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Published Article / This article is based on reviewing literature as well as experiences in the fields of Radiography and Biochemistry. Major changes have occurred in the Higher Education environment over the recent past. The concept of learner-centeredness emerged with the implementation of OBET. Adaptations to traditional teaching methods will be necessary to prevent lowering of standards in teaching and learning. Mass-lecture, multiple choice questions and using the marking machine has so far been the response from the academe, thus very little deep, meaningful learning is taking place. Good facilitation should narrow the gap caused by student diversity. Facilitating improved learning requires a great deal of professional development as a facilitator. The learning process should strive to attain learning through a deep approach addressing the specific needs of the learners. To assist you to effectively facilitate learning, the article addresses some factors associated with academic achievement. Practical examples are also provided to facilitate effective learning in the classroom. The philosophy driving a good facilitator is also expounded. It is concluded that an excellent facilitator will not only make effort, but will make waves in facilitating his / her subject.

This study aimed to explore Taiwanese piano teachers’ beliefs about good teaching, and their practice, particularly teachers who teach beginners or young children; and to gain understanding of how Taiwanese piano teachers perceive creativity in their teaching. The perceptions of piano teaching of seven Taiwanese teachers were explored through using a qualitative methodology, which included an open questionnaire, two interviews separated by observation of classroom practice, and a reflective diary prepared by the participants which was facilitated by video-stimulated recall. The principal areas and findings of my research were that Taiwanese piano teachers’ beliefs about what constituted good lessons are diverse. These were explored from three perspectives, namely, the characteristics of effective teachers, the components of effective lessons, and effective teaching strategies. The participant teachers’ attitudes towards creativity in teaching were also different, and can be categorised as ranging from fixed and rigid, to flexible and open. They identified several teaching strategies as creative teaching, such as using metaphor, storytelling, and Internet resources. Additionally, their various purposes in using creative teaching were observed to be to develop learners’ musical abilities; for enjoyment; and to impart a specific teaching point. Although the teachers’ own experiences were found to have a positive effect on their teaching beliefs, the influence of these benefits was not always evident in their actual practice. Pupils’ low motivation to learn and insufficient practice were considered as the common challenges and, when reflecting on their own teaching in the second interview and in the diaries, most of the participants focused mainly on analysis of pupils’ playing errors, and tended to believe that repeated practice by the learners was the best approach to improving performance. In contrast, two teachers believed their expertise in both music and teaching could help their learners to deal with learning difficulties. Based on these research results, I conclude that creativity in piano lessons can be understood from two perspectives. The first relates to how teachers perceive their own teaching and whether they are content with what they do or seek to develop their teaching competence; the other is associated with teachers’ own philosophy of the function of education, which affects how teachers develop their teaching.

Middleware augments operating systems and network infrastructure to assist in the creation of distributed applications in a heterogeneous environment. Current middleware systems exhibit some or all of the following five main problems: 1. Decisions must be made early in the design process. 2. Applications are inflexible to dynamic changes in their distribution. 3. Application development is complex and error-prone. 4. Existing systems force an unnatural encoding of application-level semantics. 5. Approaches to the specification of distribution policy are limited. This thesis defines a taxonomy of existing middleware systems and describes their limitations. The requirements that must be met by a third generation middleware system are defined and implemented by a system called the RAFDA Run-Time (RRT). The RRT allows control over the extent to which inter-address-space communication is exposed to programmers, aiding the creation, maintenance and evolution of distributed applications. The RRT permits the introduction of distribution into applications quickly and with minimal programmer effort, allowing for quick application prototyping. Programmers can conceal or expose the distributed nature of applications as required. The RRT allows instances of arbitrary application classes to be exposed to remote access as Web Services, provides control over the parameter-passing semantics applied to remote method calls and permits the creation of flexible distribution policies. The design of the RRT is described and evaluated qualitatively in the context of a case study based around the implementation of a peer-to-peer overlay network. A prototype implementation of the RRT is examined and evaluated quantitatively. Programmers determine the trade off between flexibility and simplicity offered by the RRT on a per-application basis, by concealing or exposing inter-address-space communication. The RRT is a middleware system that adapts to the needs of applications, rather than forcing distributed applications to adapt to the needs of the middleware system.

The purpose of this study is to create an understanding of the phenomenon of reflection. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the concept, we chose to interview four preschool teachers. The preschool teachers met with colleagues in their pre-school area regularly during the autumn and spring terms 2014-2015, to develop their skills through reflection. We wanted to examine whether these meetings influenced their understanding of the concept of reflection, as well as their ability to reflect. We tried to get a hold of these two elements through the questions in our interview. Our three most interesting findings in this study are. The preschool teachers in our study makes a fundamental theoretical difference between how you look at and define the reflection with children and how they look at peer learning. A distinction is difficult to justify theoretically. Our second interesting finding was the importance and the difficult task to keep the reflections away from mainly be about giving each other "tips and advice". Our last finding is the need of good leadership skills of the one who have the task to lead the reflection.

