Supporting the development of scientific understanding when constructing an evolving explanation

We explore how students developed an integrated understanding of scientific ideas and how they applied their understandings in new situations. We examine the incremental development of 7th grade students’ scientific ideas across four iterations of a scientific explanation related to a freshwater system. We demonstrate that knowing how to make use of scientific ideas to explain phenomena needs to be learned just as developing integrated understanding of scientific ideas needs to be learned. Students participated in an open-ended, long-term project-based learning unit, constructing one explanation over time to address, “How healthy is our stream for freshwater organisms and how do our actions on land potentially impact the water quality of the stream?” The explanation developed over several weeks as new data were collected and analyzed. Students discussed evidence by revisiting scientific ideas and including new scientific ideas. This research investigates two questions: (1) As students engage in writing a scientific explanation over time, to what extent do they develop integrated understanding of appropriate scientific ideas? and (2) When writing about new evidence, do these earlier experiences of writing explanations enable students to make use of new scientific ideas in more sophisticated ways? In other words, do earlier experiences allow students to know how to make use of their ideas in these new situations? The results indicated statistically significant effects. Through various iterations of the explanation students included richer discussion using appropriate scientific ideas. Students were also able to make better use of new knowledge in new situations.

Belgium: Formalization and Incremental Development of a Supervisor with Increasing Powers and Authority

The formalization process of Belgian banking supervision provides an interesting case. Mixed international influences as well as major domestic reforms influenced the direction of formalizing the supervisory system. It began in the middle of the 1930s as a consequence of the economic and financial crisis at the beginning of the decade. The reforms undertaken in 1934 and 1935 transformed the Belgian banking system from a free and unrestricted market, featuring very influential financial groups operating universal banking, to a supervised and more specialized banking system. However, based on our understanding of “formalization,” the process was not completed until the mid-1970s, because newly created formal supervision agency—the Banking Commission—initially functioned with very little resources and powers on a similar basis as its Swiss equivalent. In the post-Second World War era, the Belgian banking supervisor developed significantly, and its influence reached beyond mere prudential supervision. By the mid-1970s, the Banking Commission got involved in monetary and state financing policy, and the agency obtained the supervision of additional financial institutions.

Automated Conflict Management Framework Development for Autonomous Aerial and Ground Vehicles

The number of aerial- and ground-based unmanned vehicles and operations is expected to significantly expand in the near future. While aviation traditionally has an excellent safety record in managing conflicts, the current approaches will not be able to provide safe and efficient operations in the future. This paper presents the development of a novel framework integrating autonomous aerial and ground vehicles to facilitate short- and mid-term tactical conflict management. The methodology presents the development of a modular web service framework to develop new conflict management algorithms. This new framework is aimed at managing urban and peri-urban traffic of unmanned ground vehicles and assisting the introduction of urban air mobility into the same framework. A set of high-level system requirements is defined. The incremental development of two versions of the system prototype is presented. The discussions highlight the lessons learnt while implementing and testing the conflict management system and the introduced version of the stop-and-go resolution algorithm and defines the identified future development directions. Operation of the system was successfully demonstrated using real hardware. The developed framework implements short- and mid-term conflict management methodologies in a safe, resource efficient and scalable manner and can be used for the further development and the evaluation of various methods integrating aerial- and ground-based autonomous vehicles.

TAPHONOMY AND DEPOSITIONAL SETTING OF THE SHRINGASAURUS INDICUS (ARCHOSAUROMORPHA: ALLOKOTOSAURIA) BONEBED FROM THE MIDDLE TRIASSIC DENWA FORMATION, SATPURA GONDWANA BASIN, INDIA

ABSTRACT A bonebed of multiple skeletons of the Triassic horned reptile Shringasaurus indicus was discovered in the upper Denwa Formation, Satpura Gondwana Basin, India. The monotaxic bonebed contains multiple individuals of different ontogenic stages indicating herding behavior by Shringasaurus indicus. The herd was a mixed-sex herd. The adult and sub-adult bones in the bonebed exceed the number of juvenile bones. The distribution of the bones was slightly patchy, bones of different individuals were admixed, and several bones were piled up implying mass mortality. The bonebed occurs in a fine-grained mudrock that is hydraulically incompatible with long-distance transport and concentration by currents. Sedimentary facies analysis indicates that the bonebed accumulated and was buried in a crevasse splay deposit between two ENE-WSW trending channel-fill complexes. The northern channel-fill complex was formed by unidirectional flow with lateral channel migration towards the south and with minor contemporaneous tectonic subsidence. Repeated breaching of the levee by this channel flow led to the incremental development of the crevasse splay deposit. The herd of Shringasaurus indicus, which lived near to the perennial channel, was drowned en masse and the carcasses were trapped within the muddy sediments of the crevasse splay deposit. Apart from a partially articulated skeleton, the rest of the bones were disarticulated but remained associated. The bones show little evidence of post-mortem modifications. With a continuous supply of the sediments through the spillover channels, the bones were buried before complete disarticulation and dispersal had taken place.

