Documenting Current Instructional Design Practices: Towards a Typology of Instructional Designer Activities, Roles, and Collaboration

The overall goal of this study was to conduct a yearlong inquiry into an instructional designer’s activities and interactions with his clients. Exclusive focus of this study was on an instructional designer who worked at a large public university in the southeastern region of the United States. Documented in an instructional design activities log, this study analyzed 115 distinct activities. Using an emergent theme analysis approach, specific instructional design activities and roles emerged. In addition, the instructional designer’s collaboration with his clients was analyzed. Results of this study augment the knowledge base of existing studies of instructional design practices

Medical Student Service Learning Improves Community Health Literacy

Objective: To assess the impact of a medical student service learning initiative on community knowledge of hypertension. Background: Medical education has recently placed a greater emphasis on service learning. Studies have shown that service learning positively impacts students’ education and perception of the value of community engagement. While these studies have demonstrated positive student outcomes, there is a paucity of literature focusing on the health outcomes of the communities that these programs aim to influence. Reciprocal knowledge transfer is critical to achieve accountability to the communities where the service learning is taking place. Methods: A seven-person medical student team designed and implemented a project to assess community knowledge of hypertension at a neighborhood health clinic. Baseline knowledge of hypertension was assessed via a pre-test to 42 voluntary participants. Two post-tests separated by one month were used to evaluate short- and long-term retention after an informational pamphlet on hypertension was provided. Results: A statistically significant difference (p-value < 0.05) was observed between mean total scores of pre-test and both post-tests. Statistically significant differences in mean question scores between pre-test and both post-tests were also discovered. Finally, percent changes of total scores from pre-test to post-test 1 were positive for all but three participants. From post-test 1 to post-test 2, percent changes were positive in all but two participants. Conclusions: In this study, knowledge of hypertension was used as a surrogate for health literacy. The results from this project show increased long-term knowledge of hypertension risk factors, complications, and management strategies. These results demonstrate that reciprocal transfer of knowledge is possible in a medical student service learning context. These results help to further the support service learning by demonstrating tangible community benefits in addition to the already known positive impact on medical student learning

Heavy-Light Decay Constants with Dynamical Gauge Configurations and Wilson or Improved Valence Quark Action

We describe a calculation of heavy-light decay constants including virtual quark loop effects. We have generated dynamical gauge configurations at three $\beta$ values using two flavors of Kogut-Susskind quarks with a range of masses. These are analyzed with a Wilson valence quark action. Preliminary results based on a ``fat-link'' clover valence quark action are also reported. Results from the two methods differ by 30 to 50 MeV, which is presumably due to significant - but as yet unobserved - lattice spacing dependence in one or both of the approaches.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, LeTeX, uses espcrc2, epsf LATTICE99(Heavy Quarks

Update on the hadron spectrum with two flavors of staggered quarks

We present an update on the MILC Collaboration's light hadron spectrum calculation with two flavors of dynamical, staggered quarks. We present extrapolations of the nucleon to rho mass ratio to the continuum limit for fixed values of the pi to rho mass ratio including the physical one.Comment: 3 pages, LaTex with espcrc2 and epsf, 5 postscript figures included, Lattice '97 Proceeding

GOTHiC, a probabilistic model to resolve complex biases and to identify real interactions in Hi-C data.

Hi-C is one of the main methods for investigating spatial co-localisation of DNA in the nucleus. However, the raw sequencing data obtained from Hi-C experiments suffer from large biases and spurious contacts, making it difficult to identify true interactions. Existing methods use complex models to account for biases and do not provide a significance threshold for detecting interactions. Here we introduce a simple binomial probabilistic model that resolves complex biases and distinguishes between true and false interactions. The model corrects biases of known and unknown origin and yields a p-value for each interaction, providing a reliable threshold based on significance. We demonstrate this experimentally by testing the method against a random ligation dataset. Our method outperforms previous methods and provides a statistical framework for further data analysis, such as comparisons of Hi-C interactions between different conditions. GOTHiC is available as a BioConductor package (http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/GOTHiC.html)

Ten Simple Rules for Getting Help from Online Scientific Communities

The increasing complexity of research requires scientists to work at the intersection of multiple fields and to face problems for which their formal education has not prepared them. For example, biologists with no or little background in programming are now often using complex scripts to handle the results from their experiments; vice versa, programmers wishing to enter the world of bioinformatics must know about biochemistry, genetics, and other fields. In this context, communication tools such as mailing lists, web forums, and online communities acquire increasing importance. These tools permit scientists to quickly contact people skilled in a specialized field. A question posed properly to the right online scientific community can help in solving difficult problems, often faster than screening literature or writing to publication authors. The growth of active online scientific communities, such as those listed in Table S1, demonstrates how these tools are becoming an important source of support for an increasing number of researchers. Nevertheless, making proper use of these resources is not easy. Adhering to the social norms of World Wide Web communication—loosely termed “netiquette”—is both important and non-trivial. In this article, we take inspiration from our experience on Internet-shared scientific knowledge, and from similar documents such as “Asking the Questions the Smart Way” and “Getting Answers”, to provide guidelines and suggestions on how to use online communities to solve scientific problems

