Mentoring and Student Support in Online Doctoral Programs

The increase in online graduate programs and the online mentoring of student research have led to the need to identify challenges faced by online mentees and successful strategies used by online mentors during the dissertation process. Based on semistructured interviews with ten graduates, strategies for online mentoring and areas of support valued by online doctoral students during the dissertation process are presented in this article.     

Finding a plausible option for revitalising agricultural higher education in India: a systematic review

The objectives of this paper were to explore the existing status of agricultural higher education in India, application of marketing concepts in similar institutions and to find the most appropriate marketing concept to make agricultural higher education more competitive. Extensive searches of relevant agricultural education, business management and higher educational data bases were made. It was found that agricultural higher education in India is stagnant and is facing an identity crisis among its stakeholders. Marketing theories and concepts which are now being applied in higher education across the globe have not been thought of in the context of agriculture education. A review of the literature suggested that considering the objectives, the multiplicity of stakeholders and the nature of public-funded agricultural education, marketing orientation would be most appropriate. Based on the experiences of similar institutions, the paper suggests a three-level strategy for the implementation of marketing orientation in institutions of agricultural higher education.     

Bridging East and West educational divides in Singapore

In Asia, we are witnessing an era where the pendulum of power is swaying towards the East with the rising economic strength of China and India. Singapore is at the ‘crossroads’ between the East and West of these most populous nations on earth. Although Singapore may appear the most Westernised country in Asia, she is nevertheless a multicultural Asian society. Having the most open economy in the world, Singapore is affected by the process of globalisation. This takes on an added dimension and speed as nations compete for talent and find ways to internationalise and transform their education for sustainable competitive advantage. Singapore's education system, regarded as one of the best performing in the world, offers a unique opportunity to explore the issues where East and West culture, values and systems meet. This article discusses and highlights what happens when East and West converge. In particular, the discussion will focus on the themes of East and West schism, globalisation and Singapore's aspirations to be a global hub, rankings and branding in education, and the use of the English language.     

Gram-schmidt orthogonalization and legendre polynomials

In this section of Resonance, we invite readers to pose questions likely to be raised in a classroom situation. We may suggest strategies for dealing with them, or invite responses, or both. “Classroom” is equally a forum for raising broader issues and sharing personal experiences and viewpoints on matters related to teaching and learning science.     

Discovery of SM Higgs boson in ATLAS experiment

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the most expensive and complex instrument mankind has ever built to address some of the most fundamental questions of Nature — is colliding proton-on-proton at high energy since November 2009. The full data set delivered by the LHC over the last 4 years has been analyzed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments in their pursuit of the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for generating masses for the basic building blocks of matter. In this article I discuss in detail the building and commissioning of the detector, search strategy and results obtained by the two experiments with special emphasis on ATLAS.     

Decay and half-life period of online citations cited in open access journals

This study investigates the decay and half-life of online citations cited in four open access journals published between 2000 and 2009. A total of 1158 online citations cited in 1086 research articles published in two science and social science journals spanning a period of 10 years (2000–2009) were extracted. Study found that 24.58% (267 out of 1086) of articles had online citations and these articles contained a substantially very less number of online citations (2.98%) compared to previous study results. 30.56% (26% in Science and 52.73% in Social Science) of online citations were not accessible and remaining 69.44% of online citations were still accessible. The ‘HTTP 404 error message-page not found’ was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 67.79% of all HTTP message. Domains associated with .ac and .net had higher successful access rates while .org and .com/.co had lowest successful access rates. The half-life of online citations was computed to be approximately 11.5 years and 9.07 years in Science and Social science journal articles respectively.     

Regulation of DNA conformations and dynamics in flows with hybrid field microfluidics

Visualizing single DNA dynamics in flow provides a wealth of physical insights in biophysics and complex flow study. However, large signal fluctuations, generated from diversified conformations, deformation history dependent dynamics and flow induced stochastic tumbling, often frustrate its wide adoption in single molecule and polymer flow study. We use a hybrid field microfluidic (HFM) approach, in which an electric field is imposed at desired locations and appropriate moments to balance the flow stress on charged molecules, to effectively regulate the initial conformations and the deformation dynamics of macromolecules in flow. With λ-DNA and a steady laminar shear flow as the model system, we herein studied the performance of HFM on regulating DNA trapping, relaxation, coil-stretch transition, and accumulation. DNA molecules were found to get captured in the focused planes when motions caused by flow, and the electric field were balanced. The trapped macromolecules relaxed in two different routes while eventually became more uniform in size and globule conformations. When removing the electric field, the sudden stretching dynamics of DNA molecules exhibited a more pronounced extension overshoot in their transient response under a true step function of flow stress while similar behaviors to what other pioneering work in steady shear flow. Such regulation strategies could be useful to control the conformations of other important macromolecules (e.g., proteins) and help better reveal their molecular dynamics.     

The social culture of work: work, employment and unemployment as ways of life

All labour is directed towards producing some effect. For though some exertions are taken merely for their own sake, as when a game is played for amusement, they are not counted as labour. We may define labour as any exertion of mind or body undergone partly or wholly with a view to some good other than the pleasure derived directly from the work.     

Oysters in a new classification of keystone species

Keystone species are crucial in restoration ecology. Among all the keystone species known so far, live oysters are by far, the most efficient ‘keystone niches’, attracting hundreds of species to them. A new classification of keystone species is presented, including oysters as the best keystone niches. P J Sanjeeva Raj taught, researched and published on ecology, for the past 55 years. For his work on the Pulicat Lake, he was awarded the Karmavirar Kamrajar Environmental Award for 2002–2003, by the Department of Environment of the Tamil Nadu Government.