Freshman interest group participation and second year academic success of engineering students

Students in their second year of college experience changes in support that can negatively impact their success. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the sophomore slump, which can manifest itself as a decline in success with regard to changes in grade point average. Typically, higher education institutions provide support for students that focus on positive learning outcomes during their first year in college. One specific type of first-year success initiatives is Freshman Interest Groups which combine the shared academic experiences of freshman learning communities with a residential component. This study investigates whether Freshman Interest Groups at the University of Missouri are related to second-year academic success for students who declared an engineering major during their first year of study. Specifically, a regression-based statistical model correlates first-year participation in a Freshman Interest Group with second-year academic success (GPA, credit hours attempted, and credit hours earned). The sample draws upon first-year engineering majors at the University of Missouri for the years 2013-2016. The results indicate that Freshman Interest Group participation had no significant relationship with second-year academic success. One explanation of these results is that engineering students who participated in a Freshman Interest Group had stronger academic backgrounds (ACT subtests and high school core GPA) than students who did not participate in a Freshman Interest Group.by Caitlin Eileen MeyerIncludes bibliographical reference

CAgNVAS I. A new generation DIFMAP for Modelfitting Interferometric Data and Estimating Variances, Biases and Correlations

We present the program `Catalogue of proper motions in extragalactic jets from Active galactic Nuclei with Very large Array Studies' or CAgNVAS, with the objective of using archival and new VLA observations to measure proper motions of jet components beyond hundred parsecs. This objective requires extremely high accuracy in component localization. Interferometric datasets are noisy and often lack optimal coverage of the visibility plane, making interpretation of subtleties in deconvolved imaging inaccurate. Fitting models to complex visibilities, rather than working in the imaging plane, is generally preferred as a solution when one needs the most accurate description of the true source structure. In this paper, we present a new generation version of $\texttt{DIFMAP}$ (\texttt{ngDIFMAP}) to model and fit interferometric closure quantities developed for the CAgNVAS program. \texttt{ngDIFMAP} uses a global optimization algorithm based on simulated annealing, which results in more accurate parameter estimation especially when the number of parameters is high. Using this package we demonstrate the ramifications of amplitude and phase errors, as well as loss of $u-v$ coverage, on parameters estimated from visibility data. The package can be used to accurately predict variance, bias, and correlations between parameters. Our results demonstrate the limits on information recovery from noisy interferometric data, with a particular focus on the accurate reporting of errors on measured quantities.Comment: 26 pages, 23 figure

Knowledge work in aircraft maintenance

Knowledge work encompasses information processing and knowledge development tasks and places the knowledge worker at the centre of analysis. Knowledge and information are the knowledge worker's most precious resource in an increasingly complex working environment. Knowledge work is analysed in the context of the productive technical working environment of aircraft maintenance at Lufthansa Technik AG. The proportion of knowledge-intensive tasks in aircraft maintenance rises with increasing complexity of aircraft and their systems and components. The quantity of information and the resulting challenges for workers also increase accordingly. The findings generated by the study and a theoretical consideration of the subject are used to derive conclusions about the practice of aircraft maintenance and concrete recommendations for action.Keywords: Knowledge work, aircraft maintenance, knowledge, information, fields of actio

A Universal Scaling for the Energetics of Relativistic Jets From Black Hole Systems

Black holes generate collimated, relativistic jets which have been observed in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), microquasars, and at the center of some galaxies (active galactic nuclei; AGN). How jet physics scales from stellar black holes in GRBs to the supermassive ones in AGNs is still unknown. Here we show that jets produced by AGNs and GRBs exhibit the same correlation between the kinetic power carried by accelerated particles and the gamma-ray luminosity, with AGNs and GRBs lying at the low and high-luminosity ends, respectively, of the correlation. This result implies that the efficiency of energy dissipation in jets produced in black hole systems is similar over 10 orders of magnitude in jet power, establishing a physical analogy between AGN and GRBs.Comment: Published in Science, 338, 1445 (2012), DOI: 10.1126/science.1227416. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. Corrected typo in equation 4 of the supplementary materia