Cooperative Research As a Strategy for University Teacher Training. A Case Study of Lesson and Learning Study

This paper presents the possibilities offered by Lesson and Learning Studies for training and for improving and generating knowledge by reconstructing the practical knowledge of teachers. Firstly, we provide a summary of the concept of practical knowledge and the tradition of teachers researching their own practice. This is followed by some principles of Lesson and Learning Studies, with examples of their possibilities for university teacher training taken from a case study of our own practice during a university master's degree

Effects of a radially varying electrical conductivity on 3D numerical dynamos

The transition from liquid metal to silicate rock in the cores of the terrestrial planets is likely to be accompanied by a gradient in the composition of the outer core liquid. The electrical conductivity of a volatile enriched liquid alloy can be substantially lower than a light-element-depleted fluid found close to the inner core boundary. In this paper, we investigate the effect of radially variable electrical conductivity on planetary dynamo action using an electrical conductivity that decreases exponentially as a function of radius. We find that numerical solutions with continuous, radially outward decreasing electrical conductivity profiles result in strongly modified flow and magnetic field dynamics, compared to solutions with homogeneous electrical conductivity. The force balances at the top of the simulated fluid determine the overall character of the flow. The relationship between Coriolis and Lorentz forces near the outer boundary controls the flow and magnetic field intensity and morphology of the system. Our results imply that a low conductivity layer near the top of Mercury's liquid outer core is consistent with its weak magnetic field.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. To be published in Physics of Earth and Planetary Interiors (PEPI)

The H0H_0 tension in light of vacuum dynamics in the Universe

Despite the outstanding achievements of modern cosmology, the classical dispute on the precise value of $H_0$, which is the first ever parameter of modern cosmology and one of the prime parameters in the field, still goes on and on after over half a century of measurements. Recently the dispute came to the spotlight with renewed strength owing to the significant tension (at $>3\sigma$ c.l.) between the latest Planck determination obtained from the CMB anisotropies and the local (distance ladder) measurement from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), based on Cepheids. In this work, we investigate the impact of the running vacuum model (RVM) and related models on such a controversy. For the RVM, the vacuum energy density $\rho_{\Lambda}$ carries a mild dependence on the cosmic expansion rate, i.e. $\rho_{\Lambda}(H)$, which allows to ameliorate the fit quality to the overall $SNIa+BAO+H(z)+LSS+CMB$ cosmological observations as compared to the concordance $\Lambda$CDM model. By letting the RVM to deviate from the vacuum option, the equation of state $w=-1$ continues to be favored by the overall fit. Vacuum dynamics also predicts the following: i) the CMB range of values for $H_0$ is more favored than the local ones, and ii) smaller values for $\sigma_8(0)$. As a result, a better account for the LSS structure formation data is achieved as compared to the $\Lambda$CDM, which is based on a rigid (i.e. non-dynamical) $\Lambda$ term.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B. Significantly extended discussion, two figures and references adde

ODESGS, an Environment for the Annotation and Design of Grid Environments

ODESGS is an ongoing work carried out in the Ontogrid Project (FP6-511513). It is the extension of the ODESWS Environment [1] developed in the context of the Esperonto Project (IST-2001-34372) and is an implementation of the ODESGS Framework [2]. This framework is being developed for the markup of Grid Services (GS) and creation of new complex Semantic Grid Services (SGS) from these annotated GS, to enable their discovery and (semi)automatic composition. It also formalizes Virtual Organizations (VO) with it, defined, since the appearance of OGSA, as a set of the services that are operated and shared. Therefore, VO description is closely attached to the descriptions made to each GS individually, plus additional information about the relationships and policies between these services. Note that what we mean as markup of VO and SGS is the association of these elements with an instance of the ODESGS Ontology

Ontology Access Provisioning in Grid Environments

The increase of use of semantic technologies has reached almost every computer science related field, including the grid computing field . The next generation Grid should virtualise the notion of distribution in computation, storage, and communication over unlimited resources with well defined computational semantics. A Grid node may provide new services, functions or even new concepts that are unknown to clients. The semantics of such services are defined by means of Ontologies [Gruber, 1993; Gómez-Pérez et al., 2003]. Thus providing the appropriate means for accessing and using Ontologies in the Grid is fundamental if semantic technologies are to be used. So, the transition from monolithic, centralized ontology services to a virtual organization of Grid compliant and Grid aware ontology services that can coordinate and cooperate with each other is crucial to progress towards the Semantic Grid [De Roure et al., 2005]