Exploring the utility of grids for analysing long term population change

This paper details an innovative approach which enables the analysis of small area population change across four decades. Population surfaces are generated using small area data (enumeration districts or output areas) for each Census from 1971 to 2011 inclusive. The paper details the methods used in the creation of these surfaces, and discusses the rationale behind this approach, arguing that grids represent the most appropriate model for assessing population distributions. Methods for grid creation are tested using pre-existing population grids for Northern Ireland as a benchmark. The method developed is then applied to create population grids for the rest of the UK for 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. The changing population structures of small areas across these five time points are explored here to illustrate the value of this approach. The publically-available data resource – the final product of the ‘PopChange’ project – will facilitate exploration of long-term changes in populations over small areas. The paper argues that maximum advantage could be taken of the ‘big data revolution’ if such data were gridded in a similar way, allowing them to be placed in a longer-term historical context, using tools made available through the PopChange project

System and method for monitoring cellular activity

A system and method for monitoring cellular activity in a cellular specimen. According to one embodiment, a plurality of excitable markers are applied to the specimen. A multi-photon laser microscope is provided to excite a region of the specimen and cause fluorescence to be radiated from the region. The radiating fluorescence is processed by a spectral analyzer to separate the fluorescence into respective wavelength bands. The respective bands of fluorescence are then collected by an array of detectors, with each detector receiving a corresponding one of the wavelength bands

Reframing assessment research: through a practice perspective

Assessment as a field of investigation has been influenced by a limited number of perspectives. These have focused assessment research in particular ways that have emphasised measurement, or student learning or institutional policies. The aim of this paper is to view the phenomenon of assessment from a practice perspective drawing upon ideas from practice theory. Such a view places assessment practices as central. This perspective is illustrated using data from an empirical study of assessment decision-making and uses as an exemplar the identified practice of ‘bringing a new assessment task into being’. It is suggested that a practice perspective can position assessment as integral to curriculum practices and end separations of assessment from teaching and learning. It enables research on assessment to de-centre measurement and take account of the wider range of people, phenomena and things that constitute it

iSchools and archival studies

Whispers and rumors about the iSchool movement lead some to fear that this represents yet another shift away from the valued traditions of library schools, threatening something far different than what library science pioneers ever envisioned. Predating the iSchool movement, however, were other programmatic shifts such as those that led to the formalization of graduate archival education. This essay argues that such evolution is essential to our future, as iSchools tackle the increasingly complex issues confronting a digital society. We consider the mission and history of iSchools and of archival studies, the basic elements and concepts of archival studies that are critical to iSchools, and the relationship between iSchools and the changing nature of personal and institutional archives. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Understanding feedback in online learning - A critical review and metaphor analysis

Technologies associated with online learning have led to many new feedback practices and expanded the meaning of feedback beyond the traditional focus on instructor comments, but conceptual work on online feedback has not followed. This paper investigates how online learning researchers understand feedback's role in teaching and learning, and discusses how these understandings influence what research questions are asked, and what online feedback practices are recommended. Through a qualitative analysis of the language used about feedback in leading research journals, we identified six distinct understandings of feedback based on six dominant conceptual metaphors. These are feedback is a treatment, feedback is a costly commodity, feedback is coaching, feedback is a command, feedback is a dialogue, and feedback is a learner tool. Each of these metaphors offers a coherent frame of entailments related to the roles and responsibilities of online instructors and online learners as well as some bigger assumptions about what role feedback should play in online teaching and learning. A comparison with current feedback research revealed that just two of the six metaphors align with the learner-centric feedback practices that are increasingly considered appropriate among feedback researchers. The paper discusses how the conceptualizations might reflect different challenges facing online education. The paper proposes that researchers interrogate their own conceptualizations to ensure that they align with their beliefs about feedback and its role in the learning process. It suggests that a more deliberate use of metaphors when conceptualizing feedback and online feedback practices is necessary for clarity of communication and helpful for driving the work on feedback in online learning forward

Feedback encounters: towards a framework for analysing and understanding feedback processes

There is growing agreement that feedback should be understood as a contextual and social process, rather than as receipt of teacher comments on students’ work. This reframing brings with it new complexities, and it can be challenging for researchers and practitioners to adopt a process perspective when making sense of feedback practices in naturalistic settings. This paper takes the nascent notion of feedback encounter and proposes it as an analytical lens for understanding and analysing feedback processes. Based on a rich dataset from a cross-national digital ethnographic study of student feedback experiences, the paper identifies three categories of feedback encounters - elicited, formal and incidental - and explores how they are experienced by students, in relation to perceived usefulness, control and self-exposure. Furthermore, the paper investigates how individual feedback encounters may interconnect to form simple and complex sequences, revolving around distinct uncertainties or dilemmas. This operationalization of feedback encounters builds the foundations of a framework that can help researchers and practitioners make sense of authentic feedback processes in naturalistic settings. Such a framework is useful because it offers a structured way of analysing processes that are inherently complex and unfolding

