Assessing final-year practical work through group projects; A further study

The use of a group-based approach to project working has been shown to provide significant advantage to students in terms of project outcomes, motivation and engagement. The Department of Chemistry at the University of Reading has recently explored the use of group projects for final year practical work. In this model, students are presented with a research problem that they investigate within a team of three to five students. Students are expected to divide the work and share results in a manner that closely resembles project working in industry. This paper will report the experiences and attitudes of final-year BSc students towards this group-based approach, and outline the self-identified skills development of these students

Factors Influencing Immunization Status in Primary Care Clinics

Background and Objectives: National standards and goals for childhood immunization rates are well established. Yet, despite clear standards and goals, physicians do not achieve the desired rate (90%) for immunization coverage. This study examined factors related to immunization status for 2-year-old children in pediatric and family practice settings. Methods: Specially trained personnel used computer software to audit 2,552 records from 42 practices in Northeast Florida throughout 1997–1999. Immunization records were judged as either complete or incomplete, and factors related to immunization status were studied. Clinic type and 18 immunization practice standards were reviewed for effect on immunization status. Results: The probability of complete immunization status for children in pediatric clinics was greater than for those in family practice clinics. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that use of semiannual audits (odds ratio [OR]=2.00, confidence interval [CI]=1.65–2.42) was the most important factor for immunization completion. This was followed by availability of discounted immunizations (OR=.44, CI=.27–.73) and the use of an immunization tracking system (OR=1.48, CI=1.18–1.70). Factors that were not found to contribute included clinic type and the remaining 15 practice standards. Conclusions: Considering the significant factors, immunization status was not affected by the type of clinic providing immunizations. Based on this analysis, family physicians should implement tracking systems and should perform semiannual audits to match the success of pediatricians in immunizing children. Neither group met nationally established goals for administration of immunizations for 2-year-old children

The Height of a Giraffe

A minor modification of the arguments of Press and Lightman leads to an estimate of the height of the tallest running, breathing organism on a habitable planet as the Bohr radius multiplied by the three-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons (rather than the one-quarter power that Press got for the largest animal that would not break in falling over, after making an assumption of unreasonable brittleness). My new estimate gives a height of about 3.6 meters rather than Press's original estimate of about 2.6 cm. It also implies that the number of atoms in the tallest runner is very roughly of the order of the nine-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons, which is about 3 x 10^32.Comment: 12 pages, LaTe

Towards a psychoanalytic migration studies: a son, a brother, a father, an American, and his house in a Cameroonian village

Around the world, migrants are building houses in their countries-of-origin. For the women and men who create them, these houses are unambiguously significant. Yet, in academic migration studies, they are often seen as peripheral—interesting rather than important. This article follows recent work that aims to show why these houses really do matter. These houses are where migrants can seek to process the trauma of the disconnection that is inherent in migration and are how they repress the anxieties that arise from transnationalism. Migrants’ emotions are externalised onto the house. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon between 2013 and 2018, this article develops a case study about one transnational migrant, his family, and his house. It uses the example to develop two arguments: first that these houses sit within transnational networks, but the networks are subject-centred so a theory of the subject is needed to analyse them. Secondly, that human subjects make a deal when they exchange infantile egocentrism for collective inter-subjectivity, which is similar to the deal made between transnational migrants and their ancestral home when they receive permission to leave in exchange for continuing to connect—a link that is materialised in the house. Both these arguments combine to support an underlying claim that migration studies in general, and studies of migrant housing in particular would benefit from building further on existing work that draws on psychoanalytical approaches

Reframing Systems Disasters With Three Perspectives of organizational Culture

This paper presents the major literature on systems disasters and how organizational culture is portrayed in this literature. The paper then outlines the three cultural perspectives used by Martin 2002 to describe organizational cultures: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. The paper explores show these perspectives influence interpretations about the disasters described. The paper concludes that the effect of an organization’s culture on safety, reliability, and disasters can be fully understood only when all three perspectives are applied

The Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background At Degree Angular Scales

