Development of prospective mathematics teachers’ professional noticing in a specific domain: proportional reasoning

The aim of this research is to identify aspects that support the development of prospective mathematics teachers’ professional noticing in a b-learning context. The study presented here investigates the extent to which prospective secondary mathematics teachers attend and interpret secondary school students’ proportional reasoning and decide how to respond. Results show that interactions in an on-line discussion improve prospective mathematics teachers’ ability to identify and interpret important aspects of secondary school students’ mathematical thinking.

A comparative study of open domain and opinion question answering systems for factual and opinionated queries

The development of the Web 2.0 led to the birth of new textual genres such as blogs, reviews or forum entries. The increasing number of such texts and the highly diverse topics they discuss make blogs a rich source for analysis. This paper presents a comparative study on open domain and opinion QA systems. A collection of opinion and mixed fact-opinion questions in English is defined and two Question Answering systems are employed to retrieve the answers to these queries. The first one is generic, while the second is specific for emotions. We comparatively evaluate and analyze the systems’ results, concluding that opinion Question Answering requires the use of specific resources and methods.

Geodynamic implications derived from Numidian-like distal turbidites deposited along the Internal–External Domain Boundary of the Betic Cordillera (S Spain)

New data reveal Early Burdigalian ‘Numidian-like lithofacies’ in successions of the internal (southernmost) part of the South Iberian Margin (SIM) and the south-western margin of the Mesomediterranean Microplate (MM). The well-known Numidian Formation was deposited in the external (Massylian) sub-domain of the Maghrebian Flysch Basin (a south-western branch of the Tethys Ocean). The anomalous occurrence of ‘Numidian-like lithofacies’ is induced by the particular Early Miocene palaeogeographical and geodynamic complexity of the sector. This consisted of a ‘triple point’ with a dextral transform fault between the SIM and the MM-Maghrebian Flysch Basin system. In this framework, the ageing of Iberian reliefs and the MM collapse, coupled with an African Margin upbulging, and a shortening of the Maghrebian Flysch Basin (both related to the subduction), could have resulted in the arrival of the Numidian depositional system from so far away.

New data on the Vrancea Nappe (Moldavidian Basin, Outer Carpathian Domain, Romania): paleogeographic and geodynamic reconstructions

A study has been performed on the Cretaceous to Early Miocene succession of the Vrancea Nappe (Outer Carpathians, Romania), based on field reconstruction of the stratigraphic record, mineralogical-petrographic and geochemical analyses. Extra-basinal clastic supply and intra-basinal autochthonous deposits have been differentiated, appearing laterally inter-fingered and/or interbedded. The main clastic petrofacies consist of calcarenites, sub-litharenites, quartzarenites, sub-arkoses, and polygenic conglomerates derived from extra-basinal margins. An alternate internal and external provenance of the different supplies is the result of the paleogeographic re-organization of the basin/margins system due to tectonic activation and exhumation of rising areas. The intra-basinal deposits consist of black shales and siliceous sediments (silexites and cherty beds), evidencing major environmental changes in the Moldavidian Basin. Organic-matter-rich black shales were deposited during anoxic episodes related to sediment starvation and high nutrient influx due to paleogeographic isolation of the basin caused by plate drifting. The black shales display relatively high contents in sub-mature to mature, Type II lipidic organic matter (good oil and gas-prone source rocks) constituting a potentially active petroleum system. The intra-basinal siliceous sediments are related to oxic pelagic or hemipelagic environments under tectonic quiescence conditions although its increase in the Oligocene part of the succession can be correlated with volcanic supplies. The integration of all the data in the “progressive reorientation of convergence direction” Carpathian model, and their consideration in the framework of a foreland basin, led to propose some constrains on the paleogeographic-geodynamic evolutionary model of the Moldavidian Basin from the Late Cretaceous to the Burdigalian.

Stratigraphic and geochemical study of the organic-rich black shales in the Tarcău Nappe of the Moldavidian Domain (Carpathian Chain, Romania)

An integrated stratigraphic analysis has been made of the Tarcău Nappe (Moldavidian Domain, Eastern Romanian Carpathians), coupled with a geochemical study of organic-rich beds. Two Main Sequence Boundaries (Early Oligocene and near to the Oligocene–Aquitanian boundary, respectively) divide the sedimentary record into three depositional sequences. The sedimentation occurred in the central area of a basin supplied by different and opposite sources. The high amount of siliciclastics at the beginning of the Miocene marks the activation of the “foredeep stage”. The successions studied are younger than previously thought and they more accurately date the deformation of the different Miocene phases affecting the Moldavidian Basin. The intervals with black shales identified are related to two main separate anoxic episodes with an age not older than Late Rupelian and not before Late Chattian. The most important organic-rich beds correspond to the Lower Menilites, Bituminous Marls and Lower Dysodilic Shales Members (Interval 2). These constitute a good potential source rock for petroleum, with homogeneous Type II oil-prone organic matter, highly lipidic and thermally immature. The deposition of black shales has been interpreted as occurring within a deep, periodically isolated and tectonically controlled basin.

COMPENDIUM: A text summarization system for generating abstracts of research papers

This article analyzes the appropriateness of a text summarization system, COMPENDIUM, for generating abstracts of biomedical papers. Two approaches are suggested: an extractive (COMPENDIUM E), which only selects and extracts the most relevant sentences of the documents, and an abstractive-oriented one (COMPENDIUM E–A), thus facing also the challenge of abstractive summarization. This novel strategy combines extractive information, with some pieces of information of the article that have been previously compressed or fused. Specifically, in this article, we want to study: i) whether COMPENDIUM produces good summaries in the biomedical domain; ii) which summarization approach is more suitable; and iii) the opinion of real users towards automatic summaries. Therefore, two types of evaluation were performed: quantitative and qualitative, for evaluating both the information contained in the summaries, as well as the user satisfaction. Results show that extractive and abstractive-oriented summaries perform similarly as far as the information they contain, so both approaches are able to keep the relevant information of the source documents, but the latter is more appropriate from a human perspective, when a user satisfaction assessment is carried out. This also confirms the suitability of our suggested approach for generating summaries following an abstractive-oriented paradigm.