10 research outputs found
Assessing the efficacy of locally constructed model kits in teaching and learning of writing and naming binary compounds
No full textThe study constructed Valency Arm and Y-shaped Model Kits using local materials from the school community, serving as interventions for Sekyere Central District junior high students in Ghana. Effectiveness was tested using a quasi-experimental pre-test post-test control group design in teaching binary compounds writing and naming. We randomly selected four intact classes, two as the experimental group (n = 69) and the other two as the control group (n = 67). After constructing and using the model kits in the teaching and learning process of writing and naming binary compounds, it was found that the experimental group, who received instruction with the model kits, had better retention of the concepts and principles than the control group. These improved learning gains were evident in the three successive tests (Pillai\u27s Trace = 0.440, F (2, 133) = 52.319, p = 0.000, partial eta squared = 0.440). Additionally, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 11 randomly selected respondents from the experimental group. This interview identified four critical features that the junior high school students perceived as benefits of using the model kits in teaching writing and naming binary compounds. These benefits were a better understanding of the principles, improved attitude towards writing and naming binary compounds, better retention of concepts, and active participation and interest in class lessons. The results imply that junior high school science teachers who want to promote effective teaching and learning of writing and naming binary compounds should consider using these model kits if the original models are unavailable
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION EDUCATION: CHALLENGES, EFFECTIVENESS, AND PERCEPTIONS OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED INSTRUCTION APPLICATION IN PHYSICS CLASSROOM
No full textDigital Transformation Education has received greater attention in teaching and learning, however, there is a scarcity of studies on the challenges, effectiveness, and perceptions of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI), especially in the Colleges of Education (CoE). In addressing these, the study used the mixed method research design using 12 Physics tutors and 254 Physics students from 3 CoE purposively selected from the Sekyere South District and the Mampong Municipality. Interviews and questionnaires were used for data collection and data analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences ¬(IBM SPSS), version 26.1, employing descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The results indicated that Physics tutors generally face a high level of challenges, with inadequate technological resources and limited financial support posing the greatest hindrances. In response, tutors employed various strategies including personal investment in internet bundles and advocacy for institutional intervention. It was again found that both quantitative and qualitative findings converged after merging and that the qualitative findings agreed with the quantitative findings. It was concluded that tutors of Physics in the CoE in the Mampong Municipality and the Sekyere South District encounter challenges during their integration of CAI in their Physics lessons. However, since students of Physics in the CoE perceive the use of CAI as very positive to their academic lives, it was recommended that using CAI for teaching and learning Physics in the colleges of education should be fortified. Article visualizations
What determines the spatial pattern in summer upwelling trends on the U.S. West Coast?
No full textAuthor Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 117 (2012): C08012, doi:10.1029/2012JC008016.Analysis of sea surface temperature (SST) from coastal buoys suggests that the summertime over-shelf water temperature off the U.S. West Coast has been declining during the past 30 years at an average rate of −0.19°C decade−1. This cooling trend manifests itself more strongly off south-central California than off Oregon and northern California. The variability and trend in the upwelling north of off San Francisco are positively correlated with those of the equatorward wind, indicating a role of offshore Ekman transport in the north. In contrast, Ekman pumping associated with wind stress curls better explains the stronger and statistically more significant cooling trend in the south. While the coast-wide variability and trend in SST are strongly correlated with those of large-scale modes of climate variability, they in general fail to explain the southward intensification of the trend in SST and wind stress curl. This result suggests that the local wind stress curl, often topographically forced, may have played a role in the upwelling trend pattern.H.S. acknowledges the WHOI supports
from the Coastal Research Fund in Support of Scientific Staff, the Penzance
Endowed Fund in Support of Assistant Scientists, and the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation Endowed Fund for Innovative Research. K.B. and C.E.
acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation through grants
OCE-1059632 and OCE 1061434.2013-03-0
Filmic machines and animated monsters: retelling Frankenstein in the digital age
No full textFrankensteinian monsters have appeared on our screens since the early days of cinema. Indeed, across the history of film we see Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” rewritten as alchemical creations, animated corpses, lumbering fiends, robots, cyborgs, replicants, dinosaurs, artificial intelligences and digital constructions. In particular, Shelley’s text shares its speculative depiction of a posthuman future with fantastic and science-fictional cinema of the digital age. At the same time, posthuman bodies are being created by filmmakers. New possibilities in the digital imaging of human presence – from the replacement of actors with computer-generated imagery to the quest for photorealism in digital animation – themselves evoke the Frankenstein tale and consequently make interesting contributions to the evolving Frankenstein myth.
