How international are we? A study of the barriers to internationalisation of UK Higher Education

The internationalisation of higher education may appear to be a fairly recent phenomenon however it has been highlighted as a trend within developed country universities since the late 1980's. How universities inetrnationalise varies and this can be attributed to the differing definitions and perceptions of internationalisation itself. It is apparent that a wider ranging and more diverse internationalisation strategy will be critical to institutions to successfully manage the complex process of internationalisation. University internationalisation strategies have been analysed using content analysis to identify a number of themes why they internationalise, together with those identified a priori through the literature review. This forumlated a questionnaire, distributed to staff at UK HEIs to assess where they currently are in their internationalisation process and what they perceive as being important to this process and they have been analysed. A further stage of interviews with a range of interviewees of differing job functions at differing HEIs is still to be completed and some early initial analysis will hopefully be available for the conference. The contenet analysis produced an extensive range of coded words/phrases that were grouped into a series of rationales and there were significant similarities to findings from previous studies and also new themes identified. The questionnaire distributed via Surveymonkey generated 76 responses from across 55 different UK HEIs, a representative sample for analysis. It is clear that there is some commonality of issues associated with internationalisation but also that some opinions vary depending upon the role undertaken by the respondent and also whether a pre or post 1992 institution. Internationalisation is likely to increase in importance as traditional UK Government funding stops and HEIs seek other sources of income. To identify barriers will hopefully aid HEIs to successfully operationalise internationalisation and enhance the student experience

Building Information Modeling in quantity surveying education

Building Information Modeling (BIM) will have a significant impact on the future role and practice of the QS and will almost certainly lead to major changes in the profession. The aim of this presentation will be to consider a brief history of BIM and how it has developed into an essential tool in the construction industry and in particular, its relevance to the QS profession. This will concentrate mainly on 4d and 5d BIM as those being most relevant to the QS but will also look at 6d BIM and above. It is imperative therefore that the education of QS students embraces and embeds BIM within the curriculum and a detailed case study of how Northumbria University, UK has undertaken this will be provided. This will illustrate how BIM is being taught both as a theoretical concept and subject and also as a practical skill to ensure that graduates entering the workplace can understand and also utilize BIM in practice. The presentation will also outline the University’s partnership with practice to create the BIM Academy and how this is leading research and development both in the UK and at a global level

How international are we? A study of the internal barriers to internationalisation of UK higher education

As the landscape of UKHE undergoes yet another significant change, currently related to the funding of home students, the importance of a university’s international activities have been placed in a sharper focus. Although the direct economic impact of international student recruitment is of interest and importance, how institutions approach and organise themselves in relation to wider internationalisation is critical. This study has investigated in detail the internal barriers that exist to restrict or prevent that internationalisation process. A mixed methods approach, aligned with a realist ontology and pragmatist epistemology, has utilised a rigorous, sequential, three phase primary investigation. The earlier phases informing, although also allowing data to be transferred to other stages, the follow-on phases. An initial phase of content analysis of internationalisation strategies was utilised to identify the enablers to internationalisation and also to allow the formulation of a probability sampled questionnaire to staff involved with, and interested in, internationalisation. The phase two questionnaire results were then utilised to identify the barriers to internationalisation and to formulate detailed questions to be asked at a series of purposive sampled interviews, these interviews confirming the previously identified barriers. A series of internal barriers have been identified as follows; Resources; senior management support and leadership; staff interaction/engagement; use of a strategy and monitoring; complicated and over- bureaucratic procedures; internationally focused curriculum; internationalisation at home; staff and student mobility; communication and clarification. The degree of impact of these barriers will vary between institutions and suggestions have been made how to approach and deal with them. This study has therefore made a direct contribution to higher education practice but has also made a contribution to knowledge by utilising the sequential primary data gathering and closing the evident knowledge gap associated with the identification of the internal barriers to internationalisation of higher education in the UK

Tactical Production Planning for Customer Individual Products in Changeable Production Networks

The requirements of future production are characterized by increasing demand volatility as well as very short delivery times and high timeliness in the order-based production environment. Furthermore, the trend to customer individual products leads to additional production planning challenges. Therefore, to react fast to these market trends, changeable production networks is a key to success. This technical contribution describes a method for tactical production planning for customer individual products in changeable production networks. The design of the method contains three main process modules (1) order-capability-comparison, (2) capacity planning, and (3) order-specific network structure. Underlying the former described modules, a data model is necessary and introduced. Furthermore, the simulation of the applied system on a prototypical implementation at BSH Hausgeräte GmbH, the largest home appliances manufacturer in Europe, is shown and explained. Finally, limitations are discussed and an outlook into future work for the research field in production planning of production networks is given

Sarcoidosis of the hypothalamus and pituitary stalk

We report a rare case of sarcoidosis of the hypothalamic and suprasellar region, with clinical course and the magnetic resonance imaging follow-up

Counting with DNA in metabarcoding studies: How should we convert sequence reads to dietary data?