Micronutrients attenuate progression of prostate cancer by elevating the endogenous inhibitor of angiogenesis, Platelet Factor-4

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Longstanding evidence implicates an inadequate diet as a key factor in the onset and progression of prostate cancer. The purpose herein was to discover, validate and characterize functional biomarkers of dietary supplementation capable of suppressing the course of prostate cancer <it>in vivo</it>.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The <it>Lady </it>transgenic mouse model that spontaneously develops prostate cancer received a diet supplemented with a micronutrient cocktail of vitamin E, selenium and lycopene ad libitum. A proteomic analysis was conducted to screen for serum biomarkers of this dietary supplementation. Candidate peptides were validated and identified by sequencing and analyzed for their presence within the prostates of all mice by immunohistochemistry.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Dietary supplementation with the combined micronutrients significantly induced the expression of the megakaryocyte-specific inhibitor of angiogenesis, platelet factor-4 (P = 0.0025). This observation was made predominantly in mice lacking tumors and any manifestations associated with progressive disease beyond 37 weeks of life, at which time no survivors remained in the control group (P < 0.0001). While prostates of mice receiving standard chow were enlarged and burdened with poorly differentiated carcinoma, those of mice on the supplemented diet appeared normal. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed marked amplifications of both platelet binding and platelet factor-4 within the blood vessels of prostates from mice receiving micronutrients only.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We present unprecedented data whereby these combined micronutrients effectively promotes tumor dormancy in early prostate cancer, following initiation mutations that may drive the angiogenesis-dependent response of the tumor, by inducing platelet factor-4 expression and concentrating it at the tumor endothelium through enhanced platelet binding.</p

Lattice results for the decay constant of heavy-light vector mesons

We compute the leptonic decay constants of heavy-light vector mesons in the quenched approximation. The reliability of lattice computations for heavy quarks is checked by comparing the ratio of vector to pseudoscalar decay constant with the prediction of Heavy Quark Effective Theory in the limit of infinitely heavy quark mass. Good agreement is found. We then calculate the decay constant ratio for B mesons: $f_{B^*}/f_B= 1.01(0.01)(^{+0.04}_{-0.01})$. We also quote quenched $f_{B^*}=177(6)(17)$ MeV.Comment: 11 pages, 3 postscript figs., revtex; two references adde

Baryon Density Correlations in High Temperature Hadronic Matter

As part of an ongoing effort to characterize the high temperature phase of QCD, in a numerical simulation using the staggered fermion scheme, we measure the quark baryon density in the vicinity of a fixed test quark at high temperature and compare it with similar measurements at low temperature and at the crossover temperature. We find an extremely weak correlation at high temperature, suggesting that small color singlet clusters are unimportant in the thermal ensemble. We also find that at $T = 0.75\ T_c$ the total induced quark number shows a surprisingly large component attributable to baryonic screening. A companion simulation of a simple flux tube model produces similar results and also suggests a plausible phenomenological scenario: As the crossover temperature is approached from below, baryonic states proliferate. Above the crossover temperature the mean size of color singlet clusters grows explosively, resulting in an effective electrostatic deconfinement.Comment: 26 pp, RevTeX, 12 postscript figures, combined in a single shell archive file. (Also available in 13 postscript files by anonymous ftp from einstein.physics.utah.edu, /pub/milc/paper.sh.Z.

Two-Flavor Staggered Fermion Thermodynamics at N_t = 12

We present results of an ongoing study of the nature of the high temperature crossover in QCD with two light fermion flavors. These results are obtained with the conventional staggered fermion action at the smallest lattice spacing to date---approximately 0.1 fm. Of particular interest are a study of the temperature of the crossover a determination of the induced baryon charge and baryon susceptibility, the scalar susceptibility, and the chiral order parameter, used to test models of critical behavior associated with chiral symmetry restoration. From our new data and published results for N_t = 4, 6, and 8, we determine the QCD magnetic equation of state from the chiral order parameter using O(4) and mean field critical exponents and compare it with the corresponding equation of state obtained from an O(4) spin model and mean field theory. We also present a scaling analysis of the Polyakov loop, suggesting a temperature dependent ``constituent quark free energy.''Comment: LaTeX 25 pages, 15 Postscript figure