Coping with a changing world: the UK Open University approach to teaching ICT

The rapid pace of change in the ICT field has affected all HE providers, but for the UK Open University (UKOU), used to print-based courses lasting eight years or more, it has been a particular challenge. This paper will present some of the ways the UKOU has been coping with this problem by discussing the design of three courses, the first developed almost a decade ago. All three are distance learning courses that are either core or optional in a variety of bachelors' degrees, including the BSc programmes in: Information and Communication Technology; IT and Computing; and Technology; as well as the BEng (Hons) engineering programme. The first course, Information and Communication Technology: people and interactions is a level 2 (second year undergraduate) course first presented in 2002. It is predominately a print-based course with an eight year lifetime. The second course Networked Living: exploring information and communication technologies is a level 1 (first year undergraduate) course first presented some three-and-a-half years later in 2005. It is expected to have a course life of five years, and uses a mix of print-based (60%) and computer-based (40%) material. Both these courses use assignments as key tools for annual updating. The third course, Keeping ahead in ICT is aimed primarily at equipping students with advanced information searching and evaluation skills that will serve them well in professional life, and is presented at level 3 (final year undergraduate). It was first presented in 2007 and has an expected course life of 8 years. It uses much less print than in most OU courses, and has a greater reliance on third-party resources such as newspaper, conference and journal articles, websites, and other electronic resources. Some elements in each block are designed to change from year to year, in order to retain currency. Finally, the paper will look forward to the development of a new level 2 course with an expected first presentation in 2010, drawing out the lessons learned about course updating, and predicting the approach that the course team may tak

Bird Migration Through A Mountain Pass Studied With High Resolution Radar, Ceilometers, And Census

Autumnal migration was studied with high-resolution radar, ceilometer, and daily census in the area of Franconia Notch, a major pass in the northern Appalachian Mountains. Under synoptic conditions favorable for migration, broadfront movements of migrants toward the south passed over the mountains, often above a temperature inversion. Birds at lower elevations appeared to be influenced by local topography. Birds moving southwest were concentrated along the face of the mountain range. Birds appeared to deviate their flights to follow local topography through the pass. Specific migratory behavior was not associated with species or species groups. Under synoptic conditions unfavorable for southward migration, multimodal movements probably associated with local flights were as dense as the southward migrations described above. Avian migrants reacting to local terrain may result in concentrations of migrants over ridge summits or other topographic features

SCRAM: Software configuration and management for the LHC Computing Grid project

Recently SCRAM (Software Configuration And Management) has been adopted by the applications area of the LHC computing grid project as baseline configuration management and build support infrastructure tool. SCRAM is a software engineering tool, that supports the configuration management and management processes for software development. It resolves the issues of configuration definition, assembly break-down, build, project organization, run-time environment, installation, distribution, deployment, and source code distribution. It was designed with a focus on supporting a distributed, multi-project development work-model. We will describe the underlying technology, and the solutions SCRAM offers to the above software engineering processes, while taking a users view of the system under configuration management.Comment: Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 2003 1 tar fil

Monolayers of 3He on the Surface of Bulk Superfluid 4He

We have used quantum evaporation to investigate the two-dimensional fermion system that forms at the free surface of (initially isotopically pure) 4He when small quantities of 3He are added to it. By measuring the first-arrival times of the evaporated atoms, we have determined that the 3He-3He potential in this system is V_3S/k_B=(0.23+/-0.02) K nm^2 (repulsive) and estimated a value of m_3S=(1.53+/-0.02)m_3 for the zero-coverage effective mass. We have also observed the predicted second layer-state which becomes occupied once the first layer-state density exceeds about 0.6 monolayers.Comment: 2 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Proc. LT-22 (1999) to appear in Physica

Relative Evaporation Probabilities of 3He and 4He from the Surface of Superfluid 4He

We report a preliminary experiment which demonstrates that 3He atoms in Andreev states are evaporated by high-energy (E/k_B ~ 10.2 K) phonons in a quantum evaporation process similar to that which occurs in pure 4He. Under conditions of low 3He coverage, high-energy phonons appear to evaporate 3He and 4He atoms with equal probability. However, we have not managed to detect any 3He atoms that have been evaporated by rotons, and conclude that the probability of a roton evaporating a 3He atom is less than 2% of the probability that it evaporates a 4He atom.Comment: 2 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Proc. LT-22 (1999) Physica

Mapping biodiversity value worldwide: combining higher-taxon richness from different groups

Maps of large-scale biodiversity are urgently needed to guide conservation, and yet complete enumeration of organisms is impractical at present. One indirect approach is to measure richness at higher taxonomic ranks, such as families. The difficulty is how to combine information from different groups on numbers of higher taxa, when these taxa may in effect have been defined in different ways, particularly for more distantly related major groups. In this paper, the regional family richness of terrestrial and freshwater seed plants, amphibians, reptiles and mammals is mapped worldwide by combining: (i) absolute family richness; (ii) proportional family richness; and (iii) proportional family richness weighted for the total species richness in each major group. The assumptions of the three methods and their effects on the results are discussed, although for these data the broad pattern is surprisingly robust with respect to the method of combination. Scores from each of the methods of combining families are used to rank the top five richness hotspots and complementary areas, and hotspots of endemism are mapped by unweighted combination of range-size rarity scores

Evidence for two electronic components in high-temperature superconductivity from NMR

A new analysis of 63Cu and 17O NMR shift data on La1.85Sr0.15CuO4 is reported that supports earlier work arguing for a two-component description of this material, but conflicts with the widely held view that the cuprates are a one-component system. The data are analyzed in terms of two components A and B with susceptibilities Chi(A), Chi(B), and Chi(AB)=Chi(BA) . We find that above Tc, Chi(AB) and Chi(BB) are independent of temperature and obtain for the first time the temperature dependence of all three susceptibilities above Tc as well as the complete temperature dependence of Chi(AA)+Chi(AB) and of Chi(AB)+Chi(BB) below Tc. The form of the results agrees with that recently proposed by Barzykin and Pines.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Poincare duality for K-theory of equivariant complex projective spaces

We make explicit Poincare duality for the equivariant K-theory of equivariant complex projective spaces. The case of the trivial group provides a new approach to the K-theory orientation