979 resultados para Massive Data
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Background: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become immensely popular in a short span of time. However, there is very little research exploring MOOCs in the discipline of Health and Medicine. This paper is aimed to fill this void by providing a review of Health and Medicine related MOOCs. Objective: Provide a review of Health and Medicine related MOOCs offered by various MOOC platforms within the year 2013. Analyze and compare the various offerings, their target audience, typical length of a course and credentials offered. Discuss opportunities and challenges presented by MOOCs in the discipline of Health and Medicine. Methods: Health and Medicine related MOOCs were gathered using several methods to ensure the richness and completeness of data. Identified MOOC platform websites were used to gather the lists of offerings. In parallel, these MOOC platforms were contacted to access official data on their offerings. Two MOOC aggregator sites (Class Central and MOOC List) were also consulted to gather data on MOOC offerings. Eligibility criteria were defined to concentrate on the courses that were offered in 2013 and primarily on the subject ‘Health and Medicine’. All language translations in this paper were achieved using Google Translate. Results: The search identified 225 courses out of which 98 were eligible for the review (n = 98). 58% (57) of the MOOCs considered were offered on the Coursera platform and 94% (92) of all the MOOCs were offered in English. 90 MOOCs were offered by universities and the John Hopkins University offered the largest number of MOOCs (12). Only three MOOCs were offered by developing countries (China, West Indies, and Saudi Arabia). The duration of MOOCs varied from three weeks to 20 weeks with an average length of 6.7 weeks. On average MOOCs expected a participant to work on the material for 4.2 hours a week. Verified Certificates were offered by 14 MOOCs while three others offered other professional recognition. Conclusions: The review presents evidence to suggest that MOOCs can be used as a way to provide continuous medical education. It also shows the potential of MOOCs as a means of increasing health literacy among the public.
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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become very popular among learners millions of users from around the world registered with leading platforms. There are hundreds of universities (and other organizations) offering MOOCs. However, sustainability of MOOCs is a pressing concern as MOOCs incur up front creation costs, maintenance costs to keep content relevant and on-going support costs to provide facilitation while a course is being run. At present, charging a fee for certification (for example Coursera Signature Track and FutureLearn Statement of Completion) seems a popular business model. In this paper, the authors discuss other possible business models and their pros and cons. Some business models discussed here are: Freemium model – providing content freely but charging for premium services such as course support, tutoring and proctored exams. Sponsorships – courses can be created in collaboration with industry where industry sponsorships are used to cover the costs of course production and offering. For example Teaching Computing course was offered by the University of East Anglia on the FutureLearn platform with the sponsorship from British Telecom while the UK Government sponsored the course Introduction to Cyber Security offered by the Open University on FutureLearn. Initiatives and Grants – The government, EU commission or corporations could commission the creation of courses through grants and initiatives according to the skills gap identified for the economy. For example, the UK Government’s National Cyber Security Programme has supported a course on Cyber Security. Similar initiatives could also provide funding to support relevant course development and offering. Donations – Free software, Wikipedia and early OER initiatives such as the MIT OpenCourseware accept donations from the public and this could well be used as a business model where learners could contribute (if they wish) to the maintenance and facilitation of a course. Merchandise – selling merchandise could also bring revenue to MOOCs. As many participants do not seek formal recognition (European Commission, 2014) for their completion of a MOOC, merchandise that presents their achievement in a playful way could well be attractive for them. Sale of supplementary material –supplementary course material in the form of an online or physical book or similar could be sold with the revenue being reinvested in the course delivery. Selective advertising – courses could have advertisements relevant to learners Data sharing – though a controversial topic, sharing learner data with relevant employers or similar could be another revenue model for MOOCs. Follow on events – the courses could lead to follow on summer schools, courses or other real-life or online events that are paid-for in which case a percentage of the revenue could be passed on to the MOOC for its upkeep. Though these models are all possible ways of generating revenue for MOOCs, some are more controversial and sensitive than others. Nevertheless unless appropriate business models are identified the sustainability of MOOCs would be problematic.