This thesis investigates the retelling of Frankenstein in popular cinema of the digital age. Through close analysis of a series of chosen texts, I examine the figure of the Frankensteinian monster and his/her/its equivalents in today’s popular culture: posthuman figures who negotiate uneasily with the organic world, boundary creatures who both define and unsettle our understandings of human being. I consider the way the tale, its themes and characters have both endured and evolved over time. I also examine the way these new filmic “machines” and animated “monsters” embody crucial problems associated with the technologies that screen them and the media that contain them.
My concern in this project is twofold. Firstly, I seek to map the (changing) relationship between Frankenstein and film. Since the early 1900s, cinema has provided a fertile ground for the retelling of Shelley’s tale. At the same time, cinema itself has always been a sort of Frankensteinian experiment: a means of breathing life into stillness, of constructing and re-constructing human presence, of stitching together fragmented moments to create a semblance of wholeness. In the digital age, this experiment grows and changes: new modes of production are continually being trialled, allowing us to re-create and re-present human presence in new and often bizarre ways. The figure of the Frankensteinian monster confronts and responds to these concerns, embodying and performing the uncanny, spectacular, mechanical, or organic-mechanical nature of screen presence.
Secondly, this thesis reads the Frankensteinian monster as a mythic figure for the digital age. I move towards the assertion that Frankenstein is a tale about the artificial body and its negotiation with a lost or disrupted origin in the organic world, and that this particular problem reverberates strongly in an age of digital representation. The analyses that constitute this thesis contribute to the argument that each time the Frankenstein tale is retold, re-technologised, and re-imagined using new filmic techniques, the problem of the screen body and its troubled origin stories is revisited and complicated
The city and landscapes beyond Harold Pinter's rooms
No full textPinter's dramas have been labelled as 'absurd', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic', 'taciturn'.
There has been a constant tendency to reduce the idea of the 'Pinteresque' to language
when Pinter is preoccupied with the tensions between reality and the world of the
imagination. He has, actually and accurately, used theatre as a 'critical act' to denote
the abstracted realities, and he has applied his language to embody his world-view - his
concerns in the contemporary capitalist world.
Pinter has journeyed from the room to the outside world, from the private to the public
social space, and has identified an inescapable sense of pessimism and alienation, and
investigated an alarming world of atrocities. There are cities and landscapes beyond
Pinter's rooms, cities peopled by wandering, displaced figures surveying the self-estranged city that is modern consciousness, and landscapes where his people retreat
into the private realms of memory and fantasy.
This thesis explores the virtual geographies beyond Pinter's rooms through the
vocabulary of some modernist theoreticians and social scientists, as there are significant
parallels between their analytical observations and the poetic perceptions of Pinter, a
practising artist, and the phantom images of his characters.
Pinter's plays and film adaptations tend to portray the city as a colonial present, and the
country as a mythological past. The 1970s' plays portray a community of isolation,
urban decay, dispossession and suffering, through the figure of the 'flâneur' - his
characters' subjective experiences, memories and fantasies in the metropolis. In these
memory plays, men and women have different mental landscapes and desires. To some
extent the city is both a male-constructed world and an image of the twentieth century;
in both senses it is anti-human and in decline.
In his 1980s mature plays, Pinter's lyrical interiors and serene landscapes are colonised
by the metropolis. Here Pinter investigates a universally oppressive space filled with
misery and social dislocation. The city destroys humanity in a decaying modem world.
These plays identify the global city as the locus of existential alienation and as the
centre of political power and oppression - a world of brute masculine power.
The last two plays, in this study explore other wastelands of human isolation and
suffering, and criticise the British suspicion of the 'intelligentsia'. Using scenes that are
ingrained in the contemporary audience's physical memory, Pinter makes the
distinction between being an active participant and being a witness, a 'spectator' in this
alarming world. And thus, he criticises the tradition of mockery of the artistic and the
intellectually curious in Britain, and urges a need for a 'politically curious', at politically questioning theatre-going society
La cooperació bibliotecària en l'era digital. Consorcis i adquisicions de revistes a les biblioteques universitàries catalanes
No full textThe appearance of electronic journals as a new media has transformed academic publishing and the services offered by university libraries. The big publishing houses have tackled the change from paper-based scientific journal publishing to electronic formats by introducing a new marketing model: substituting traditional title-by-title subscriptions to a system of subscribing to licence packages, known as the "Big Deal". In answer to this, the libraries have joined forces to negotiate better terms for the joint acquisition of electronic content.
In the case of the University Library Consortium of Catalonia (CBUC), analysis has been carried out of the use of electronic journals to which libraries have subscribed.
Based on the usage statistics supplied by the publishers, analysis was conducted on the use of subscription to seven electronic journals packages (American Chemical Society (ACS), American Institute of Physics (AIP), Blackwell, Elsevier, Emerald, Springer and Wiley) amongst the seven universities that made up the CBUC –Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Universidad de Girona (UDG), Universitat de Lleida (UDL) and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)– in 2005.
