Traversing the Design-Language Divide in the Design and Evaluation of Physical Learning Environments: A Trial of Visual Methods in Focus Groups

When gathering data for the design and evaluation of physical learning environments, there is a significant challenge in traversing, or translating, architect/designer language and stakeholders’ verbal accounts of their expectations, preferences and experiences. In a series of studies used to provide data for both the evaluation of existing spaces and the design of future spaces, the authors utilised three focus group methods that incorporated elements of participatory design and visual play in activities. This paper describes these methods and the efficacy of each method in the context of physical learning environment evaluation and design

Current Health and Environmental Status of the Maasai People in Sub-Saharan Africa

As time passes, the AIDS pandemic continues to spike, affecting an estimated 38.6 million people worldwide. In response, a satellite health clinic is being designed by two Cal Poly students to serve the Maasai people living in the Kajiado district in Southern Kenya. The Maasai have traditionally lived as pastoralists, surviving off of their cattle with which they share their water, increasing the risk for contamination. However, as the population of Kenya increases, the land the Maasai have traditionally used for grazing is shrinking. For this reason, some have turned to farming to maintain their livelihood. These factors have contributed to the desertification and deforestation of their region. As the lifestyle of the Maasai evolves, they rely more on maize than meat and dairy products for their nutrients. All of these changes have contributed to the evolution of the Maasai culture. We will address these changes in order to better understand the Maasai, as well as highlight possible further aid needed to support their survival

A Census of Outflow to Magnetic Field Orientations in Nearby Molecular Clouds

We define a sample of 200 protostellar outflows showing blue and redshifted CO emission in the nearby molecular clouds Ophiuchus, Taurus, Perseus and Orion to investigate the correlation between outflow orientations and local, but relatively large-scale, magnetic field directions traced by Planck 353 GHz dust polarization. At high significance (p~1e-4), we exclude a random distribution of relative orientations and find that there is a preference for alignment of projected plane of sky outflow axes with magnetic field directions. The distribution of relative position angles peaks at ~30deg and exhibits a broad dispersion of ~50deg. These results indicate that magnetic fields have dynamical influence in regulating the launching and/or propagation directions of outflows. However, the significant dispersion around perfect alignment orientation implies that there are large measurement uncertainties and/or a high degree of intrinsic variation caused by other physical processes, such as turbulence or strong stellar dynamical interactions. Outflow to magnetic field alignment is expected to lead to a correlation in the directions of nearby outflow pairs, depending on the degree of order of the field. Analyzing this effect we find limited correlation, except on relatively small scales < 0.5 pc. Furthermore, we train a convolutional neural network to infer the inclination angle of outflows with respect to the line of sight and apply it to our outflow sample to estimate their full 3D orientations. We find that the angles between outflow pairs in 3D space also show evidence of small-scale alignment.Comment: ApJ Accepte

IMPRINTING POLYMERFILM ON PATTERNED SUBSTRATE

A method of applying a pattern on a topography includes first applying a polymer film to an elastormer member, such as PDMS, to form a pad. The pad is then applied to a substrate having a varying topography under pressure. The polymer film is transferred to the substrate due to the plastic deformation of the polymer film under pressure compared to the elastic deformation of the PDMS member pulls away from the polymer layer, thereby depositing the polymer layer, thereby depositing the polymer layer upon the substrate

Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modules

Incorporating language-specific (LS) modules is a proven method to boost performance in multilingual machine translation. This approach bears similarity to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) because it does not inflate FLOPs. However, the scalability of this approach to hundreds of languages (experts) tends to be unmanageable due to the prohibitive number of parameters introduced by full-rank matrices in fully-connected layers. In this work, we introduce the Language-Specific Matrix Synthesis (LMS) method. This approach constructs LS modules by generating low-rank matrices from two significantly smaller matrices to approximate the full-rank matrix. Furthermore, we condense multilingual knowledge from multiple LS modules into a single shared module with the Fuse Distillation (FD) technique to improve the efficiency of inference and model serialization. We show that our LMS method significantly outperforms previous LS methods and MoE methods with the same amount of extra parameters, e.g., 1.73 BLEU points over the Switch Transformer on many-to-many multilingual machine translation. Importantly, LMS is able to have comparable translation performance with much fewer parameters.Comment: Accepted at the main conference of EMNLP 202

Designing Shared Decision-Making Interventions for Dissemination and Sustainment: Can Implementation Science Help Translate Shared Decision Making Into Routine Practice