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Background: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become commonplace in the e-learning landscape. Thousands of elderly learners are participating in courses offered by various institutions on a multitude of platforms in many different languages. However, there is very little research into understanding elderly learners in MOOCs. Objective: We aim to show that a considerable proportion of elderly learners are participating in MOOCs and that there is a lack of research in this area. We hope this assertion of the wide gap in research on elderly learners in MOOCs will pave the way for more research in this area. Methods: Pre-course survey data for 10 University of Reading courses on the FutureLearn platform were analyzed to show the level of participation of elderly learners in MOOCs. Two MOOC aggregator sites (Class Central and MOOC List) were consulted to gather data on MOOC offerings that include topics relating to aging. In parallel, a selected set of MOOC platform catalogues, along with a recently published review on health and medicine-related MOOCs, were searched to find courses relating to aging. A systematic literature search was then employed to identify research articles on elderly learners in MOOCs. Results: The 10 courses reviewed had a considerable proportion of elderly learners participating in them. For the over-66 age group, this varied from 0.5% (on the course “Managing people”) to 16.3% (on the course “Our changing climate”), while for the over-56 age group it ranged from 3.0% (on “A beginners guide to writing in English”) to 39.5% (on “Heart health”). Only six MOOCs were found to include topics related to aging: three were on the Coursera platform, two on the FutureLearn platform, and one on the Open2Study platform. Just three scholarly articles relating to MOOCs and elderly learners were retrieved from the literature search. Conclusions: This review presents evidence to suggest that elderly learners are already participating in MOOCs. Despite this, there has been very little research into their engagement with MOOCs. Similarly, there has been little research into exploiting the scope of MOOCs for delivering topics that would be of interest to elderly learners. We believe there is potential to use MOOCs as a way of tackling the issue of loneliness among older adults by engaging them as either resource personnel or learners.
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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)
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The effects of massive lesions of the telencephalon on the behavioral repertoire of captive pigeons were investigated. The behavior of four birds with an intact telencephalon was compared to that of four birds submitted to ablation of telencephalic structures. Behavioral audio recording was done according to previously defined categories in three daily sessions for fifteen days. Experimental birds were followed up for one month. Immediately after the lesion, operated birds showed decreases in the occurrence of different behaviors such as coordinated movements, feeding, interaction, preening, maintenance, exploration and vocalization and increases in locomotion and discrete movements of the body when compared to the control birds (P < 0.05). Recovery of exploration (P < 0.05), feeding and localization was observed during the follow-up period. These data are interpreted as suggestive of a functional role of the telencephalon in the organization of behavior and a long-term recovery of behavior after detelencephalation.
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Starting from the well established form of the Dirac action coupled to the electromagnetic and torsion field we find that there is some additional softly broken local symmetry associated with torsion. This symmetry fixes the form of divergences of the effective action after the spinor fields are integrated out. Then the requirement of renormalizability fixes the torsion field to be equivalent to some massive pseudovector and its action is fixed with accuracy to the values of coupling constant of torsion-spinor interaction, mass of the torsion and higher derivative terms. Implementing this action into the abelian sector of the Standard Model we establish the upper bounds on the torsion mass and coupling. In our study we used results of present experimental limits on four-fermion contact interaction (LEP, HERA, SLAC, SLD, CCFR) and TEVATRON limits on the cross section of new gauge boson, which could be produced as a resonance at high energy pp̄ collisions. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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A one parameter model of a confined-gluon propagator has been formulated by Frank and Roberts recently, which has a great success explaining π - and p - meson observables. We show, computing few chiral parameters, that a small variation of this model considering an infrared finite gluon propagator with a dynamically generated gluon mass, can also fit data related to the chiral symmetry breaking. This allows a direct interpretation for the unique parameter involved in the model as the gluon mass scale. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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Chiral symmetry breaking in QCD is studied introducing a confining effective propagator, as proposed recently by Cornwall, and considering the effect of dynamically massive gluons. The effective confining propagator has the form 1/(k2 +m2)2 and we study the bifurcation equation finding limits on the parameter m below which a satisfactory fermion mass solution is generated. Since the coupling constant and gluon propagator are damped in the infrared, due to the presence of a dynamical gluon mass, the major part of the chiral breaking is only due to the confining propagator and related to the low momentum region of the gap equation. We study the asymptotic behavior of the gap equation containing this confinement effect and massive gluon exchange, and find that the symmetry breaking can be approximated by an effective four-fermion interaction generated by the confining propagator. We compute some QCD chiral parameters as a function of m, finding values compatible with the experimental data. We find a simple approximate relation between the fermion condensate and dynamical mass for a given representation as a function of the parameters appearing in the effective confining propagator. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.
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It is quite difficult to obtain non-trivial chiral symmetry breaking solutions for the quark gap equation in the presence of dynamically generated gluon masses. An effective confining propagator has recently been proposed by Cornwall in order to solve this problem. We study phenomenological consequences of this approach, showing its compatibility with the experimental data. We argue that this confining propagator should be restricted to a small region of momenta, leading to effective four-fermion interactions at low energy. © 2013 American Institute of Physics.
