It is widely recognized that we need to prepare students to think with data. This study investigates student interactions with digital data graphs and seeks to identify what might prompt them to ...shift toward using their graphs as thinking tools in the authentic activity of doing science. Drawing from video screencast data of three small groups engaged in sensor‐based and computer simulation‐based experiments in high school physics classes, exploratory qualitative methods are used to identify the student interactions with their graphs and what appeared to prompt shifts in those interactions. Analysis of the groups, one from a 9th grade class and two from 11th/12th grade combined classes, revealed that unexpected data patterns and graphical anomalies sometimes, but not always, preceded deeper engagement with the graphs. When shifts toward deeper engagement did occur, transcripts revealed that the students perceived the graphical patterns to be misaligned with the actions they had taken to produce those data. Misalignments between the physical, digital, and conceptual worlds of the investigations played an important role in these episodes, appearing to motivate students to revise either their experimental procedures or their conceptions of the phenomena being explored. If real‐time graphs can help foster a sense in students that there should be alignments between their data production and data representations, it is suggested that pedagogy leverage this as a way to support deeper student engagement with graphs.
•The 28-item four-factor Driver Behaviour Questionnaire was confirmed on a large sample of drivers in Australia.•Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) showed that the DBQ was equivalent ...across gender.•MGCFA showed that the DBQ was also equivalent across drivers aged 24–64 years.•Equivalence could not be supported for the youngest (17–25) or oldest (65+) drivers.•The four-factor 28-item DBQ did not fit fleet drivers, suggesting a fleet specific DBQ might be required.
The Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) is a widely used measure of driving behaviours that may increase a driver's risk of crash involvement. However, there are several different versions of the DBQ varying in terms of number of items and factor structure. The aim of the current research was to assess the construct validity of the popular 28-item four-factor DBQ solution in a representative sample of drivers in Australia. A further aim was to test the factorial invariance of the measure across gender, age and also between fleet and non-fleet drivers using multigroup confirmatory factor analyses. Data on a range of attitudes towards road safety were collected using an online survey. A stratified sampling procedure was undertaken to ensure the age, gender and location distributions of participants were representative of the Australian population. A total of 2771 responses were obtained from fully licensed motor vehicle drivers (male: 46%). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the 28-item four-factor DBQ in the Australian sample. The DBQ was also found to be gender-invariant and strong partial measurement invariance was found for drivers aged from 26 to 64, but not for younger (17–25) or older (65–75) drivers. Modifications to the DBQ suggest how the DBQ can be improved for use in these two age groups.
The oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel), is a major pest throughout South East Asia and in a number of Pacific Islands. As a result of their widespread distribution, pest status, ...invasive ability and potential impact on market access, B. dorsalis and many other fruit fly species are considered major threats to many countries. CLIMEX was used to model the potential global distribution of B. dorsalis under current and future climate scenarios. Under current climatic conditions, its projected potential distribution includes much of the tropics and subtropics and extends into warm temperate areas such as southern Mediterranean Europe. The model projects optimal climatic conditions for B. dorsalis in the south-eastern USA, where the principle range-limiting factor is likely to be cold stress. As a result of climate change, the potential global range for B. dorsalis is projected to extend further polewards as cold stress boundaries recede. However, the potential range contracts in areas where precipitation is projected to decrease substantially. The significant increases in the potential distribution of B. dorsalis projected under the climate change scenarios suggest that the World Trade Organization should allow biosecurity authorities to consider the effects of climate change when undertaking pest risk assessments. One of the most significant areas of uncertainty in climate change concerns the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. Results are provided that span the range of standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios. The impact on the projected distribution of B. dorsalis is striking, but affects the relative abundance of the fly within the total suitable range more than the total area of climatically suitable habitat.
High numbers of threatened species might be expected to occur where overall species richness is also high; however, this explains only a proportion of the global variation in threatened species ...richness. Understanding why many areas have more or fewer threatened species than would be expected given their species richness, and whether that is consistent across taxa, is essential for identifying global conservation priorities. Here, we show that, after controlling for species richness, environmental factors, such as temperature and insularity, are typically more important than human impacts for explaining spatial variation in global threatened species richness. Human impacts, nevertheless, have an important role, with relationships varying between vertebrate groups and zoogeographic regions. Understanding this variation provides a framework for establishing global conservation priorities, identifying those regions where species are inherently more vulnerable to the effects of threatening human processes, and forecasting how threatened species might be distributed in a changing world.
•It has been 20years since the Driving Anger Scale was first published.•We provide a broad review of the development of the scale.•We provide a review of the research using the scale over the past ...two decades.•We discuss similarities and differences in findings.•We conclude by suggesting avenues for further research.
