Teaching high-school students nanoscience and nanotechnology

Science education research has recognized the potential of NanoScience and nanoTechnology (NST) due to its contribution to scientific literacy of future generations. Scholars have identified nine "Big Ideas" as important enough to teach in order to understand NST issues. Based on these "Big Ideas" a teaching learning sequence for lower secondary students has been developed focused on: Size and Scale, Tools and Instrumentation, Size-Dependent Properties and Science- Technology-Society. The teaching sequence was implemented in a class of 15 students of a lower secondary school (8 th grade; aged 14-15). Seven meetings took place; each one lasting about ninety minutes. The course was structured as follows: 1. Introduction. 2. How small is a nanometer? 3. How can we "see" the nanoworld? 4. Size-dependent properties: Change of the surface area to volume ratio. 5. Explaining the behavior of different textiles (ranged from hydrophilic to hydrophobic) when absorbing water drops. 6. Explaining color changes in gold nanoparticles. 7. Risk assessment of nanotechnology. Data have been collected by questionnaires, interviews, students' worksheets and field notes. The results seem to be encouraging for the teaching of NST issues even in lower levels of education.

Efficient lineage for SUM aggregate queries

AI systems typically make decisions and find patterns in data based on the computation of aggregate and specifically sum functions, expressed as queries, on data's attributes. This computation can become costly or even inefficient when these queries concern the whole or big parts of the data and especially when we are dealing with big data. New types of intelligent analytics require also the explanation of why something happened. In this paper we present a randomised algorithm that constructs a small summary of the data, called Aggregate Lineage, which can approximate well and explain all sums with large values in time that depends only on its size. The size of Aggregate Lineage is practically independent on the size of the original data. Our algorithm does not assume any knowledge on the set of sum queries to be approximated.

Depression and Suicidal Ideation During Two Psychosocial Treatments in Older Adults with Major Depression and Dementia

Depression is prevalent in dementia and contributes to poor outcomes for patients and their families. Antidepressants have limited efficacy in older adults with major depression and dementia, and psychosocial interventions are under-investigated.

Quality of Life and Participation in the Daily Life (Activities) of Adults with Pompe Disease Receiving Enzyme Replacement Therapy: 10 Years of International Follow-Up

Responses were available for 174 adult patients. In the periods before and after the start of ERT, the median follow-up times were 4 years each (range 0.5– 8). The SF-36 Physical Component Summary measure (PCS) deteriorated before ERT (−0.73 score Quality of Life and Participation in the Daily Life (Activities) of Adults with Pompe Disease Receiving Enzyme Replacement Therapy: 10 Years of International Follow-Up

DBpedia – A large-scale, multilingual knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia

The DBpedia community project extracts structured, multilingual knowledge from Wikipedia and makes it freely available on the Web using Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. The project extracts knowledge from 111 different language editions of Wikipedia. The largest DBpedia knowledge base which is extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia consists of over 400 million facts that describe 3.7 million things. The DBpedia knowledge bases that are extracted from the other 110 Wikipedia editions together consist of 1.46 billion facts and describe 10 million additional things. The DBpedia project maps Wikipedia infoboxes from 27 different language editions to a single shared ontology consisting of 320 classes and 1,650 properties. The mappings are created via a world-wide crowd-sourcing effort and enable knowledge from the different Wikipedia editions to be combined. The project publishes releases of all DBpedia knowledge bases for download and provides SPARQL quer y access to 14 out of the 111 language editions via a global network of local DBpedia chapters. In addition to the regular releases, the project maintains a live knowledge base which is updated whenever a page in Wikipedia changes. DBpedia sets 27 million RDF links pointing into over 30 external data sources and thus enables data from these sources to be used together with DBpedia data. Several hundred data sets on the Web publish RDF links pointing to DBpedia themselves and make DBpedia one of the central interlinking hubs in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. In this system report, we give an overview of the DBpedia community project, including its architecture, technical implementation, maintenance, internationalisation, usage statistics and applications

Dimitris Pikionis: la alfombra pétrea

Con restos de materiales pétreos procedentes del derribo de unas construcciones del siglo XIX, Pikionis construyó una alfombra pétrea, un nuevo umbral, para la polis elevada de Atenas. Para construir este collage se valió de restos de mármol, cornisas y materiales cerámicos, estableciendo un diálogo entre la memoria arqueológica estratificada y la intervención contemporánea.

Differences in size and reproductive output of loggerhead turtles Caretta caretta nesting in the eastern Mediterranean Sea are linked to foraging site

Foraging success affects reproductive output in sea turtles, and is therefore an impor- tant factor to measure in order to understand population dynamics. During 2010 and 2011, we used satellite telemetry to track the at-sea behavior of 20 post-nesting loggerhead turtles Caretta caretta from Rethymno, Crete, Greece. Nineteen transmitters provided location and dive data throughout the turtles' migration towards their foraging grounds and the transition into foraging behavior. We identified 3 foraging regions: (1) 9 turtles migrated southwest towards the North African coast, with 8 concentrated in the region of the Gulf of Gabes, Tunisia; (2) 6 turtles migrated north towards the Aegean Sea; and (3) 4 turtles did not take long-distance migrations, instead remaining resident within the waters of Crete. Two fitness proxies were associated with differ- ences in post-nesting strategies. Turtles foraging in northern waters had significantly larger curved and straight carapace lengths and clutch sizes than turtles foraging near Crete or Africa. Those differences reflect the disparity in benthic prey abundances among the 3 regions. The Aegean had a higher abundance of macrobenthic fauna than the other 2 regions, and the Gulf of Gabes had an increased level of eutrophication. Deterioration of the aquatic resources in the Gulf of Gabes region may be a contributing factor in the observed steady decline in clutch size and total nests per season in 2 critical nesting beaches for loggerheads in Greece.

Long-run Bulls and Bears

In Search of Ideas: Technological Innovation and Executive Pay Inequality

Old-new ERP effects and remote memories: the late parietal effect is absent as recollection fails whereas the early mid-frontal effect persists as familiarity is retained

Understanding the electrophysiological correlates of recognition memory processes has been a focus of research in recent years. This study investigated the effects of retention interval on recognition memory by comparing memory for objects encoded four weeks (remote) or 5 min (recent) before testing. In Experiment 1, event related potentials (ERPs) were acquired while participants performed a yes-no recognition memory task involving remote, recent and novel objects. Relative to correctly rejected new items, remote and recent hits showed an attenuated frontal negativity from 300–500 ms post-stimulus. This effect, also known as the FN400, has been previously associated with familiarity memory. Recent and remote recognition ERPs did not differ from each other at this time-window. By contrast, recent but not remote recognition showed increased parietal positivity from around 500 ms post-stimulus. This late parietal effect (LPE), which is considered a correlate of recollection-related processes, also discriminated between recent and remote memories. A second, behavioral experiment confirmed that remote memories unlike recent memories were based almost exclusively on familiarity. These findings support the idea that the FN400 and LPE are indices of familiarity and recollection memory, respectively and show that remote and recent memories are functionally and anatomically distinct.