17,040 research outputs found
Are CSCL and Learning Sciences research relevant to large-scale educational reform?
This Symposium includes 4 papers: Paper 1 - From e-Learning Pilot Scheme to Scalable e-Learning Innovations: Wishful thinking or reality? (pp. 573-574 Nancy Law and Yeung Lee, University of Hong Kong)
Paper 2: Restoring âhow people learnâ as the core of educational reform in Japanese classrooms (pp. 574-575 Naomi Miyake, University of Tokyo)
Paper 3: Scaling up rapid collaborative practices in Singapore schools (pp. 575-577 Chee-Kit Looi, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
Paper 4: eTwinning: a European Network Community for Teachers to support cross-border school collaboration (pp. 577-579 Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet)CSCL 2013 Proceedings: v. 1 - Full Papers & Symposia - http://www.isls.org/cscl2013/Volume%201%20Final%20CSCL%202013%20Proceedings.pdf ; v. 2 - Short Papers, Panels, Posters, Demos, & Community Events - http://www.isls.org/cscl2013/Volume%202%20Final%20CSCL%202013%20Proceedings.pdfConference Theme: To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time, and scaleMany scholars have contributed efforts to improve education in schools. A major motivation for learning scientists to develop design research as a methodology is to contribute to theory and educational practice through rigorous research without avoiding the complexities and messiness in authentic educational settings. There are many examples of successful implementation of collaborative, knowledge-construction oriented pedagogies using socio-cognitive and socio-metacognitive tools in formal and informal educational settings as well as in teacher professional development. However, there are many challenges to scaling up such innovations beyond small-scale implementation, including that of developing into âfatal mutationsâ (Brown, 1992). This symposium provides an opportunity for discussion and reflection on the impact that CSCL and Learning Sciences researchers have made on large-scale education reform and what, if any, may be done to extend this impact by bringing together a set of papers describing some large-scale education innovation initiatives in Asia and Europe.published_or_final_versio
Shifting Attention From Theory to Practice in Philosophy of Biology
Traditional approaches in philosophy of biology focus attention on biological concepts, explanations, and theories, on evidential support and inter-theoretical relations. Newer approaches shift attention from concepts to conceptual practices, from theories to practices of theorizing, and from theoretical reduction to reductive retooling. In this article, I describe the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered philosophy of science and explain how it is leading philosophers to abandon fundamentalist assumptions associated with traditional approaches in philosophy of science and to embrace scientific pluralism. This article comes in three parts, each illustrating the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered epistemology. The first illustration shows how shifting philosophical attention to conceptual practice reveals how molecular biologists succeed in identifying coherent causal strands within systems of bewildering complexity. The second illustration suggests that analyzing how a multiplicity of alternative models function in practice provides an illuminating approach for understanding the nature of theoretical knowledge in evolutionary biology. The third illustration demonstrates how framing reductionism in terms of the reductive retooling of practice offers an informative perspective for understanding why putting DNA at the center of biological research has been incredibly productive throughout much of biology. Each illustration begins by describing how traditional theory-focused philosophical approaches are laden with fundamentalist assumptions and then proceeds to show that shifting attention to practice undermines these assumptions and motivates a philosophy of scientific pluralism
CAR-Net: Clairvoyant Attentive Recurrent Network
We present an interpretable framework for path prediction that leverages
dependencies between agents' behaviors and their spatial navigation
environment. We exploit two sources of information: the past motion trajectory
of the agent of interest and a wide top-view image of the navigation scene. We
propose a Clairvoyant Attentive Recurrent Network (CAR-Net) that learns where
to look in a large image of the scene when solving the path prediction task.
Our method can attend to any area, or combination of areas, within the raw
image (e.g., road intersections) when predicting the trajectory of the agent.
