Apollo-Soyuz pamphlet no. 9: General science

The objectives and planning activities for the Apollo-Soyuz mission are summarized. Aspects of the space flight considered include the docking module and launch configurations, spacecraft orbits, and weightlessness. The 28 NASA experiments conducted onboard the spacecraft are summarized. The contributions of the mission to the fields of astronomy, geoscience, biology, and materials sciences resulting from the experiments are explored

Who cares about polar regions? Results from a survey of U.S. public opinion

Abstract What do members of the general public know about polar regions, and how much do they care? Who knows or cares? This paper explores data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which in 2006 questioned a representative sample of more than 1800 U.S. adults about their knowledge and opinions concerning polar regions. The polar survey items were modeled on long-running GSS assessments of general science knowledge and opinions, recently summarized in the U.S. National Science Board\u27s report Science and Engineering Indicators 2008. Polar knowledge proves to be limited but certainly not absent among survey respondents. Polar knowledge, general science knowledge, and education - together with individual background characteristics (age, sex, income) - predict policy-relevant opinions. Political orientation filters the impacts of education, and also shows consistent, significant effects across all the polar opinion questions. These 2006 GSS polar results will provide a baseline for comparison when the questions are repeated on a 2010 survey, after the International Polar Year concludes

Mathematics in Hands-On Science for Liberal Arts Students

We describe a number of experiments from the courses called, General Science 9, part of the science program for elementary education majors at Brooklyn College. These courses provide hands-on learning experiences for students who are insecure and weak in science and mathematics. Quantitative thinking is a central element in most of the students’ work. Mathematics is taught in a concrete and intuitive way, as a direct outgrowth of their needs; first, in analysis of data, and second, in discovering underlying theory. The science program has been developed through cooperation among faculty from the School of Education and the science departments

ENGINEERING A VISUAL FIELD

Of the branches of mathematics, geometry has, from the earliest Hellenic period, been given a curious position that straddles empirical and exact science. Its standing as an empirical and approximate science stems from the practical pursuits of artistic drafting, land surveying and measuring in general. From the prominence of visual application, such as figures and constructions in the twentieth century Einstein's General Theory of Relativity holds that the geometry of space-time is dependent upon physical quantities

Hybrid approximate message passing

Gaussian and quadratic approximations of message passing algorithms on graphs have attracted considerable recent attention due to their computational simplicity, analytic tractability, and wide applicability in optimization and statistical inference problems. This paper presents a systematic framework for incorporating such approximate message passing (AMP) methods in general graphical models. The key concept is a partition of dependencies of a general graphical model into strong and weak edges, with the weak edges representing interactions through aggregates of small, linearizable couplings of variables. AMP approximations based on the Central Limit Theorem can be readily applied to aggregates of many weak edges and integrated with standard message passing updates on the strong edges. The resulting algorithm, which we call hybrid generalized approximate message passing (HyGAMP), can yield significantly simpler implementations of sum-product and max-sum loopy belief propagation. By varying the partition of strong and weak edges, a performance--complexity trade-off can be achieved. Group sparsity and multinomial logistic regression problems are studied as examples of the proposed methodology.The work of S. Rangan was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1116589, 1302336, and 1547332, and in part by the industrial affiliates of NYU WIRELESS. The work of A. K. Fletcher was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1254204 and 1738286 and in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-15-1-2677. The work of V. K. Goyal was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1422034. The work of E. Byrne and P. Schniter was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCF-1527162. (1116589 - National Science Foundation; 1302336 - National Science Foundation; 1547332 - National Science Foundation; 1254204 - National Science Foundation; 1738286 - National Science Foundation; 1422034 - National Science Foundation; CCF-1527162 - National Science Foundation; NYU WIRELESS; N00014-15-1-2677 - Office of Naval Research

Understanding the Transition between High School and College Mathematics and Science

Mathematics and science education is gaining increasing recognition as key for the well-being of individuals and society. Accordingly, the transition from high school to college is particularly important to ensure that students are prepared for college mathematics and science. The goal of this study was to understand how high school mathematics and science course-taking related to performance in college. Specifically, the study employed a nonparametric regression method to examine the relationship between high school mathematics and science courses, and academic performance in college mathematics and science courses. The results provide some evidence pertaining to the positive benefits from high school course-taking. Namely, students who completed high school trigonometry and lab-based chemistry tended to earn higher grades in college algebra and general chemistry, respectively. However, there was also evidence that high school coursework in biology and physics did not improve course performance in general biology and college physics beyond standardized test scores. Interestingly, students who completed high school calculus earned better grades in general biology. The implications of the findings are discussed for high school curriculum and alignment in standards between high schools and colleges

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context