Characteristics of productive feedback encounters in online learning

Understanding how students engage with feedback is often reduced to a study of feedback messages that sheds little light on effects. Using the emerging notion of feedback encounters as an analytical lens, this study examines what characterizes productive feedback encounters when learning online. Drawing from a cross-national digital ethnographic dataset, a qualitative analysis categorized feedback encounters within this dataset: While most encounters led to instrumental impacts without any significant reflections, students also engaged in encounters with more substantive impact on learning. The latter took place under two conditions. First, the encounter must challenge the student’s assumptions about their work, and they must be able and willing to accept this challenge. Second, the encounter must take place at a time which is appropriate in relation to whichever task the student is currently working on. This highlights design considerations, such as importance of social interactions, and the instrumental enactments of self-generated feedback

Suicide ideation of individuals in online social networks

Suicide explains the largest number of death tolls among Japanese adolescents in their twenties and thirties. Suicide is also a major cause of death for adolescents in many other countries. Although social isolation has been implicated to influence the tendency to suicidal behavior, the impact of social isolation on suicide in the context of explicit social networks of individuals is scarcely explored. To address this question, we examined a large data set obtained from a social networking service dominant in Japan. The social network is composed of a set of friendship ties between pairs of users created by mutual endorsement. We carried out the logistic regression to identify users' characteristics, both related and unrelated to social networks, which contribute to suicide ideation. We defined suicide ideation of a user as the membership to at least one active user-defined community related to suicide. We found that the number of communities to which a user belongs to, the intransitivity (i.e., paucity of triangles including the user), and the fraction of suicidal neighbors in the social network, contributed the most to suicide ideation in this order. Other characteristics including the age and gender contributed little to suicide ideation. We also found qualitatively the same results for depressive symptoms.Comment: 4 figures, 9 table

LES-based Study of the Roughness Effects on the Wake of a Circular Cylinder from Subcritical to Transcritical Reynolds Numbers

This paper investigates the effects of surface roughness on the flow past a circular cylinder at subcritical to transcritical Reynolds numbers. Large eddy simulations of the flow for sand grain roughness of size k/D = 0.02 are performed (D is the cylinder diameter). Results show that surface roughness triggers the transition to turbulence in the boundary layer at all Reynolds numbers, thus leading to an early separation caused by the increased momentum deficit, especially at transcritical Reynolds numbers. Even at subcritical Reynolds numbers, boundary layer instabilities are triggered in the roughness sublayer and eventually lead to the transition to turbulence. The early separation at transcritical Reynolds numbers leads to a wake topology similar to that of the subcritical regime, resulting in an increased drag coefficient and lower Strouhal number. Turbulent statistics in the wake are also affected by roughness; the Reynolds stresses are larger due to the increased turbulent kinetic energy production in the boundary layer and separated shear layers close to the cylinder shoulders.We acknowledge “Red Española de Surpercomputación” (RES) for awarding us access to the MareNostrum III machine based in Barcelona, Spain (Ref. FI-2015-2-0026 and FI-2015-3-0011). We also acknowledge PRACE for awarding us access to Fermi and Marconi Supercomputers at Cineca, Italy (Ref. 2015133120). Oriol Lehmkuhl acknowledges a PDJ 2014 Grant by AGAUR (Generalitat de Catalunya). Ugo Piomelli acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada under the Discovery Grant Programme (Grant No. RGPIN-2016-04391). Ricard Borrell acknowledges a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant (IJCI-2014-21034). Ivette Rodriguez, Oriol Lehmkuhl, Ricard Borrell and Assensi Oliva acknowledge Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, Spain (ref. ENE2014-60577-R).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

How does assessment drive learning? A focus on students' development of evaluative judgement

Summative assessment is often considered a motivator that drives students’ learning. Higher education has a responsibility in promoting lifelong learning and assessment plays an important role in supporting students’ capability to make evaluative judgements about their work and that of others. However, as research often focuses on formal pedagogical design, it is unclear what behaviours summative assessment prompts, thus the relationship between summative assessment, learning and evaluative judgement requires further investigation. Drawing on a small-scale ethnography-informed study, this paper adopts a practice theory approach to explore how undergraduate physics students from three year levels make evaluative judgements in the context of summative assessment tasks. The contexts explored through observations and interviews include a graded in-class tutorial, an out-of-class study group for an in-semester assignment, and individual preparation for examinations. The findings suggest that while summative assessment is a crucial aspect of students’ learning context, it does not fully shape students’ practices. Instead, students engage in incidental conversations about the quality of their work and how to do things in their studies. By focusing on what students actually do, this study integrates formal and informal aspects of students’ learning, highlighting the tensions between undergraduate practices and intended learning outcomes