Children as experiencers: increasing engagement, participation and inclusion for young children in the museum

This research aimed to evaluate young children’s engagement, participation and inclusion within a city museum by utilising observations and semi structured interviews with children and families. Both groups requested more interactive exhibits, sensory experiences, making and doing activities and role play opportunities. In this article, we argue for increased visibility of children’s ‘intangible heritage’(Brookshaw, 2016) and opportunities for responding which make links with children’s lives contemporarily. We further argue that museums should view children as experiencers rather than learners

AAO Starbugs: software control and associated algorithms

The Australian Astronomical Observatory's TAIPAN instrument deploys 150 Starbug robots to position optical fibres to accuracies of 0.3 arcsec, on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. This paper describes the software system developed to control and monitor the Starbugs, with particular emphasis on the automated path-finding algorithms, and the metrology software which keeps track of the position and motion of individual Starbugs as they independently move in a crowded field. The software employs a tiered approach to find a collision-free path for every Starbug, from its current position to its target location. This consists of three path-finding stages of increasing complexity and computational cost. For each Starbug a path is attempted using a simple method. If unsuccessful, subsequently more complex (and expensive) methods are tried until a valid path is found or the target is flagged as unreachable.Comment: 10 pages, to be published in Proc. SPIE 9913, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy IV; 201

The Physicist's Guide to the Orchestra

An experimental study of strings, woodwinds (organ pipe, flute, clarinet, saxophone and recorder), and the voice was undertaken to illustrate the basic principles of sound production in music instruments. The setup used is simple and consists of common laboratory equipment. Although the canonical examples (standing wave on a string, in an open and closed pipe) are easily reproduced, they fail to explain the majority of the measurements. The reasons for these deviations are outlined and discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures (jpg files). Submitted to European Journal of Physic

Risk Factors for Swine Infection with Toxoplasma gondii

The objective of this study was to evaluate the association between the seroprevalence of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies in swine in commercial pork production systems in Iowa, USA and the source of water (surface water vs. well water vs. rural processed water) and method of water delivery (surface or trough vs. nipple vs. cup). Also the study evaluated the association between T. gondii seroprevalence and other selected potential farm variables

Properties of Hydrogen Terminated Diamond as a Photocathode

Electron emission from the negative electron affinity (NEA) surface of hydrogen terminated, boron doped diamond in the [100] orientation is investigated using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). ARPES measurements using 16 eV synchrotron and 6 eV laser light are compared and found to show a catastrophic failure of the sudden approximation. While the high energy photoemission is found to yield little information regarding the NEA, low energy laser ARPES reveals for the first time that the NEA results from a novel Franck-Condon mechanism coupling electrons in the conduction band to the vacuum. The result opens the door to the development of a new class of NEA electron emitter based on this effect

Empirical comparison of high gradient achievement for different metals in DC and pulsed mode

For the SwissFEL project, an advanced high gradient low emittance gun is under development. Reliable operation with an electric field, preferably above 125 MV/m at a 4 mm gap, in the presence of an UV laser beam, has to be achieved in a diode configuration in order to minimize the emittance dilution due to space charge effects. In the first phase, a DC breakdown test stand was used to test different metals with different preparation methods at voltages up to 100 kV. In addition high gradient stability tests were also carried out over several days in order to prove reliable spark-free operation with a minimum dark current. In the second phase, electrodes with selected materials were installed in the 250 ns FWHM, 500 kV electron gun and tested for high gradient breakdown and for quantum efficiency using an ultra-violet laser.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables. Follow up from FEL 2008 conference (Geyongju Korea 2008) New Title in JVST A (2010) : Vacuum breakdown limit and quantum efficiency obtained for various technical metals using DC and pulsed voltage source

The IKMC web portal: a central point of entry to data and resources from the International Knockout Mouse Consortium

The International Knockout Mouse Consortium (IKMC) aims to mutate all protein-coding genes in the mouse using a combination of gene targeting and gene trapping in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells and to make the generated resources readily available to the research community. The IKMC database and web portal (www.knockoutmouse.org) serves as the central public web site for IKMC data and facilitates the coordination and prioritization of work within the consortium. Researchers can access up-to-date information on IKMC knockout vectors, ES cells and mice for specific genes, and follow links to the respective repositories from which corresponding IKMC products can be ordered. Researchers can also use the web site to nominate genes for targeting, or to indicate that targeting of a gene should receive high priority. The IKMC database provides data to, and features extensive interconnections with, other community databases

The QE numerical simulation of PEA semiconductor photocathode

Several kinds of models have already been proposed for explaining the photoemission process. The exact photoemission theory of semiconductor photocathode was not well established after decades of research. In this paper an integral equation of quantum efficiency (QE) is constructed to describe the photoemission of positive electron affinity (PEA) semiconductor photocathode based on three-step photoemission model. The influences of forbidden gap, electron affinity, photon energy, incident angle, degree of polarization, refractive index, extinction coefficient, initial/final electron energy, relaxation time and external electric field on the QE of PEA semiconductor photocathode are taken into account. In addition, a computer code is also programmed to calculate the QE of K2CsSb photocathode theoretically at 532nm wavelength, the result is in line with the experimental value by and large. What are the reasons caused to the distinction between the experimental measuring and theoretical QE are discussed.Comment: 12 pages,3 figures,2 tables,submitted to Chinese Physics

Construction and accessibility of a cross-species phenotype ontology along with gene annotations for biomedical research

Phenotype analyses, e.g. investigating metabolic processes, tissue formation, or organism behavior, are an important element of most biological and medical research activities. Biomedical researchers are making increased use of ontological standards and methods to capture the results of such analyses, with one focus being the comparison and analysis of phenotype information between species. We have generated a cross-species phenotype ontology for human, mouse and zebrafish that contains classes from the Human Phenotype Ontology, Mammalian Phenotype Ontology, and generated classes for zebrafish phenotypes. We also provide up-to-date annotation data connecting human genes to phenotype classes from the generated ontology. We have included the data generation pipeline into our continuous integration system ensuring stable and up-to-date releases. This article describes the data generation process and is intended to help interested researchers access both the phenotype annotation data and the associated cross-species phenotype ontology. The resource described here can be used in sophisticated semantic similarity and gene set enrichment analyses for phenotype data across species. The stable releases of this resource can be obtained from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hp/uberpheno/