Development and Application of Big Data in the Field of Satellite Navigation

Based on the characteristics of big data, the meaning of fog computing, and the spatiotemporal data characteristics of satellite navigation systems, the concept, connotation, and characteristics of Beidou big data were put forward. The Beidou big data processing process was sorted out, the preliminary architecture of the Beidou big data system with fog computing function was built, and finally the fog computing based Beidou big data system was proposed. Big data research content provides technical support for further tapping the value of Beidou satellite navigation system data and realizing the incremental development of satellite navigation systems.

First Molecular Characterization of Siphoviridae-Like Bacteriophages Infecting Staphylococcus hyicus in a Case of Exudative Epidermitis

Exudative epidermitis (EE), also known as greasy pig disease, is one of the most frequent skin diseases affecting piglets. Zoonotic infections in human occur. EE is primarily caused by virulent strains of Staphylococcus (S.) hyicus. Generally, antibiotic treatment of this pathogen is prone to decreasing success, due to the incremental development of multiple resistances of bacteria against antibiotics. Once approved, bacteriophages might offer interesting alternatives for environmental sanitation or individualized treatment, subject to the absence of virulence and antimicrobial resistance genes. However, genetic characterization of bacteriophages for S. hyicus has, so far, been missing. Therefore, we investigated a piglet raising farm with a stock problem due to EE. We isolated eleven phages from the environment and wash water of piglets diagnosed with the causative agent of EE, i.e., S. hyicus. The phages were morphologically characterized by electron microscopy, where they appeared Siphoviridae-like. The genomes of two phages were sequenced on a MiSeq instrument (Illumina), resulting in the identification of a new virulent phage, PITT-1 (PMBT8), and a temperate phage, PITT-5 (PMBT9). Sequencing of three host bacteria (S. hyicus) from one single farm revealed the presence of two different strains with genes coding for two different exfoliative toxin genes, i.e., exhA (2 strains) and exhC (1 strain). The exhC-positive S. hyicus strain was only weakly lysed by most lytic phages. The occurrence of different virulent S. hyicus strains in the same outbreak limits the prospects for successful phage treatment and argues for the simultaneous use of multiple and different phages attacking the same host.

NETWORK INTERACTIONS WITHIN A REGIONAL COMMUNITY

The communication space of modern society is rapidly expanding its boundaries. First of all, this can be traced in the modernization of old and the emergence of new types of interaction between individuals in the economic, political, social, spiritual spheres of society. The topic of social networks, as one of the areas of research in theoretical sociology, can be characterized as promising and actively developing, that is especially due to the fact that the network theory is the most natural for the analysis of social structure. In a broad sense, a social network is understood as many points (participants of a social system) related to each other to a greater or lesser extent. The first part of the article presents a theoretical analysis of the evolution of social network theory in the works of foreign researchers, describes a graphic model of its incremental development. The second part offers the analysis of the functioning of social networks in the regional communities (Cherepovets, Vologda) on the basis of the survey "Barriers to civil participation and mechanisms for overcoming them at the regional level", which was conducted by the Vologda Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2019. In conclusion, we formulate the main conclusions about the functioning of social networks in given regional communities, and develop recommendations for further empirical study of this phenomenon.

PENGEMBANGAN SISTEM INFORMASI KEMAJUAN AKADEMIK MENGGUNAKAN MODEL INCREMENTAL BERBASIS EVALUASI USABILITY DAN WHITE BOX TESTING

This research aims to develop an Academic Progress Information System (SIsKA) in the Computer Science Study Program, Postgraduate Program at Ganesha University of Education. The incremental development model is used in the development of SIsKA. The evaluation stage is carried out using the Focus Group Discussions technique to validate user input for the development stage. Evaluation was carried out on 20 respondents, who were selected using simple random sampling technique from active SIsKA users. Testing of the SIsKA development code is also carried out using White Box Testing. The results of the evaluation of phase 1 and phase 2 of development succeeded in providing recommendations for improvements according to user needs. The evaluation results from phase 3 of development show that SIsKA is in accordance with user needs. The results of the White Box test show that all lecturer page functions are at a simple level. Future development and evaluation can focus on improving the complexity of the 14 functions on the administrator and student pages, as well as analyzing data security related to SIsKA.

Data proliferation, reconciliation, and synthesis in viral ecology

The fields of viral ecology and evolution have rapidly expanded in the last two decades, driven by technological improvements, and motivated by efforts to discover potentially zoonotic wildlife viruses under the rubric of pandemic prevention. One consequence has been a massive proliferation of host-virus association data, which comprise the backbone of research in viral macroecology and zoonotic risk prediction. These data remain fragmented across numerous data portals and projects, each with their own scope, structure, and reporting standards. Here, we propose that synthesis of host-virus association data is a central challenge to improve our understanding of the global virome and develop foundational theory in viral ecology. To illustrate this, we build an open reconciled mammal-virus database from four key published datasets, applying a standardized taxonomy and metadata. We show that reconciling these datasets provides a substantially richer view of the mammal virome than that offered by any one individual database. We argue for a shift in best practice towards the incremental development and use of synthetic datasets in viral ecology research, both to improve comparability and replicability across studies, and to facilitate future efforts to use machine learning to predict the structure and dynamics of the global virome.