Draft genomes of Amanita jacksonii, Ceratocystis albifundus, Fusarium circinatum, Huntiella omanensis, Leptographium procerum, Rutstroemia sydowiana, and Sclerotinia echinophila

The genomes of fungi provide an important resource to resolve issues pertaining to their taxonomy, biology, and evolution. The genomes of Amanita jacksonii, Ceratocystis albifundus, a Fusarium circinatum variant, Huntiella omanensis, Leptographium procerum, Sclerotinia echinophila, and Rutstroemia sydowiana are presented in this genome announcement. These seven genomes are from a number of fungal pathogens and economically important species. The genome sizes range from 27 Mb in the case of Ceratocystis albifundus to 51.9 Mb for Rutstroemia sydowiana. The latter also encodes for a predicted 17 350 genes, more than double that of Ceratocystis albifundus. These genomes will add to the growing body of knowledge of these fungi and provide a value resource to researchers studying these fungi.The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Royal Ontario Museum to J.M.M.; Graduate Scholarships from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (Mexico) and the University of Toronto to SSR; and a Undergraduate Student Research Award from NSERC to M.S. Financial support was provided by members of the Tree Protection Cooperative Program (TPCP), the Department of Science and Technology (DST)/ National Research Foundation (NRF) Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology, and the Genomics Research Institute of the University of Pretoria. This project was supported by multiple grants from the NRF, South Africa, including the grant specific unique reference number (UID) 83924.http://www.imafungus.orgam201

TAG Developments proposal (PIOP3)

To provide LEAP2A based export and import facilitie s to and from TAG’s existing variety of MAPS based school and F.E. ePortfolio sy stems, providing significant educational benefits to individual students and ins titutions

Adaptive comparative judgement: Adapting adaptive assessment to assess the quality of students’ work

It is increasingly acknowledged that adaptive assessment has a significant role to play in enhancing the assessment of and for learning. Computer adaptive testing (CAT) is a familiar method of delivering adaptive assessment, but it comes with a number of challenges that make it difficult to deploy, especially its reliance on questions (items) that can be presented and scored on computer, as well as the need for a large bank of items that have all been calibrated on large samples of suitable students. This paper focuses on a new form of adaptive assessment, where the adaptive nature of the approach is the very thing that makes it viable for large scale deployment. Adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ) is based on a historically sound approach developed by L.L. Thurstone in 1927 - the law of comparative judgement. The approach utilises paired comparisons to deliver highly reliable, non-subjective scaled ranking, but in its raw state, it relies on many paired comparisons to achieve a secure ranked result, making it impractical for use as an operational system. Through work carried out over several years, TAG Developments, working with Cambridge expert Alastair Pollitt, has developed a web-based application of Thurstone's law that is underpinned by an innovative adaptive algorithm which can generate a secure, scaled rank order of student work at least as efficiently as traditional marking. In addition, since assessors are not restricted to the types of task that can be marked reliably, they are free to use whatever methods they judge most authentic and valid. The system therefore delivers strong validity and exceptional reliability when compared to traditional criterion referenced assessment methods.In addition to outlining ACJ and its advantages and disadvantages, the paper also provides information on a number of research projects and live/pilot deployments where the approach has been used in an assessment context

Draft genomes of Amanita jacksonii, Ceratocystis albifundus, Fusarium circinatum, Huntiella omanensis, Leptographium procerum, Rutstroemia sydowiana, and Sclerotinia echinophila

Abstract The genomes of fungi provide an important resource to resolve issues pertaining to their taxonomy, biology, and evolution. The genomes of Amanita jacksonii, Ceratocystis albifundus, a Fusarium circinatum variant, Huntiella omanensis, Leptographium procerum, Sclerotinia echinophila, and Rutstroemia sydowiana are presented in this genome announcement. These seven genomes are from a number of fungal pathogens and economically important species. The genome sizes range from 27 Mb in the case of Ceratocystis albifundus to 51.9 Mb for Rutstroemia sydowiana. The latter also encodes for a predicted 17 350 genes, more than double that of Ceratocystis albifundus. These genomes will add to the growing body of knowledge of these fungi and provide a value resource to researchers studying these fungi

Impact of changed positive and negative task-related brain activity on word-retrieval in aging

Previous functional imaging studies that compared activity patterns in older and younger adults during nonlinguistic tasks found evidence for 2 phenomena: older participants usually show more pronounced task-related positive activity in the brain hemisphere that is not dominant for the task and less pronounced negative task-related activity in temporo-parietal and midline brain regions. The combined effects of these phenomena and the impact on word retrieval, however, have not yet been assessed. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore task-related positive (active task > baseline) and negative activity (baseline > active task) during semantic and phonemic verbal fluency tasks. Increased right frontal positive activity during the semantic task and reduced negative activity in the right hemisphere during both tasks was associated with reduced performance in older subjects. No substantial relationship between changes in positive and negative activity was observed in the older participants, pointing toward 2 partially independent but potentially co-occurring processes. Underlying causes of the observed functional network inefficiency during word retrieval in older adults need to be determined in the future