The construction of reflective practice in key policy documents in England

This article presents an analysis of the construction of reflection in relation to teacher's practice to be found in some key documents designed to present or implement the current educational policy in England and Wales. There is evidence in these key texts that there is a potentially fruitful approach to the harnessing of reflection and reflective practice in the pursuit of given goals. This is however in tension with bureaucratic and political imperatives to control and those imperatives win out in the actual implementation documents. In so far as these actually determine the experience of teachers training for the Literacy Hour, then in practice teachers will feel that their own reflection is considerably censored rather than legitimated.     

On Data Fusion for Parametric-Model-Based Wireless Localization

In this paper, we present a data fusion framework for parametric-model-based wireless localization where the mobile station location is treated as a deterministic unknown vector. Three types of fusion schemes are presented: measurement fusion, estimate fusion and mixed fusion. Theoretical performance comparison among these schemes in terms of the estimation root mean square error via the weighted least square estimator (WLSE) is conducted. Such a performance metric coincides with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) in the case of Gaussian noise. We show that, if the raw measurement vectors are correlated, then measurement fusion achieves the best performance, mixed fusion follows and estimate fusion is the worst. If the raw measurement vectors are uncorrelated, then these different fusion schemes achieve the same performance. Benefits that can be earned from data fusion for wireless localization are also investigated and numerical examples are presented to validate our theoretical analysis.     

Determination of Thermoelectric Module Efficiency: A Survey

The development of thermoelectrics (TE) for energy conversion is in the transition phase from laboratory research to device development. There is an increasing demand to accurately determine the module efficiency, especially for the power generation mode. For many TE, the figure of merit, ZT, of the material sometimes cannot be fully realized at the device level. Reliable efficiency testing of thermoelectric modules is important to assess the device ZT and provide end-users with realistic values for how much power can be generated under specific conditions. We conducted a general survey of efficiency testing devices and their performance. The results indicated a lack of industry standards and test procedures. This study included a commercial test system and several laboratory systems. Most systems are based on the heat flow meter method, and some are based on the Harman method. They are usually reproducible in evaluating thermoelectric modules. However, different systems often showed large differences that are likely caused by uncertain heat loss and thermal resistance. Efficiency testing is an important capability for the thermoelectric community to improve. A follow-up international standardization effort is planned.     

The temperature dependence of anaerobic glycolysis in beef muscle held in a linear temperature gradient

Measurements have been made of the rate of pH fall post-mortem in excised beef sternomandibularis muscles held in a linear temperature gradient. A minimum rate of pH fall was observed between 10 and 12°C and the rate increased as the temperature was further reduced towards 0°C, a phenomenon known to be accompanied by cold-shortening and attributable to increased activity of the contractile actomyosin ATPase which stimulates glycolysis. The increase in rate observed as the temperature was raised above the 10–12°C minimum, had an activation energy of 40kJ/mol, similar to that of the calcium-independent myosin ATPase.     

Cathepsin D from horse spleen. I. Purification and study of certain physicochemical properties

Horse spleen cathepsin D (3.4.23.5.) was purified from crude extract by sodium chloride and ethanol precipitation, column chromatography fractionation on DEAE cellulose and CM Sephadex, re-chromatography on DEAE cellulose and gel filtration. The enzyme has been purified about 3.000 folds with a yield of 30 per cent. The purified enzyme seems to be homogeneous on Sephadex G100, one protein band is apparent on disc electrophoresis. Determined by dansylation the N-terminal amino acid is glycine. A molecular weight of 42,500 +/- 3,000 was obtained with Sephadex G100 gel filtration and light scattering measurements. Amino acid analysis and chemical determinations were performed: cathepsin D is a glycoprotein (2 or 3 osamine residues) including 344 amino acids and 4 disulfide bonds. Spectrophotometric data show that E1cm/1 mg/ml = 1.01 at lambda = 280 nm. ORD measurements indicate about 20 per cent of helicoidal content in the molecule.     

Polymerase chain reaction-mediated characterization of molds belonging to the Aspergillus flavus group and detection of Aspergillus parasiticus in peanut kernels by a multiplex polymerase chain reaction

The Aspergillus flavus group covers species of A. flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus as aflatoxin producers and Aspergillus oryzae and Aspergillus sojae as koji molds. Genetic similarity among these species is high, and aflatoxin production of a culture may be affected by cultivation conditions and substrate composition. Therefore, a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-mediated method of detecting the aflatoxin-synthesizing genes to indicate the degree of risk a genotype has of being a phenotypic producer was demonstrated. In this study, 19 strains of the A. flavus group, including A. flavus, A. parasiticus, A. oryzae, A. sojae, and one Aspergillus niger, were subjected to PCR testing in an attempt to detect four genes, encoding for norsolorinic acid reductase (nor-1), versicolorin A dehydrogenase (ver-1), sterigmatocystin O-methyltransferase (omt-1), and a regulatory protein (apa-2), involved in aflatoxin biosynthesis. Concurrently, the strains were cultivated in yeast-malt (YM) broth for aflatoxin detection. Fifteen strains were shown to possess the four target DNA fragments. With regard to aflatoxigenicity, all seven aflatoxigenic strains possessed the four DNA fragments, and five strains bearing less than the four DNA fragments did not produce aflatoxin. When peanut kernels were artificially contaminated with A. parasiticus and A. niger for 7 days, the contaminant DNA was extractable from a piece of cotyledon (ca. 100 mg), and when subjected to multiplex PCR testing using the four pairs of primers coding for the above genes, they were successfully detected. The target DNA fragments were detected in the kernels infected with A. parasiticus, and none was detected in the sound (uninoculated) kernels or in the kernels infected with A. niger.