Modern oil and gas exploration depends on a variety of geophysical prospect tools. One of them is reflection seismology that allows to obtain interwell information of sufficient resolution economically. This exploration method collects reflection seismic data on the surface of an area of prospect interest and then uses them to build seismic images of the subsurface. All imaging approaches can be divided into two groups: wave equation-based methods and integral schemes. Kirchhoff migration, which belongs to the second group, is an indispensable tool in seismic imaging due to its flexibility and relatively low computational cost. Unfortunately, the classic formulation of this method images only a part of the surface data, if so-called multipathing is present in it. That phenomenon occurs in complex geologic settings, such as subsalt areas, when seismic waves travel between a subsurface point and a surface location through more than one path. The quality of imaging with Kirchhoff migration in complex geological areas can be improved if multiple paths of ray propagation are included in the integral. Multiple arrivals can be naturally incorporated into the imaging operator if it is expressed as an integral over subsurface take-off angles. In this form, the migration operator involves escape functions that connect subsurface locations with surface seismic data values through escape traveltime and escape positions. These escape quantities are functions of phase space coordinates that are simply related to the subsurface reflection system. The angle-domain integral operator produces output scattering- and dip-angle image gathers, which represent a convenient domain for subsurface analysis. Escape functions for angle-domain imaging can be simply computed with initial-value ray tracing, a Lagrangian computational technique. However, the computational cost of such a bottom-up approach can be prohibitive in practice. The goal of this work was to construct a computationally efficient phase space imaging framework. I designed several approaches to computing escape functions directly in phase space for mapping surface seismic reflection data to the subsurface angle domain. Escape equations have been introduced previously to describe distribution of escape functions in the phase space. Initially, I employed these equations as a basis for building an Eulerian numerical scheme using finite-difference method in the 2-D case. I show its accuracy constraints and suggest a modification of the algorithm to overcome them. Next, I formulate a semi-Lagrangian approach to computing escape functions in 3-D. The second method relies on the fundamental property of continuity of these functions in the phase space. I define locally constrained escape functions and show that a global escape solution can be reconstructed from local solutions iteratively. I validate the accuracy of the proposed methods by imaging synthetic seismic data in several complex 2-D and 3-D models. I draw conclusions about efficiency by comparing the compute time of the imaging tests with the compute time of a well-optimized conventional initial-value ray tracing. / text

Cleaning validation, in which cleaned surfaces are analysed for residual material, is an important process in pharmaceutical manufacturing and research facilities. Current procedures usually consist of either swab or rinse-water sampling followed by analysis of the samples. The analysis step is typically either rapid but unselective (conductivity, pH, total organic carbon, etc.), or selective but time-consuming (HPLC). This thesis describes the development of an in situ surface-spectroscopic analysis that removes the need for swab sampling and is both rapid and selective. This method has the potential to complement existing analyses to increase the efficiency of cleaning-validation protocols. The spectrometric system consists of a Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer coupled to a fibre-optic grazing-angle reflectance probe, and allows the measurement of infrared reflection-absorbance spectra (IRRAS) from flat surfaces in ~10 s. Multivariate chemometric methods, such as partial least squares (PLS) regression, are used to exploit the high information content of infrared spectra to obtain selective analyses without physical separation of the analyte or analytes from whatever interfering species may be present. Multivariate chemometric models require considerably more effort for calibration and validation than do traditional univariate techniques. This thesis details suitable methods for preparing calibration standards by aerosol deposition, optimising and validating the model by cross- and test-set validation, and estimating the uncertainty by resampling and formula-based approaches. Successful calibration models were demonstrated for residues of acetaminophen, a model active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), on glass surfaces. The root-mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) was ~0.07 µg cm⁻². Simultaneous calibration for acetaminophen and aspirin, another API, gave a similar RMSEP of 0.06 µg cm⁻² for both compounds, demonstrating the selectivity of the method. These values correspond to detection limits of ~0.2 µg cm⁻², well below the accepted visual detection limit of ~1-4 µg cm⁻². The sensitivity of the method with a stainless steel substrate was found to depend strongly on the surface finish, with highly polished surfaces giving more intense IRRAS. RMSEP values of 0.04- 0.05 µg cm⁻² were obtained for acetaminophen on stainless steel with three different finishes. For this system, severe nonlinearity was encountered for loadings 1.0 µg cm⁻². From the results presented in this thesis, it is clear that IRRAS has potential utility in cleaning validation as a complement to traditional techniques.

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