We detect anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree angular scales and confirm a previous detection reported by Wollack et al. (1993). The root-mean-squared amplitude of the fluctuations is $44^{+13}_{-7} \mu$K. This may be expressed as the square root of the angular power spectrum in a band of multipoles between $l_{eff}=69^{+29}_{-22}$. We find $\delta T_l = \sqrt{l(2l+1)/4\pi} = 42^{+12}_{-7} \mu$K. The measured spectral index of the fluctuations is consistent with zero, the value expected for the CMB. The spectral index corresponding to Galactic free-free emission, the most likely foreground contaminant, is rejected at approximately $3\sigma$. The analysis is based on three independent data sets. The first, taken in 1993, spans the 26 - 36 GHz frequency range with three frequency bands; the second was taken with the same radiometer as the first but during an independent observing campaign in 1994; and the third, also take in 1994, spans the 36-46 GHz range in three bands. For each telescope position and radiometer channel, the drifts in the instrument offset are $\le 4~\mu$K/day over a period of one month. The dependence of the inferred anisotropy on the calibration and data editing is addressed.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures. Saskatoon 1993/1994 combined analysi

Planar Two-Loop Five-Parton Amplitudes from Numerical Unitarity

We compute a complete set of independent leading-color two-loop five-parton amplitudes in QCD. These constitute a fundamental ingredient for the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to three-jet production at hadron colliders. We show how to consistently consider helicity amplitudes with external fermions in dimensional regularization, allowing the application of a numerical variant of the unitarity approach. Amplitudes are computed by exploiting a decomposition of the integrand into master and surface terms that is independent of the parton type. Master integral coefficients are numerically computed in either finite-field or floating-point arithmetic and combined with known analytic master integrals. We recompute two-loop leading-color four-parton amplitudes as a check of our implementation. Results are presented for all independent four- and five-parton processes including contributions with massless closed fermion loops.Comment: v3: corrected wrong signs for five-gluon $N_f^2$ amplitudes with vanishing tree

Dynamic coherent backscattering of ultrasound in three-dimensional strongly-scattering media

We present measurements of the diffusion coefficient of ultrasound in strongly scattering three-dimensional (3D) disordered media using the dynamic coherent backscattering (CBS) effect. Our experiments measure the CBS of ultrasonic waves using a transducer array placed in the far-field of a 3D slab sample of brazed aluminum beads surrounded by vacuum. We extend to 3D media the general microscopic theory of CBS that was developed initially for acoustic waves in 2D. This theory is valid in the strong scattering, but still diffuse, regime that is realized in our sample, and is evaluated in the diffuse far field limit encountered in our experiments. By comparing our theory with the experimental data, we obtain an accurate measurement of the diffusion coefficient of ultrasound in our sample. We find that the value of $D$ is quite small, $0.74 \pm 0.03$ mm$^2/\mu$s, and comment on the implications of this slow transport for the energy velocity

Case Study Analysis of Trust and Commitment Between the Civil Engineering Commodity Council and the Civil Engineering Career Field

The Air Force is pursuing strategic sourcing as a strategy for reducing costs of goods and services to help meet budget reductions while still performing its mission. These commodities are sourced through a number of commodity councils, each of which whom interact with their stakeholders throughout the sourcing process for that specific commodity. This research identifies factors that influence the success or failure of the sourcing process from the perspective of the Civil Engineering Commodity Council (CECC) and attempts to organize these factors within a framework built around trust and its effect on commitment and cooperation. These factors were identified through in-depth interviews performed with personnel on the CECC with experience in the sourcing process, after which responses were analyzed with Atlas.ti to identify themes and trends. Stakeholder support and participation was stated to be one of the largest factors impacting successful sourcing efforts, and perceptions of other factors such as appropriate training, appropriate mix of specialties on the team, experience, marketing, and successes were proposed as important to building trust in the CECC. Addressing these factors would then improve the perceptions of ability and benevolence of the CECC, resulting in improved trust, commitment, and cooperation from the career field