The results showed that the universities, regardless of their size, had different levels of use of the journals. The results also showed differences between different scientific fields. These differences in use were referenced against each university's collection of back issues and with the institution's research activity. It was also seen that journals that were not previously subscribed to showed very low levels of use.
Finally, the analysis showed that the level of use of a scientific journals can serve as an indicator of the research a university carries out and for its own evaluation purposes. Use can be taken into account when distributing the cost of subscribing to electronic journals
Time, Space and Fantasy' in the novels of H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and J. K. Rowling: A Critical Study
No full textNot availabl
Transformation and growth : the Davidic temple builder in Ephesians
No full textThe focus of this thesis is on the way in which the theology of the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians is both shaped by and shapes the appropriation of OT texts and themes, especially in Eph 2:11-22. This reveals an overarching theme, not only in 2:11-22, but in the whole letter, of the Davidic scion who builds his new temple consisting of Jews and Gentiles together. The creation and growth of this new humanity is expressed using temple imagery and by appropriating OT texts that are concerned with the eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentiles to Zion.
Ephesians is concerned with the transformed walking that is inherent to membership of the Messiah’s people. It is further concerned that this corporate entity should function as God’s dwelling place on earth; unity and loving relationships therefore being the burden of Ephesians’ paraenesis. This entire process is summed up at the gateway to the letter’s paraenesis in the phrase “learn the Messiah.” The discipleship thus conceived is about much more than (but not less than) individual transformation. The temple/dwelling place theme imparts a corporate dimension to growth that is crucial if the Messiah’s people are to function as they ought. This functioning is given further definition, however, by the expansionist element introduced by the temple theme and texts, as well as the framing of membership of the Messiah’s people in explicitly covenantal terms.
Ephesians may thus be seen as a letter whose purpose is to induct believers into the privileges and responsibilities of the Messiah’s new humanity, to give them the self understanding that they constitute corporately the new temple and to convince them that the manner of their “walking” is the means by which the unity and integrity of God’s dwelling place is both expressed and maintained
Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study
No full text© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licenseBackground: Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide. Methods: A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study—a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital. Findings: Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3·85 [95% CI 2·58–5·75]; p<0·0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63·0% vs 82·7%; OR 0·35 [0·23–0·53]; p<0·0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer. Interpretation: Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised. Funding: National Institute for Health and Care Research
Global variation in postoperative mortality and complications after cancer surgery: a multicentre, prospective cohort study in 82 countries
No full text© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licenseBackground: 80% of individuals with cancer will require a surgical procedure, yet little comparative data exist on early outcomes in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). We compared postoperative outcomes in breast, colorectal, and gastric cancer surgery in hospitals worldwide, focusing on the effect of disease stage and complications on postoperative mortality. Methods: This was a multicentre, international prospective cohort study of consecutive adult patients undergoing surgery for primary breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer requiring a skin incision done under general or neuraxial anaesthesia. The primary outcome was death or major complication within 30 days of surgery. Multilevel logistic regression determined relationships within three-level nested models of patients within hospitals and countries. Hospital-level infrastructure effects were explored with three-way mediation analyses. This study was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03471494. Findings: Between April 1, 2018, and Jan 31, 2019, we enrolled 15 958 patients from 428 hospitals in 82 countries (high income 9106 patients, 31 countries; upper-middle income 2721 patients, 23 countries; or lower-middle income 4131 patients, 28 countries). Patients in LMICs presented with more advanced disease compared with patients in high-income countries. 30-day mortality was higher for gastric cancer in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (adjusted odds ratio 3·72, 95% CI 1·70–8·16) and for colorectal cancer in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (4·59, 2·39–8·80) and upper-middle-income countries (2·06, 1·11–3·83). No difference in 30-day mortality was seen in breast cancer. The proportion of patients who died after a major complication was greatest in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (6·15, 3·26–11·59) and upper-middle-income countries (3·89, 2·08–7·29). Postoperative death after complications was partly explained by patient factors (60%) and partly by hospital or country (40%). The absence of consistently available postoperative care facilities was associated with seven to 10 more deaths per 100 major complications in LMICs. Cancer stage alone explained little of the early variation in mortality or postoperative complications. Interpretation: Higher levels of mortality after cancer surgery in LMICs was not fully explained by later presentation of disease. The capacity to rescue patients from surgical complications is a tangible opportunity for meaningful intervention. Early death after cancer surgery might be reduced by policies focusing on strengthening perioperative care systems to detect and intervene in common complications. Funding: National Institute for Health Research Global Health Research Unit
