2,172 research outputs found
Tracking the policy literacy journey of students in a postgraduate diploma course in disability and rehabilitation studies
Health and/or rehabilitation practitioners have to interact with policy decisions. Ideally, they need to be able to understand policies and to engage with them, however, practitioners are often not aware of policies and of how to engage with them. As a post graduate unit with a mandate to develop programmes that respond to practice needs, this article reports on the development of a policy analysis module as part of the Post Graduate Diploma in Disability and Rehabilitation Studies. In this article we report on the development of the module, the approach taken, and on student responses to the module. The course journey of enrolled students is narrated, highlighting the encouragement of student engagement and peer feedback as key to improved learning and understandings in higher education. Facilitators’ use of didactic approaches that centre students and participatory learning seem equally important for meaningful learning
Nonlinear Mechanical Response of DNA due to Anisotropic Bending Elasticity
The response of a short DNA segment to bending is studied, taking into
account the anisotropy in the bending rigidities caused by the double-helical
structure. It is shown that the anisotropy introduces an effective nonlinear
twist-bend coupling that can lead to the formation of kinks and modulations in
the curvature and/or in the twist, depending on the values of the elastic
constants and the imposed deflection angle. The typical wavelength for the
modulations, or the distance between the neighboring kinks is found to be set
by half of the DNA pitch.Comment: 4 pages, 3 encapsulated EPS figure
Delivering alcohol IBA: broadening the base from health to non-health contexts: review of the literature and scoping
A review of the literature and scoping on alcohol brief interventions. The review considers the evidence base on the delivery of identification and brief advice in a wide range of settings. It concludes that broader delivery of IBA is feasible, but requires strong organisational support, effective training and financial investment
VPLanet: The Virtual Planet Simulator
We describe a software package called VPLanet that simulates fundamental
aspects of planetary system evolution over Gyr timescales, with a focus on
investigating habitable worlds. In this initial release, eleven physics modules
are included that model internal, atmospheric, rotational, orbital, stellar,
and galactic processes. Many of these modules can be coupled simultaneously to
simulate the evolution of terrestrial planets, gaseous planets, and stars. The
code is validated by reproducing a selection of observations and past results.
VPLanet is written in C and designed so that the user can choose the physics
modules to apply to an individual object at runtime without recompiling, i.e.,
a single executable can simulate the diverse phenomena that are relevant to a
wide range of planetary and stellar systems. This feature is enabled by
matrices and vectors of function pointers that are dynamically allocated and
populated based on user input. The speed and modularity of VPLanet enables
large parameter sweeps and the versatility to add/remove physical phenomena to
assess their importance. VPLanet is publicly available from a repository that
contains extensive documentation, numerous examples, Python scripts for
plotting and data management, and infrastructure for community input and future
development.Comment: 75 pages, 34 figures, 10 tables, accepted to the Proceedings of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Source code, documentation, and examples
available at https://github.com/VirtualPlanetaryLaboratory/vplane
Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning
Human-annotated data plays a critical role in the fairness of AI systems,
including those that deal with life-altering decisions or moderating
human-created web/social media content. Conventionally, annotator disagreements
are resolved before any learning takes place. However, researchers are
increasingly identifying annotator disagreement as pervasive and meaningful.
They also question the performance of a system when annotators disagree.
Particularly when minority views are disregarded, especially among groups that
may already be underrepresented in the annotator population. In this paper, we
introduce \emph{CrowdOpinion}\footnote{Accepted for publication at ACL 2023},
an unsupervised learning based approach that uses language features and label
distributions to pool similar items into larger samples of label distributions.
We experiment with four generative and one density-based clustering method,
applied to five linear combinations of label distributions and features. We use
five publicly available benchmark datasets (with varying levels of annotator
disagreements) from social media (Twitter, Gab, and Reddit). We also experiment
in the wild using a dataset from Facebook, where annotations come from the
platform itself by users reacting to posts. We evaluate \emph{CrowdOpinion} as
a label distribution prediction task using KL-divergence and a single-label
problem using accuracy measures.Comment: Accepted for Publication at ACL 202
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