Who is learning what from student evaluations of teaching?

Student evaluations of teaching (or SET) through anonymous survey forms are a consistent practice in higher education across the world yet research results vary considerably as to the reliability, validity and efficacy of SET. Nonetheless, the widespread use of SET for promotion and tenure decisions ensures that these results are high stakes for tertiary staff. The tension between the purposes of SET (to supposedly improve teaching) and the ramifications of SET results are explored. Staff and students tend to hold very different views of SET and the issue of maintaining high academic standards can be at risk. However, SET can be used as an opportunity for staff and students to work together on issues in teaching and learning that enhance quality for all concerned

An evolutionarily stable joining policy for group foragers

For foragers that exploit patchily distributed resources that are challenging to locate, detecting discoveries made by others with a view to joining them and sharing the patch may often be an attractive tactic, and such behavior has been observed across many taxa. If, as will commonly be true, the time taken to join another individual on a patch increases with the distance to that patch, then we would expect foragers to be selective in accepting joining opportunities: preferentially joining nearby discoveries. If competition occurs on patches, then the profitability of joining (and of not joining) will be influenced by the strategies adopted by others. Here we present a series of models designed to illuminate the evolutionarily stable joining strategy. We confirm rigorously the previous suggestion that there should be a critical joining distance, with all joining opportunities within that distance being accepted and all others being declined. Further, we predict that this distance should be unaffected by the total availability of food in the environment, but should increase with decreasing density of other foragers, increasing speed of movement towards joining opportunities, increased difficulty in finding undiscovered food patches, and decreasing speed with which discovered patches can be harvested. We are further able to make predictions as to how fully discovered patches should be exploited before being abandoned as unprofitable, with discovered patches being more heavily exploited when patches are hard to find: patches can be searched for remaining food more quickly, forager density is low, and foragers are relatively slow in traveling to discovered patches

Friction brake cushions acceleration and vibration loads

Friction brake cushions an object in a vehicle from axially applied vibration and steady-state acceleration forces. The brake incorporates a doubly tapered piston that applies a controlled radial force to friction brake segments bearing against the walls of a cylinder

Snail2 directly represses cadherin6B during epithelial-to-mesenchymal transitions of the neural crest

The neural crest, a transient population of migratory cells, forms the craniofacial skeleton and peripheral nervous system, among other derivatives in vertebrate embryos. The transcriptional repressor Snail2 is thought to be crucial for the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) that promotes neural crest delamination from the neural tube; however, little is known about its downstream targets. To this end, we depleted avian Snail2 in the premigratory neural crest using morpholino antisense oligonucleotides and examined effects on potential targets by quantitative PCR. Several dorsal neural tube genes were upregulated by alleviating Snail2 repression; moreover, the cell adhesion molecule cadherin6B was derepressed within 30 minutes of blocking Snail2 translation. Examination of the chick cadherin6B genomic sequence reveals that the regulatory region contains three pairs of clustered E boxes, representing putative Snail2 binding sites. Furthermore, in vivo and in vitro biochemical analyses demonstrate that Snail2 directly binds to these sites and regulates cadherin6B transcription. These results are the first to describe a direct target of Snail2 repression in vivo and in the context of the EMT that characterizes neural crest developmen

Stationary solution of the ring-spinning balloon in zero air drag using a RBFN based mesh-free method

A technique for numerical analysis of the dynamics of the ring-spinning balloon based on the Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFNs) is presented in this paper. This method uses a 'universal approximator' based on neural network methodology to solve the differential governing equations which are derived from the conditions of the dynamic equilibrium of the yarn to determine the shape of balloon yarn. The method needs only a coarse finite collocation points without any finite element-type discretisation of the domain and its boundary for numerical solution of the governing differential equations. This paper will report a first assessment of the validity and efficiency of the present mesh-less method in predicting the balloon shape across a wide range of spinning conditions

Robust filtering for gene expression time series data with variance constraints

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright 2007 Taylor & Francis Ltd.In this paper, an uncertain discrete-time stochastic system is employed to represent a model for gene regulatory networks from time series data. A robust variance-constrained filtering problem is investigated for a gene expression model with stochastic disturbances and norm-bounded parameter uncertainties, where the stochastic perturbation is in the form of a scalar Gaussian white noise with constant variance and the parameter uncertainties enter both the system matrix and the output matrix. The purpose of the addressed robust filtering problem is to design a linear filter such that, for the admissible bounded uncertainties, the filtering error system is Schur stable and the individual error variance is less than a prespecified upper bound. By using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique, sufficient conditions are first derived for ensuring the desired filtering performance for the gene expression model. Then the filter gain is characterized in terms of the solution to a set of LMIs, which can easily be solved by using available software packages. A simulation example is exploited for a gene expression model in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design procedures.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grants GR/S27658/01 and EP/C524586/1, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) of the UK under Grants BB/C506264/1 and 100/EGM17735, the Nuffield Foundation of the UK under Grant NAL/00630/G, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany