Teaching TAs To Teach: Strategies for TA Training

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses

Perspectives on Allyship in Academia

Allyship in academia is critical for creating inclusive communities that are welcoming to all students, but the perception of its benefits and challenges can vary depending on a number of factors. This session will explore perspectives of allyship in academia by bringing together a diverse group of faculty and students who can share a wide range of experiences and insights, and aims to facilitate a discussion among all attendees that leads to an exchange of ideas, the strengthening of our community, and progress toward our common goal of inclusion in computing

Teaching TAs To Teach: Strategies for TA Training

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses

Perspectives on Allyship in Academia

Allyship in academia is critical for creating inclusive communities that are welcoming to all students, but the perception of its benefits and challenges can vary depending on a number of factors. This session will explore perspectives of allyship in academia by bringing together a diverse group of faculty and students who can share a wide range of experiences and insights, and aims to facilitate a discussion among all attendees that leads to an exchange of ideas, the strengthening of our community, and progress toward our common goal of inclusion in computing

Earth observations from DSCOVR EPIC instrument

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft was launched on 11 February 2015 and in June 2015 achieved its orbit at the first Lagrange point (L1), 1.5 million km from Earth toward the sun. There are two National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth-observing instruments on board: the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Radiometer (NISTAR). The purpose of this paper is to describe various capabilities of the DSCOVR EPIC instrument. EPIC views the entire sunlit Earth from sunrise to sunset at the backscattering direction (scattering angles between 168.5° and 175.5°) with 10 narrowband filters: 317, 325, 340, 388, 443, 552, 680, 688, 764, and 779 nm. We discuss a number of preprocessing steps necessary for EPIC calibration including the geolocation algorithm and the radiometric calibration for each wavelength channel in terms of EPIC counts per second for conversion to reflectance units. The principal EPIC products are total ozone (O3) amount, scene reflectivity, erythemal irradiance, ultraviolet (UV) aerosol properties, sulfur dioxide (SO2) for volcanic eruptions, surface spectral reflectance, vegetation properties, and cloud products including cloud height. Finally, we describe the observation of horizontally oriented ice crystals in clouds and the unexpected use of the O2 B-band absorption for vegetation properties.The NASA GSFC DSCOVR project is funded by NASA Earth Science Division. We gratefully acknowledge the work by S. Taylor and B. Fisher for help with the SO2 retrievals and Marshall Sutton, Carl Hostetter, and the EPIC NISTAR project for help with EPIC data. We also would like to thank the EPIC Cloud Algorithm team, especially Dr. Gala Wind, for the contribution to the EPIC cloud products. (NASA Earth Science Division)Accepted manuscrip

e-VLBI observations of GHz-Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio sources in nearby galaxies from the AT20G survey

GHz-peaked spectrum (GPS) radio sources are thought to be young objects which later evolve into FR-I and FR-II radio galaxies. We have used the Australia Telescope 20GHz (AT20G) survey catalogue to select a uniform sample of GPS sources with spectral peaks above 5GHz, which should represent the youngest members of this class. In this paper, we present e-VLBI observations of ten such objects which are associated with nearby (z<0.15) galaxies and so represent a new population of local, low--power GPS sources. Our e-VLBI observations were carried out at 4.8GHz with the Australia Telescope Long Baseline Array (LBA) using a real--time software correlator. All ten sources were detected, and were unresolved on scales of ~100mas, implying that they are typically less than 100pc in linear size.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Mirror Position Determination for the Alignment of Cherenkov Telescopes

Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) need imaging optics with large apertures to map the faint Cherenkov light emitted in extensive air showers onto their image sensors. Segmented reflectors fulfill these needs using mass produced and light weight mirror facets. However, as the overall image is the sum of the individual mirror facet images, alignment is important. Here we present a method to determine the mirror facet positions on a segmented reflector in a very direct way. Our method reconstructs the mirror facet positions from photographs and a laser distance meter measurement which goes from the center of the image sensor plane to the center of each mirror facet. We use our method to both align the mirror facet positions and to feed the measured positions into our IACT simulation. We demonstrate our implementation on the 4 m First Geiger-mode Avalanche Cherenkov Telescope (FACT).Comment: 11 figures, small ray tracing performance simulation, and implementation demonstratio