Assessment Feedback Using Comment Banks: A Useful Approach?

The workload of any academic can be challenging, with a plethora of activities and conflicting priorities. This paper provides an analysis of one of the most time-consuming of teaching roles; the assessment of student work. It begins with a literature review identifying the role of assessment and assessment feedback, and identifies best-practice in assessment feedback. A method of generating high quality feedback efficiently through the use of IT and comment banks has then been critiqued. The method proposed here has been trialled on a large cohort of students and feedback gleaned through two focus groups. Students demonstrated clear preference for feedback generated through the proposed method, and the time savings to academics are dramatic

On The Capacity of Surfaces in Manifolds with Nonnegative Scalar Curvature

Given a surface in an asymptotically flat 3-manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature, we derive an upper bound for the capacity of the surface in terms of the area of the surface and the Willmore functional of the surface. The capacity of a surface is defined to be the energy of the harmonic function which equals 0 on the surface and goes to 1 at infinity. Even in the special case of Euclidean space, this is a new estimate. More generally, equality holds precisely for a spherically symmetric sphere in a spatial Schwarzschild 3-manifold. As applications, we obtain inequalities relating the capacity of the surface to the Hawking mass of the surface and the total mass of the asymptotically flat manifold.Comment: 18 page

Retail Innovation - The never-ending road to success? A critical analysis of pitfalls and opportunities

This paper outlines the current and continuous changes occurring in the retail and social environment that necessitate the constant evolution of retail formats. Over recent years experiential retail formats have appeared in recognition of the increasing need to ‘entertain’ shoppers and satisfy their ‘leisure’ needs. A number of ‘best practice’ examples of such retail innovation have been presented. While such experiential innovations appear to be the ‘holy grail’ of modern retailing, they often require considerable investments of both capital and management time. This paper has used an autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the constraints and costs involved in the design, construction and operation of such a retail enterprise to provide a unique and holistic assessment of the benefits and challenges experiential innovation holds in developing new retail formats and initiatives. The findings from this research highlight a number of previously unreported pitfalls that are likely to be encountered, financially, operationally and symbolically. It is recommended that retailers continue to explore experiential innovations, but that they proceed with caution

Consumer Behaviour Theory: Approaches and Models

Critique of the various approaches that have been taken towards the study of Consumer Behaviou

Zero area singularities in general relativity and inverse mean curvature flow

First we restate the definition of a Zero Area Singularity, recently introduced by H. Bray. We then consider several definitions of mass for these singularities. We use the Inverse Mean Curvature Flow to prove some new results about the mass of a singularity, the ADM mass of the manifold, and the capacity of the singularity.Comment: 13 page

Dynamics of kinks in the Ginzburg-Landau equation: Approach to a metastable shape and collapse of embedded pairs of kinks

We consider initial data for the real Ginzburg-Landau equation having two widely separated zeros. We require these initial conditions to be locally close to a stationary solution (the ``kink'' solution) except for a perturbation supported in a small interval between the two kinks. We show that such a perturbation vanishes on a time scale much shorter than the time scale for the motion of the kinks. The consequences of this bound, in the context of earlier studies of the dynamics of kinks in the Ginzburg-Landau equation, [ER], are as follows: we consider initial conditions $v_0$ whose restriction to a bounded interval $I$ have several zeros, not too regularly spaced, and other zeros of $v_0$ are very far from $I$. We show that all these zeros eventually disappear by colliding with each other. This relaxation process is very slow: it takes a time of order exponential of the length of $I$