Multimedia motion: Motivating learners

The Multimedia Motion CD‐ROM is used as part of the teaching for the Supported Learning in Physics (SLIP) project, an Open University‐led project to develop open and flexible learning materials in physics for use by post‐16 students in schools and colleges. Multimedia Motion enables students to chart and analyse a range of movements: displacement, velocities, accelerations, etc. of a variety of people and vehicles. During the pilot phase of the project, we conducted an evaluation of the CD‐ROM‐based activities. The evaluation consisted of observations of teacher and student use of the material in two schools, augmented with data obtained from questionnaires administered in a further two schools. The resulting data raises a number of issues about how exploratory learning can best be supported by multimedia. We observed the expected benefits of increased motivation for learners because of access to more realistic applications of the laws of physics illustrated on the disc. However, several others factors appeared to be important to students when using it. In this paper, we explore how teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the task involved in learning post‐16 physics must be addressed in designing suitable multimedia presentations and exercises

Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961- 1977

This paper takes as its focus the Midland Group Gallery in order to first, make a case for the consideration of the geographies of art galleries. Second, highlight the importance of galleries in the context of cultural geographies of the sixties. Third, discuss the role of provinciality in the operation of art worlds. In so doing it explicates one set of geographies surrounding the gallery – those of the local, regional and international networks that connected to produce art works and art space. It reveals how the interactions between places and practices outside of metropolitan and regional hierarchies provides a more nuanced insight into how art worlds operated during the sixties, a period of growing internationalism of art, and how contested definitions of the provincial played an integral role in this. The paper charts the operations of the Midland Group Gallery and the spaces that it occupied to demonstrate how it was representative of a post-war discourse of provincialism and a corresponding re-evaluation of regional cultural activity

Comparison of short- and long-term humoral immune responses to pneumococcal polysaccharide and glycoconjugate vaccines in an HIV-infected population

Background: Immunisation is recommended internationally to protect against pneumococcal infections in HIV-infected adults. However, vaccination schedule designs are mostly based on studies of initial rather than long-term antibody responses. This UK observational study investigated the short- and long-term antibody responses to polysaccharide and glycoconjugate pneumococcal vaccines in an adult HIV-infected cohort.Methods: We studied a subgroup of 152 of 839 participants from the AIR (Assessment of Immune Responses to Routine Immunisations in HIV-infected Adults, ISRCTN95588307) study that had received pneumococcal vaccinations and had blood samples collected pre- and post-vaccination, as well as at least annually for four subsequent calendar years. Patients received either Pneumovax-23 (PPV, N = 89) or Prevenar-13 (PCV, N = 63) as their primary vaccine, with immunity assessed by measuring IgG antibody concentrations for 12 pneumococcal polysaccharide serotypes (PnPS). The primary outcome was achieving IgG antibody concentrations above the recommended World Health Organisation (WHO) threshold of 0.35 µg/mL for at least 8/12 of the PnPS assessed (WHO≥8/12PnPS). Patients who did not achieve WHO≥8/12PnPS after the primary vaccination were offered further vaccination with PCV; booster vaccinations with PCV were additionally offered to those where antibody levels subsequently fell below the WHO≥8/12PnPS threshold.Results: Patients receiving PCV as their primary pneumococcal vaccine were significantly more likely to achieve WHO≥8/12PnPS after a single vaccine dose than those receiving PPV (54% vs. 33%, p = 0.012). This difference persisted following booster vaccination with PCV, with cumulative rates of WHO≥8/12PnPS in those receiving PCV vs. PPV as the primary vaccine of 88% vs. 67% and 100% vs. 85% after receiving up to one and two booster vaccinations, respectively. Where WHO≥8/12PnPS was achieved, this persisted significantly longer in those receiving PCV as their primary vaccine compared to PPV (median: 23.5 vs. 11.1 months; p = 0.010).Conclusions: Immunisation with PCV resulted in quantitatively greater antibody responses than immunisation with PPV in a cohort of HIV-infected UK adults. Individuals receiving PCV as their primary vaccine required fewer total pneumococcal vaccine doses to achieve WHO≥8/12PnPS and experienced greater duration of time above this threshold than those with PPV as the primary vaccine. However, the median longevity of both vaccine responses was relatively short, which supports the use of ongoing booster doses using high-valency glycoconjugate vaccines to sustain WHO≥8/12PnPS threshold antibody levels

Intelligent transport systems harmonisation assessment: use case of some Spanish intelligent transport systems services

