Change management - practising what we teach: successfully engaging international students in the teaching, learning & assessment process

In this article we review processes of change in a module whose subject matter is change management. The module attracts mainly international students, and has suffered from uneven student engagement and performance. We will recount how a Teaching Enhancement and Student Success (TESS) project was used to inform our attempts to improve engagement and performance. Bearing in mind the origins of action research as part of Kurt Lewin‟s approach to planned change, we will use the four different elements of Lewin‟s work to reflect on the challenges we have been grappling with. The article will highlight different approaches to action research, which are linked to different aspirations as to the scope of change

Investigations into the pharmacodynamic effects of drugs used in the treatment of parasitic diseases in farm animals

1. QUINURONIUM SULPHATE.(a) Hypotension was produced by quinuronium in rat, guinea pig, chicken, rabbit and sheep. In the rat this hypotension was antagonised by mepyramine; in rabbits only by atropine; in sheep partially by both atropine and mepyramine. In guinea pig and chicken neither antagonist was effective.(b) Experiments on the blood vessels of the rabbit's ear showed a muscarinic effect of quinuronium, whereas plethysmo- graphic studies on the hind-limb and small intestine of the sheep showed that both histaminic and muscarinic factors were involved in the vascular actions, with the latter predominating.(c) Quinuronium stimulated both the rate and amplitude of contraction of the isolated heart of guinea pig and rabbit. The effect was not muscarinic, but in the absence of a suitable antagonist it was not possible to determine the extent this might have been due to histamine or to histamine-like activity. The stimulant effect of quinuronium on the isolated heart suggested that such a cardiac action could play little part in inducing hypotension and it was concluded that peripheral vaso-dilatation was probably the more important factor.(d) The contractions of the smooth muscle of the intestine and bladder by quinuronium appeared to be muscarinic and the 89. specific potentiating effect of this agent on the action of acetylcholine was evidence of anticholinesterase activity. The findings supported clinical evidence of defaecation end urination produced by quinuronium and antagonised by atropine.(e) Excessive salivation after quinuronium appeared to be attributable to muscarinic effects, whereas the stimulation of gastric secretion by quinuronium was not entirely muscarinic. The potentiating action of quinuronium on acid production induced by acetylcholine was indicative of anticholinesterase activity. It was clear that part of the action of quinuronium on gastric acid secretion in rats was not muscarinic, but in the absence of antagonists of the gastric effects of histamine it was not possible to show whether or not this other action was histaminic.(f) Small doses of quinuronium potentiated the contraction of supra-maximally stimulated skeletal muscle in chicken and rabbit, whereas larger doses produced a neuromuscular block apparently similar to that produced by d-tubocurarine. The effect of quinuronium in depressing respiration in these species was much greater than that of d-tubocurarine at doses which were equi-potent in producing neuromuscular block. This sugnested that respiratory depression of quinuronium was only partially accounted for by neuromuscular blockade.(g) Anticholinesterase activity was shown in whole blood in vitro in a wide variety of species and was confirmed in the live sheep. There was evidence of substrate reversal of the action of quinuronium in vitro, whereas in the living sheep the cholinesteras 90, enzyme did not return to completely normal activity for two weeks, which suggested a partial irreversibility. Sheep were hyper- susceptible to a second dose of quinuronium when this was given within two weeks of the first dose. A number of explanations were proposed. Studies with the cholinesterase "reactivator" pyridine 2-aldoxime methiodide indicated that this agent did not protect or alleviate whole blood cholinesterase inhibition by quinuronium.(h) Quinuronium was shown to liberate histamine from rat skin in vitro and from the skin of rats and mice in vivo. In the rat the evidence for histamina-induced hypotension and gastric acid secretion was substantiated by direct evidence for histamine release; and it seemed that released histamine was at least as important as muscarinic activity in this species. Direct evidence of histamine release from sheep diaphragm in vitro and indirect evidence from increased capillary permeability ("bluedye" test) and from mast cell disruption and degranulation indicate that histamine release is an important part in the overall pharmacodynamic activity of quinuronium in sheep.2. AMICARBALIDE.(a) Experiments with the isolated rabbit ear showed that amicarbalide antagonised the action of acetylcholine on the blood vessels.(b) Further evidence of an atropine like action was obtained from studies on the smooth muscle of the bladder and intestine.c) Amicarbalide stimulated the secretion of gastric acid in the anaesthetised rat and neither atropine nor repyramine antago- nised this. Amicarbalide partially antagonised the action of acetylcholine on gastric acid secretion which was further evidence of an atropine like action.(d) The anticholinesterase activity of amicarbalide was weak by comparison with quinuronium. This result was probably not clinically significant.(e) The release of histamine by amicarbalide was most marked in rat tissue, absent in mice and weak in sheep in vitro and in vivo. The evidence suggests that in the rat, histamine release is a major factor in the toxicity of amicarbalide and in the sheep, histamine release is positive but of less significance