Shared decision making (SDM) is not widely practiced in routine care due to a variety of organizational, provider, patient, and contextual factors. This article explores how implementation science-which encourages attention to the multilevel contextual factors that influence the adoption, implementation, and sustainment of health care practices-can provide useful insights for increasing SDM use in routine practice. We engaged with stakeholders representing different organizations and geographic locations over three phases: 1) multidisciplinary workgroup meeting comprising researchers and clinicians (n = 11); 2) survey among a purposive sample of 47 patient advocates, clinicians, health care system leaders, funders, policymakers, and researchers; and 3) working session among diverse stakeholders (n = 30). The workgroup meeting identified priorities for action and research, which included targeting multiple audiences and levels, shifting culture toward valuing and supporting SDM, and considering contextual factors influencing SDM implementation. Survey respondents provided recommendations for increasing adoption, implementation, and maintenance of SDM in practice including providing tools to support SDM, obtaining stakeholders\u27 involvement, and raising awareness of the importance of SDM. Stakeholders in the working session provided recommendations on the design of a guide for implementation of SDM in clinical settings, strategies to disseminate educational curricula on SDM, and strategies to influence policies to increase SDM use. These specific recommendations serve as a call to action to pursuing specific promising strategies aimed at increasing SDM use in practice and enhance understanding of the perspectives of diverse stakeholders at multiple levels from an implementation science perspective that appear fruitful for further study and application

The Protostellar Luminosity Function

The protostellar luminosity function (PLF) is the present-day luminosity function of the protostars in a region of star formation. It is determined using the protostellar mass function (PMF) in combination with a stellar evolutionary model that provides the luminosity as a function of instantaneous and final stellar mass. As in McKee & Offner (2010), we consider three main accretion models: the Isothermal Sphere model, the Turbulent Core model, and an approximation of the Competitive Accretion model. We also consider the effect of an accretion rate that tapers off linearly in time and an accelerating star formation rate. For each model, we characterize the luminosity distribution using the mean, median, maximum, ratio of the median to the mean, standard deviation of the logarithm of the luminosity, and the fraction of very low luminosity objects. We compare the models with bolometric luminosities observed in local star forming regions and find that models with an approximately constant accretion time, such as the Turbulent Core and Competitive Accretion models, appear to agree better with observation than those with a constant accretion rate, such as the Isothermal Sphere model. We show that observations of the mean protostellar luminosity in these nearby regions of low-mass star formation suggest a mean star formation time of 0.3$\pm$0.1 Myr. Such a timescale, together with some accretion that occurs non-radiatively and some that occurs in high-accretion, episodic bursts, resolves the classical "luminosity problem" in low-mass star formation, in which observed protostellar luminosities are significantly less than predicted. An accelerating star formation rate is one possible way of reconciling the observed star formation time and mean luminosity.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, accepted to Ap

Stellar Kinematics of Young Clusters in Turbulent Hydrodynamic Simulations

The kinematics of newly-formed star clusters are interesting both as a probe of the state of the gas clouds from which the stars form, and because they influence planet formation, stellar mass segregation, cluster disruption, and other processes controlled in part by dynamical interactions in young clusters. However, to date there have been no attempts to use simulations of star cluster formation to investigate how the kinematics of young stars change in response to variations in the properties of their parent molecular clouds. In this letter we report the results of turbulent self-gravitating simulations of cluster formation in which we consider both clouds in virial balance and those undergoing global collapse. We find that stars in these simulations generally have velocity dispersions smaller than that of the gas by a factor of ~ 5, independent of the dynamical state of the parent cloud, so that subvirial stellar velocity dispersions arise naturally even in virialized molecular clouds. The simulated clusters also show large-scale stellar velocity gradients of ~0.2-2 km s$^{-1}$ pc$^{-1}$ and strong correlations between the centroid velocities of stars and gas, both of which are observed in young clusters. We conclude that star clusters should display subvirial velocity dispersions, large-scale velocity gradients, and strong gas-star velocity correlations regardless of whether their parent clouds are in virial balance, and, conversely, that observations of these features cannot be used to infer the dynamical state of the parent gas clouds.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ

Mitigation of a prospective association between early language delay at toddlerhood and ADHD among bilingual preschoolers: Evidence from the GUSTO Cohort

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its Translational and Clinical Research (TCR) Flagship Programm