British Columbia Institute of Technology

About: British Columbia Institute of Technology is a education organization based out in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Smart grid & Belief revision. The organization has 458 authors who have published 785 publications receiving 16140 citations.

Distance Education in Bhutan: Improving Access and Quality through ICT Use

Abstract: Since 2004, the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Samtse, Bhutan, has made systematic efforts to introduce information and communication technology (ICT) for learning support into its distance teacher education program. This article describes the early experiences of using ICT for distance education in Bhutan by teachers and students with relatively limited ICT background. It discusses the challenges of providing student support for a distance teacher education program in Bhutan and it explores the use of ICT for student support. The article also reports an assessment of student perceptions and readiness for ICT use, the introduction of a learning management system and regional study centers as ICT access points, and the experiences and challenges encountered in the process of ICT introduction in its early stages. The use of ICT by distance students based on log data from the learning management system Moodle™ and regional study centers are discussed, as well as the challenges of ICT use under infr...

Making the body plan: precision in the genetic hierarchy of Drosophila embryo segmentation.

Abstract: We quantify fluctuations in protein expression for three of the segmentation genes in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. These proteins are representative members of the first three levels of a signalling hierarchy which determines the segmented body plan: maternal (Bicoid protein); gap (Hunchback protein); and pair-rule (Even-skipped protein). We quantify both inter-embryo and inter-nucleus (within a single embryo) variability in expression, especially with respect to positional specification by concentration gradient reading. Errors are quantified both early and late in cleavage cycle 14, during which the protein patterns develop, to study the dynamics of error transmission. We find that Bicoid displays very large positional errors, while expression of the downstream genes, Hunchback and Even-skipped, displays far more precise positioning. This is evidence that the pattern formation of the downstream proteins is at least partially independent of maternal signal, i. e. evidence against simple concentration gradient reading. We also find that fractional errors in concentration increase during cleavage cycle 14.

Uranium five (U v), the 1 S 0 level, and a parametric analysis of the 5f 2 configuration

Abstract: The 1S0 level of the 5f2 configuration of U v has been found at 43 613.58 ± 0.1 cm−1. A parametric fit of the 13 levels of the 5f2 configuration gives an rms deviation of 9.8 cm−1 with F2 = 51 938 ± 39, F4 = 42 708 ± 100, F6 = 27 748 ± 68, α = 35.5 ± 0.4, β = −664 ± 25, γ = 744 ± 26, ζ = 1968 ± 2, P2 = 573 ± 66, P4 = 524 ± 144, and P6 = 1173 ± 321, all in inverse centimeters.