Educating students on metamaterials-The story of the EUProMeta

The EUProMeta is an international distributed doctoral school that educates students at the Ph.D. level in all theoretical and experimental aspects of metamaterials. This contribution provides an overview to the activities of the school' its intention' its structure and the way individual school events are implemented. The article aimes to raise awareness that education of students is an essential ingredient of a research community that advances its research field as a whole. Doctoral schools are an excellent institution to set a base of shared knowledge in a community and to interlink the people that contribute most to the actual research performed in the field. © 2012 EUROPEAN MICROWAVE ASSOC.

Improving the Semantics of Conceptual-Modeling Grammars:A New Perspective on an Old Problem

A core activity in information systems development involves understanding the
conceptual model of the domain that the information system supports. Any conceptual model is ultimately created using a conceptual-modeling (CM) grammar. Accordingly, just as high quality conceptual models facilitate high quality systems development, high quality CM grammars facilitate high quality conceptual modeling. This paper seeks to provide a new perspective on improving the quality of CM grammar semantics. For the past twenty years, the leading approach to this topic has drawn on ontological theory. However, the ontological approach captures just half of the story. It needs to be coupled with a logical approach. We show how ontological quality and logical quality interrelate and we outline three contributions of a logical approach: the ability to see familiar conceptualmodeling problems in simpler ways, the illumination of new problems, and the ability to prove the benefit of modifying CM grammars.

Simultaneously uncovering the patterns of brain regions involved in different story reading subprocesses

Story understanding involves many perceptual and cognitive subprocesses, from perceiving individual words, to parsing sentences, to understanding the relationships among the story characters. We present an integrated computational model of reading that incorporates these and additional subprocesses, simultaneously discovering their fMRI signatures. Our model predicts the fMRI activity associated with reading arbitrary text passages, well enough to distinguish which of two story segments is being read with 74% accuracy. This approach is the first to simultaneously track diverse reading subprocesses during complex story processing and predict the detailed neural representation of diverse story features, ranging from visual word properties to the mention of different story characters and different actions they perform. We construct brain representation maps that replicate many results from a wide range of classical studies that focus each on one aspect of language processing and offer new insights on which type of information is processed by different areas involved in language processing. Additionally, this approach is promising for studying individual differences: it can be used to create single subject maps that may potentially be used to measure reading comprehension and diagnose reading disorders.

Mesenchymal stromal cells for treatment of the acute respiratory distress syndrome: The beginning of the story

In spite of decades of research, the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) continues to have an unacceptably high mortality and morbidity. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) present a promising candidate for the treatment of this condition and have demonstrated benefit in preclinical models. MSCs, which are a topic of growing interest in many inflammatory disorders, have already progressed to early phase clinical trials in ARDS. While a number of their mechanisms of effect have been elucidated, a better understanding of the complex actions of these cells may pave the way for MSC modifications, which might enable more effective translation into clinical practice.

The inside story: A survey of social work students’ supervision and learning opportunities on placement

Practice learning accounts for half of the content of the Bachelor of Social Work degree course requirements in Northern Ireland in their field education programs and share a professional and ethical responsibility with practice teachers to provide appropriate learning environments to prepare students as competent and professional practitioners. The accreditation standards for practice learning require the placement to provide students with regular supervision and exposure to a range of learning strategies, but there is little research that actually identifies the types of placements offering this learning and the key activities provided. This paper builds on an Australian study and surveys social work students in two programs in Northern Ireland about their exposure a range of learning activities, how frequently they were provided and how it compares to what is required by the Northern Ireland practice standards. The results indicated that, although most students were satisfied with the supervision and support they received during their placement, the frequency of supervision and type of learning activities varied according to different settings, year levels and who provided the learning opportunities.