Keele University

About: Keele University is a education organization based out in Newcastle-under-Lyme, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Stars. The organization has 11318 authors who have published 26323 publications receiving 894671 citations. The organization is also known as: Keele University.

The role of parental influences in the development of musical performance

Abstract: Interviews were conducted with 257 children and their parents; all of the children had studied a musical instrument but differed in the extent of their mastery. The purpose of the study was to investigate the role of parents in the development of musical ability. It was discovered that the most successful children had parents who were the most highly involved in lessons and practice in the earliest stages of learning. These successful music learners often had parents who were involved with music themselves. Parental involvement in music typically took the form of listening to music rather than performing it, and tended to increase over the child's learning period. The children who failed to continue with lessons had parents who were, on average, less interested in music and who did not change their own degree of involvement with music over their child's learning period. Overall, the most musically able children had the highest levels of parental support.

Guidelines: the do’s, don’ts and don’t knows of feedback for clinical education

Abstract: Introduction The guidelines offered in this paper aim to amalgamate the literature on formative feedback into practical Do’s, Don’ts and Don’t Knows for individual clinical supervisors and for the institutions that support clinical learning.

Phenotypic drift in human tenocyte culture.

Abstract: Tendon ruptures are increasingly common, repair can be difficult, and healing is poorly understood. Tissue engineering approaches often require expansion of cell numbers to populate a construct, and maintenance of cell phenotype is essential for tissue regeneration. Here, we characterize the phenotype of human Achilles tenocytes and assess how this is affected by passaging. Tenocytes, isolated from tendon samples from 6 patients receiving surgery for rupture of the Achilles tendon, were passaged 8 times. Proliferation rates and cell morphology were recorded at passages 1, 4, and 8. Total collagen, the ratio of collagen types I and III, and decorin were used as indicators of matrix formation, and expression of the integrin beta1 subunit as a marker of cell-matrix interactions. With increasing passage number, cells became more rounded, were more widely spaced at confluence, and confluent cell density declined from 18,700/cm2 to 16,100/cm2 ( p = 0.009). No change to total cell layer collagen was observed but the ratio of type III to type I collagen increased from 0.60 at passage 1 to 0.89 at passage 8 ( p < 0.001). Decorin expression significantly decreased with passage number, from 22.9 +/- 3.1 ng/ng of DNA at passage 1, to 9.1 +/- 1.8 ng/ng of DNA at passage 8 ( p < 0.001). Integrin expression did not change. We conclude that the phenotype of tenocytes in culture rapidly drifts with progressive passage.

On Determining Extinction from Reddening

Abstract: The influence of shifts in effective wavelengths on ratios of total to selective extinction is examined, primarily to determine how to evaluate the Galactic extinction of extragalactic bodies in a way that minimizes systematic errors. In the process, a new procedure is developed for evaluating the Galactic or extragalactic extinction of any source in any filter from any index of reddening. The amount of dust along a sightline is quantified by the optical depth at 1 μm, which has the advantage of being roughly equal numerically to E(B-V). The optical depth can be derived iteratively from a color excess using an appropriate spectral energy distribution (SED) for the reddening probe, and a monochromatic law of reddening which delivers a value of AV/E(B-V) characteristic of the obscuring medium when applied to the spectrum of a reference source for which this ratio is known. Knowledge of the optical depth then facilitates the determination of the extinction of any source in any filter without concern as to the shape of the spectrum of the probe. The ratio of total to selective extinction for stars and galaxies is synthesized for a variety of filter combinations in order to examine variations with type, tilt, optical depth, and redshift. For this purpose, representative integrated SEDs spanning the space ultraviolet to the near-infrared are constructed for galaxy types E, Sab, Sbc, Scd, and Im, all at well-defined inclinations. In addition, an algorithm to adjust the shapes of the SEDs for tilt is developed. Along the main sequence, the classical ratio of total to selective extinction, AV/E(B-V), increases by 23% from O5 to M6. At late types, there are differences as high as 17% between evolved and unevolved stars. Along the Hubble sequence, AV/E(B-V) decreases by 5% from E to Im. The value for elliptical galaxies falls near the locus for the main sequence, not the giant branch. Correlated against B-I, AV/E(B-V) for star-forming galaxies is systematically lower than for stars of the same color by up to 5%. It increases much more rapidly with tilt than with the optical depth of Galactic dust, although neither dependence is strong. For both stars and galaxies, AV/E(B-V) varies dramatically with the redshift. Changes of 16% for a Type Ia supernovae and 22% for a Cepheid are seen out to z = 0.4. For elliptical galaxies, a variation of 30% can be expected out to z = 1, the precise form of which being dependent upon the ultraviolet excess. Even infrared ratios of total to selective extinction, such as AH/E(B-V), change significantly with color and redshift because of differential shifts in the effective wavelengths of B and V. As a gauge of reddening, E(V-I) is greatly preferable to E(B-V), because it is much less sensitive to color and redshift, yet more sensitive to the optical depth of dust. A demonstration is given on how to quantify upper limits to Galactic extinction which should be placed on studies of high-redshift supernovae, to reduce the redshift dependence of extinction corrections to a range that is insignificant compared with residuals supporting accelerated universal expansion. When the new technique for evaluating extinction corrections is applied to Cepheids in M31, distances for fields at different radii become less dispersed, confirming that the period-luminosity relation is not very sensitive to metallicity. However, the discrepancy between the Cepheid and maser distances to NGC 4258 cannot be attributed to the method of handling the extinction.