Community building and virtual teamwork in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper aims to explore the issues that there was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from European students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer booked meetings and evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment. </p

Generalized Voronoi Tessellation as a Model of Two-dimensional Cell Tissue Dynamics

Voronoi tessellations have been used to model the geometric arrangement of cells in morphogenetic or cancerous tissues, however so far only with flat hypersurfaces as cell-cell contact borders. In order to reproduce the experimentally observed piecewise spherical boundary shapes, we develop a consistent theoretical framework of multiplicatively weighted distance functions, defining generalized finite Voronoi neighborhoods around cell bodies of varying radius, which serve as heterogeneous generators of the resulting model tissue. The interactions between cells are represented by adhesive and repelling force densities on the cell contact borders. In addition, protrusive locomotion forces are implemented along the cell boundaries at the tissue margin, and stochastic perturbations allow for non-deterministic motility effects. Simulations of the emerging system of stochastic differential equations for position and velocity of cell centers show the feasibility of this Voronoi method generating realistic cell shapes. In the limiting case of a single cell pair in brief contact, the dynamical nonlinear Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process is analytically investigated. In general, topologically distinct tissue conformations are observed, exhibiting stability on different time scales, and tissue coherence is quantified by suitable characteristics. Finally, an argument is derived pointing to a tradeoff in natural tissues between cell size heterogeneity and the extension of cellular lamellae.Comment: v1: 34 pages, 19 figures v2: reformatted 43 pages, 21 figures, 1 table; minor clarifications, extended supplementary materia

Lepton flavor violating Z-decays in supersymmetric see-saw model

In supersymmetric see-saw model, the large flavor mixings of sleptons induce the lepton flavor violating (LFV) interactions $\ell_I \bar\ell_J V$ ($V=\gamma, Z$), which give rise to various LFV processes. In this work we examine the induced LFV decays $Z\to\ell_I \bar\ell_J$. Subject to the constraints from the existing neutrino oscillation data and the experimental bounds on the decays $\ell_J\to\ell_I\gamma$, these LFV $Z$-decays are found to be sizable, among which the largest-rate channel $Z\to \tau \bar{\mu}$ can ocuur with a branching ratio of $10^{-8}$ and may be accessible at the LHC or GiagZ experiment.Comment: 8 pages,4 ps files, to appear in EPJ

Beam instrumentation for the Tevatron Collider

The Tevatron in Collider Run II (2001-present) is operating with six times more bunches and many times higher beam intensities and luminosities than in Run I (1992-1995). Beam diagnostics were crucial for the machine start-up and the never-ending luminosity upgrade campaign. We present the overall picture of the Tevatron diagnostics development for Run II, outline machine needs for new instrumentation, present several notable examples that led to Tevatron performance improvements, and discuss the lessons for future colliders

Global standards of Constitutional law : epistemology and methodology

Just as it led the philosophy of science to gravitate around scientific practice, the abandonment of all foundationalist aspirations has already begun making political philosophy into an attentive observer of the new ways in which constitutional law is practiced. Yet paradoxically, lawyers and legal scholars are not those who understand this the most clearly. Beyond analyzing the jurisprudence that has emerged from the expansion of constitutional justice, and taking into account the development of international and regional law, the ongoing globalization of constitutional law requires comparing the constitutional laws of individual nations. Following Waldron, the product of this new legal science can be considered as ius gentium. This legal science is not as well established as one might like to think. But it can be developed on the grounds of the practice that consists in ascertaining standards. As abstract types of best “practices” (and especially norms) of constitutional law from around the world, these are only a source of law in a substantive, not a formal, sense. They thus belong to what I should like to call a “second order legal positivity.” In this article I will undertake, both at a methodological and an epistemological level, the development of a model for ascertaining global standards of constitutional law

Data representation synthesis

We consider the problem of specifying combinations of data structures with complex sharing in a manner that is both declarative and results in provably correct code. In our approach, abstract data types are specified using relational algebra and functional dependencies. We describe a language of decompositions that permit the user to specify different concrete representations for relations, and show that operations on concrete representations soundly implement their relational specification. It is easy to incorporate data representations synthesized by our compiler into existing systems, leading to code that is simpler, correct by construction, and comparable in performance to the code it replaces

Measuring the Higgs Sector

If we find a light Higgs boson at the LHC, there should be many observable channels which we can exploit to measure the relevant parameters in the Higgs sector. We use the SFitter framework to map these measurements on the parameter space of a general weak-scale effective theory with a light Higgs state of mass 120 GeV. Our analysis benefits from the parameter determination tools and the error treatment used in new--physics searches, to study individual parameters and their error bars as well as parameter correlations.Comment: 45 pages, Journal version with comments from refere