This allows us to visualize fine-grained semantic elements of navigation scenes
that influence the prediction of trajectories. To study the impact of space on
agents' trajectories, we build a new dataset made of top-view images of
hundreds of scenes (Formula One racing tracks) where agents' behaviors are
heavily influenced by known areas in the images (e.g., upcoming turns). CAR-Net
successfully attends to these salient regions. Additionally, CAR-Net reaches
state-of-the-art accuracy on the standard trajectory forecasting benchmark,
Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). Finally, we show CAR-Net's ability to generalize
to unseen scenes.Comment: The 2nd and 3rd authors contributed equall
Quantum enhanced positioning and clock synchronization
A wide variety of positioning and ranging procedures are based on repeatedly
sending electromagnetic pulses through space and measuring their time of
arrival. This paper shows that quantum entanglement and squeezing can be
employed to overcome the classical power/bandwidth limits on these procedures,
enhancing their accuracy. Frequency entangled pulses could be used to construct
quantum positioning systems (QPS), to perform clock synchronization, or to do
ranging (quantum radar): all of these techniques exhibit a similar enhancement
compared with analogous protocols that use classical light. Quantum
entanglement and squeezing have been exploited in the context of
interferometry, frequency measurements, lithography, and algorithms. Here, the
problem of positioning a party (say Alice) with respect to a fixed array of
reference points will be analyzed.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication by Natur
Quantum Interference of Photon Pairs from Two Trapped Atomic Ions
We collect the fluorescence from two trapped atomic ions, and measure quantum
interference between photons emitted from the ions. The interference of two
photons is a crucial component of schemes to entangle atomic qubits based on a
photonic coupling. The ability to preserve the generated entanglement and to
repeat the experiment with the same ions is necessary to implement entangling
quantum gates between atomic qubits, and allows the implementation of protocols
to efficiently scale to larger numbers of atomic qubits.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
EQ-5D-3L Derived Population Norms for Health Related Quality of Life in Sri Lanka
Background Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) is an important outcome measure in health economic evaluation that guides health resource allocations. Population norms for HRQoL are an essential ingredient in health economics and in the evaluation of population health. The aim of this study was to produce EQ-5D-3L-derived population norms for Sri Lanka. Method A population sample (nâ=â 780) was selected from four districts of Sri Lanka. A stratified cluster sampling approach with probability proportionate to size was employed. Twenty six clusters of 30 participants each were selected; each participant completed the EQ-5D-3L in a face-to-face interview. Utility weights for their EQ-5D-3L health states were assigned using the Sri Lankan EQ-5D-3L algorithm. The population norms are reported by age and socio-economic variables. Results The EQ-5D-3L was completed by 736 people, representing a 94% response rate. Sixty per cent of the sample reported being in full health. The percentage of people responding to any problems in the five EQ-5D-3L dimensions increased with age. The mean EQ-5D-3L weight was 0.85 (SD 0.008; 95%CI 0.84-0.87). The mean EQ-5D-3L weight was significantly associated with age, housing type, disease experience and religiosity. People above 70 years of age were 7.5 times more likely to report mobility problems and 3.7 times more likely to report pain/discomfort than those aged 18-29 years. Those with a tertiary education were five times less likely to report any HRQoL problems than those without a tertiary education. A person living in a shanty was 4.3 more likely to have problems in usual activities than a person living in a single house. Conclusion The population norms in Sri Lanka vary with socio-demographic characteristics. The socioeconomically disadvantaged have a lower HRQoL. The trends of population norms observed in this lower middle income country were generally similar to those previously reported in high income countries
A particle swarm optimization based memetic algorithm for dynamic optimization problems
Copyright @ Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2010.Recently, there has been an increasing concern from the evolutionary computation community on dynamic optimization problems since many real-world optimization problems are dynamic. This paper investigates a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based memetic algorithm that hybridizes PSO with a local search technique for dynamic optimization problems. Within the framework of the proposed algorithm, a local version of PSO with a ring-shape topology structure is used as the global search operator and a fuzzy cognition local search method is proposed as the local search technique. In addition, a self-organized random immigrants scheme is extended into our proposed algorithm in order to further enhance its exploration capacity for new peaks in the search space. Experimental study over the moving peaks benchmark problem shows that the proposed PSO-based memetic algorithm is robust and adaptable in dynamic environments.This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 70431003 and Grant No. 70671020, the National Innovation Research Community Science Foundation of China under
Grant No. 60521003, the National Support Plan of China under Grant No. 2006BAH02A09 and the Ministry of Education, science, and Technology in Korea through the Second-Phase of Brain Korea 21 Project in 2009, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/01 and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Grants under Grant G-YH60
Extracellular electrical signals in a neuron-surface junction: model of heterogeneous membrane conductivity
Signals recorded from neurons with extracellular planar sensors have a wide
range of waveforms and amplitudes. This variety is a result of different
physical conditions affecting the ion currents through a cellular membrane. The
transmembrane currents are often considered by macroscopic membrane models as
essentially a homogeneous process. However, this assumption is doubtful, since
ions move through ion channels, which are scattered within the membrane.
Accounting for this fact, the present work proposes a theoretical model of
heterogeneous membrane conductivity. The model is based on the hypothesis that
both potential and charge are distributed inhomogeneously on the membrane
surface, concentrated near channel pores, as the direct consequence of the
inhomogeneous transmembrane current. A system of continuity equations having
non-stationary and quasi-stationary forms expresses this fact mathematically.
The present work performs mathematical analysis of the proposed equations,
following by the synthesis of the equivalent electric element of a
heterogeneous membrane current. This element is further used to construct a
model of the cell-surface electric junction in a form of the equivalent
electrical circuit. After that a study of how the heterogeneous membrane
conductivity affects parameters of the extracellular electrical signal is
performed. As the result it was found that variation of the passive
characteristics of the cell-surface junction, conductivity of the cleft and the
cleft height, could lead to different shapes of the extracellular signals
Multimode quantum interference of photons in multiport integrated devices
We report the first demonstration of quantum interference in multimode
interference (MMI) devices and a new complete characterization technique that
can be applied to any photonic device that removes the need for phase stable
measurements. MMI devices provide a compact and robust realization of NxM
optical circuits, which will dramatically reduce the complexity and increase
the functionality of future generations of quantum photonic circuits
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