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Building air leaks (both through exterior and interior surfaces) can have a significant impact on energy consumption, indoor air quality, fire safety, and moisture accumulation affecting structural durability. Blower door testing has been used to measure leaks in buildings, but commonly used testing methods do not directly measure interior leaks. In this paper, new testing methods (guarded interior test and zonal multipoint pressure testing method) are presented that directly measure these interior leaks, utilizing common blower door equipment for both single and multi-point testing. These new methods are compared to conventional methods in terms of the information provided, limitations and time/effort needed. In addition, building leak measurement results are analyzed to reveal (a) coupling between power law model values (exponent and coefficient) for an ensemble of buildings, (b) the error in using single point testing when estimating low pressure leakage, and (c) how building power law models vary from low to high pressure ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international research literature concludes that effective professional development for teachers needs to: be truly collaborative involving an active role for practitioners; help break down teacher insulation and isolation; provide opportunities for teachers to work together in developing their classroom practices. However, professional development, as understood in the Irish context, tends to be characterised by predominantly transmission of knowledge models. The Clare Small Schools Project (CSSP) is an innovative professional development programme in primary science education in Ireland. Its constituent partners are Clare Education Centre, Dublin City University and small rural primary schools in County Clare. It is planned and designed in accordance with agreed characteristics of transformative professional development: ongoing, collaborative, embedded in teachers’ work, with an emphasis on changing classroom practice. This paper draws on the key developments emerging from the programme. Findings show that the CSSP is making positive changes in teachers’ individual and collaborative practices and is helping teachers overcome professional isolation. Key to this is the prominent role the Education Centre plays in encouraging participatory approaches to practice. These findings add to what is known about providing transformative professional development. They have far-reaching implications for teacher educators in Ireland and farther afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) provide very intense X-ray pulses suitable for macromolecular crystallography. Each X-ray pulse typically lasts for tens of femtoseconds and the interval between pulses is many orders of magnitude longer. Here we describe two novel acoustic injection systems that use focused sound waves to eject picoliter to nanoliter crystal-containing droplets out of microplates and into the X-ray pulse from which diffraction data are collected. The on-demand droplet delivery is synchronized to the XFEL pulse scheme, resulting in X-ray pulses intersecting up to 88% of the droplets. We tested several types of samples in a range of crystallization conditions, wherein the overall crystal hit ratio (e.g., fraction of images with observable diffraction patterns) is a function of the microcrystal slurry concentration. We report crystal structures from lysozyme, thermolysin, and stachydrine demethylase (Stc2). Additional samples were screened to demonstrate that these methods can be applied to rare samples.

Urban freight systems embed and reflect spatial inequities in cities and imbalanced power structures within transport decision-making. These concerns are principal domains of "transportation justice" (TJ) and "mobility justice" (MJ) scholarship that have emerged in the past decade. However, little research exists situating urban freight within these prevailing frameworks, which leaves urban freight research on socio-environmental equity and justice ill-defined, especially compared to passenger or personal mobility discussions. Through the lens that derives from TJ and MJ's critical dialogue, this study synthesises urban freight literature's engagement with equity and justice. Namely, the review evaluates: How do researchers identify equitable distributions of urban freight's costs and benefits? At what scale do researchers evaluate urban freight inequities? And who does research consider entitled to urban freight equity and how are they involved in urban freight governance? The findings help inform researchers who seek to reimagine urban freight management strategies within broader equity and justice discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If standard two-parameter item response functions are employed in the analysis of a test with some newly constructed items, it can be expected that, for some items, the item response function (IRF) will not fit the data well. This lack of fit can also occur when standard IRFs are fitted to personality or psychopathology items. When investigating reasons for misfit, it is helpful to compare item response curves (IRCs) visually to detect outlier items. This is only feasible if the IRF employed is sufficiently flexible to display deviations in shape from the norm. A quasi-parametric IRF that can be made arbitrarily flexible by increasing the number of parameters is proposed for this purpose. To take capitalization on chance into account, the use of Akaike information criterion or Bayesian information criterion goodness of approximation measures is recommended for suggesting the number of parameters to be retained. These measures balance the effect on fit of random error of estimation against systematic error of approximation. Computational aspects are considered and efficacy of the methodology developed is demonstrated.