Evidence of widespread degradation of gene control regions in hominid genomes

Although sequences containing regulatory elements located close to protein-coding genes are often only weakly conserved during evolution, comparisons of rodent genomes have implied that these sequences are subject to some selective constraints. Evolutionary conservation is particularly apparent upstream of coding sequences and in first introns, regions that are enriched for regulatory elements. By comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes, we show here that there is almost no evidence for conservation in these regions in hominids. Furthermore, we show that gene expression is diverging more rapidly in hominids than in murids per unit of neutral sequence divergence. By combining data on polymorphism levels in human noncoding DNA and the corresponding human¿chimpanzee divergence, we show that the proportion of adaptive substitutions in these regions in hominids is very low. It therefore seems likely that the lack of conservation and increased rate of gene expression divergence are caused by a reduction in the effectiveness of natural selection against deleterious mutations because of the low effective population sizes of hominids. This has resulted in the accumulation of a large number of deleterious mutations in sequences containing gene control elements and hence a widespread degradation of the genome during the evolution of humans and chimpanzees

Student-Teacher Curriculum Learning via Reinforcement Learning: Predicting Hospital Inpatient Admission Location

Accurate and reliable prediction of hospital admission location is important due to resource-constraints and space availability in a clinical setting, particularly when dealing with patients who come from the emergency department. In this work we propose a student-teacher network via reinforcement learning to deal with this specific problem. A representation of the weights of the student network is treated as the state and is fed as an input to the teacher network. The teacher network's action is to select the most appropriate batch of data to train the student network on from a training set sorted according to entropy. By validating on three datasets, not only do we show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on tabular data and performs competitively on image recognition, but also that novel curricula are learned by the teacher network. We demonstrate experimentally that the teacher network can actively learn about the student network and guide it to achieve better performance than if trained alone.Comment: 16 pages, 31 figures, In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learnin

Sowing summer grain crops early in late winter or spring: Effects on root growth, water use, and yield

CONTEXT. Drought and extreme heat at flowering are common stresses limiting the yield of summer crops. Adaptation to these stresses could be increased by sowing summer crops early in late winter or spring, to avoid the overlap with critical crop stages around flowering. Though little is known about the effects of cold weather on root growth, water use and final grain yield in sorghum. OBJECTIVE. To research the effects of cold conditions in early sowing sorghum on crop and root growth and function (i.e., water use), and final grain yield. METHODS. Two years of field experiments were conducted in the Darling and Eastern Downs region of Qld, Australia. Each trial consisted of three times of sowing (late winter, spring, and summer), two levels of irrigation (i.e., rainfed and supplementary irrigated), four plant population densities (3, 6, 9 and 12 pl m⁻²), and six commercial sorghum hybrids. Roots and shoots were sampled at the flag leaf stage on three times of sowing, two levels of irrigation, and three replications, for a single hybrid and a single plant population density (9pl m⁻²). Crop water use and functional root traits were derived from consecutive electromagnetic induction (EMI) surveys around flowering. At maturity crop biomass, yield and yield components were determined across all treatments. RESULTS. The combinations of seasons, times of sowing and levels of irrigation created large variations in growth conditions that affected the growth and production of the crops. Early sowing increased yield by transferring water use from vegetative to reproductive stages increasing water use efficiency (kg mm⁻¹ available water). The larger yields in the early and spring sown crops were associated to larger grain numbers, particularly in tillers. Cold temperatures in the early sowing times tended to produce smaller crops with smaller rooting systems, smaller root-to-shoot ratios, and larger average root diameters. Total root length and root length density increased with increasing pre-flowering mean air temperatures up to 20°C. Linear relationships were observed between an EMI derived index of root activity and the empirically determined values of root length density (cm cm⁻³) at flowering. CONCLUSIONS. Sowing sorghum, a summer crop, early in late winter or spring transferred water use from vegetative stages to flowering and post-flowering stages increasing crop water use efficiency. The higher grain numbers in early sown crops were related to higher grain numbers in tillers. Root length and root length density were reduced by pre-flowering mean temperatures lower than 20°C, indicating a need to increase cold tolerance for early sowing. The EMI derived index of root activity has potential in the development of high throughput root phenotyping applications

The effect of organic and conventional management on the yield and quality of wheat grown in a long-term field trial

The performance of winter wheat was evaluated under organic (ORG) and conventional (CON) management systems in the Nafferton Factorial Systems Comparison (NFSC) long-term field trial. The present study separates out the crop protection and fertility management components of organic and conventional production systems using two levels each of crop protection (CP) and fertility management (FM). The experimental design provided the four combinations of crop protection and fertility (CON-CP CONFM, CON-CP ORG-FM, ORG-CP CON-FM and ORG-CP ORG-FM) to evaluate their effects on yield, quality (protein content and hectolitre weight) and disease levels during the period 2004–2008. The conventional management system (CON-CP CON-FM) out-yielded the organic management system (ORG-CP ORG-FM) in all years by an average of 3.1 t ha−1, i.e. 7.9 t ha−1 vs. 4.8 t ha−1. Fertility management was the key factor identified limiting both yield and grain protein content in the ORG management system. The CON-FM produced on average a 3% higher protein content than ORG-FM in all years (12.5% vs. 9.7%). However the ORG-CP system produced higher protein levels than CON-CP although it was only in 2008 that this was statistically significant. In contrast to protein content it was ORG-FM which produced a higher hectolitre weight than the CON-FM system (71.6 kg hl−1 vs. 71.0 kg hl−1). The clear and significant differences in yield and protein content between the ORG-FM and CON-FM systems suggest a limited supply of available N in the organic fertility management system which is also supported by the significant interaction effect of the preceding crop on protein content. The pRDA showed that although fertilisation had the greatest effect on yield, quality and disease there was also a considerable effect of crop protection and the environment

The influence of organic and conventional fertilisation and crop protection practices, preceding crop, harvest year and weather conditions on yield and quality of potato (Solanum tuberosum) in a long-term management trial

The effects of organic versus conventional crop management practices (fertilisation, crop protection) and preceding crop on potato tuber yield (total, marketable, tuber size grade distribution) and quality (proportion of diseased, green and damaged tubers, tuber macro-nutrient concentrations) parameters were investigated over six years (2004–2009) as part of a long-term factorial field trial in North East England. Inter-year variability (the effects of weather and preceding crop) was observed to have a profound effect on yields and quality parameters, and this variability was greater in organic fertility systems. Total and marketable yields were significantly reduced by the use of both organic crop protection and fertility management. However, the yield gap between organic and conventional fertilisation regimes was greater and more variable than that between crop protection practices. This appears to be attributable mainly to lower and less predictable nitrogen supply in organically fertilised crops. Increased incidence of late blight in organic crop protection systems only occurred when conventional fertilisation was applied. In organically fertilised crops yield was significantly higher following grass/red clover leys than winter wheat, but there was no pre-crop effect in conventionally fertilised crops. The results highlight that nitrogen supply from organic fertilisers rather than inefficient pest and disease control may be the major limiting factor for yields in organic potato production systems

