Share and share alike: Encouraging the reuse of academic resources through the Scottish electronic staff development library

This paper reports on the findings of a consultancy procedure conducted within the Scottish Higher Education staff development community and focusing on the reuse and sharing of communications and information technology resources for teaching and learning. While this consultancy was conducted primarily to inform the development of the Scottish electronic Staff Development Library (SeSDL), its findings, will be of relevance to colleagues working in the fields of staff development and C&IT and all those involved in the creation of shared teaching and learning resources. The consultancy identified general staff development demands, specific pedagogical requirements, and concerns relating to the provision, reuse and sharing of staff development resources. The SeSDL Project will attempt to address these demands through the development of a Web‐based resource centre, which will facilitate the reuse and sharing of high‐quality staff development resources. Library materials are stored in the form of granules which are branded with IMS compatible metadata and which are classified using a controlled educational taxonomy. Staff developers will be able to assemble these granular components to build customized lessons tailored to meet the needs of their own departments and institutions

Kuang Lu's Customs of the south : loyalty on the borders of empire

The late Ming dynasty Cantonese scholar and poet Kuang Lu (1604-1650) is almost lost to history. The anecdotes that do tell of him, found scattered in the occasional notes of a number of early Qing writers, situate him on the margins of various discourses: the discourse on the strange and the absurd; that on depravity; and finally that on loyalty, for when Manchu troops occupied Canton Kuang Lu died a martyr to the cause of the Ming dynasty, his favourite qin clutched to his breast. Kuang Lu was also, however, an early ethnographer. Having injured a local magistrate in an accident, he fled to live in Guangxi province amongst the Yao people, serving for some time as the secretary to a woman general there. My paper presents a reading of the account of his stay in the borderlands of the empire that he produced upon his return, his Chiya (Customs of the South), seeking to understand it not so much in terms of what he has to say about the Yao people and their way of life, but as a commentary upon the failings of the social and political order of the Ming dynasty itself

Massive black holes in stellar systems: 'quiescent' accretion and luminosity

Only a small fraction of local galaxies harbor an accreting black hole, classified as an active galactic nucleus (AGN). However, many stellar systems are plausibly expected to host black holes, from globular clusters to nuclear star clusters, to massive galaxies. The mere presence of stars in the vicinity of a black hole provides a source of fuel via mass loss of evolved stars. In this paper we assess the expected luminosities of black holes embedded in stellar systems of different sizes and properties, spanning a large range of masses. We model the distribution of stars and derive the amount of gas available to a central black hole through a geometrical model. We estimate the luminosity of the black holes under simple, but physically grounded, assumptions on the accretion flow. Finally we discuss the detectability of 'quiescent' black holes in the local Universe.Comment: ApJ in pres

Generalized Mapping and Object Removal

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a problem that has been explored for the past few decades. SLAM deals with the concept of a robot being introduced into an environment in which it has no prior knowledge. Then, through the use of sensors, the robot is able to map its environment while simultaneously determining its position within the given area. While there has been extensive research into the development of methods by which this problem can be solved, not much has been done on what to do with the resulting maps once they are produced. The research conducted deals with maps that are generated of indoor environments where some object such as tables and chairs can possibly change location within their environment, making storing their location unnecessary. There were several methods explored regarding the ability to remove such objects from the environment without unintentionally removing objects that are needed to be kept. The methods and their implementations are then integrated within the Robotics Operating System (ROS)