From the 1980s, new telematic technologies have meant a great evolution in several areas. In the transportation domain, their use has implied the development and implementation of several intelligent transport systems (ITS). However, these deployments were done in an isolated way. Traffic managers, public and private organisations, stakeholders and others have implemented ITS without much perspective, that is, without providing ITS as services for end users. In the last few years, several European Union (EU) funded projects have been dealing with the development of harmonised ITS services. For example, the EasyWay Project is involving most of the European countries (EU member states and others) to deploy harmonised ITS services taking into account the European citizen as the final target. In this study, an introduction of the EasyWay project is made, including the ITS concept services and the deployment guidelines for harmonisation. In November 2012, EasyWay presented a new version of DGs, which were approved with minor editorial changes. An overview on these DGs for the ITS services is presented and two real Spanish road traffic ITS services are analysed

RosettaAntibody: antibody variable region homology modeling server

The RosettaAntibody server (http://antibody.graylab.jhu.edu) predicts the structure of an antibody variable region given the amino-acid sequences of the respective light and heavy chains. In an initial stage, the server identifies and displays the most sequence homologous template structures for the light and heavy framework regions and each of the complementarity determining region (CDR) loops. Subsequently, the most homologous templates are assembled into a side-chain optimized crude model, and the server returns a picture and coordinate file. For users requesting a high-resolution model, the server executes the full RosettaAntibody protocol which additionally models the hyper-variable CDR H3 loop. The high-resolution protocol also relieves steric clashes by optimizing the CDR backbone torsion angles and by simultaneously perturbing the relative orientation of the light and heavy chains. RosettaAntibody generates 2000 independent structures, and the server returns pictures, coordinate files, and detailed scoring information for the 10 top-scoring models. The 10 models enable users to use rational judgment in choosing the best model or to use the set as an ensemble for further studies such as docking. The high-resolution models generated by RosettaAntibody have been used for the successful prediction of antibody–antigen complex structures

SnugDock: Paratope Structural Optimization during Antibody-Antigen Docking Compensates for Errors in Antibody Homology Models

High resolution structures of antibody-antigen complexes are useful for analyzing the binding interface and to make rational choices for antibody engineering. When a crystallographic structure of a complex is unavailable, the structure must be predicted using computational tools. In this work, we illustrate a novel approach, named SnugDock, to predict high-resolution antibody-antigen complex structures by simultaneously structurally optimizing the antibody-antigen rigid-body positions, the relative orientation of the antibody light and heavy chains, and the conformations of the six complementarity determining region loops. This approach is especially useful when the crystal structure of the antibody is not available, requiring allowances for inaccuracies in an antibody homology model which would otherwise frustrate rigid-backbone docking predictions. Local docking using SnugDock with the lowest-energy RosettaAntibody homology model produced more accurate predictions than standard rigid-body docking. SnugDock can be combined with ensemble docking to mimic conformer selection and induced fit resulting in increased sampling of diverse antibody conformations. The combined algorithm produced four medium (Critical Assessment of PRediction of Interactions-CAPRI rating) and seven acceptable lowest-interface-energy predictions in a test set of fifteen complexes. Structural analysis shows that diverse paratope conformations are sampled, but docked paratope backbones are not necessarily closer to the crystal structure conformations than the starting homology models. The accuracy of SnugDock predictions suggests a new genre of general docking algorithms with flexible binding interfaces targeted towards making homology models useful for further high-resolution predictions

The instrument suite of the European Spallation Source

An overview is provided of the 15 neutron beam instruments making up the initial instrument suite of the European Spallation Source (ESS), and being made available to the neutron user community. The ESS neutron source consists of a high-power accelerator and target station, providing a unique long-pulse time structure of slow neutrons. The design considerations behind the time structure, moderator geometry and instrument layout are presented. The 15-instrument suite consists of two small-angle instruments, two reflectometers, an imaging beamline, two single-crystal diffractometers; one for macromolecular crystallography and one for magnetism, two powder diffractometers, and an engineering diffractometer, as well as an array of five inelastic instruments comprising two chopper spectrometers, an inverse-geometry single-crystal excitations spectrometer, an instrument for vibrational spectroscopy and a high-resolution backscattering spectrometer. The conceptual design, performance and scientific drivers of each of these instruments are described. All of the instruments are designed to provide breakthrough new scientific capability, not currently available at existing facilities, building on the inherent strengths of the ESS long-pulse neutron source of high flux, flexible resolution and large bandwidth. Each of them is predicted to provide world-leading performance at an accelerator power of 2 MW. This technical capability translates into a very broad range of scientific capabilities. The composition of the instrument suite has been chosen to maximise the breadth and depth of the scientific impact o