A University of Glasgow guide to MOOCs

No abstract available

A First Briefing on MOOCs

This memo is addressed to members of our university (and maybe others) who want to know whether they need to know about MOOCs, and what the first things they would need to know are. MOOCS were the academic buzzword of 2012.1 But what is a MOOC. Do we care? Should we? In this short memo we begin with a list of questions, in no particular order, that we have either asked or been asked. The discussion that follows will contain the answers to these, and other, questions, although there may not be a separate section for each question

Mobile Mental Health Crisis Intervention in the Western Health Region of Newfoundland and Labrador

The impetus for this research is Recommendation #15 of the 2003 Luther Inquiry into the deaths of Norman Reid and Darryl Power: “IT IS FURTHER RECOMMENDED that the Regional Health Boards establish mobile health units to respond to mentally ill persons in crisis where no criminal offence is alleged. Each unit would be developed locally and based on local needs.” Our stakeholder partners in the Western Regional Health Authority asked us to identify a range of mobile crisis intervention service models, some of which may be better suited to lower-density, rural populations and some of which may be better suited to higher-density areas like Corner Brook. Our partners expressed a particular interest in models that can be implemented with minimal additional human resources, but that involve local, face-to-face contact rather than telephone, electronic, or clinic-based models of service delivery. The term “crisis intervention” generally refers to any immediate, short-term therapeutic interventions or assistance provided to an individual or group of individuals who are in acute psychological distress or crisis. The term encompasses a number of after-the-fact interventions – such as rape counseling and critical incident stress debriefing – that would not be relevant to the kinds of situations described in the Luther Report. Given the project parameters specified by our partners at Western Health, we formulated a research question and a literature search strategy that would enable us to focus specifically on forms of crisis intervention that are designed to manage potentially dangerous mental health crises on-site rather than to mediate their impacts after the fact. Our research question is as follows: “What models of mobile– i.e., face-to-face – crisis intervention have proven effective in managing potentially violent mental health crises occurring outside the hospital setting?

The Value of Citizen Scientists: Data Collection for American Eel Using Non-Traditional Field Gear & Social Media

American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) is a facultative catadromous species with a unique and complex life history. After hatching, larval eel begin their journey as leptocephalus in the Sargasso Sea and drift on ocean currents along the Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Central and South America. They transform into glass eel as they approach shore and begin to develop pigment as they settle in estuaries or move upstream into rivers as elvers. American Eel then spend 3-40+ years in these habitats as yellow eel until they sexually mature into silver eel and return to the Sargasso Sea where they spawn and presumably die. State and federal agencies, multiple universities and numerous citizen science volunteers are working to better understand their movement patterns and recruitment window in Texas. Citizen scientists with coastal chapters of the Texas Master Naturalists (TMN) have taken a lead role in assisting with this effort. Since February of 2018, TMN have established a network of monitoring sites across the mid to upper Texas Coast to sample for juvenile American Eel using eel mops. Eel mops have been deployed for various lengths of time at 29 sites throughout the past two years and checked routinely for glass and elver eel. Volunteers have conducted approximately 250 eel mop checks and provided record of their catch by category (e.g., eel, shrimp, crab, other fish, etc.) based on occurrence or abundance. TMN have documented close to 7,000 individuals across all categories with various species of crab, shrimp, and fish being the most common groups collected. While no glass or elver eel have been collected in an eel mop, TMN have provide valuable data for this project by testing a common gear type that is often used to monitor for American Eel on the Atlantic Coast.Integrative Biolog

Analysing parking search (‘cruising’) time using generalised multilevel structural equation modelling

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the URI link.The aim of this paper is to identify factors influencing parking search (cruising) time. A revealed-preference on-street parking survey was undertaken with individual drivers in four UK cities to investigate the influence of personal, trip, socio-economic, physical, time49 related, and price-related variables on parking search. In order to address the potential endogeneity problems between the factors (e.g. parking fee and parking search time) and hierarchical issues in the survey data, a generalised multilevel structural equation model was applied. It was revealed that cruising time could be reduced by seeking drivers to pay for parking as a way of improving social welfare

Proposed optical realisation of a two photon, four-qubit entangled χ\chi state

The four-qubit states $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$, exhibiting genuinely multi-partite entanglement have been shown to have many interesting properties and have been suggested for novel applications in quantum information processing. In this work we propose a simple quantum circuit and its corresponding optical embodiment with which to prepare photon pairs in the $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$ states. Our approach uses hyper-entangled photon pairs, produced by the type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process in two contiguous nonlinear crystals, together with a set of simple linear-optical transformations. Our photon pairs are maximally hyper-entangled in both their polarisation and orbital angular momentum (OAM). After one of these daughter photons passes through our optical setup, we obtain photon pairs in the hyper-entangled state $\lvert\chi^{00}\rangle$, and the $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$ states can be achieved by further simple transformations.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Optic

Optimal sequential measurements for bipartite state discrimination

State discrimination is a useful test problem with which to clarify the power and limitations of different classes of measurement. We consider the problem of discriminating between given states of a bipartite quantum system via sequential measurement of the subsystems, with classical feed-forward of measurement results. Our aim is to understand when sequential measurements, which are relatively easy to implement experimentally, perform as well, or almost as well, as optimal joint measurements, which are in general more technologically challenging. We construct conditions that the optimal sequential measurement must satisfy, analogous to the well-known Helstrom conditions for minimum error discrimination in the unrestricted case. We give several examples and compare the optimal probability of correctly identifying the state via global versus sequential measurement strategies