Advances in DNA sequencing technology have revolutionized the field of molecular analysis of trophic interactions, and it is now possible to recover counts of food DNA sequences from a wide range of dietary samples. But what do these counts mean? To obtain an accurate estimate of a consumer's diet should we work strictly with data sets summarizing frequency of occurrence of different food taxa, or is it possible to use relative number of sequences? Both approaches are applied to obtain semi-quantitative diet summaries, but occurrence data are often promoted as a more conservative and reliable option due to taxa-specific biases in recovery of sequences. We explore representative dietary metabarcoding data sets and point out that diet summaries based on occurrence data often overestimate the importance of food consumed in small quantities (potentially including low-level contaminants) and are sensitive to the count threshold used to define an occurrence. Our simulations indicate that using relative read abundance (RRA) information often provides a more accurate view of population-level diet even with moderate recovery biases incorporated; however, RRA summaries are sensitive to recovery biases impacting common diet taxa. Both approaches are more accurate when the mean number of food taxa in samples is small. The ideas presented here highlight the need to consider all sources of bias and to justify the methods used to interpret count data in dietary metabarcoding studies. We encourage researchers to continue addressing methodological challenges and acknowledge unanswered questions to help spur future investigations in this rapidly developing area of research

Family Unification, Exotic States and Light Magnetic Monopoles

Models with fermions in bifundamental representations can lead naturally to family unification as opposed to family replication. Such models typically predict (exotic) color singlet states with fractional electric charge, and magnetic monopoles with multiple Dirac charge. The exotics may be at the TeV scale, and relatively light magnetic monopoles (greater than about 10^7 GeV) can be present in the galaxy with abundance near the Parker bound. We focus on three family SU(4)XSU(3)XSU(3) models.Comment: 37 page

Lithium distribution across the membrane of motoneurons in the isolated frog spinal cord

Lithium sensitive microelectrodes were used to investigate the transmembrane distribution of lithium ions (Li+) in motoneurons of the isolated frog spinal cord. After addition of 5 mmol·l–1 LiCl to the bathing solution the extracellular diffusion of Li+ was measured. At a depth of 500 m, about 60 min elapsed before the extracellular Li+ concentration approached that of the bathing solution. Intracellular measurements revealed that Li+ started to enter the cells soon after reaching the motoneuron pool and after up to 120 min superfusion, an intra — to extracellular concentration ratio of about 0.7 was obtained. The resting membrane potential and height of antidromically evoked action potentials were not altered by 5 mmol·l–1 Li+

Fate and transport of volatile organic compounds in glacial till and groundwater at an industrial site in Northern Ireland

Volatile organic compound (VOC) contamination of subsurface geological material and groundwater was discovered on the Nortel Monkstown industrial site, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The objectives of this study were to (1) investigate the characteristics of the geological material and its influences on contaminated groundwater flow across the site using borehole logs and hydrological evaluations, and (2) identify the contaminants and examine their distribution in the subsurface geological material and groundwater using chemical analysis. This report focuses on the eastern car park (ECP) which was a former storage area associated with trichloroethene (TCE) degreasing operations. This is where the greatest amount of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particularly TCE, were detected. The study site is on a complex deposit of clayey glacial till with discontinuous coarser grained lenses, mainly silts, sands and gravel, which occur at 0.45-7.82 m below ground level (bgl). The lenses overall form an elongated formation that acts as a small unconfined shallow aquifer. There is a continuous low permeable stiff clayey till layer beneath the lenses that performs as an aquitard to the groundwater. Highest concentrations of VOCs, mainly TCE, in the geological material and groundwater are in these coarser lenses at similar to 4.5-7 m bgl. Highest TCE measurements at 390,000 mu g L-1 for groundwater and at 39,000 mu g kg(-1) at 5.7 m for geological material were in borehole GA19 in the coarse lens zone. It is assumed that TCE gained entrance to the subsurface near this borehole where the clayey till was thin to absent above coarse lenses which provided little retardation to the vertical migration of this dense non-aqueous phase liquid (DNAPL) into the groundwater. However, TCE is present in low concentrations in the geological material overlying the coarse lens zone. Additionally, VOCs appear to be associated with poorly drained layers and in peat < 3.0 m bgl in the ECP. Some indication of natural attenuation as VOCs degradation products vinyl chloride (VC) and dichloromethane (DCM) also occur on the site