Building Capacity for Sustainability through Curricular and Faculty Development: A Learning Outcomes Approach

Portland State University has made integration of sustainability across its academic programs an institutional priority. This article describes the strategies that have been used to engage faculty in developing sustainability curricula, including adopting sustainability as one of eight campus-wide learning outcomes, incorporating sustainability into the general education program, providing faculty development, and developing a Graduate Certificate in Sustainability. The article shares lessons learned and next steps planned to advance Portland State\u27s sustainability curricula

Lessons from the harmonic oscillator -- a reconciliation of the Frequency-Resolved Frozen Phonon Multislice Method with other theoretical approaches

We compare the Frequency-Resolved Frozen Phonon Multislice (FRFPMS) method, introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 025501 (2020), with other theoretical approaches used to account for the inelastic scattering of high energy electrons, namely the first-order Born approximation and the quantum excitation of phonons model. We show, that these theories lead to similar expressions for the single inelastically scattered intensity as a function of momentum transfer for an anisotropic quantum harmonic oscillator in a weak phase object approximation of the scattered waves, except for a too small smearing of the scattering potential by the effective Debye-Waller factor (DWF) in the FRFPMS method. We propose that this issue can be fixed by including an explicit DWF smearing into the potential and demonstrate numerically, that in any realistic situation, a FRFPMS approach revised in this way, correctly accounts for the single inelastically scattered intensity and the correct elastic scattering intensity. Furthermore our simulations illustrate that the only requirement for such a revised FRFPMS method is the smallness of mean squared displacements for all atomic species in all frequency bins. The analytical considerations for the FRFPMS method also explain the $1/\omega^2$-scaling of FRFPMS spectra observed in Phys. Rev. B 104, 104301 (2021) by the use of classical statistics in the molecular dynamics simulation. Moreover, we find that the FRFPMS method inherently adds the contributions of phonon loss and gain within each frequency bin. Both of these issues related to the frequency-scaling can be fixed by a system-independent post-processing step

Determining the effects of cattle grazing treatments on Yosemite toads (Anaxyrus [=Bufo] canorus) in montane meadows.

Amphibians are experiencing a precipitous global decline, and population stability on public lands with multiple uses is a key concern for managers. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains (California, USA), managers have specifically identified livestock grazing as an activity that may negatively affect Yosemite toads due to the potential overlap of grazing with toad habitat. Grazing exclusion from Yosemite toad breeding and rearing areas and/or entire meadows have been proposed as possible management actions to alleviate the possible impact of cattle on this species. The primary objective of this study was to determine if different fencing treatments affect Yosemite toad populations. We specifically examined the effect of three fencing treatments on Yosemite toad breeding pool occupancy, tadpoles, and young of the year (YOY). Our hypothesis was that over the course of treatment implementation (2006 through 2010), Yosemite toad breeding pool occupancy and early life stage densities would increase within two fencing treatments relative to actively grazed meadows due to beneficial changes to habitat quality in the absence of grazing. Our results did not support our hypothesis, and showed no benefit to Yosemite toad presence or early life stages in fenced or partially fenced meadows compared to standard USDA Forest Service grazing levels. We found substantial Yosemite toad variation by both meadow and year. This variation was influenced by meadow wetness, with water table depth significant in both the tadpole and YOY models

Theology, News and Notes - Vol. 36, No. 04

Theology News & Notes was a theological journal published by Fuller Theological Seminary from 1954 through 2014.https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/tnn/1105/thumbnail.jp

The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Unveiling the nature of kinematically offset active galactic nuclei

We have observed two kinematically offset active galactic nuclei (AGN), whose ionised gas is at a different line-of-sight velocity to their host galaxies, with the SAMI integral field spectrograph (IFS). One of the galaxies shows gas kinematics very different to the stellar kinematics, indicating a recent merger or accretion event. We demonstrate that the star formation associated with this event was triggered within the last 100 Myr. The other galaxy shows simple disc rotation in both gas and stellar kinematics, aligned with each other, but in the central region has signatures of an outflow driven by the AGN. Other than the outflow, neither galaxy shows any discontinuity in the ionised gas kinematics at the galaxy's centre. We conclude that in these two cases there is no direct evidence of the AGN being in a supermassive black hole binary system. Our study demonstrates that selecting kinematically offset AGN from single-fibre spectroscopy provides, by definition, samples of kinematically peculiar objects, but IFS or other data are required to determine their true nature.Comment: MNRAS accepted. 14 pages, 11 figure

CODE-2 : moored array and large-scale data report

The Coastal Ocean Dynamics Experiment (CODE) was undertaken to identify and study the important dynamical processes which govern the wind-driven motion of coastal water over the continental shelf. The initial effort in this multi-year, multi-institutional research program was to obtain high-quality data sets of all the relevant physical variables needed to construct accurate kinematic and dynamic descriptions of the response of shelf water to strong wind forcing in the 2 to 10 day band. A series of two small-scale, densely- instrumented field experiments of approximately four months duration (called CODE-1 and CODE-2) were designed to explore and to determine the kinematics and momentum and heat balances of the local wind-driven flow over a region of the northern California shelf which is characterized by both relatively simple bottom topography and large wind stress events in both winter and summer. A more lightly instrumented, long -term, large-scale component was designed to help separate the local wind-driven response in the region of the small-scale experiments from motions generated either offshore by the California Current system or in some distant region along the coast, and also to help determine the seasonal cycles of the atmospheric forcing, water structure, and coastal currents over the northern California shelf. The first small-scale experiment (CODE-1) was conducted between April and August, 1981 as a pilot study in "which primary emphasis was placed on characterizing the wind-driven "signal" and the "noise" from which this signal must be extracted. In particular, CODE-1 was designed to identify the key features of the circulation and its variability over the northern California shelf and to determine the important time and length scales of the wind-driven response. The second small-scale experiment (CODE-2) was conducted between April and August, 1982 and was designed to sample more carefully the mesoscale horizonta1 variability observed in CODE-1. This report presents a basic description of the moored array data and some other Eulerian data collected during CODE-2. A brief description of the CODE-2 field program is presented first, followed by a description of the common data analysis procedures used to produce the various data sets presented here. Then basic descriptions of the following data sets are presented: (a) the coastal and moored meteorological measurements, (b) the moored current measurements, (c) array plots of the surface wind stress and near-surface current measurements, (d) the moored temperature and conductivity observations, (e) the bottom pressure measurements, and (f) the wind and adjusted coastal sea level observations obtained as part of the CODE-2 large-scale component.This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation