Learning Design: reflections on a snapshot of the current landscape

The mounting wealth of open and readily available information and the swift evolution of social, mobile and creative technologies warrant a re-conceptualisation of the role of educators: from providers of knowledge to designers of learning. This need is being addressed by a growing trend of research in Learning Design. Responding to this trend, the Art and Science of Learning Design workshop brought together leading voices in the field and provided a forum for discussing its key issues. It focused on three thematic axes: practices and methods, tools and resources, and theoretical frameworks. This paper reviews some definitions of Learning Design and then summarises the main contributions to the workshop. Drawing upon these, we identify three key challenges for Learning Design that suggest directions for future research

Consolidation of Customer Orders Into Truckloads at a Large Manufacturer

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 48, pp. 779-785.We describe the development and operation of an interactive system based on a mathematical optimization model which is used by a major US manufacturer to consolidate customer orders into truckloads. Dozens of users employ the system daily for planning delivery of orders from manufacturing plants to customers by truckload carriers, saving numerous hours of the users' time and reducing transportation costs

Consolidating and Dispatching Truck Shipments of Mobil Heavy Petroleum Products

Interfaces, 25, pp. 1-17.Mobil Oil Coporation consolidates and dispatches truck shipments of heavy petroleum products-lubricants in packages and in bulk from 10 lubricant plants nationwide. It dispatches hundreds of orders daily either individually or as consolidated truckloads, using a very nonhomogeneous fleet of Mobil controlled and contract vehicles and common carriers..

Scheduling Ocean Transportation of Crude Oil

Management Science, 33, p. 335-346. (Nominated for 1987 International Management Science Achievement Award.)The article of record as published may be found at http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1909%28198703%2933%3A3%3C335%3ASOTOCO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-FNominated for 1987 International Management Science Achievement Award.A crude oil tankerscheduling problem faced by a major oil company is presented and solved using an elastic set partitioning model. The model takes into account all fleet cost components, including the opportunity cost of ship time, port and canal charges, and demurrage and bunker fuel. The model determines optimalspeeds for the ships and the best routing of ballast (empty) legs, as well as which cargos to load on controlled ships and which to spot charter. All feasible schedules are generated, the cost of each is accurately determined and the best set of schedules is selected. For the problems encountered, optimal integer solutions to set partitioning problems with thousands of binary variables have been achieved in less than a minute

Strings-to-rings transition and antiparallel dipole alignment in two-dimensional methanols

Structural order emerging in the liquid state necessitates a critical degree of anisotropy of the molecules. For example, liquid crystals and Langmuir monolayers require rod- or disc-shaped and long-chain amphiphilic molecules, respectively, to break the isotropic symmetry of liquids. In this Letter we present results from molecular dynamics simulations demonstrating that in two-dimensional liquids, a significantly smaller degree of anisotropy is sufficient to allow structural organization. In fact, the condensed phase of the smallest amphiphilic molecule, methanol, confined between two, or adsorbed on, graphene sheets forms a monolayer characterized by long chains of molecules. Intrachain interactions are dominated by hydrogen bonds, whereas interchain interactions are dispersive. Upon a decrease in density toward a gaslike state, these strings are transformed into rings. The two-dimensional liquid phase of methanol undergoes another transition upon cooling; in this case, the order–disorder transition is characterized by a low-temperature phase in which the hydrogen bond dipoles of neighboring strings adopt an antiparallel orientation

A Method for High Throughput Determination of Viable Bacteria Cell Counts in 96-Well Plates

Background: There are several methods for quantitating bacterial cells, each with advantages and disadvantages. The most common method is bacterial plating, which has the advantage of allowing live cell assessment through colony forming unit (CFU) counts but is not well suited for high throughput screening (HTS). On the other hand, spectrophotometry is adaptable to HTS applications but does not differentiate between dead and living bacteria and has low sensitivity. Results: Here, we report a bacterial cell counting method termed Start Growth Time (SGT) that allows rapid and serial quantification of the absolute or relative number of live cells in a bacterial culture in a high throughput manner. We combined the methodology of quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) calculations with a previously described qualitative method of bacterial growth determination to develop an improved quantitative method. We show that SGT detects only live bacteria and is sensitive enough to differentiate between 40 and 400 cells/mL. SGT is based on the re-growth time required by a growing cell culture to reach a threshold, and the notion that this time is proportional to the number of cells in the initial inoculum. We show several applications of SGT, including assessment of antibiotic effects on cell viability and determination of an antibiotic tolerant subpopulation fraction within a cell population. SGT results do not differ significantly from results obtained by CFU counts. Conclusion: SGT is a relatively quick, highly sensitive, reproducible and non-laborious method that can be used in HTS settings to longitudinally assess live cells in bacterial cell cultures

Consolidation of customer orders into truckloads at a large manufacturer

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 48, pp. 779-785.We describe the development and operation of an interactive system based on a mathematical optimization model which is used by a major US manufacturer to consolidate customer orders into truckloads. Dozens of users employ the system daily for planning delivery of orders from manufacturing plants to customers by truckload carriers, saving numerous hours of the users' time and reducing transportation costs