Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing I: Overview

As part of the conceptual and preliminary design processes of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the TMT site testing team has spent the last five years measuring the atmospheric properties of five candidate mountains in North and South America with an unprecedented array of instrumentation. The site testing period was preceded by several years of analyses selecting the five candidates, Cerros Tolar, Armazones and Tolonchar in northern Chile; San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico and the 13 North (13N) site on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Site testing was concluded by the selection of two remaining sites for further consideration, Armazones and Mauna Kea 13N. It showed that all five candidates are excellent sites for an extremely large astronomical observatory and that none of the sites stands out as the obvious and only logical choice based on its combined properties. This is the first article in a series discussing the TMT site testing project.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP, April 2009 issu

A Novel in situ Trigger Combination Method

Searches for rare physics processes using particle detectors in high-luminosity colliding hadronic beam environments require the use of multi-level trigger systems to reject colossal background rates in real time. In analyses like the search for the Higgs boson, there is a need to maximize the signal acceptance by combining multiple different trigger chains when forming the offline data sample. In such statistically limited searches, datasets are often amassed over periods of several years, during which the trigger characteristics evolve and system performance can vary significantly. Reliable production cross-section measurements and upper limits must take into account a detailed understanding of the effective trigger inefficiency for every selected candidate event. We present as an example the complex situation of three trigger chains, based on missing energy and jet energy, that were combined in the context of the search for the Higgs (H) boson produced in association with a $W$ boson at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). We briefly review the existing techniques for combining triggers, namely the inclusion, division, and exclusion methods. We introduce and describe a novel fourth in situ method whereby, for each candidate event, only the trigger chain with the highest a priori probability of selecting the event is considered. We compare the inclusion and novel in situ methods for signal event yields in the CDF $WH$ search. This new combination method, by virtue of its scalability to large numbers of differing trigger chains and insensitivity to correlations between triggers, will benefit future long-running collider experiments, including those currently operating on the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables, accepted by Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research

American Bar Association Special Committee on Election Reform, Symposium on the Vice-Presidency, Panel Discussion 2. Selection of Vice-Presidential Candidates

This transcript is part of the published proceedings of a symposium convened by the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on Election Reform, which the ABA formed in 1973 and was chaired by John D. Feerick. The symposium took place at Fordham Law School on December 3, 1976. It occurred in the wake of the Watergate era, which saw the resignation of one vice president, the appointment of two vice presidents pursuant to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment’s Section 2, and a vice president’s succession to the presidency. The symposium’s purpose was to assemble experts on the vice-presidency to develop reform proposals related to the office. In this segment, the panelists discuss issues related to selection of vice presidential candidates. The following panelists participated in the discussion: Charles G. Armstrong, Member of the ABA Special Committee on Election Reform Craig H. Baab, Legislative Assistant to the ABA Special Committee on Election Reform Birch Bayh, U.S. Senator from Indiana and sponsor of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment John D. Feerick, Chairman of the ABA Special Committee on Election Reform Daniel L. Golden, Member of the ABA Special Committee on Election Reform Joel Goldstein, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford Robert Griffin, U.S. Senator from Michigan Ira Jackson, Assistant Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and co-author of Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics Report on vice presidential selection Charles H. Kirbo, Adviser to President Jimmy Carter James C. Kirby, Professor at New York University Law School and former general counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments Clarence M. Mitchell, Director of the NAACP’s Washington Office Endicott Peabody, Former Governor or Massachusetts and Member of the Humphrey Commission on Vice Presidential Selection Dale W. Read, Jr., Member of the ABA Special Committee on Election Reform George Reedy, Dean of Marquette University College of Journalism and former aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Professor at the City University of New York and author of “The Imperial Presidency” Margaret Chase Smith, former U.S. Senator from Maine William B. Spann, Jr., President-elect of the ABA Donald Young, Senior Editor for American History and Political Science at Encyclopedia American

Fostering the reduction of assortative mixing or homophily into the class

Human societies from the outset have been associated according to race, beliefs, religion, social level, and the like. These behaviors continue even today in the classroom at primary, middle, and superior levels. However, the growth of ICT offers educational researchers new ways to explore methods of team formation that have been proven to be efficient in the field of serious games through the use of computer networks. The selection process of team members in serious games through the use of computer networks is carried out according to their performance in the area of the game without distinction of social variables. The use of serious games in education has been discussed in multiple research studies which state that its application in teaching and learning processes are changing the way of teaching. This article presents an exploratory analysis of the team formation process based on collaboration through the use of ICT tools of collective intelligence called TBT (The best team). The process and its ICT tool combine the paradigms of creativity in swarming, collective intelligence, serious games, and social computing in order to capture the participants’ emotions and evaluate contributions. Based on the results, we consider that the use of new forms of teaching and learning based on the emerging paradigms is necessary. Therefore, TBT is a tool that could become an effective way to encourage the formation of work groups by evaluating objective variable of performance of its members in collaborative works.Postprint (published version