TESTING THE RELIABILITY OF CIVIC SCIENCE DATA COLLECTION OF PLANT TRAITS IN A PERENNIAL SUNFLOWER DOMESTICATION EXPERIMENT

Civic science has been prevalent in environmental science for many years. The use of volunteers and the community as a helping hand in research continues to link society and science, as well as increases the magnitude and breadth of environmental studies. Assessments of data quality produced by civic science is an important component in validating the accuracy and reliability of the research. In this study, the reliability of civic science was tested by assessing the variation within data gathered from undergraduate Cal Poly students. Using a common garden experimental set up, the health of twelve wildtype silphium genotypes were assessed through six general plant traits: plant height, the number and width of viable seed heads, percent disease and herbivory, and pollinator count. During the lab period of a Cal Poly ecology course, eight groups of students performed the plant health assessments on all twelve genotypes. As an assessment of reliability, the coefficient of variance was calculated for each plant trait and an ANOVA with a Tukey-Kramer HSD test applied to determine any significant variation within groups. Significant variation within groups was found in more complex estimation methods such as estimating disease prevalence and herbivory, while more simple methods of data collection such as counting seed heads or measuring plant height were the most reliably consistent. We conclude that methods of data collection had a significant effect on the reliability of data collection using civic science and that with increased training and improved protocols, civic science can produce reliable data in the environmental sciences and further broaden the involvement of the community in research

From integrals to combinatorial formulas of finite type invariants -- a case study

We obtain a localized version of the configuration space integral for the Casson knot invariant, where the standard symmetric Gauss form is replaced with a locally supported form. An interesting technical difference between the arguments presented here and the classical arguments is that the vanishing of integrals over hidden and anomalous faces does not require the well-known ``involution tricks''. Further, the integral formula easily yields the well-known arrow diagram expression for the invariant, first presented in the work of Polyak and Viro. We also take the next step of extending the arrow diagram expression to multicrossing knot diagrams and obtain a lower bound for the {\em {\"u}bercrossing number}. The primary motivation is to better understand a connection between the classical configuration space integrals and the arrow diagram expressions for finite type invariants.Comment: 30 (10pt) pages including appendices, 9 figure

Glimmerglass Volume 37 Number 07 (1978)

Official Student Newspaper Issue is 8 pages long

Glimmerglass Volume 37 Number 11 (1978)

Official Student Newspaper Issue is 8 pages long

Glimmerglass Volume 37 Number 12 (1978)

Official Student Newspaper Issue is 8 pages long

A Matrix of Feedback for Learning

The present study used an established model of feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007) as a framework to explore which types and levels of feedback are most common in the upper primary classroom. Results demonstrate that feedback was predominantly directed toward the task level and that feed forward, information about the next steps for learning, was the least occurring feedback type in the classroom. Based upon research and findings, the authors propose a conceptual matrix of feedback that bridges research to practice with the aim of feedback being a driver to promote improvement

Glimmerglass Volume 37 Number 09 (1978)

Official Student Newspaper Issue is 8 pages long

Glimmerglass Volume 37 Number 08 (1978)

Official Student Newspaper Issue is 8 pages long

Switch Points of Bi-Persistence Matching Distance

In multi-parameter persistence, the matching distance is defined as the supremum of weighted bottleneck distances on the barcodes given by the restriction of persistence modules to lines with a positive slope. In the case of finitely presented bi-persistence modules, all the available methods to compute the matching distance are based on restricting the computation to lines through pairs from a finite set of points in the plane. Some of these points are determined by the filtration data as they are entrance values of critical simplices. However, these critical values alone are not sufficient for the matching distance computation and it is necessary to add so-called switch points, i.e. points such that on a line through any of them, the bottleneck matching switches the matched pair. This paper is devoted to the algorithmic computation of the set of switch points given a set of critical values. We find conditions under which a candidate switch point is erroneous or superfluous. The obtained conditions are turned into algorithms that have been implemented. With this, we analyze how the size of the set of switch points increases as the number of critical values increases, and how it varies depending on the distribution of critical values. Experiments are carried out on various types of bi-persistence modules.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures. Comments welcom

Towards Directed Collapsibility

In the directed setting, the spaces of directed paths between fixed initial and terminal points are the defining feature for distinguishing different directed spaces. The simplest case is when the space of directed paths is homotopy equivalent to that of a single path; we call this the trivial space of directed paths. Directed spaces that are topologically trivial may have non-trivial spaces of directed paths, which means that information is lost when the direction of these topological spaces is ignored. We define a notion of directed collapsibility in the setting of a directed Euclidean cubical complex using the spaces of directed paths of the underlying directed topological space relative to an initial or a final vertex. In addition, we give sufficient conditions for a directed Euclidean cubical complex to have a contractible or a connected space of directed paths from a fixed initial vertex. We also give sufficient conditions for the path space between two vertices in a Euclidean cubical complex to be disconnected. Our results have applications to speeding up the verification process of concurrent programming and to understanding partial executions in concurrent programs