Open Science Happens Somewhere: Exploring the use of Science OER in Schools

This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University’s (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary thinking and learning through inquiry (Macintyre 2014). The idea of the pilot was to work on how “open content” might be used in schools to understand what openness might mean in and for educational practice. While our initial intention was simply to run these in schools after the first workshops it became apparent while the technical and licences were open and it was relatively clear how to do the experiments, people were uncertain how to use them in their educational practice. Emphasising the need to attend to Educational Practice as well as Openness in OEP. The pilot took a participatory design approach (Sanders and Westerlund 2011; Mor et.al 2012), to developing and support practices around the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in classroom. Through a series of workshops and schools visits we looked to solve these problems from the classroom out, using the teachers experience to develop learning journeys that worked for teachers and pupils. With teachers we created a learning journey using the OU’s free platform OpenLearnWorks to wrap the experiments in a mixture of existing and newly developed OER. Two journeys were created, these will be run in two locations with with two sets of teachers in December 2014. The paper will report on the outcomes for pupils and teachers of this final stage. In doing so it will reflect on the participatory design process, highlighting the practices developed to support the use of open content, drawing out broader conclusions might support the use open materials in the classroom

The Relationship of Porcine Muscle Fiber Size and Number to Management, Meatiness and Quality

For many years animal scientists have been striving to find the “foolproof” method foreseeing the desired carcass and consumer characteristics in live animals before they are slaughtered. As a result, several different live animal and carcass evaluation techniques have been developed and tested with slow but encouraging success in some areas. This “never-ending” search has been stimulated by the development of new and more sophisticated research tools and facilities as time advances. Increasing consumer demands for a muscular, trim, high quality meat product makes identification of these desired traits in the live animal and carcass necessary. Thus, the producer, feeder and packer could supply the product in greatest demand more efficiently and economically. In fact, the current competition of meat substitutes and convenience foods may make this early evaluation of economic traits necessary for the advancement or even survival of the meat animal industry in the growing food market. In this experiment the use of pork muscle fiber diameter and number within two different muscles of the carcass was studied as a meaningful and practical evaluation tool. This is not a new endeavor, since literature cites evidence of the curiosity about muscle fibers since the invention of the microscope. However, for many years emphasis on muscle chemistry has foreshadowed the muscle physical characteristics and their relation to meatiness and quality traits. Recent renewal of interest in muscle structure may have been stimulated by greatly improved equipment for the completion of more detailed and meaningful experimentation as well as the increasing need for more accurate evaluation of animals and carcasses. Several important pork meatiness and quality characteristics have been compared with muscle fiber data of heavy weight market barrows fed differing protein levels. Efforts to study the influence of nutrition, muscle location and function, and age on the size and number of pork muscle fibers were completed in this experiment. Furthermore, muscle fiber data were tested in the prediction of several live animal and carcass traits that may be helpful to the producer and packer

Higher Education, Research, and the Future of Nevada

May you live in interesting times.” This Chinese proverb comes to mind lately, as we are indeed living through some interesting times at UNLV

Shipping and the Spread of Infectious Salmon Anemia in Scottish Aquaculture

Long-distance transport of pathogens plays a critical role in the emergence of novel diseases. Shipping is a major contributor to such transport, and the role of ships in spreading disease has been recognized for centuries. However, statistical confirmation of pathogen spread by shipping is usually impractical. We present evidence of invasive spread of infectious salmon anemia in the salmon farms of Scotland and demonstrate a link between vessel visits and farm contamination. The link is associated with vessels moving fish between sites and transporting harvest, but not with vessels delivering food or involved in other work

Hartle-Hawking state is a maximum of entanglement entropy

It is shown that the Hartle-Hawking state of a scalar field is a maximum of entanglement entropy in the space of pure quantum states satisfying the condition that backreaction is finite. In other words, the Hartle-Hawking state is a curved-space analogue of the EPR state, which is also a maximum of entanglement entropy.Comment: Latex, 4 pages, Some comments are added on the "small backreaction condition

ACEE composite structures technology

Toppics addressed include: advanced composites on Boeing commercial aircraft; composite wing durability; damage tolerance technology development; heavily loaded wing panel design; and pressure containment and damage tolerance in fuselages

Neutral Hydrogen in the Ringed Barred Galaxies NGC 1433 and NGC 6300

We have made observations of the \ion{H}{1} in the southern ringed barred spiral galaxies NGC~1433 and NGC~6300 with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), the main goal being to test the resonance theory for the origin of these rings. NGC~1433 is the prototypical ringed barred spiral, and displays distinct \ion{H}{1}~counterparts to its nuclear ring, inner ring, outer pseudoring, and plume-like features. The $L_{4}$ and $L_{5}$ regions at corotation, as well as the bar itself, are relatively devoid of neutral atomic hydrogen. By associating the inner ring of NGC~1433 with the inner second harmonic resonance, and its outer pseudoring with the outer Lindblad resonance, we are able to infer a bar pattern speed for NGC~1433 of $26\pm5$~km~s$^{-1}$~kpc$^{-1}$. By way of contrast, NGC~6300 possesses a much more extended \ion{H}{1}~disk than NGC~1433. There is a gas ring underlying the inner pseudoring, but it is both broader and slightly larger in diameter than the optical feature. By again linking this inner ring feature to the inner second harmonic resonance, we derive a bar pattern speed for NGC~6300 of $27\pm8$~km~s$^{-1}$~kpc$^{-1}$, but in this case, neither the outer pseudoring nor the nuclear ring predicted by the resonance-ring theory can be identified in NGC~6300. Although it may be the case that the ring in NGC~6300 is not related to a resonance with the bar at all, we postulate instead that NGC~6300 is merely a less well-developed example of a resonance-ring galaxy than is NGC~1433.Comment: 21 pages, aas2pp4 LaTeX, no figures included. Accepted for April 1 1996 ApJ. Full paper (with figures) available from http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~sdr/prep.htm

Kepler Mission Stellar and Instrument Noise Properties Revisited

An earlier study of the Kepler Mission noise properties on time scales of primary relevance to detection of exoplanet transits found that higher than expected noise followed to a large extent from the stars, rather than instrument or data analysis performance. The earlier study over the first six quarters of Kepler data is extended to the full four years ultimately comprising the mission. Efforts to improve the pipeline data analysis have been successful in reducing noise levels modestly as evidenced by smaller values derived from the current data products. The new analyses of noise properties on transit time scales show significant changes in the component attributed to instrument and data analysis, with essentially no change in the inferred stellar noise. We also extend the analyses to time scales of several days, instead of several hours to better sample stellar noise that follows from magnetic activity. On the longer time scale there is a shift in stellar noise for solar-type stars to smaller values in comparison to solar values.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted by A

Individual differences in infant fixation duration relate to attention and behavioral control in childhood

Individual differences in fixation duration are considered a reliable measure of attentional control in adults. However, the degree to which individual differences in fixation duration in infancy (0–12 months) relate to temperament and behavior in childhood is largely unknown. In the present study, data were examined from 120 infants (mean age = 7.69 months, SD = 1.90) who previously participated in an eye-tracking study. At follow-up, parents completed age-appropriate questionnaires about their child’s temperament and behavior (mean age of children = 41.59 months, SD = 9.83). Mean fixation duration in infancy was positively associated with effortful control (β = 0.20, R2 = .02, p = .04) and negatively with surgency (β = −0.37, R2 = .07, p = .003) and hyperactivity-inattention (β = −0.35, R2 = .06, p = .005) in childhood. These findings suggest that individual differences in mean fixation duration in infancy are linked to attentional and behavioral control in childhood