Polling as Pedagogy: Experimental Philosophy as a Valuable Tool for Teaching Philosophy

First, we briefly familiarize the reader with the emerging field of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers use empirical methods, rather than armchair speculation, to ascertain laypersons’ intuitions about philosophical issues. Second, we discuss how the surveys used by experimental philosophers can serve as valuable pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy—independently of whether one believes surveying laypersons is an illuminating approach to doing philosophy. Giving students surveys that contain questions and thought experiments from philosophical debates gets them to actively engage with the material and paves the way for more fruitful and impassioned classroom discussion. We offer some suggestions for how to use surveys in the classroom and provide an appendix that contains some examples of scenarios teachers could use in their courses

A New Plant Record for Iowa: \u3ci\u3eLactuca hirsuta\u3c/i\u3e (Asteraceae)

A new record of a native vascular plant, Lactuca hirsuta Muhlenberg ex Nuttall var. sanguinea (Bigelow) Fernald, is reported for Iowa. A specimen was collected in 1983 by the author during a study of the Swaledale railroad prairie in Cerro Gordo County, north central Iowa (Eddy 1988). The plant was inexplicably excluded in the species catalogue when a Swaledale railroad flora was published in 1988; thus, this “new” Iowa record in 2013 was collected 30 years prior. The voucher specimen was “re-discovered” by Dr. Neil A. Harriman at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh (OSH), and its identification verified

Lucid Data Dreaming for Video Object Segmentation

Convolutional networks reach top quality in pixel-level video object segmentation but require a large amount of training data (1k~100k) to deliver such results. We propose a new training strategy which achieves state-of-the-art results across three evaluation datasets while using 20x~1000x less annotated data than competing methods. Our approach is suitable for both single and multiple object segmentation. Instead of using large training sets hoping to generalize across domains, we generate in-domain training data using the provided annotation on the first frame of each video to synthesize ("lucid dream") plausible future video frames. In-domain per-video training data allows us to train high quality appearance- and motion-based models, as well as tune the post-processing stage. This approach allows to reach competitive results even when training from only a single annotated frame, without ImageNet pre-training. Our results indicate that using a larger training set is not automatically better, and that for the video object segmentation task a smaller training set that is closer to the target domain is more effective. This changes the mindset regarding how many training samples and general "objectness" knowledge are required for the video object segmentation task.Comment: Accepted in International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV

Improved stick number upper bounds

2019 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.A stick knot is a mathematical knot formed by a chain of straight line segments. For a knot K, define the stick number of K, denoted stick(K), to be the minimum number of straight edges necessary to form a stick knot which is equivalent to K. Stick number is a knot invariant whose precise value is unknown for the large majority of knots, although theoretical and observed bounds exist. There is a natural correspondence between stick knots and polygons in R3. Previous research has attempted to improve observed stick number upper bounds by computationally generating such polygons and identifying the knots that they form. This thesis presents a new variation on this method which generates equilateral polygons in tight confinement, thereby increasing the incidence of polygons forming complex knots. Our generation strategy is to sample from the space of confined polygons by leveraging the toric symplectic structure of this space. An efficient sampling algorithm based on this structure is described. This method was used to discover the precise stick number of knots 935, 939, 943, 945, and 948. In addition, the best-known stick number upper bounds were improved for 60 other knots with crossing number ten and below

A STRATEGY FOR INTEGRATING PRINCIPLES AND CONCEPTS OF WILDLIFE DAMAGE CONTROL INTO THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

This paper reports an approach to educating today\u27s youth concerning the importance of regulating numbers of wildlife species that threaten property, products and health. The emphases are on preparing teachers to integrate principles and concepts into the existing curricular materials, justifying control measures with ecological understandings and economic is information and dealing effectively with sensitive animal rights issues. Opportunities for integration of specific wildlife damage control topics are suggested for lessons in the life sciences, social sciences, health, language arts and mathematics. Examples of conflict between groups of different opinions about the seriousness of a pest\u27s activities or appropriateness of control are given with rationale for resolution of the problem. Evaluation by the classroom teachers of the applicability and effectiveness of the strategy was generally enthusiastic

Wisconsin Academy STIR Report: A Vascular Flora of Snake Creek Corridor, Wisconsin

In November, 1978 my advanced biology class received a research grant through the Wisconsin Junior Academy\u27s (WJA) Student-Teacher Integrated Research (STIR) Program. Funding for the program was provided by the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters-Youth Program and by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The basic purpose of STIR is to promote quality high school science and social science research by sponsoring grants which can be used to purchase equipment and supplies

Continuing Education at Purdue University, 1975–2019

Continuing Education at Purdue University, 1975–2019 is intended to provide a follow-up to the monograph written by Dr. Frank K. Burrin after his retirement as director of Purdue Continuing Education in 1984, Continuing Education at Purdue University: The First Hundred Years (1874–1974). Burrin became ill shortly after his retirement, and he was not able to complete his project. His notes were later compiled, edited, and published by Elizabeth Boyd Thompson. This monograph presents forty-five years of the history of Continuing Education and Conferences at Purdue under the leadership of eight deans and directors.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/continuinged/1001/thumbnail.jp

New Stick Number Bounds from Random Sampling of Confined Polygons

The stick number of a knot is the minimum number of segments needed to build a polygonal version of the knot. Despite its elementary definition and relevance to physical knots, the stick number is poorly understood: for most knots we only know bounds on the stick number. We adopt a Monte Carlo approach to finding better bounds, producing very large ensembles of random polygons in tight confinement to look for new examples of knots constructed from few segments. We generated a total of 220 billion random polygons, yielding either the exact stick number or an improved upper bound for more than 40% of the knots with 10 or fewer crossings for which the stick number was not previously known. We summarize the current state of the art in Appendix A, which gives the best known bounds on stick number for all knots up to 10 crossings.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figure