Teaching Paleontology

This guide is designed to be used by teachers as an aid for teaching principles of fossils and past life to elementary school students. The activities and labs provided include topics such as fossilization, sedimentation, trace fossils, the importance of fossils, ancient environments, changes in environments, paleontology as a science, biodiversity, food webs, ecosystems, and human influences. The lessons provide pre- and post-questions, procedures, vocabulary, materials, and field trip ideas. This curriculum guide for paleontology was developed by Fossil Butte National Monument as part of its growing environmental education program. Educational levels: Intermediate elementary, Primary elementary

Who witnesses The Witness? Finding witnesses in The Witness is hard and sometimes impossible

We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular grid graph from a start vertex to a destination vertex. The different puzzle types place different constraints on the path: preventing some edges from being visited (broken edges); forcing some edges or vertices to be visited (hexagons); forcing some cells to have certain numbers of incident path edges (triangles); or forcing the regions formed by the path to be partially monochromatic (squares), have exactly two special cells (stars), or be singly covered by given shapes (polyominoes) and/or negatively counting shapes (antipolyominoes). We show that any one of these clue types (except the first) is enough to make path finding NP-complete ("witnesses exist but are hard to find"), even for rectangular boards. Furthermore, we show that a final clue type (antibody), which necessarily "cancels" the effect of another clue in the same region, makes path finding $\Sigma_2$-complete ("witnesses do not exist"), even with a single antibody (combined with many anti/polyominoes), and the problem gets no harder with many antibodies. On the positive side, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for monomino clues, by reducing to hexagon clues on the boundary of the puzzle, even in the presence of broken edges, and solving "subset Hamiltonian path" for terminals on the boundary of an embedded planar graph in polynomial time.Comment: 72 pages, 59 figures. Revised proof of Lemma 3.5. A short version of this paper appeared at the 9th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2018

Multimedia-based Medicinal Plants Sustainability Management System

Medicinal plants are increasingly recognized worldwide as an alternative source of efficacious and inexpensive medications to synthetic chemo-therapeutic compound. Rapid declining wild stocks of medicinal plants accompanied by adulteration and species substitutions reduce their efficacy, quality and safety. Consequently, the low accessibility to and non-affordability of orthodox medicine costs by rural dwellers to be healthy and economically productive further threaten their life expectancy. Finding comprehensive information on medicinal plants of conservation concern at a global level has been difficult. This has created a gap between computing technologies’ promises and expectations in the healing process under complementary and alternative medicine. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Multimedia-based Medicinal Plants Sustainability Management System addressing these concerns. Medicinal plants’ details for designing the system were collected through semi-structured interviews and databases. Unified Modelling Language, Microsoft-Visual-Studio.Net, C#3.0, Microsoft-Jet-Engine4.0, MySQL, Loquendo Multilingual Text-to-Speech Software, YouTube, and VLC Media Player were used. Keywords: Complementary and Alternative Medicine, conservation, extinction, medicinal plant, multimedia, phytoconstituents, rural dweller

Atmospheric detectives: Atlas 2 teacher's guide with activities. For use with middle-school students

Can you imagine doing a science project in space? This is the challenging and exciting situation that researchers experience in Spacelab, the laboratory carried inside the Shuttle. Here, hundreds of kilometers above Earth's surface, the crews of the ATLAS missions scan, probe, and measure concentrations of chemicals and water vapor in Earth's protective bubble. So far, one ATLAS crew has rocketed into the atmosphere, watching many sunrises and sunsets come and go while activating delicate instruments and conducting experiments that monitor the complicated interactions between the Sun, the atmosphere, and Earth. We, the crew of ATLAS 2, will continue this important work aboard the Space Shuttle. Together, we will gather data that will be compared with information from satellites, balloons, and instruments on the ground. As part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) contribution to Mission to Planet Earth, ATLAS 2 will help develop a thorough picture of the Sun's output, its interaction with the atmosphere, and the well-being of Earth's middle atmosphere. Because the health of the atmosphere is of vital importance to all Earth's inhabitants, everyone should be part of this investigation. You can be active participants in exciting and vital activities: recycling and practicing other conservation methods and gathering information to learn more about how you can keep our atmosphere healthy now, as students, and in the future as informed citizens, scientists, technicians, and mathematicians