Comprehensive Report on Extraterrestrial Resource Extraction

The prospect of asteroid mining provides a plethora of riches that include metals and water. As the number of discovered asteroids continues to grow, opportunities arise to commercialize these resources within Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs). With urgent applications on Earth and in space, NEAs allow for a surge in sales. Planning forward, Astroider Aerospace Systems follows a mission split into four phases. Phase 1 develops a series of spacecraft using existing technologies, titled as Near-Earth Asteroid Miners and Near-Earth Asteroid Surveyors. Phase 2 first launches the surveyors to candidate NEAs, prospecting them for ores. To identify potential celestial bodies for this phase, astronomical tools are employed: Precovery Database, Photometry, and Radar Data. Phase 3 then proceeds to launch the miners as soon as targeted NEAs are determined to have ample mining zones. The miners commence extraction and once finished, deliver the payloads back to Earth. Phase 4 finally commercializes these transported NEA material payloads, where they are sold under Astroider Aerospace Systems for profit. Findings showcase the constituents of each phase working in synergy to promote the start of an NEA mining program

Metadata Pragmatics: Toward A Unified Semiotic Framework

With the increasing focus on data sharing in the sciences and information organization in networked information-spaces, metadata has become a prominent area of research and activity. Scholars in library and information science and science studies have distinct approaches to describing and understanding metadata. This thesis reviews the accounts of metadata given by these two fields and then takes preliminary steps toward a unified analytic framework for research, based in Peircean semiotics as it has been developed within semiotic anthropology.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Proceedings of the tenth international conference Models in developing mathematics education: September 11 - 17, 2009, Dresden, Saxony, Germany

This volume contains the papers presented at the International Conference on “Models in Developing Mathematics Education” held from September 11-17, 2009 at The University of Applied Sciences, Dresden, Germany. The Conference was organized jointly by The University of Applied Sciences and The Mathematics Education into the 21st Century Project - a non-commercial international educational project founded in 1986. The Mathematics Education into the 21st Century Project is dedicated to the improvement of mathematics education world-wide through the publication and dissemination of innovative ideas. Many prominent mathematics educators have supported and contributed to the project, including the late Hans Freudental, Andrejs Dunkels and Hilary Shuard, as well as Bruce Meserve and Marilyn Suydam, Alan Osborne and Margaret Kasten, Mogens Niss, Tibor Nemetz, Ubi D’Ambrosio, Brian Wilson, Tatsuro Miwa, Henry Pollack, Werner Blum, Roberto Baldino, Waclaw Zawadowski, and many others throughout the world. Information on our project and its future work can be found on Our Project Home Page http://math.unipa.it/~grim/21project.htm It has been our pleasure to edit all of the papers for these Proceedings. Not all papers are about research in mathematics education, a number of them report on innovative experiences in the classroom and on new technology. We believe that “mathematics education” is fundamentally a “practicum” and in order to be “successful” all new materials, new ideas and new research must be tested and implemented in the classroom, the real “chalk face” of our discipline, and of our profession as mathematics educators. These Proceedings begin with a Plenary Paper and then the contributions of the Principal Authors in alphabetical name order. We sincerely thank all of the contributors for their time and creative effort. It is clear from the variety and quality of the papers that the conference has attracted many innovative mathematics educators from around the world. These Proceedings will therefore be useful in reviewing past work and looking ahead to the future

Supporting the Discoverability of Open Educational Resources: on the Scent of a Hidden Treasury

Open Educational Resources (OERs), now available in large numbers, have a considerable potential to improve many aspects of society, yet one of the factors limiting this positive impact is the difficulty to discover them. This thesis investigates and proposes strategies to better support educators in discovering OERs. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of existing search systems, including for OER discovery, could be improved by supporting users, such as teachers, in carrying out more exploratory search activities closer to their existing methods of working. Hence, a preliminary taxonomy of OER-related search tasks was produced, based on an analysis of the literature, interpreted through Information Foraging Theory. This taxonomy was empirically evaluated to preliminarily identify a set of search tasks that involve finding other OERs similar to one that has already been identified, a process that is generally referred to as Query By Example (QBE). Following the Design Science Research methodology, three prototypes to support as well as to refine those tasks were iteratively designed, implemented, and evaluated involving an increasing number of educators in usability oriented studies. The resulting high-level and domain-oriented blended search/recommendation strategy transparently replicates Google searches in specialized networks, and identifies similar resources with a QBE strategy. It makes use of a domain-oriented similarity metric based on shared alignments to educational standards, and clusters results in expandable classes of comparable degrees of similarity. The summative evaluation shows that educators do appreciate this strategy because it is exploratory and – balancing similarity and diversity – it supports their high-level tasks, such as lesson planning and personalization of education. Finally, potential barriers and opportunities for the uptake of OER discovery tools were investigated in a structured interview study with experts from the OER field. Identified issues included how to work across multiple OER portals, variability in the use of metadata and how to align with the working practices of teachers. The findings of the thesis can be used to inform the research and development of methods and tools for OER discovery as well as their deployment to serve the needs of educators