Status of TAUOLA and related projects

Status of new hadronic currents for tau lepton decay Monte Carlo generator TAUOLA was revieved in other talks of the conference. Efforts on comparison with BaBar and Belle collaboration data were carefully discussed. Also use of the program in phenomenology of W decays measured by ATLAS collaboration was presented in these talks as well. That is why, in my talk, I will concentrate on other aspects of our work necessary for development of tau lepton Monte Carlo programs and their phenomenological use. Presented results illustrate the status of the projects performed in collaboration with Swagato Banerjee, Zofia Czyczula, Nadia Davidson, Jan Kalinowski, Wojciech Kotlarski Tomasz Przedzinski, Olga Shekhovtsova, Elzbieta Richter-Was, Pablo Roig, Jakub Zaremba, Qingjun Xu and others.Comment: 4 pages, Presented at International workshop on Tau Lepton Physics, TAU12 Nagoya, Japan, September, 201

All hands on deck: CREWED for technology-enabled learning

The University of New South Wales’ (UNSW’s) Faculty of Engineering is introducing a new process for designing and developing blended and fully online (distance) courses, as part of action research to support curriculum renewal. The process, referred to as CREWED (Curriculum Renewal and E-learning Workloads: Embedding in Disciplines), is being used to develop key courses that add flexibility to student progression pathways. By integrating the design of learning activities with the planning and organization of teaching and support work, CREWED addresses some of the known barriers to embedding innovative use of learning technologies within disciplines. CREWED incorporates key features of two course development models from the UK, one emphasising team building and the other emphasising pedagogical planning. It has been piloted in priority curriculum development projects, to ensure that the disciplinary organizational context is supportive. One pilot is a fully online distance version of a postgraduate course. The other is a blended version of an undergraduate course. Both are core (required) courses in accredited professional engineering degree programs and were previously available only in face-to-face mode. The UNSW pilots have confirmed the importance of articulating clear pedagogical models, and of planning ahead for the resources required to put these models into practice, as part of departmental capacity building, especially where teaching has primarily been treated as an individual classroom-based activity that competes with disciplinary research for academic staff time and resources

The Color Dipole Picture

We give a brief exposition of the color dipole picture of deep inelastic scattering.Comment: Presented at Diffraction 2012, Lanzarote, Canary Islands (Spain), September 10-15, 2012 (Proceedings to appear

Essential amino acids: master regulators of nutrition and environmental footprint?

The environmental footprint of animal food production is considered several-fold greater than that of crops cultivation. Therefore, the choice between animal and vegetarian diets may have a relevant environmental impact. In such comparisons however, an often neglected issue is the nutritional value of foods. Previous estimates of nutrients\u2019 environmental footprint had predominantly been based on either food raw weight or caloric content, not in respect to human requirements. Essential amino acids (EAAs) are key parameters in food quality assessment. We re-evaluated here the environmental footprint (expressed both as land use for production and as Green House Gas Emission (GHGE), of some animal and vegetal foods, titrated to provide EAAs amounts in respect to human requirements. Production of high-quality animal proteins, in amounts sufficient to match the Recommended Daily Allowances of all the EAAs, would require a land use and a GHGE approximately equal, greater o smaller (by only \ub11-fold), than that necessary to produce vegetal proteins, except for soybeans, that exhibited the smallest footprint. This new analysis downsizes the common concept of a large advantage, in respect to environmental footprint, of crops vs. animal foods production, when human requirements of EAAs are used for reference

On Some Critical Issues of the LAGEOS-Based Tests of the Lense-Thirring Effect

We summarize some critical issues pertaining the tests of the general relativistic Lense-Thirring effect performed by I. Ciufolini and coworkers in the gravitational field of the Earth with the geodetic satellites LAGEOS and LAGEOS II tracked with the Satellite Laser Ranging technique.Comment: Latex2e, 14 pages, no figures, no tables, 67 references. I thank M. Cerdonio for private communication (September 2010