Exploring the contribution of professional staff to student outcomes: a comparative study of Australian and UK case studies

© 2016 Association for Tertiary Education Management and the LH Martin Institute for Tertiary Education Leadership and Management. This paper reports on the second stage of a comparative study between two higher education institutions: one in Australia and the other in the United Kingdom, which explored the contributions of professional staff to student outcomes. The first stage acted as a scoping exercise to ascertain how the contributions of professional staff to student outcomes could be investigated. The second stage of the study aimed to undertake a more in-depth exploration of self-reported behaviours in a range of professional staff roles, within the two case studies. The main finding of the comparative study is the broad similarities between the case studies, in self-reported behaviours that contribute to successful student outcomes. Four key factors were identified, which enable or inhibit the contributions of professional staff to successful outcomes. Three of the four factors were found to be the same in both case studies, whereas technology was more important in the Australian case study

Numerical resolution effects on simulations of massive black hole seeds

We have performed high-resolution numerical simulations with the hydrodynamical AMR code Enzo to investigate the formation of massive seed black holes in a sample of six dark matter haloes above the atomic cooling threshold. The aim of this study is to illustrate the effects of varying the maximum refinement level on the final object formed. The virial temperatures of the simulated haloes range from $\rm{T} \sim 10000\ \rm{K} - 16000\ \rm{K}$ and they have virial masses in the range $\rm{M} \sim 2 \times 10^7 \rm{M_{\odot}}$ to $\rm{M} \sim 7 \times 10^7 \rm{M_{\odot}}$ at $z \sim 15$. The outcome of our six fiducial simulations is both generic and robust. A rotationally supported, marginally gravitationally stable, disk forms with an exponential profile. The mass and scale length of this disk depends strongly on the maximum refinement level used. Varying the maximum refinement level by factors between 1 / 64 to 256 times the fiducial level illustrates the care that must be taken in interpreting the results. The lower resolution simulations show tentative evidence that the gas may become rotationally supported out to 20 pc while the highest resolution simulations show only weak evidence of rotational support due to the shorter dynamical times for which the simulation runs. The higher resolution simulations do, however, point to fragmentation at small scales of the order of $\sim 100$ AU. In the highest resolution simulations a central object of a few times $10^2\ \rm{M_{\odot}}$ forms with multiple strongly bound, Jeans unstable, clumps of $\sim 10\ \rm{M_{\odot}}$ and radii of 10 - 20 AU suggesting the formation of dense star clusters in these haloes

Motmot, an open-source toolkit for realtime video acquisition and analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Video cameras sense passively from a distance, offer a rich information stream, and provide intuitively meaningful raw data. Camera-based imaging has thus proven critical for many advances in neuroscience and biology, with applications ranging from cellular imaging of fluorescent dyes to tracking of whole-animal behavior at ecologically relevant spatial scales.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present 'Motmot': an open-source software suite for acquiring, displaying, saving, and analyzing digital video in real-time. At the highest level, Motmot is written in the Python computer language. The large amounts of data produced by digital cameras are handled by low-level, optimized functions, usually written in C. This high-level/low-level partitioning and use of select external libraries allow Motmot, with only modest complexity, to perform well as a core technology for many high-performance imaging tasks. In its current form, Motmot allows for: (1) image acquisition from a variety of camera interfaces (package motmot.cam_iface), (2) the display of these images with minimal latency and computer resources using wxPython and OpenGL (package motmot.wxglvideo), (3) saving images with no compression in a single-pass, low-CPU-use format (package motmot.FlyMovieFormat), (4) a pluggable framework for custom analysis of images in realtime and (5) firmware for an inexpensive USB device to synchronize image acquisition across multiple cameras, with analog input, or with other hardware devices (package motmot.fview_ext_trig). These capabilities are brought together in a graphical user interface, called 'FView', allowing an end user to easily view and save digital video without writing any code. One plugin for FView, 'FlyTrax', which tracks the movement of fruit flies in real-time, is included with Motmot, and is described to illustrate the capabilities of FView.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Motmot enables realtime image processing and display using the Python computer language. In addition to the provided complete applications, the architecture allows the user to write relatively simple plugins, which can accomplish a variety of computer vision tasks and be integrated within larger software systems. The software is available at <url>http://code.astraw.com/projects/motmot</url></p

Chromatic Illumination Discrimination Ability Reveals that Human Colour Constancy Is Optimised for Blue Daylight Illuminations

The phenomenon of colour constancy in human visual perception keeps surface colours constant, despite changes in their reflected light due to changing illumination. Although colour constancy has evolved under a constrained subset of illuminations, it is unknown whether its underlying mechanisms, thought to involve multiple components from retina to cortex, are optimised for particular environmental variations. Here we demonstrate a new method for investigating colour constancy using illumination matching in real scenes which, unlike previous methods using surface matching and simulated scenes, allows testing of multiple, real illuminations. We use real scenes consisting of solid familiar or unfamiliar objects against uniform or variegated backgrounds and compare discrimination performance for typical illuminations from the daylight chromaticity locus (approximately blue-yellow) and atypical spectra from an orthogonal locus (approximately red-green, at correlated colour temperature 6700 K), all produced in real time by a 10-channel LED illuminator. We find that discrimination of illumination changes is poorer along the daylight locus than the atypical locus, and is poorest particularly for bluer illumination changes, demonstrating conversely that surface colour constancy is best for blue daylight illuminations. Illumination discrimination is also enhanced, and therefore colour constancy diminished, for uniform backgrounds, irrespective of the object type. These results are not explained by statistical properties of the scene signal changes at the retinal level. We conclude that high-level mechanisms of colour constancy are biased for the blue daylight illuminations and variegated backgrounds to which the human visual system has typically been exposed

Dietary garlic and hip osteoarthritis: evidence of a protective effect and putative mechanism of action

Background Patterns of food intake and prevalent osteoarthritis of the hand, hip, and knee were studied using the twin design to limit the effect of confounding factors. Compounds found in associated food groups were further studied in vitro. Methods Cross-sectional study conducted in a large population-based volunteer cohort of twins. Food intake was evaluated using the Food Frequency Questionnaire; OA was determined using plain radiographs. Analyses were adjusted for age, BMI and physical activity. Subsequent in vitro studies examined the effects of allium-derived compounds on the expression of matrix-degrading proteases in SW1353 chondrosarcoma cells. Results Data were available, depending on phenotype, for 654-1082 of 1086 female twins (median age 58.9 years; range 46-77). Trends in dietary analysis revealed a specific pattern of dietary intake, that high in fruit and vegetables, showed an inverse association with hip OA (p = 0.022). Consumption of 'non-citrus fruit' (p = 0.015) and 'alliums' (p = 0.029) had the strongest protective effect. Alliums contain diallyl disulphide which was shown to abrogate cytokine-induced matrix metalloproteinase expression. Conclusions Studies of diet are notorious for their confounding by lifestyle effects. While taking account of BMI, the data show an independent effect of a diet high in fruit and vegetables, suggesting it to be protective against radiographic hip OA. Furthermore, diallyl disulphide, a compound found in garlic and other alliums, represses the expression of matrix-degrading proteases in chondrocyte-like cells, providing a potential mechanism of action

The use of etoricoxib to treat an idiopathic stabbing headache: a case report

According to the International Headache Society, idiopathic stabbing headache (ISH), an indomethacin-responsive headache syndrome, is a paroxysmal disorder of short duration manifested as head pain occurring as a single stab or a series of stabs involving the area supplied in the distribution of the first division of the trigeminal nerve. Stabs last for approximately a few seconds, occurring and recurring from once to multiple times per day in an irregular frequency, with no underlying attributable disorder

Inflammatory bowel disease, such as Ulcerative colitis, is a risk factor for recurrent thromboembolic events: a case report

Ulcerative colitis (UC), a member of the family of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), occurs worldwide. It has an incidence which in recent years has been rising in areas such as Southern Europe and Asia, while remaining relatively constant in Northern Europe and North America

CP violation Beyond the MSSM: Baryogenesis and Electric Dipole Moments

We study electroweak baryogenesis and electric dipole moments in the presence of the two leading-order, non-renormalizable operators in the Higgs sector of the MSSM. Significant qualitative and quantitative differences from MSSM baryogenesis arise due to the presence of new CP-violating phases and to the relaxation of constraints on the supersymmetric spectrum (in particular, both stops can be light). We find: (1) spontaneous baryogenesis, driven by a change in the phase of the Higgs vevs across the bubble wall, becomes possible; (2) the top and stop CP-violating sources can become effective; (3) baryogenesis is viable in larger parts of parameter space, alleviating the well-known fine-tuning associated with MSSM baryogenesis. Nevertheless, electric dipole moments should be measured if experimental sensitivities are improved by about one order of magnitude.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figure

Single-Scale Natural SUSY

We consider the prospects for natural SUSY models consistent with current data. Recent constraints make the standard paradigm unnatural so we consider what could be a minimal extension consistent with what we now know. The most promising such scenarios extend the MSSM with new tree-level Higgs interactions that can lift its mass to at least 125 GeV and also allow for flavor-dependent soft terms so that the third generation squarks are lighter than current bounds on the first and second generation squarks. We argue that a common feature of almost all such models is the need for a new scale near 10 TeV, such as a scale of Higgsing or confinement of a new gauge group. We consider the question whether such a model can naturally derive from a single mass scale associated with supersymmetry breaking. Most such models simply postulate new scales, leaving their proximity to the scale of MSSM soft terms a mystery. This coincidence problem may be thought of as a mild tuning, analogous to the usual mu problem. We find that a single mass scale origin is challenging, but suggest that a more natural origin for such a new dynamical scale is the gravitino mass, m_{3/2}, in theories where the MSSM soft terms are a loop factor below m_{3/2}. As an example, we build a variant of the NMSSM where the singlet S is composite, and the strong dynamics leading to compositeness is triggered by masses of order m_{3/2} for some fields. Our focus is the Higgs sector, but our model is compatible with a light stop (with the other generation squarks heavy, or with R-parity violation or another mechanism to hide them from current searches). All the interesting low-energy mass scales, including linear terms for S playing a key role in EWSB, arise dynamically from the single scale m_{3/2}. However, numerical coefficients from RG effects and wavefunction factors in an extra dimension complicate the otherwise simple story.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures; version accepted by JHE