solution, but a simple solution. We establish the existence of Nash equilibria that are composed of k memoryless strategies for each agent in a setting with k agents, one main and k-1 minor strategies. The main strategy describes what happens when all agents comply, whereas the minor strategies ensure that all other agents immediately start to co-operate against the agent who first deviates from the plan. This simplicity is important, as rational agents are an idealisation. Realistically, agents have to decide on their moves with very limited resources, and complicated strategies that require exponential--or even non-elementary--implementations cannot realistically be implemented. The existence of simple strategies that we prove in this paper therefore holds a promise of implementability.Comment: 23 page

The 2011 Outburst of Recurrent Nova T Pyx: X-ray Observations Expose the White Dwarf Mass and Ejection Dynamics

The recurrent nova T Pyx underwent its sixth historical outburst in 2011, and became the subject of an intensive multi-wavelength observational campaign. We analyze data from the Swift and Suzaku satellites to produce a detailed X-ray light curve augmented by epochs of spectral information. X-ray observations yield mostly non-detections in the first four months of outburst, but both a super-soft and hard X-ray component rise rapidly after Day 115. The super-soft X-ray component, attributable to the photosphere of the nuclear-burning white dwarf, is relatively cool (~45 eV) and implies that the white dwarf in T Pyx is significantly below the Chandrasekhar mass (~1 M_sun). The late turn-on time of the super-soft component yields a large nova ejecta mass (>~10^-5 M_sun), consistent with estimates at other wavelengths. The hard X-ray component is well fit by a ~1 keV thermal plasma, and is attributed to shocks internal to the 2011 nova ejecta. The presence of a strong oxygen line in this thermal plasma on Day 194 requires a significantly super-solar abundance of oxygen and implies that the ejecta are polluted by white dwarf material. The X-ray light curve can be explained by a dual-phase ejection, with a significant delay between the first and second ejection phases, and the second ejection finally released two months after outburst. A delayed ejection is consistent with optical and radio observations of T Pyx, but the physical mechanism producing such a delay remains a mystery.Comment: Re-submitted to ApJ after revision

Enhancer control of MicroRNA miR-155 expression in EpsteinBarr virus-infected B cells

The oncogenic microRNA miR-155 is the most frequently upregulated miRNA in Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-positive B cell malignancies and is upregulated in other non-viral lymphomas. Both the EBV nuclear antigen 2 (EBNA2), and B cell transcription factor, interferon regulatory factor 4 (IRF4) are known to activate transcription of the host cell gene from which miR-155 is processed (miR-155HG, BIC). EBNA2 also activates IRF4 transcription indicating that EBV may upregulate miR-155 through direct and indirect mechanisms. The mechanism of transcriptional regulation of IRF4 and miR-155HG by EBNA2 however has not been defined. We demonstrate that EBNA2 can activate IRF4 and miR-155HG expression through specific upstream enhancers that are dependent on the Notch signaling transcription factor RBPJ, a known binding partner of EBNA2. We demonstrate that in addition to activation of the miR-155HG promoter, IRF4 can also activate miR-155HG via the upstream enhancer also targeted by EBNA2. Gene editing to remove the EBNA2- and IRF4-responsive miR-155HG enhancer located 60 kb upstream of miR-155HG led to reduced miR155HG expression in EBV-infected cells. Our data therefore demonstrate that specific RBPJ-dependent enhancers regulate the IRF4-miR-155 expression network and play a key role in the maintenance of miR-155 expression in EBV-infected B cells. These findings provide important insights that will improve our understanding of miR-155 control in B cell malignancies

Postgraduate Spotlights:Using a Community of Inquiry approach to enhance student engagement in geographical higher education

While the majority of pedagogical practice has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the teaching of geographical research skills has been especially difficult with the loss of fieldwork and practical applications. Furthermore, the move to online teaching has diminished the learning communities in face-to-face classrooms. In an attempt to counteract these issues, this paper reflects on a learning activity in an undergraduate geographical research methods course, ‘Postgraduate Spotlights’ where two postgraduate researchers presented their specialist research methods followed by an interactive question-and-answer session with the undergraduates. We (as postgraduates, undergraduates and teaching staff) found that the open and critical discussion in the workshop fostered a Community of Inquiry that encouraged engagement from students stimulating their curiosity about geographical research methods. Through our discussion, we demonstrate the importance of having postgraduate researchers involved in teaching, as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) given their liminal role of researcher-learner. We also emphasise the importance of letting the students lead their own learning, building a Community of Inquiry across academic stages, and creating a constructive dialogue around geographical research methods. While the reproducibility of the workshop face-to-face remains to be seen, this article emphasises the potential for applying such an approach to stimulate free-flowing discussion and ultimately promote a Community of Inquiry