It has been two decades since Deffenbacher, Oetting, and Lynch (1994) published their paper introducing the construct of driving anger. Since this time the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) has been adopted by a large number of transportation researchers and is the scale most commonly used to measure trait driving anger. Drivers high in trait driving anger tend to experience anger more often and more intensely when driving than those low in trait driving anger. In this paper we provide a broad overview of some of the leading research on driving anger conducted over the past 20years. We intertwine the body of work by Deffenbacher and colleagues undertaken over the past years with research drawn from New Zealand, Malaysia, Turkey, Spain, Ireland, Japan, Ukraine, France, UK, China, Finland, The Netherlands and Ukraine. This article summarises the results regarding the validity and stability of the latent constructs underlying the measure of driving anger, along with the similarities and differences in the patterns of findings made. In particular we focus on the situations and driver characteristics, such as age and gender that trigger anger. This manuscript discusses the potential detrimental consequences of this anger and the factors that mediate the two. We conclude that the construct of driving anger is robust across a diverse range of drivers. However, while the DAS is a valuable tool in identifying drivers prone to anger, and subsequently higher risk of aggressive behaviour, we introduce some potential shortfalls of the current scale in the modern driving climate. In doing this, we present to the research community potential avenues for further development of the driving anger construct.
An increasing concern affecting a growing aging population is working memory (WM) decline. Consequently, there is great interest in improving or stabilizing WM, which drives expanded use of brain ...training exercises. Such regimens generally result in temporary WM benefits to the trained tasks but minimal transfer of benefit to untrained tasks. Pairing training with neurostimulation may stabilize or improve WM performance by enhancing plasticity and strengthening WM-related cortical networks. We tested this possibility in healthy older adults. Participants received 10 sessions of sham (control) or active (anodal, 1.5 mA) tDCS to the right prefrontal, parietal, or prefrontal/parietal (alternating) cortices. After ten minutes of sham or active tDCS, participants performed verbal and visual WM training tasks. On the first, tenth, and follow-up sessions, participants performed transfer WM tasks including the spatial 2-back, Stroop, and digit span tasks. The results demonstrated that all groups benefited from WM training, as expected. However, at follow-up 1-month after training ended, only the participants in the active tDCS groups maintained significant improvement. Importantly, this pattern was observed for both trained and transfer tasks. These results demonstrate that tDCS-linked WM training can provide long-term benefits in maintaining cognitive training benefits and extending them to untrained tasks.
Context:
Exercise benefits most, but not all, individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D). The beneficial effects are well studied, but why some individuals do not respond favorably to exercise training ...is largely unexplored. It is critical to treatment and prevention strategies to identify individuals with T2D that have a blunted metabolic response to exercise and investigate the underlying mechanisms that might predict this “programmed response to fail.”
Evidence Acquisition:
We carried out a systematic review of classic and contemporary primary reports on clinical human and animal exercise studies. We also referenced unpublished data from our previous studies, as well those of collaborators. Genetic and epigenetic components and their associations with the exercise response were also examined.
Evidence Synthesis:
As evidence of the exercise resistance premise, we and others found that supervised exercise training results in substantial response variations in glucose homeostasis, insulin sensitivity, and muscle mitochondrial density, wherein approximately 15–20% of individuals fail to improve their metabolic health with exercise. Classic genetic studies have shown that the extent of the exercise training response is largely heritable, whereas new evidence demonstrates that DNA hypomethylation is linked to the exercise response in skeletal muscle. DNA sequence variation and/or epigenetic modifications may, therefore, dictate the exercise training response.
Conclusions:
Studies dedicated to uncovering the mechanisms of exercise resistance will advance the field of exercise and T2D, allowing interventions to be targeted to those most likely to benefit and identify novel approaches to treat those who do not experience metabolic improvements after exercise training.
Current synteny visualization tools either focus on small regions of sequence and do not illustrate genome-wide trends, or are complicated to use and create visualizations that are difficult to ...interpret. To address this challenge, The Comparative Genomics Platform (CoGe) has developed two web-based tools to visualize synteny across whole genomes. SynMap2 and SynMap3D allow researchers to explore whole genome synteny patterns (across two or three genomes, respectively) in responsive, web-based visualization and virtual reality environments. Both tools have access to the extensive CoGe genome database (containing over 30 000 genomes) as well as the option for users to upload their own data. By leveraging modern web technologies there is no installation required, making the tools widely accessible and easy to use.
Both tools are open source (MIT license) and freely available for use online through CoGe ( https://genomevolution.org ). SynMap2 and SynMap3D can be accessed at http://genomevolution.org/coge/SynMap.pl and http://genomevolution.org/coge/SynMap3D.pl , respectively. Source code is available: https://github.com/LyonsLab/coge .
ericlyons@email.arizona.edu.
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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