'Really on the ball': exploring the implications of teachers' PE-CPD experience

Continuing professional development (CPD) is currently high on the Scottish Education agenda. Recent curriculum reform in Scotland, with the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence, places physical education (PE) at the forefront for its role in directly supporting learners' mental, emotional, social and physical well-being. This emphasis on PE, along with concerns about the health of the nation, has resulted in a nationwide initiative providing non-specialist teachers of primary PE with the opportunity to develop a specialism in the subject through government-funded CPD programmes at postgraduate level. Using Knowles' andragogical model as a framework, this paper reports data from a larger research study that evaluated a Scottish PE-CPD initiative. This paper comprises a single case holistic study investigating the impact and implications of a PE-CPD programme through the professional learning journeys, from the outset until completion, of four teachers: a nursery teacher, a class teacher, a cluster cover teacher and a PE specialist who participated in the programme. Data were collected over one academic year using two-stage questionnaire interviews and were analysed thematically with special attention given to the emerging general themes to achieve a holistic understanding of the case. Study findings endorse the positive impact of using the andragogical model of adult learning combined with the literature-supported characteristics of effective PE-CPD programmes. Teachers' perspectives on their CPD experiences, integration of acquired learning into working contexts and teaching post-PE-CPD were then examined to determine the next steps. This led to critical reflection on the implications of the findings for the teachers' ongoing professional development. We then challenged the role that university providers play in supporting teachers' lifelong learning. Instead, we suggest new school-university partnerships and alternative ways to support capacity building and lifelong learning towards a sustainable transformational change in Scotland's primary PE

Double Charge Exchange And Configuration Mixing

The energy dependence of forward pion double charge exchange reactions on light nuclei is studied for both the Ground State transition and the Double-Isobaric-Analog-State transitions. A common characteristic of these double reactions is a resonance-like peak around 50 MeV pion lab energy. This peak arises naturally in a two-step process in the conventional pion-nucleon system with proper handling of nuclear structure and pion distortion. A comparison among the results of different nuclear structure models demonstrates the effects of configuration mixing. The angular distribution is used to fix the single particle wave function.Comment: Added 1 figure (now 8) corrected references and various other change

Neural signatures of cognitive flexibility and reward sensitivity following nicotinic receptor stimulation in dependent smokers : a randomized trial

IMPORTANCE Withdrawal from nicotine is an important contributor to smoking relapse. Understanding how reward-based decision making is affected by abstinence and by pharmacotherapies such as nicotine replacement therapy and varenicline tartrate may aid cessation treatment. OBJECTIVE To independently assess the effects of nicotine dependence and stimulation of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor on the ability to interpret valence information (reward sensitivity) and subsequently alter behavior as reward contingencies change (cognitive flexibility) in a probabilistic reversal learning task. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Nicotine-dependent smokers and nonsmokers completed a probabilistic reversal learning task during acquisition of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a 2-drug, double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design conducted from January 21, 2009, to September 29, 2011. Smokers were abstinent from cigarette smoking for 12 hours for all sessions. In a fully Latin square fashion, participants in both groups underwent MRI twice while receiving varenicline and twice while receiving a placebo pill, wearing either a nicotine or a placebo patch. Imaging analysis was performed from June 15, 2015, to August 10, 2016. MAIN OUTCOME AND MEASURES A well-established computational model captured effects of smoking status and administration of nicotine and varenicline on probabilistic reversal learning choice behavior. Neural effects of smoking status, nicotine, and varenicline were tested for on MRI contrasts that captured reward sensitivity and cognitive flexibility. RESULTS The study included 24 nicotine-dependent smokers (12 women and 12 men; mean [SD] age, 35.8 [9.9] years) and 20 nonsmokers (10 women and 10 men; mean [SD] age, 30.4 [7.2] years). Computational modeling indicated that abstinent smokers were biased toward response shifting and that their decisions were less sensitive to the available evidence, suggesting increased impulsivity during withdrawal. These behavioral impairments were mitigated with nicotine and varenicline. Similarly, decreased mesocorticolimbic activity associated with cognitive flexibility in abstinent smokers was restored to the level of nonsmokers following stimulation of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (familywise error-corrected P<.05). Conversely, neural signatures of decreased reward sensitivity in smokers (vs nonsmokers; familywise error-corrected P<.05) in the dorsal striatum and anterior cingulate cortex were not mitigated by nicotine or varenicline. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE There was a double dissociation between the effects of chronic nicotine dependence on neural representations of reward sensitivity and acute effects of stimulation of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on behavioral and neural signatures of cognitive flexibility in smokers. These chronic and acute pharmacologic effects were observed in overlapping mesocorticolimbic regions, suggesting that available pharmacotherapies may alleviate deficits in the same circuitry for certain mental computations but not for others

J Regularization Improves Imbalanced Multiclass Segmentation

We propose a new loss formulation to further advance the multiclass segmentation of cluttered cells under weakly supervised conditions. When adding a Youden's J statistic regularization term to the cross entropy loss we improve the separation of touching and immediate cells, obtaining sharp segmentation boundaries with high adequacy. This regularization intrinsically supports class imbalance thus eliminating the necessity of explicitly using weights to balance training. Simulations demonstrate this capability and show how the regularization leads to correct results by helping advancing the optimization when cross entropy stagnates. We build upon our previous work on multiclass segmentation by adding yet another training class representing gaps between adjacent cells. This addition helps the classifier identify narrow gaps as background and no longer as touching regions. We present results of our methods for 2D and 3D images, from bright field images to confocal stacks containing different types of cells, and we show that they accurately segment individual cells after training with a limited number of images, some of which are poorly annotated

