New Species and Additional Records of Protura from Michigan

Three new species, Eosentomon antrimense, E. pinusbanksianum, and Berberentulus mcqueeni, and one new record, E. australicum Womersley are added to the known Protura fauna of Michigan. Further records of E. wheeleri Silvestri, Protentomon michiganense Bernard, Proturentomon iowaense Womersley, Acerentulus confinis (Berlese) and Amerentulus amencanus (Ewing) are listed from various parts of the state

Scalar Meson Spectroscopy with Lattice Staggered Fermions

With sufficiently light up and down quarks the isovector ($a_0$) and isosinglet ($f_0$) scalar meson propagators are dominated at large distance by two-meson states. In the staggered fermion formulation of lattice quantum chromodynamics, taste-symmetry breaking causes a proliferation of two-meson states that further complicates the analysis of these channels. Many of them are unphysical artifacts of the lattice approximation. They are expected to disappear in the continuum limit. The staggered-fermion fourth-root procedure has its purported counterpart in rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory (rSXPT). Fortunately, the rooted theory provides a strict framework that permits the analysis of scalar meson correlators in terms of only a small number of low energy couplings. Thus the analysis of the point-to-point scalar meson correlators in this context gives a useful consistency check of the fourth-root procedure and its proposed chiral realization. Through numerical simulation we have measured correlators for both the $a_0$ and $f_0$ channels in the ``Asqtad'' improved staggered fermion formulation in a lattice ensemble with lattice spacing $a = 0.12$ fm. We analyze those correlators in the context of rSXPT and obtain values of the low energy chiral couplings that are reasonably consistent with previous determinations.Comment: 23 pp., 3 figs., submitted to Phys. Rev.

Innovation and design change strategies for learning technologies at Warwick : towards a ‘design capabilities’ heuristic for guiding practice and evaluating change.

This report gives a narrative account of an investigation into design and design capability in teaching and learning in a research-intensive university. It begins, in the Introduction, with definitions of key concepts: design, designing, successful design (achieving fit, stick, spread and growth), design change and design capability (although this last term is only really fleshed­out in Reading the Case Studies and the Conclusion). These words are common currency, but rarely used with precision. When clearly defined they provide a lens through which we can attain more clarity and granularity in analysing attempts at enhancing practice. In the second part, on the Origins of the Investigation and Earlier Experiments, we examine the limitations of a techno­centric approach to understanding, predicting and supporting the uptake of technology enhanced learning. It is argued that a design capability approach is needed, in which the ability of all people (including students) to discover, create, adopt, adapt designs that fit, stick, spread and grow is of prime value. In part 3, the design of the investigation is explained, with its focus upon discovering, creating and using design patterns as a key facilitating aspect of design capability. In part 4, this is put to the test, with an attempt at creatively reading the 23 mini case studies produced in interviews with academics. However, design patterns do not emerge easily from the cases, and we see that design and designing in this setting is more diverse and complex than expected. It is argued that a design patterns based approach will be useful, but much more work needs to be done before design patterns can become the lingua franca of teaching and learning design and development. This leads to a more sophisticated view of design capability, presented in the Conclusion. Drawing upon the experiences of the academics interviewed in the case studies, especially experienced and confident senior academics, it is conjectured that we need to increase the intensity with which academics encounter and reflect upon design challenges, designerly approaches, suboptimal and successful designs and design patterns. An integrated combination of Design Thinking and the Higher Education Academy Fellowship framework is recommended as a way of achieving this

The Fubini-Furlan-Rossetti Sum Rule Revisited

The Fubini-Furlan-Rossetti sum rule for pion photoproduction on the nucleon is evaluated by dispersion relations at constant t, and the corrections to the sum rule due to the finite pion mass are calculated. Near threshold these corrections turn out to be large due to pion-loop effects, whereas the sum rule value is closely approached if the dispersion integrals are evaluated for sub-threshold kinematics. This extension to the unphysical region provides a unique framework to determine the low-energy constants of chiral perturbation theory by global properties of the excitation spectrum.Comment: 12 pages, 7 postscript figures, EPJ style files include

Flipping the classroom : a design study of the adoption and adaption of new pedagogy in a higher education context

The Flipped Classroom idea is simple: the students consume lecture content as videos or audios individually in their own time, freeing­-up lecture time for more interactive and constructive pedagogies, with the students being more engaged and active in class. Does this fit with the Higher Education context? Specifically anywhere in Warwick (a research-intensive university in the English Midlands)? This paper reports on the initial phase of a Design Thinking investigation inspired by the basic Flipped Classroom idea, looking for ways in which it may be adopted and/or adapted to fit into existing or changing HE practices, in specific well defined contexts. In doing so, important lessons are learned concerning the diversity and specificity of the disciplines that are considered (english literature, medicine, psychology, teacher training, history, chemistry). The cases presented in the 7 design studies each illustrates how an academic teacher has designed new practice to address problems encountered in teaching, by applying pedagogy that stands out from the everyday pedagogies of their disciplines. They show how designerly practitioners can reflect upon teaching, identify "threshold concepts" and areas of difficulty (or even liminality), and respond with additional design and development work

Strong and Radiative Meson Decays in a Generalized Nambu--Jona-Lasinio Model

We investigate strong and radiative meson decays in a generalized Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. The one loop order calculation provides a satisfactory agreement with the data for the mesonic spectrum and for radiative decays. Higher order effects for strong decays of $\rho$ and $K^*$ are estimated to be large. We also discuss the role of the flavour mixing determinantal interaction.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX, 2 figs available upon request, CRN 92-4

Flat Puppets on an Empty Screen, Stories in the Round Imagining Space in Wayang Kulit and the Worlds Beyond

The puppets are flat, the screen against which they are placed and moved is white and devoid of scenery. In what kinds of space do the stories of the classical shadow-play of Java, Bali, Lombok, and the Malay world unfold despite this double flatness? How do performers use not only puppets and screen but also music and language to bring space into being? What must spectators know and do to make sense of these storytelling techniques? As a contribution to the narratological study of the multimodal making of storyworlds, I demonstrate that wayang kulit caters for different degrees of interpretive competence, which yield different understandings of the space that wayang portrays. An expert way of apprehending space requires seeing beyond the screen, puppets, and silhouettes, or even looking away from them. At the same time the peculiar ways of narrating space in wayang point to a deeply felt spatiality in real-life contexts as well

Heavy-Light Semileptonic Decays in Staggered Chiral Perturbation Theory

We calculate the form factors for the semileptonic decays of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons in partially quenched staggered chiral perturbation theory (\schpt), working to leading order in $1/m_Q$, where $m_Q$ is the heavy quark mass. We take the light meson in the final state to be a pseudoscalar corresponding to the exact chiral symmetry of staggered quarks. The treatment assumes the validity of the standard prescription for representing the staggered ``fourth root trick'' within \schpt by insertions of factors of 1/4 for each sea quark loop. Our calculation is based on an existing partially quenched continuum chiral perturbation theory calculation with degenerate sea quarks by Becirevic, Prelovsek and Zupan, which we generalize to the staggered (and non-degenerate) case. As a by-product, we obtain the continuum partially quenched results with non-degenerate sea quarks. We analyze the effects of non-leading chiral terms, and find a relation among the coefficients governing the analytic valence mass dependence at this order. Our results are useful in analyzing lattice computations of form factors $B\to\pi$ and $D\to K$ when the light quarks are simulated with the staggered action.Comment: 53 pages, 8 figures, v2: Minor correction to the section on finite volume effects, and typos fixed. Version to be published in Phys. Rev.