Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

A unified approach to mapping and clustering of bibliometric networks

In the analysis of bibliometric networks, researchers often use mapping and clustering techniques in a combined fashion. Typically, however, mapping and clustering techniques that are used together rely on very different ideas and assumptions. We propose a unified approach to mapping and clustering of bibliometric networks. We show that the VOS mapping technique and a weighted and parameterized variant of modularity-based clustering can both be derived from the same underlying principle. We illustrate our proposed approach by producing a combined mapping and clustering of the most frequently cited publications that appeared in the field of information science in the period 1999-2008

Mapping e-Science’s Path in the Collaboration Space: Ontological Approach to Monitoring Infrastructure Development

In an undertaking such as the U.S. Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, or the UK e-science program, which span many years and comprise a great many projects funded by multiple agencies, it can be very difficult to keep tabs on what everyone is doing. But, it is not impossible. In this paper, we propose the construction of ontologies as a means of monitoring a research program’s portfolio of projects. In particular, we introduce the “virtual laboratory ontology” (VLO) and show how its application to e-Science yields a mapping of the distribution of projects in several dimensions of the “collaboration space.” In this paper, we sketch out a method to induce a project mapping from project descriptions and present the resulting map for the UK e-science program. This paper shows the proposed mapping approach to be informative as well as feasible, and we expect that its further development can prove to be substantively useful for future work in cyber-infrastructure-building.e-Science, virtual laboratory ontology, collaboration space, project mapping, cyber-infrastructure building

Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps

This chapter reports pilot work investigating the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping to scaffold young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Our research objective is to better understand pupils’ usage of dialogue maps created in Compendium to write scientific ex-planations. The participants were 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. Through qualitative analysis of three case studies, we investigate the value of dialogue mapping as a mediating tool in the scientific reasoning process during a set of learning activities. These activities were published in an online learning envi-ronment to foster collaborative learning. Pupils mapped their discussions in pairs, shared maps via the online forum and in plenary discussions, and wrote essays based on their dialogue maps. This study draws on these multiple data sources: pupils’ maps in Compendium, writings in science and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Our analysis highlights the diversity of ways, both successful and unsuccessful, in which dialogue mapping was used by these young teenagers

HI Intensity Mapping with MeerKAT

We explore the possibility of performing an HI intensity mapping survey with the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, which is a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). We propose to use cross-correlations between the MeerKAT intensity mapping survey and optical galaxy surveys, in order to mitigate systematic effects and produce robust cosmological measurements. Our forecasts show that precise measurements of the HI signal can be made in the near future. These can be used to constrain HI and cosmological parameters across a wide range of redshift.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; Submitted to the Proceedings of Science, "MeerKAT Science: On the Pathway to the SKA", Stellenbosch, 25-27 May 201

How do Ontology Mappings Change in the Life Sciences?

Mappings between related ontologies are increasingly used to support data integration and analysis tasks. Changes in the ontologies also require the adaptation of ontology mappings. So far the evolution of ontology mappings has received little attention albeit ontologies change continuously especially in the life sciences. We therefore analyze how mappings between popular life science ontologies evolve for different match algorithms. We also evaluate which semantic ontology changes primarily affect the mappings. We further investigate alternatives to predict or estimate the degree of future mapping changes based on previous ontology and mapping transitions.Comment: Keywords: mapping evolution, ontology matching, ontology evolutio

Science Writers' Guide to Landsat 7

This guide was produced for science writers and the media and profiles several Landsat 7 research projects, and provides background and contact information. Landsat 7 is advancing several areas of Earth science, mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. including monitoring croplands and mapping Antarctic ice streams. Educational levels: Informal education

Algebraic conversions

An examination of the pure algebraic properties of computational type conversion leads to a new generalizations of the concept of a homomorphism for which the term conversion seems appropriate. While an homomorphism is a mapping that respects the value of all terms, a conversion is a mapping that respects the value of all sufficiently small terms. Such a mapping has practical value, as well as theoretical interest that stems from conversions forming a category. This paper gives a precise definition of the concept and demonstrates an application to formal computer science based on work completed by the author in his PhD thesis