The consortium: an innovative approach to employability

Employability is increasing in both importance and visibility in Higher Education due to its inclusion as a key metric in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), in which the Destination of Leavers of Higher Education (DLHE) returns consist of 2 of the 6 core TEF metrics. Furthermore increasing levels of student fees and subsequently student debt has placed a greater emphasis on value for money in Higher Education, which itself casts a light on employment and graduate salaries. This paper explores a trial undertaken within an undergraduate Product Design sandwich course in the UK. On a sandwich course, students would typically be expected to secure an industrial placement with the assistance from the Universities employability team for the 3rd year of a 4-year degree. Whilst dedicated employability support is given to students to obtain a placement, some students can struggle despite their academic achievement to obtaining a placement. This is due to a lack of confidence and an inability to perform effectively in an interview context, and is especially acute in the context of growing student numbers and therefore greater competition. With such students in mind, an innovative collaboration was launched between three separate agencies to trial 'The Consortium' an in-house student run consultancy. 'The Consortium' was trialled with 3 cohorts of students over a 3 year period to give able students who struggled to obtain industrial placements an opportunity to gain experience of working for external clients and running their own business. The university provided space, business advice, oversight and networks, which the students were encouraged to use to bring in live design projects, which they would undertake as a group of 3-5 designers during their sandwich year

Random Spin-1 Quantum Chains

We study disordered spin-1 quantum chains with random exchange and biquadratic interactions using a real space renormalization group approach. We find that the dimerized phase of the pure biquadratic model is unstable and gives rise to a random singlet phase in the presence of weak disorder. In the Haldane region of the phase diagram we obtain a quite different behavior.Comment: 13 pages, Latex, no figures, to be published in Solid State Communication

Isoscalar dipole mode in relativistic random phase approximation

The isoscalar giant dipole resonance structure in $^{208}$Pb is calculated in the framework of a fully consistent relativistic random phase approximation, based on effective mean-field Lagrangians with nonlinear meson self-interaction terms. The results are compared with recent experimental data and with calculations performed in the Hartree-Fock plus RPA framework. Two basic isoscalar dipole modes are identified from the analysis of the velocity distributions. The discrepancy between the calculated strength distributions and current experimental data is discussed, as well as the implications for the determination of the nuclear matter incompressibility.Comment: 9 pages, Latex, 3. p.s figs, submitted to Phys. Lett.

Potential for adaptation in response to thermal stress in an intertidal macroalga

Understanding responses of marine algae to changing ocean temperatures requires knowledge of the impacts of elevated temperatures and the likelihood of adaptation to thermal stress. The potential for rapid evolution of thermal tolerance is dependent on the levels of heritable genetic variation in response to thermal stress within a population. Here, we use a quantitative genetic breeding design to establish whether there is a heritable variation in thermal sensitivity in two populations of a habitat-forming intertidal macroalga, Hormosira banksii (Turner) Descaisne. Gametes from multiple parents were mixed and growth and photosynthetic performance were measured in the resulting embryos, which were incubated under control and elevated temperature (20°C and 28°C). Embryo growth was reduced at 28°C, but significant interactions between male genotype and temperature in one population indicated the presence of genetic variation in thermal sensitivity. Selection for more tolerant genotypes thus has the ability to result in the evolution of increased thermal tolerance. Furthermore, genetic correlations between embryos grown in the two temperatures were positive, indicating that those genotypes that performed well in elevated temperature also performed well in control temperature. Chlorophyll a fluorescence measurements showed a marked decrease in maximum quantum yield of photosystem II (PSII) under elevated temperature. There was an increase in the proportion of energy directed to photoinhibition (nonregulated nonphotochemical quenching) and a concomitant decrease in energy used to drive photochemistry and xanthophyll cycling (regulated nonphotochemical quenching). However, PSII performance between genotypes was similar, suggesting that thermal sensitivity is related to processes other than photosynthesis. © 2013 Phycological Society of America

High efficiency In Vivo genome engineering with a simplified 15-RVD GoldyTALEN design

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TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding service: what about the results?

Since the proposition of Quality of Service architectures by the IETF, the interaction between TCP and the QoS services has been intensively studied. This paper proposes to look forward to the results obtained in terms of TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (DiffServ/AF) service and to present an overview of the different proposals to solve the problem. It has been demonstrated that the standardized IETF DiffServ conditioners such as the token bucket color marker and the time sliding window color maker were not good TCP traffic descriptors. Starting with this point, several propositions have been made and most of them presents new marking schemes in order to replace or improve the traditional token bucket color marker. The main problem is that TCP congestion control is not designed to work with the AF service. Indeed, both mechanisms are antagonists. TCP has the property to share in a fair manner the bottleneck bandwidth between flows while DiffServ network provides a level of service controllable and predictable. In this paper, we build a classification of all the propositions made during these last years and compare them. As a result, we will see that these conditioning schemes can be separated in three sets of action level and that the conditioning at the network edge level is the most accepted one. We conclude that the problem is still unsolved and that TCP, conditioned or not conditioned, remains inappropriate to the DiffServ/AF service