Does PAL work? An exploration of affect amongst First-year HE in FE students

The study evaluates a peer-assisted learning (PAL) scheme as an effective strategy in alleviating levels of negative emotions and, in the process, contributes to explorations of affect in first-year students in an HE in FE environment, with a particular focus on anxiety and related emotions. Various types of anxieties are defined in the context of a student’s experience in HE, followed by an explanation of the present interventional study in an HE in FE institution, including the survey method used to collect data analyzed through SPSS. Surprisingly, the main findings are that overall anxiety and worry increased for students belonging to most faculties with time, regardless of participation in the PAL scheme. A positive finding was nonetheless that anxiety levels increased more steadily for students who belonged to the control group. The PAL scheme may have thus influenced how less anxious PAL students felt, compared to those who did not participate in the PAL scheme who were left feeling more anxious at the end of the semester

A List of Wisconsin Springtails With New Records and Annotations (Hexapoda: Parainsecta: Collembola)

Twenty Collembola species new to Wisconsin were collected from soil at two agricultural sites in southern Wisconsin, including an undescribed species of Isotomidae. The state faunal list now contains 52 species representing seven families

Magnetic studies of the lightly Ru doped perovskite rhodates Sr(Ru,Rh)O3_3

The solid solution between the ferromagnetic metal SrRuO$_3$ and the enhanced paramagnetic metal SrRhO$_3$ was recently reported [K. Yamaura et al., Phys. Rev. B 69 (2004) 024410], and an unexpected feature was found in the specific heat data at $x$=0.9 of SrRu$_{1-x}$Rh$_x$O$_3$. The feature was reinvestigated further by characterizing additional samples with various Ru concentrations in the vicinity of $x$=0.9. Specific heat and magnetic susceptibility data indicate that the feature reflects a peculiar magnetism of the doped perovskite, which appears only in the very narrow composition range 0.85$<$$x$$\le$0.95.Comment: Accepted for publication in a special issue of Physica B (the proceedings of SCES04

Progress in resolving charge symmetry violation in nucleon structure

Recent work unambiguously resolves the level of charge symmetry violation in moments of parton distributions using 2+1-flavor lattice QCD. We introduce the methods used for that analysis by applying them to determine the strong contribution to the proton-neutron mass difference. We also summarize related work which reveals that the fraction of baryon spin which is carried by the quarks is in fact structure-dependent rather than universal across the baryon octet.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; presented at "The Seventh International Symposium on Chiral Symmetry in Hadrons and Nuclei", BeiHang Univ. Beijing, Chin

Updated Analysis of the Mass of the H Dibaryon from Lattice QCD

Recent lattice QCD calculations from the HAL and NPLQCD Collaborations have reported evidence for the existence of a bound state with strangeness -2 and baryon number 2 at quark masses somewhat higher than the physical values. A controlled chiral extrapolation of these lattice results to the physical point suggested that the state, identified with the famed H dibaryon, is most likely slightly unbound (by 13 $\pm$ 14 MeV) with respect to the $\Lambda--\Lambda$ threshold. We report the results of an updated analysis which finds the H unbound by 26 $\pm$ 11 MeV. Apart from the insight it would give us into how QCD is realized in Nature, the H is of great interest because of its potential implications for the equation of state of dense matter and studies of neutron stars. It may also explain the enhancement above the $\Lambda--\Lambda$ threshold already reported experimentally. It is clearly of great importance that the latter be pursued in experiments at the new J-PARC facility.Comment: Invited presentation at APPC12 (12th Asia Pacific Physics Conference), July 14-19, 2013, Chiba, Japa

Towards a Principled Representation of Discourse Plans

We argue that discourse plans must capture the intended causal and decompositional relations between communicative actions. We present a planning algorithm, DPOCL, that builds plan structures that properly capture these relations, and show how these structures are used to solve the problems that plagued previous discourse planners, and allow a system to participate effectively and flexibly in an ongoing dialogue.Comment: requires cogsci94.sty, psfig.st

Aerosol studies in mid-latitude coastal environments in Australia

The results of the evaluation of several inversion procedures that were used to select one which provides the most accurate atmospheric extinction profiles for small aerosol extinction coefficients (that often predominate in the maritime airmass) are presented. Height profiles of atmospheric extinction calculated by a two component atmospheric solution to the LIDAR equation will be compared with corresponding in-situ extinction profiles based on the size distribution profiles obtained in Western Australia. Values of the aerosol backscatter to extinction ratio obtained from multi-angle LIDAR measurements will be used in this solution