Communication satellites: Guidelines for a strategic plan

To maintain and augment the leadership that the United States has enjoyed and to ensure that the nation is investing sufficiently and wisely to this purpose, a strategic plan for satellite communications research and development was prepared by NASA. Guidelines and recommendations for a NASA plan to support this objective and for the conduct of communication satellite research and development program over the next 25 years were generated. The guidelines are briefly summarized

Building a Disciplinary, World-Wide Data Infrastructure

Sharing scientific data, with the objective of making it fully discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, usable, and interoperable, requires work at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described. Each discipline has its own organization and history as a starting point, and this paper explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics get organized at the international level to tackle this question. In each case, the disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization and lessons learnt are briefly described, as well as the elements of the specific data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others. Commonalities and differences are assessed. Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar. For all, it also appears that social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, and linked to the discipline organization. CODATA, the RDA and the WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. Being problem-driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research.Comment: Proceedings of the session "Building a disciplinary, world-wide data infrastructure" of SciDataCon 2016, held in Denver, CO, USA, 12-14 September 2016, to be published in ICSU CODATA Data Science Journal in 201

Conceptual models of urban environmental information systems - toward improved information provision

Cities are the hub of European society - for over a millennium, they are the locus of social, political and economic development. As the core of intensive and creative human activity, they are also the place where the environmental externalities that accompany rapid development are most visible. The environmental consequences of urban development have been recognised long ago, as in the case of London, where in 1388 legislation was introduced to control pollutant emissions (Lowenthal, 1990). Similar historical environmental regulations can be demonstrated for many cities in Europe. However, while for most of history those who govern the city (be it the sovereign, city elders or local government) where responsible for the control, mitigation and management of the common environment in the city, the last 30 years are a period of profound change. This is due to the trend toward improved participation in environmental decision making . a more inclusive and open approach to decisions that deal with the city commons. This change did not occurre overnight but rather gradually. For example, in the United Kingdom, it was the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 which introduced public scrutiny to changes in the urban form (Rydin, 1998), or the development of public involvement in environmental impact assessment of urban projects as developed in many countries throughout the developed world during the 1970s and 1980s (Gilpin 1995). These changes accelerate within the last three decades, and especially since the publication of .Our Common Future. (WCED and Brundtland 1987), the acceptance of the .Sustainable Development. principles and the Rio conference. A quiet (mini) revolution happened in Europe not long ago, toward the end of 1998 when the members of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) signed the .Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. - the Aarhus Convention (UN/ECE 1998). The convention is expected to come into force by the end of 2001, and calls the governments and public authorities to open up access to environmental information as a means to improve public participation in environmental decision making and awareness of environmental issues (UN/ECE, 1998). However, these declarations on the value and importance of environmental information do not match our level of understanding on the role of environmental information in decision making processes, and especially on the role of information in improving awareness and participation. Therefore, it is useful to take a step back, and to try and evaluate how environmental information and access to it and its use support public involvement in such processes. This paper is aimed to offer a framework that can assist us in the analytical process of understanding environmental information use. It focuses on public access and assumes that environmental information will be delivered to the public through the Internet. Such assumption is based on the current trend within public authorities is to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a major delivery medium and it seems that it will become more so in the near future (OECD 2000). The framework which this paper presents, is based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) study which unpacked some of the core issues relating to public access and use of environmental information (Haklay, 2001). Although the aim here is not to discuss the merits of SSM, but to focus on the conceptual models, some introduction to the techniques that are used here is needed. Therefore, the following section opens with introduction to SSM and its techniques. The core of the paper is dedicated to the development of conceptual models. After presenting the conceptual models, some conclusions about these models and their applications are drown

Primitive Christianity Revived—The Original Quaker Vision

Quaker histories over the last century or so have been highly interpretive in their interests and approaches, yielding a number of diverse results as to the character of the early Quaker movement, with varying implications. Obviously, one of the interests in history involves seeking to understand more about the past in order to shed light on the present and the future of the Friends movement itself. What, however, if such an interest is itself misguided? What if the founders of the Friends movement did not seek to start a movement, but rather, were solely invested in something entirely different? In their own terms, the first two generations of Friends were seeking to recover “Basic Christianity” or “Primitive Christianity Revived,” seeking to be “Friends of Jesus” because they claimed to know and carry out his will, as referenced in John 15:14-15