Dark Matter Halo Properties vs. Local Density and Cosmic Web Location

We study the effects of the local environmental density and the cosmic web environment (filaments, walls, and voids) on key properties of dark matter halos using the Bolshoi-Planck LCDM cosmological simulation. The z = 0 simulation is analysed into filaments, walls, and voids using the SpineWeb method and also the VIDE package of tools, both of which use the watershed transform. The key halo properties that we study are the specific mass accretion rate, spin parameter, concentration, prolateness, scale factor of the last major merger, and scale factor when the halo had half of its z = 0 mass. For all these properties, we find that there is no discernible difference between the halo properties in filaments, walls, or voids when compared at the same environmental density. As a result, we conclude that environmental density is the core attribute that affects these properties. This conclusion is in line with recent findings that properties of galaxies in redshift surveys are independent of their cosmic web environment at the same environmental density at z ~ 0. We also find that the local web environment of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies near the centre of a cosmic wall does not appear to have any effect on the properties of these galaxies' dark matter halos except for their orientation, although we find that it is rather rare to have such massive halos near the centre of a relatively small cosmic wall.Comment: 23 page

Promoted Ignition and Burning Tests of Stainless Steel in Flowing and Nonflowing Oxygen

The Industry-Sponsored Metals Combustion Test Program 96-1 was coordinated through Wendell Hull & Associates, Inc. on behalf of several contributing companies, and all design and testing was performed at the NASA White Sands Test Facility. Phase I of this test program studied the threshold pressure for self-sustained burning of various types and sizes of stain less steel rods in nonflowing oxygen, as observed in Standard Test Method for Determining the Combustion Behavior of Metallic Materials in Oxygen-Enriched Atmospheres (ASTM G 124-95). Phase II studied the ignition and propagation of burning of 316L stainless steel rods and pipe in flowing gaseous oxygen. The test sample configurations were chosen to replicate previous promoted ignition and burning tests as well as to represent geometries and cross-sectional thicknesses common in industrial piping applications. The gas pressw'es and velocities for the test matrix were selected to generally compare with CGA G-4.4 guidelines for the use of stain less steel in oxygen service. This paper summarizes the results from the Phase I nonflowing oxygen tests and presents in detail the results of the Phase II flowing oxygen tests. The maximum sample burn-length is shown as a function of test pressure in Phase 1 and also as a function of gas velocity in Phase IT. These results indicate that flowing oxygen, under the given test conditions, significantly affects maximum sample burn length as compared to nonflowing oxygen. Supplementary flowing oxygen test data on stainless steel rods from a follow-up test program are consistent with these results and are presented herein

Nucleosynthesis in the Early Galaxy

Recent observations of r-process-enriched metal-poor star abundances reveal a non-uniform abundance pattern for elements $Z\leq47$. Based on non-correlation trends between elemental abundances as a function of Eu-richness in a large sample of metal-poor stars, it is shown that the mixing of a consistent and robust light element primary process (LEPP) and the r-process pattern found in r-II metal-poor stars explains such apparent non-uniformity. Furthermore, we derive the abundance pattern of the LEPP from observation and show that it is consistent with a missing component in the solar abundances when using a recent s-process model. As the astrophysical site of the LEPP is not known, we explore the possibility of a neutron capture process within a site-independent approach. It is suggested that scenarios with neutron densities $n_{n}\leq10^{13}$ $cm^{-3}$ or in the range $n_{n}\geq10^{24}$ $cm^{-3}$ best explain the observations.Comment: 28 pages, 7 Postscript figures. To be published in The Astrophysical Journa

High-throughput screening of encapsulated islets using wide-field lens-free on-chip imaging

Islet microencapsulation is a promising solution to diabetes treatment, but its quality control based on manual microscopic inspection is extremely low-throughput, highly variable and laborious. This study presents a high-throughput islet-encapsulation quality screening system based on lens-free on-chip imaging with a wide field-of-view of 18.15 cm^2, which is more than 100 times larger than that of a lens-based optical microscope, enabling it to image and analyze ~8,000 microcapsules in a single frame. Custom-written image reconstruction and processing software provides the user with clinically important information, such as microcapsule count, size, intactness, and information on whether each capsule contains an islet. This high-throughput and cost-effective platform can be useful for researchers to develop better encapsulation protocols as well as perform quality control prior to transplantation

Temperature and orientation dependence of kinetic roughening during homoepitaxy: A quantitative x-ray-scattering study of Ag

URL:http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.54.17938 DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.54.17938Kinetic roughening during homoepitaxial growth was studied for Ag(111) and Ag(001). For Ag(111), from 150 to 500 K, the rms roughness exhibits a power law, σ∝tβ over nearly three decades in thickness. β≈1/2 at low temperatures, and there is an abrupt transition to smaller values above 300 K. In contrast, Ag(001) exhibits layer-by-layer growth with a significantly smaller β. These results are the first to establish the evolution of surface roughness quantitatively for a broad thickness and temperature range, as well as for the case where growth kinetics are dominated by a step-ledge diffusion barrier.Support is acknowledged from the University of Missouri Research Board, the NSF under Contract Nos. DMR-9202528 and DMR-9623827, and the Midwest Superconductivity Consortium ~MISCON! under DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-90ER45427. The SUNY X3 beamline is supported by the DOE under Contract No. DE-FG02-86ER45231, and the NSLS is supported by the DOE, Div. of Materials Sciences and Div. of Chemical Sciences. One of us ~W.C.E.! acknowledges support from the GAANN program of the U.S. Department of Education. We thank Ian Robinson for the Ag~111! crystal