Mentoring in academe: an Australian response to the drought of senior accounting academics

The purpose of this paper is to expose the shortage of senior academics in Australian accounting schools, to relate the way one school is addressing this crisis through an innovative mentoring program, and to challenge existing institutional arrangements. This is a qualitative case study of one mentoring program set within the institutional context of Australian accounting schools. Data collected from semi-structured interviews, archival sources and personal reflections, is presented using metaphor to theorize (Llewellyn 2003). The scheme achieved some notable individual successes, but raised many issues and challenges to extant mentoring models and existing structures. Mentoring is a multifaceted investment in vocational endeavour and intellectual infrastructure, which will not occur unless creative means are developed over the long term to overcome current chronic staff shortages. The paper tells the story about one mentoring project in one Australian university, thus limiting its generalisability. The use of metaphor to theorise and explain qualitative data carries its own inherent limitations. This mentoring scheme exemplifies the possibility of finding creative solutions to staff shortages, but acknowledges the need for major structural changes. The paper makes three contributions: first, it addresses the lacuna in research mentoring for accounting academics; secondly, it uses metaphor as theory in a qualitative research paper, in response to Llewelyn’s (2003) observation that metaphor in qualitative research is both undervalued and underdeveloped; and thirdly, by exposing a crisis in Australian accounting schools the paper opens debate on how that crisis can best be addressed

Weak refinement in Z

An important aspect in the specification of distributed systems is the role of the internal (or unobservable) operation. Such operations are not part of the user interface (i.e. the user cannot invoke them), however, they are essential to our understanding and correct modelling of the system. Various conventions have been employed to model internal operations when specifying distributed systems in Z. If internal operations are distinguished in the specification notation, then refinement needs to deal with internal operations in appropriate ways. However, in the presence of internal operations, standard Z refinement leads to undesirable implementations. In this paper we present a generalization of Z refinement, called weak refinement, which treats internal operations differently from observable operations when refining a system. We illustrate some of the properties of weak refinement through a specification of a telecommunications protocol

The Chromospheric Activity, Age, Metallicity, and Space Motions of 36 Wide Binaries

We present the chromospheric activity (CA) levels, metallicities, and full space motions for 41 F, G, K, and M dwarf stars in 36 wide binary systems. Thirty-one of the binaries contain a white dwarf (WD) component. In such binaries, the total age can be estimated by adding the cooling age of the WD to an estimate of the progenitor’s main-sequence lifetime. To better understand how CA correlates to stellar age, 14 cluster member stars were also observed. Our observations demonstrate for the first time that, in general, CA decays with age from 50 Myr to at least 8 Gyr for stars with 1.0 \u3c V − I \u3c 2.4. However, little change occurs in the CA level for stars with V − I \u3c 1.0 between 1 Gyr and 5 Gyr, consistent with the results of Pace et al. Our sample also exhibits a negative correlation between the stellar age and metallicity, a positive correlation between the stellar age and W space velocity component, and the W velocity dispersion increases with age. Finally, the population membership of these wide binaries is examined based upon their U, V, W kinematics, metallicity, and CA. We conclude that wide binaries are similar to field and cluster stars in these respects. More importantly, they span a much more continuous range in age and metallicity than is afforded by nearby clusters

The Chromospheric Activity, Age, Metallicty and Space Motions of 36 Wide Binaries

We present the chromospheric activity (CA) levels, metallicities and full space motions for 41 F, G, K and M dwarf stars in 36 wide binary systems. Thirty-one of the binaries, contain a white dwarf component. In such binaries the total age can be estimated by adding the cooling age of the white dwarf to an estimate of the progenitor's main sequence lifetime. To better understand how CA correlates to stellar age, 14 cluster member stars were also observed. Our observations demonstrate for the first time that in general CA decays with age from 50 Myr to at least 8 Gyr for stars with 1.0 < V-I < 2.4. However, little change occurs in CA level for stars with V-I < 1.0 between 1 Gyr and 5 Gyr, consistent with the results of Pace et al. (2009). Our sample also exhibits a negative correlation between stellar age and metallicity, a positive correlation between stellar age and W space velocity component and the W velocity dispersion increases with age. Finally, the population membership of these wide binaries is examined based upon their U, V, W kinematics, metallicity and CA. We conclude that wide binaries are similar to field and cluster stars in these respects. More importantly, they span a much more continuous range in age and metallicity than is afforded by nearby clusters.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A

Formal Specification and Testing of a Management Architecture

The importance of network and distributed systems management to supply and maintain services required by users has led to a demand for management facilities. Open network management is assisted by representing the system resources to be managed as objects, and providing standard services and protocols for interrogating and manipulating these objects. This paper examines the application of formal description techniques to the specification of managed objects by presenting a case study in the specification and testing of a management architecture. We describe a formal specification of a management architecture suitable for scheduling and distributing services across nodes in a distributed system. In addition, we show how formal specifications can be used to generate conformance tests for the management architecture

The nature of the fungal cargo induces significantly different temporal programmes of macrophage phagocytosis

Acknowledgements We acknowledge Wellcome support of a Senior Investigator (101873/Z/13/Z), Collaborative (200208/A/15/Z) and Strategic Awards (097377/Z11/Z) and the MRC for a programme grant (MR/M026663/2) and the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (MR/N006364/2). We thank Kevin Mackenzie for help with microscopy.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

EXACT2: the semantics of biomedical protocols

© 2014 Soldatova et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: The reliability and reproducibility of experimental procedures is a cornerstone of scientific practice. There is a pressing technological need for the better representation of biomedical protocols to enable other agents (human or machine) to better reproduce results. A framework that ensures that all information required for the replication of experimental protocols is essential to achieve reproducibility. Methods: We have developed the ontology EXACT2 (EXperimental ACTions) that is designed to capture the full semantics of biomedical protocols required for their reproducibility. To construct EXACT2 we manually inspected hundreds of published and commercial biomedical protocols from several areas of biomedicine. After establishing a clear pattern for extracting the required information we utilized text-mining tools to translate the protocols into a machine amenable format. We have verified the utility of EXACT2 through the successful processing of previously ‘unseen’ (not used for the construction of EXACT2) protocols. Results: The paper reports on a fundamentally new version EXACT2 that supports the semantically-defined representation of biomedical protocols. The ability of EXACT2 to capture the semantics of biomedical procedures was verified through a text mining use case. In this EXACT2 is used as a reference model for text mining tools to identify terms pertinent to experimental actions, and their properties, in biomedical protocols expressed in natural language. An EXACT2-based framework for the translation of biomedical protocols to a machine amenable format is proposed. Conclusions: The EXACT2 ontology is sufficient to record, in a machine processable form, the essential information about biomedical protocols. EXACT2 defines explicit semantics of experimental actions, and can be used by various computer applications. It can serve as a reference model for for the translation of biomedical protocols in natural language into a semantically-defined format.This work has been partially funded by the Brunel University BRIEF award and a grant from Occams Resources