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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)
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Abstract Background One goal of gene expression profiling is to identify signature genes that robustly distinguish different types or grades of tumors. Several tumor classifiers based on expression profiling have been proposed using microarray technique. Due to important differences in the probabilistic models of microarray and SAGE technologies, it is important to develop suitable techniques to select specific genes from SAGE measurements. Results A new framework to select specific genes that distinguish different biological states based on the analysis of SAGE data is proposed. The new framework applies the bolstered error for the identification of strong genes that separate the biological states in a feature space defined by the gene expression of a training set. Credibility intervals defined from a probabilistic model of SAGE measurements are used to identify the genes that distinguish the different states with more reliability among all gene groups selected by the strong genes method. A score taking into account the credibility and the bolstered error values in order to rank the groups of considered genes is proposed. Results obtained using SAGE data from gliomas are presented, thus corroborating the introduced methodology. Conclusion The model representing counting data, such as SAGE, provides additional statistical information that allows a more robust analysis. The additional statistical information provided by the probabilistic model is incorporated in the methodology described in the paper. The introduced method is suitable to identify signature genes that lead to a good separation of the biological states using SAGE and may be adapted for other counting methods such as Massive Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) or the recent Sequencing-By-Synthesis (SBS) technique. Some of such genes identified by the proposed method may be useful to generate classifiers.
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Abstract Background Smallpox is a lethal disease that was endemic in many parts of the world until eradicated by massive immunization. Due to its lethality, there are serious concerns about its use as a bioweapon. Here we analyze publicly available microarray data to further understand survival of smallpox infected macaques, using systems biology approaches. Our goal is to improve the knowledge about the progression of this disease. Results We used KEGG pathways annotations to define groups of genes (or modules), and subsequently compared them to macaque survival times. This technique provided additional insights about the host response to this disease, such as increased expression of the cytokines and ECM receptors in the individuals with higher survival times. These results could indicate that these gene groups could influence an effective response from the host to smallpox. Conclusion Macaques with higher survival times clearly express some specific pathways previously unidentified using regular gene-by-gene approaches. Our work also shows how third party analysis of public datasets can be important to support new hypotheses to relevant biological problems.
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The nature of the dark matter in the Universe is one of the greatest mysteries in modern astronomy. The neutralino is a nonbaryonic dark matter candidate in minimal supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. If the dark matter halo of our galaxy is made up of neutralinos some would become gravitationally trapped inside massive bodies like the Earth. Their pair-wise annihilation produces neutrinos that can be detected by neutrino experiments looking in the direction of the centre of the Earth. The AMANDA neutrino telescope, currently the largest in the world, consists of an array of light detectors buried deep in the Antarctic glacier at the geographical South Pole. The extremely transparent ice acts as a Cherenkov medium for muons passing the array and using the timing information of detected photons it is possible to reconstruct the muon direction. A search has been performed for nearly vertically upgoing neutrino induced muons with AMANDA-B10 data taken over the three year period 1997-99. No excess above the atmospheric neutrino background expectation was found. Upper limits at the 90 % confidence level has been set on the annihilation rate of neutralinos at the centre of the Earth and on the muon flux induced by neutrinos created by the annihilation products.
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Seyfert galaxies are the closest active galactic nuclei. As such, we can use
them to test the physical properties of the entire class of objects. To investigate
their general properties, I took advantage of different methods of data analysis. In
particular I used three different samples of objects, that, despite frequent overlaps,
have been chosen to best tackle different topics: the heterogeneous BeppoS AX
sample was thought to be optimized to test the average hard X-ray (E above 10 keV)
properties of nearby Seyfert galaxies; the X-CfA was thought the be optimized to
compare the properties of low-luminosity sources to the ones of higher luminosity
and, thus, it was also used to test the emission mechanism models; finally, the
XMM–Newton sample was extracted from the X-CfA sample so as to ensure a
truly unbiased and well defined sample of objects to define the average properties
of Seyfert galaxies.
Taking advantage of the broad-band coverage of the BeppoS AX MECS and
PDS instruments (between ~2-100 keV), I infer the average X-ray spectral propertiesof nearby Seyfert galaxies and in particular the photon index (
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In this thesis two related arguments are investigated: - The first stages of the process of massive star formation, investigating the physical conditions and -properties of massive clumps in different evolutionary stages, and their CO depletion; - The influence that high-mass stars have on the nearby material and on the activity of star formation. I characterise the gas and dust temperature, mass and density of a sample of massive clumps, and analyse the variation of these properties from quiescent clumps, without any sign of active star formation, to clumps likely hosting a zero-age main sequence star. I briefly discuss CO depletion and recent observations of several molecular species, tracers of Hot Cores and/or shocked gas, of a subsample of these clumps. The issue of CO depletion is addressed in more detail in a larger sample consisting of the brightest sources in the ATLASGAL survey: using a radiative tranfer code I investigate how the depletion changes from dark clouds to more evolved objects, and compare its evolution to what happens in the low-mass regime. Finally, I derive the physical properties of the molecular gas in the photon-dominated region adjacent to the HII region G353.2+0.9 in the vicinity of Pismis 24, a young, massive cluster, containing some of the most massive and hottest stars known in our Galaxy. I derive the IMF of the cluster and study the star formation activity in its surroundings. Much of the data analysis is done with a Bayesian approach. Therefore, a separate chapter is dedicated to the concepts of Bayesian statistics.