The History of Astrometry

The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years ago, and extending to the high accuracy observations being made from space today. Improved star positions progressively opened up and advanced fundamental fields of scientific enquiry, including our understanding of the scale of the solar system, the details of the Earth's motion through space, and the comprehension and acceptance of Newtonianism. They also proved crucial to the practical task of maritime navigation. Over the past 400 years, during which positional accuracy has improved roughly logarithmically with time, the distances to the nearest stars were triangulated, making use of the extended measurement baseline given by the Earth's orbit around the Sun. This led to quantifying the extravagantly vast scale of the Universe, to a determination of the physical properties of stars, and to the resulting characterisation of the structure, dynamics and origin of our Galaxy. After a period in the middle years of the twentieth century in which accuracy improvements were greatly hampered by the perturbing effects of the Earth's atmosphere, ultra-high accuracies of star positions from space platforms have led to a renewed advance in this fundamental science over the past few years.Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures. To appear in The European Physical Journal: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physic

Sustainability Literacy in French Literature and Film: From Solitary Reveries to Treks across Deserts

This essay explores the imperative to embrace a new model of education that will engage students in learning about the interconnectedness of our multi species world, sustainability, and global solidarity -- the belief that unity of humankind can be established on the basis of some basic or core human values (Korab-Karpowicz 305). Foreign language courses -- in particular advanced-level offerings that address literacy, critical thinking, and cultural comparisons -- are ideal settings for educating for sustainability literacy. Such literacy is essential to our collective twenty-first-century global identity, but it requires transformative educational practices. As we design foreign language courses, we should strive to employ a greater variety of teaching methods and keep in mind the necessity of more comprehensive goals, which include making students more aware of principles that reach beyond forming citizens who will participate in the economic world. Specifically, as twenty-first-century educators, we should strive to imbue our students with a sense of global citizenship to instill personal responsibility that will translate into their making more sustainable choices. When we sensitize students to issues that affect them, and indeed all humankind on our planet, we prepare them to become global citizens, leaders, and stewards of the global commons (Bennett et al.)

Teachers’ Understanding of Imago Dei

Often education is viewed pragmatically as that of preparing students for life as employees. Another view is that education is about enabling human beings to flourish. The pragmatic and flourishing paradox has consequences for national citizenship. For Christian teachers, critical to such an approach would be the manner in which their teaching practice is informed and shaped by a Christian worldview. Such shaping involves an applied knowledge with reference to understanding people, and particularly students as “Imago Dei.” This research presents a pilot study in which 120 teachers in Christian schools in New Zealand and Canada were invited, via an online survey, to respond to three questions on what it means to be made in the image of God, and how that understanding informed their practice. In appropriating the work of Dorothy Smith (2005) on the significance of “voices in the everyday” within a profession, coupled with Charteris’s (2014) “epistemological shudders,” the research engages in a discourse analysis for probing unquestioned assumptions which open up possibilities for meaning-making and, consequently, increased intentionality of practice. Following grounded methodology, the literature review was not undertaken until after the data analysis. Discussion explores the degree of fit with approaches to Imago Dei found in the literature. Data analysis identifies four approaches to participants’ meaning making of Imago Dei. Preliminary findings suggest that how teachers understand Imago Dei does make a difference to how they view themselves as teacher, view students as image bearers, and craft their teaching

Crise d\u27Identite : The Push to Preserve National Identity in France

In 2010, France\u27s President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a Maison de l \u27histoire de fa France, a heritage museum, as reporters began calling it, to be opened in Paris in 2015. President Sarkozy\u27s speechwriter on issues of national identity has cast the museum as an answer to France\u27s identity crisis .\u27 The project\u27s aim, as President Sarkozy has articulated it, is to reinforce national identity, warning as well, It is always dangerous to forget your history.t It is exactly this fear, the fear of forgetting France\u27s rich history, which has spurred controversy and upheaval within the French republic. The extent to which President Sarkozy\u27s proposal has struck a nerve in the French population is evidenced by the extensive protest against the Maison, notably from the academic sphere. Several historians signed letters that were published in Le Monde, speaking against this promotion of official history and its propagation as a political tool. One letter points specifically to the creation and promotion of national identity as problematic to academic historical pursuits. The letter states, Si l\u27echelle privilegiee est celle d\u27une France rabougrie, c\u27est, en consequence, moins le resultat d\u27une reflexion pedagogique, savante et critique que de la mise en place d\u27un projet fonde sur la peur de l\u27autre et que Ie pouvoir exprime dans un mouvement de repli sur soi.,,3 For the historians who signed this letter, the national identity to be promoted by this museum would represent less a celebration of French history and more the assertion of a French identity that diminishes the multitude of different histories that compose an increasingly diverse national identity. Addressing exactly this concern, immigrant organizations have also staged protests throughout Paris, denouncing the propagation of an official French history that they argue fails to incorporate their stories, often with roots in countries beyond France, into the mosaic of French national history. The problem with the proposed museum, from their perspectives, is the legitimization of a singular national history, one that implies a definitive version of the history that defines France, and French citizens, in the past and as they exist today