7,763 research outputs found
Learning Design: reflections on a snapshot of the current landscape
The mounting wealth of open and readily available information and the swift evolution of social, mobile and creative technologies warrant a re-conceptualisation of the role of educators: from providers of knowledge to designers of learning. This need is being addressed by a growing trend of research in Learning Design. Responding to this trend, the Art and Science of Learning Design workshop brought together leading voices in the field and provided a forum for discussing its key issues. It focused on three thematic axes: practices and methods, tools and resources, and theoretical frameworks. This paper reviews some definitions of Learning Design and then summarises the main contributions to the workshop. Drawing upon these, we identify three key challenges for Learning Design that suggest directions for future research
alpha-nucleus potentials for the neutron-deficient p nuclei
alpha-nucleus potentials are one important ingredient for the understanding
of the nucleosynthesis of heavy neutron-deficient p nuclei in the astrophysical
gamma-process where these p nuclei are produced by a series of (gamma,n),
(gamma,p), and (gamma,alpha) reactions. I present an improved alpha-nucleus
potential at the astrophysically relevant sub-Coulomb energies which is derived
from the analysis of alpha decay data and from a previously established
systematic behavior of double-folding potentials.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Biological Regulation in the Formation of Hypoxia
2010 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Science and Policy Challenges for a Sustainable Futur
Neutron-induced background in the CONUS experiment
CONUS is a novel experiment aiming at detecting elastic neutrino nucleus
scattering in the fully coherent regime using high-purity Germanium (Ge)
detectors and a reactor as antineutrino () source. The detector setup
is installed at the commercial nuclear power plant in Brokdorf, Germany, at a
very small distance to the reactor core in order to guarantee a high flux of
more than 10/(scm). For the experiment, a good
understanding of neutron-induced background events is required, as the neutron
recoil signals can mimic the predicted neutrino interactions. Especially
neutron-induced events correlated with the thermal power generation are
troublesome for CONUS. On-site measurements revealed the presence of a thermal
power correlated, highly thermalized neutron field with a fluence rate of
(74530)cmd. These neutrons that are produced by nuclear
fission inside the reactor core, are reduced by a factor of 10 on
their way to the CONUS shield. With a high-purity Ge detector without shield
the -ray background was examined including highly thermal power
correlated N decay products as well as -lines from neutron
capture. Using the measured neutron spectrum as input, it was shown, with the
help of Monte Carlo simulations, that the thermal power correlated field is
successfully mitigated by the installed CONUS shield. The reactor-induced
background contribution in the region of interest is exceeded by the expected
signal by at least one order of magnitude assuming a realistic ionization
quenching factor of 0.2.Comment: 28 pages, 28 figure
A diquark model for baryons containing one heavy quark
We present a phenomenological ansatz for coupling a heavy quark with two
light quarks to form a heavy baryon. The heavy quark is treated in the heavy
mass limit, and the light quark dynamics is approximated by propagating scalar
and axial vector 'diquarks'. The resulting effective lagrangian, which
incorporates heavy quark and chiral symmetry, describes interactions of heavy
baryons with Goldstone bosons in the low energy region. As an application, the
Isgur--Wise form factors are estimated.Comment: 9 pages + 8 figures, both as uuencoded PS, discussion of Bjorken
limit (1 par + 1 fig) added, to appear in Z.Phys.
A Multi-signal Variant for the GPU-based Parallelization of Growing Self-Organizing Networks
Among the many possible approaches for the parallelization of self-organizing
networks, and in particular of growing self-organizing networks, perhaps the
most common one is producing an optimized, parallel implementation of the
standard sequential algorithms reported in the literature. In this paper we
explore an alternative approach, based on a new algorithm variant specifically
designed to match the features of the large-scale, fine-grained parallelism of
GPUs, in which multiple input signals are processed at once. Comparative tests
have been performed, using both parallel and sequential implementations of the
new algorithm variant, in particular for a growing self-organizing network that
reconstructs surfaces from point clouds. The experimental results show that
this approach allows harnessing in a more effective way the intrinsic
parallelism that the self-organizing networks algorithms seem intuitively to
suggest, obtaining better performances even with networks of smaller size.Comment: 17 page
C/EBPβ-Thr217 Phosphorylation Signaling Contributes to the Development of Lung Injury and Fibrosis in Mice
mice are refractory to Bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis the molecular mechanisms remain unknown. Here we show that blocking the ribosomal S-6 kinase (RSK) phosphorylation of the CCAAT/Enhancer Binding Protein (C/EBP)-β on Thr217 (a RSK phosphoacceptor) with either a single point mutation (Ala217), dominant negative transgene or a blocking peptide containing the mutated phosphoacceptor ameliorates the progression of lung injury and fibrosis induced by Bleomycin in mice. mice with a cell permeant, C/EBPβ peptide that inhibits phosphorylation of C/EBPβ on Thr217 (40 µg instilled intracheally on day-2 and day-6 after the single Bleomycin dose) also blocked the progression of lung injury and fibrosis induced by Bleomycin. Phosphorylation of human C/EBPβ on Thr266 (human homologue phosphoacceptor) was induced in collagen-activated human lung fibroblasts in culture as well as in activated lung fibroblasts in situ in lungs of patients with severe lung fibrosis but not in control lungs, suggesting that this signaling pathway may be also relevant in human lung injury and fibrosis.These data suggest that the RSK-C/EBPβ phosphorylation pathway may contribute to the development of lung injury and fibrosis
Breaking Synchrony by Heterogeneity in Complex Networks
For networks of pulse-coupled oscillators with complex connectivity, we
demonstrate that in the presence of coupling heterogeneity precisely timed
periodic firing patterns replace the state of global synchrony that exists in
homogenous networks only. With increasing disorder, these patterns persist
until they reach a critical temporal extent that is of the order of the
interaction delay. For stronger disorder these patterns cease to exist and only
asynchronous, aperiodic states are observed. We derive self-consistency
equations to predict the precise temporal structure of a pattern from the
network heterogeneity. Moreover, we show how to design heterogenous coupling
architectures to create an arbitrary prescribed pattern.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
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