Chemistry Add-In for Word

Poster presented at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The Chemistry Add-In for Word is an Open Source program that allows chemists to create, edit and manipulate chemistry (labels and 2D structures) in the Word environment. the on-screen representation is backed by semantic data in Chemical Markup Language (CML). Combined with domain-aware libraries we enable novel functionality in data checking during the authoring process, chemistry-centric article reading support and data-mining applications. [http://research.microsoft.com/chem4word/] [http://chem4word.codeplex.com/]The Chem4Word project was sponsored and supported by Microsoft External Research

A journey through Spain in the years 1786 and 1787 : with particular attention to the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, population, taxes and revenue of that country and remarks in passing through a part of France

Sign.: A4, B-Z8, Aa-Bb8, Cc4Ante

The effects of feedback on the behavioral profile of preservice teachers across three educational levels of the physical education student teaching experience.

The student teaching experience represents one of the most important components of a novice physical educator\u27s preservice preparation. However, current research raises several important issues regarding the cooperating teacher\u27s role as clinical supervisor. At the present time a less than complete picture exists of the effect of feedback using systematic behavioral data by cooperating teachers on their assigned preservice teacher in a variety of settings. This study adds to a research base that has rarely used behavior analytic designs in the past decade. A reversal to baseline research design was used to determine whether cooperating teachers could provide systematically collected data in combination with prescriptive feedback and change the behavioral profile of student teachers and their pupils at three different educational levels, specifically elementary, middle, and high school. The participants were two student teachers who each taught at the same high school and elementary schools, but differing middle schools. Results showed that in regards to the student teacher\u27s behavior and that of their students, the cooperating teacher made positive changes by providing data only and also by providing data augmented by prescriptive feedback. Furthermore, each intervention was successful across all three levels of education. On particular intervention did not necessarily out perform the other and there were no order effects observed. However, while no order effects were present, the variable of time did appear to be an issue in relation to the performance of the independent variables

An evaluation of curriculum-related specialties in grades five and six

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The impacts of credit on village economies

April 9, 200

A structural evaluation of a large-scale quasi-experimental microfinance initiative

December 1, 200

Repurposing Plastic Waste in El Cercado

This project aims to assist the community of El Cercado in the Dominican Republic in turning their plastic waste into useful products. The design team developed a first iteration shredder, injector, and aluminum mold which future design teams could further iterate in order to make products out of waste plastic. Different products were researched to ensure that they can be sold or used in the community. The goal of producing these items is to stimulate economic activity in the community by creating economic opportunity. The design shall also be sustainable in three ways. It shall reuse plastic waste while also ensuring that the energy used is sustainable. Additionally, it shall be designed to have long term impact in the community. The first iteration machines were modified versions of schematics published by a non-profit organization called Precious Plastic. The design team borrowed a shredder from LA Precious Plastic for experimental testing, which successfully shreds the plastic waste into small pieces. For the team’s shredder, all of the metal, all of the acrylic, the motor, and the reducer were bought, and manufacturing was completed on the teeth, spacers, shaft, and partial casing for the team’s shredder. For testing on the first-iteration injector, plastic chips were melted and injected into a mold. For the shredder, future teams should first find the optimal motor, and then design the parts in the following order: teeth, spacers, comb, motor, reducer, bearing, base, housing, hopper. Better heating and increased pressure are two clear paths that would lead to a more effective injector and ultimately expand the amount of plastic that can reach the mold

Extracting and re-using research data from chemistry e-theses: the SPECTRa-T project

Scientific e-theses are data-rich resources, but much of the information they contain is not readily accessible. For chemistry, the SPECTRa-T project has addressed this problem by developing data-mining techniques to extract experimental data, creating RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples for exposure to sophisticated Semantic Web searches. We used OSCAR3, an Open Source chemistry text-mining tool, to parse and extract data from theses in PDF, and from theses in Office Open XML document format. Theses in PDF suffered data corruption and a loss of formatting that prevented the identification of chemical objects. Theses in .docx yielded semantically rich SciXML that enabled the additional extraction of associated data. Chemical objects were placed in a data repository, and RDF triples deposited in a triplestore. Data-mining from chemistry e-theses is both desirable and feasible; but the use of PDF, the de facto format standard for deposit in most repositories, prevents the optimal extraction of data for semantic querying. In order to facilitate this, we recommend that universities also require deposition of chemistry e-theses in an XML document format. Further work is required to clarify the complex IPR issues and ensure that they do not become an unwarranted barrier to data extraction and re-use

A semantic Grid for molecular science

Proceedings of the 2003 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, 31st August - 3rd September, Nottingham UKThe properties of molecules have very well defined semantics and allow the creation of a semantic GRID. Markup languages (CML - Chemical Markup Language) and dictionary-based ontologies have been designed to support a wide range of applications, including chemical supply, publication and the safety of compounds. Many properties can be computed by Quantum Mechanical (QM) programs and we have developed a "black-box" system based on XML wrappers for all components. This is installed on a Condor system on which we have computed properties for 250, 000 compounds. The results of this will be available in an OpenData/OpenSource peer-to-peer (P2P) system (WorldWide Molecular Matrix - WWMM)

Artificial Development of Neural-Symbolic Networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and logic programs have both been suggested as means of modelling human cognition. While ANNs are adaptable and relatively noise resistant, the information they represent is distributed across various neurons and is therefore difficult to interpret. On the contrary, symbolic systems such as logic programs are interpretable but less adaptable. Human cognition is performed in a network of biological neurons and yet is capable of representing symbols, and therefore an ideal model would combine the strengths of the two approaches. This is the goal of Neural-Symbolic Integration [4, 16, 21, 40], in which ANNs are used to produce interpretable, adaptable representations of logic programs and other symbolic models. One neural-symbolic model of reasoning is SHRUTI [89, 95], argued to exhibit biological plausibility in that it captures some aspects of real biological processes. SHRUTI's original developers also suggest that further biological plausibility can be ascribed to the fact that SHRUTI networks can be represented by a model of genetic development [96, 120]. The aims of this thesis are to support the claims of SHRUTI's developers by producing the first such genetic representation for SHRUTI networks and to explore biological plausibility further by investigating the evolvability of the proposed SHRUTI genome. The SHRUTI genome is developed and evolved using principles from Generative and Developmental Systems and Artificial Development [13, 105], in which genomes use indirect encoding to provide a set of instructions for the gradual development of the phenotype just as DNA does for biological organisms. This thesis presents genomes that develop SHRUTI representations of logical relations and episodic facts so that they are able to correctly answer questions on the knowledge they represent. The evolvability of the SHRUTI genomes is limited in that an evolutionary search was able to discover genomes for simple relational structures that did not include conjunction, but could not discover structures that enabled conjunctive relations or episodic facts to be learned. Experiments were performed to understand the SHRUTI fitness landscape and demonstrated that this landscape is unsuitable for navigation using an evolutionary search. Complex SHRUTI structures require that necessary substructures must be discovered in unison and not individually in order to yield a positive change in objective fitness that informs the evolutionary search of their discovery. The requirement for multiple substructures to be in place before fitness can be improved is probably owed to the localist representation of concepts and relations in SHRUTI. Therefore this thesis concludes by making a case for switching to more distributed representations as a possible means of improving evolvability in the future