Benthic Carbon Mineralization and Nutrient Turnover in a Scottish Sea Loch: An Integrative In Situ Study

© 2016, The Author(s). Based on in situ microprofiles, chamber incubations and eddy covariance measurements, we investigated the benthic carbon mineralization and nutrient regeneration in a ~65-m-deep sedimentation basin of Loch Etive, UK. The sediment hosted a considerable amount of infauna that was dominated by the brittle star A. filiformis. The numerous burrows were intensively irrigated enhancing the benthic in situ O2 uptake by ~50 %, and inducing highly variable redox conditions and O2 distribution in the surface sediment as also documented by complementary laboratory-based planar optode measurements. The average benthic O2 exchange as derived by chamber incubations and the eddy covariance approach were similar (14.9 ± 2.5 and 13.1 ± 9.0 mmol m−2 day−1) providing confidence in the two measuring approaches. Moreover, the non-invasive eddy approach revealed a flow-dependent benthic O2 flux that was partly ascribed to enhanced ventilation of infauna burrows during periods of elevated flow rates. The ratio in exchange rates of ΣCO2 and O2 was close to unity, confirming that the O2 uptake was a good proxy for the benthic carbon mineralization in this setting. The infauna activity resulted in highly dynamic redox conditions that presumably facilitated an efficient degradation of both terrestrial and marine-derived organic material. The complex O2 dynamics of the burrow environment also concurrently stimulated nitrification and coupled denitrification rates making the sediment an efficient sink for bioavailable nitrogen. Furthermore, bioturbation mediated a high efflux of dissolved phosphorus and silicate. The study documents a high spatial and temporal variation in benthic solute exchange with important implications for benthic turnover of organic carbon and nutrients. However, more long-term in situ investigations with like approaches are required to fully understand how environmental events and spatio-temporal variations interrelate to the overall biogeochemical functioning of coastal sediments

Benthic Carbon Mineralization and Nutrient Turnover in a Scottish Sea Loch: An Integrative In Situ Study

© 2016, The Author(s). Based on in situ microprofiles, chamber incubations and eddy covariance measurements, we investigated the benthic carbon mineralization and nutrient regeneration in a ~65-m-deep sedimentation basin of Loch Etive, UK. The sediment hosted a considerable amount of infauna that was dominated by the brittle star A. filiformis. The numerous burrows were intensively irrigated enhancing the benthic in situ O2 uptake by ~50 %, and inducing highly variable redox conditions and O2 distribution in the surface sediment as also documented by complementary laboratory-based planar optode measurements. The average benthic O2 exchange as derived by chamber incubations and the eddy covariance approach were similar (14.9 ± 2.5 and 13.1 ± 9.0 mmol m−2 day−1) providing confidence in the two measuring approaches. Moreover, the non-invasive eddy approach revealed a flow-dependent benthic O2 flux that was partly ascribed to enhanced ventilation of infauna burrows during periods of elevated flow rates. The ratio in exchange rates of ΣCO2 and O2 was close to unity, confirming that the O2 uptake was a good proxy for the benthic carbon mineralization in this setting. The infauna activity resulted in highly dynamic redox conditions that presumably facilitated an efficient degradation of both terrestrial and marine-derived organic material. The complex O2 dynamics of the burrow environment also concurrently stimulated nitrification and coupled denitrification rates making the sediment an efficient sink for bioavailable nitrogen. Furthermore, bioturbation mediated a high efflux of dissolved phosphorus and silicate. The study documents a high spatial and temporal variation in benthic solute exchange with important implications for benthic turnover of organic carbon and nutrients. However, more long-term in situ investigations with like approaches are required to fully understand how environmental events and spatio-temporal variations interrelate to the overall biogeochemical functioning of coastal sediments