Development of Literacy Beliefs and Practices: Preservice Teachers with Reading Specializations in a Field-Based Program

This manuscript documents a year-long descriptive case study of preservice teachers specializing in reading. The objectives of this study were to (a) better understand the development of literacy beliefs and change processes in preservice teachers with reading specializations engaged in the final year of their field-based teacher education program, and (b) ascertain factors influencing their change processes during the final year of preparation. The results highlight the shifts these preservice teachers made concerning their beliefs about literacy instruction and the factors that served as catalysts for those changes

UKCEH at the Edinburgh Climate Festival, 14th Aug 2021, Leith Links, Edinburgh

In total over 200 people engaged with the UKCEH Team between noon and 6 pm on the 14th Aug 2021 at the Edinburgh Climate Festival. The stand fulfilled its aim to raise awareness of publicly funded research conducted at UKCEH Edinburgh, including the national capability project UK-SCAPE, as evidenced by the number of people attracted into the stand, the remarks made in conversations with the team members and written in the answers to the poster quiz. Three activities were offered to target different age groups: • Carbon Game – target children- duration typically 2-4 min, estimated 100 children and adults participated • Intergenerational trend in CO2 concentration – target all age ranges – duration typically 1 to 5 min, estimated 80 children and adults participated • Poster quiz – target adults - duration typically 5-20 min, 42 primarily adults participated. A wide range of conversations were noted by the UKCEH team members primarily focused on: • the role of carbon in the environment and link to climate change • the steep rise in CO2 concentration in the lifetime of the people present • the range of science conducted at a local institution • the variety of options that people could make to their life choices that could improve the environment • routes for a career in STEM subjects

UKCEH at the Climate Science Showcase – Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, 6th November 2021

In total over 250 people engaged with the UKCEH Team at the Dynamic Earth hosted Climate Science Showcase on Saturday 6th November 2021 between 10 am and 4 pm (~40 h-1). The stand fulfilled its aim to raise awareness of publicly funded research conducted at UKCEH Edinburgh, including the national capability project UK Status, Change and Projections of the Environment (UK-SCAPE), as evidenced by the large number of people attracted into the stand, the remarks made in conversations with the team members and written in the answers to the wishing tree

Improving land use change tracking in the UK Greenhouse Gas Inventory: final outputs report

This report describes work on the project “Improving Land Use Change Tracking in the UK Greenhouse Gas Inventory” for the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (reference TRN 2384/05/2020). The aim of the project was to make improved estimates of land-use change in the UK, using multiple sources of data. We applied a method for estimating land-use change using a Bayesian data assimilation approach. This allows us to constrain estimates of gross land-use change with national-scale census data, whilst retaining the detailed information available from several other sources. We produced a time series of maps describing our best estimate of land-use change given the available data, as well as the full posterior distribution of this space-time data cube. This quantifies the joint probability distribution of the parameters, and properly propagates the uncertainty from input data to final output. The output data has been summarised in the form of land-use vectors. The results show that we can provide improved estimates of past land-use change using this method. The main advantage of the approach is that it provides a coherent, generalised framework for combining multiple disparate sources of data, and adding further sources of data in future would be straightforward. Future work could focus on more detailed analysis of existing data sets, introducing independent constraints where possible, and obtaining further relevant data sets. The code is available via GitHub

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts