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The Canary Islands are heavily dependent on fossil fuels which intensifies the need for a decarbonisation pathway by 2050. Our study provides a comprehensive approach to identify possible energy transition pathways in line with different stakeholder perspectives. We conducted two rounds of 16 foresight interviews in the region with stakeholders representing different groups. The first round focused on understanding the current challenges and opportunities of the energy system, while the second round aimed at identifying the overall vision of the stakeholders for their local energy system. We have found that there are still significant regulatory difficulties that hinder implementation of technologies and innovative business models. However, the main challenges highlighted were achieving a transition without energy justice and the lack of collaboration between stakeholders. Different pathways have been identified but all interviewees emphasised that the future energy system needs to be human-centred and support citizen participation, prosumers, and energy communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African higher education terrain has undergone massive transformation through curriculum transformation involving programme alignment. There are three technical town planning schools out of the eleven town planning schools in South Africa and these were the hardest hit by the curriculum changes. These technical planning schools phased out technical programmes, and introduced bachelor and honours degrees. This paper investigates the possible pathways of curriculum transformation for technical planning schools critical to the retention of practical skills training within the new programmes. The paper adopted a phenomenological case study research design and applied the qualitative research approach. Content analyses were used to derive meaning from the collected data. Preliminary findings reveal three possible pathways that could be adopted by the technical planning schools to ensure that new curriculated degrees produce graduates with practical town planning skills. The new degree programmes that replaced technical programmes need to place graduates and universities at par with conventional universities in terms of recognition and quality. Pursuit to that, the paper recommends the infusion of the uniqueness of the phased technical programmes in the new degree programmes to deliver competitive, marketable qualifications that are preferred by students and valued by industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gene expression microarray enables us to measure the gene expression levels for thousands of genes at the same time. Here, we constructed the non-negative matrix factorization analysis strategy (NMFAS) to dig the underlying biological pathways related with various diseases by factorizing the pathway expression matrix, which was extracted from microarray matrix using pathway membership information, into the product of row and column vectors. We defined row vector as the pathway activity and column vector as the gene contribution weight. Via comparing the pathway activity of two different sample groups, we can identify significantly expressed pathways. We applied this strategy on two different cases: smoking and type 2 diabetes (DM2). We found 152 differentially expressed pathways by the comparison of pathway activity between smoker and never smoker, including pathways that have been validated in literature, such as “O-Glycans biosynthesis” and “Glutathione metabolism”. We also found important genes related to smoking phenotype, such as NQO, HSPA1A, ALDH3A1. As for DM2 analysis, our results suggested 9 pathways were significantly expressed, including typical pathways like “Oxidative phosphorylation” and “mTOR signaling pathway”, and found genes like CAPNS1, APP, COX7A1, COX7B, which might play important roles in the cellular regulations of DM2. In conclusion, Our strategy can be efficiently used to integrate gene expression profiles and biological pathway information to identify the key processes underlying human disease and can identify gene pathways missed by alternative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes to extract local information in a gene set for identifying differentially expressed (DE) gene pathways. DE pathways are more meaningful than a single DE gene to understanding a biological process, and identifying DE pathways has drawn more and more attentions recently. Current methods are mainly based on the identification of single DE genes, and do not concern correlations between genes. We propose to extract local correlations in a pathway of interest by randomly sampling multiple gene subsets from it and using a logistic regression model to measure how the local correlation pattern in each subset predicts phenotypic labels. The differential expression significance of the pathway is finally assessed by combining the p-values of the subsets predicting phenotypic labels to a combinative one. The proposed method referred to as locLR is evaluated on three simulation data sets and a real-world data, and is shown to be more powerful for identifying DE pathways than the previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A diverse and technically literate core of graduates from engineering programs is needed now more than ever before to help serve, lead, and transform a troubled world. In order to prepare our engineering students to be effective and ethical professionals, citizens, and individuals, we have restructured our curriculum through a new core that offers a more effective and coherent experience, providing more opportunities for interdisciplinary, experiential, and civic education. This paper presents our approach to preparing engineering students to not only be proficient in engineering and science principles but to be aware of the interplay among science, technology, and society. We describe the core requirements and how we adapted our program to incorporate their learning objectives through a combination of exercises required in the Introduction to Engineering course they take in their freshman year in conjunction with their senior capstone design project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digitisation of the cultural heritage means that a significant amount of material is now available through online digital library portals. However, the vast quantity of cultural heritage material can also be overwhelming for many users who lack knowledge of the collections, subject knowledge and the specialist language used to describe this content. Search portals often provide little or no guidance on how to find and interpret this information. The situation is very different in museums and galleries where collections are organized in exhibitions which offer themes and stories that visitors can explore. The PATHS project, which is funded under the European Commission's FP7 programme, is developing a system that explores the familiar metaphor of a trail (pathway) to enhance the discovery and use of the content made available in digital libraries. This paper will report on the findings of the user requirements analysis and the specifications for the first prototype of the PATHS system which is based on contents from Europeana and the Alinari Archives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on a study which identifies combinations of demographic, ideological, and beauty practice variables which produce women's feelings of satisfaction about their appearances. The combinatory role that sexual orientation, race, feminist beliefs, education, income, and spending on beauty supplies have on women's levels of appearance satisfaction will be explored. The study suggests nine pathways, and three combinations of key variables which lead to women's satisfaction with their appearances. The study is takes into account feminist ideology and education, and bisexual or homosexuality.