Computing as the 4th “R”: a general education approach to computing education

Computing and computation are increasingly pervading our lives, careers, and societies - a change driving interest in computing education at the secondary level. But what should define a "general education" computing course at this level? That is, what would you want every person to know, assuming they never take another computing course? We identify possible outcomes for such a course through the experience of designing and implementing a general education university course utilizing best-practice pedagogies. Though we nominally taught programming, the design of the course led students to report gaining core, transferable skills and the confidence to employ them in their future. We discuss how various aspects of the course likely contributed to these gains. Finally, we encourage the community to embrace the challenge of teaching general education computing in contrast to and in conjunction with existing curricula designed primarily to interest students in the field

Urban warming in villages

Long term meteorological records (> 100 years) from stations associated with villages are generally classified as rural and assumed to have no urban influence. Using networks installed in two European villages, the local and microclimatic variations around two of these rural-village sites are examined. An annual average temperature difference ($\Delta{T}$) of 0.6 and 0.4 K was observed between the built-up village area and the current meteorological station in Geisenheim (Germany) and Haparanda (Sweden), respectively. Considerably larger values were recorded for the minimum temperatures and during summer. The spatial variations in temperature within the villages are of the same order as recorded over the past 100+ years in these villages (0.06 to 0.17 K/10 years). This suggests that the potential biases in the long records of rural-villages also warrant careful consideration like those of the more commonly studied large urban areas effects

A 3,500-year tree-ring record of annual precipitation on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau

An annually resolved and absolutely dated ring-width chronology spanning 4,500 y has been constructed using subfossil, archaeological, and living-tree juniper samples from the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. The chronology represents changing mean annual precipitation and is most reliable after 1500 B.C. Reconstructed precipitation for this period displays a trend toward more moist conditions: the last 10-, 25-, and 50-y periods all appear to be the wettest in at least three and a half millennia. Notable historical dry periods occurred in the 4th century BCE and in the second half of the 15th century CE. The driest individual year reconstructed (since 1500 B.C.) is 1048 B.C., whereas the wettest is 2010. Precipitation variability in this region appears not to be associated with inferred changes in Asian monsoon intensity during recent millennia. The chronology displays a statistical association with the multidecadal and longer-term variability of reconstructed mean Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the last two millennia. This suggests that any further large-scale warming might be associated with even greater moisture supply in this region

Small Rocket/Spacecraft Technology (SMART) Platform

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Department of Defense Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office are exercising a multi-year collaborative agreement focused on a redefinition of the way space missions are designed and implemented. A much faster, leaner and effective approach to space flight requires the concerted effort of a multi-agency team tasked with developing the building blocks, both programmatically and technologically, to ultimately achieve flights within 7-days from mission call-up. For NASA, rapid mission implementations represent an opportunity to find creative ways for reducing mission life-cycle times with the resulting savings in cost. This in tum enables a class of missions catering to a broader audience of science participants, from universities to private and national laboratory researchers. To that end, the SMART (Small Rocket/Spacecraft Technology) micro-spacecraft prototype demonstrates an advanced avionics system with integrated GPS capability, high-speed plug-and-playable interfaces, legacy interfaces, inertial navigation, a modular reconfigurable structure, tunable thermal technology, and a number of instruments for environmental and optical sensing. Although SMART was first launched inside a sounding rocket, it is designed as a free-flyer

Wavelet-Petrov-Galerkin Method for the Numerical Solution of the KdV Equation

The development of numerical techniques for obtaining approximate solutions of partial differential equations has very much increased in the last decades. Among these techniques are the finite element methods and finite difference. Recently, wavelet methods are applied to the numerical solution of partial differential equations, pioneer works in this direction are those of Beylkin, Dahmen, Jaffard and Glowinski, among others. In this paper, we employ the Wavelet-Petrov-Galerkin method to obtain the numerical solution of the equation Korterweg-de Vries (KdV).The development of numerical techniques for obtaining approximate solutions of partial differential equations has very much increased in the last decades. Among these techniques are the finite element methods and finite difference. Recently, wavelet methods are applied to the numerical solution of partial differential equations, pioneer works in this direction are those of Beylkin, Dahmen, Jaffard and Glowinski, among others. In this paper, we employ the Wavelet-Petrov-Galerkin method to obtain the numerical solution of the equation Korterweg-de Vries (KdV)

Predictors of willingness to pay a price premium for hotels’ water-saving initiatives

This study examines customers’ willingness to pay a premium to support hotels’ water-saving initiatives and the effect of different explanatory variables: attitude toward water conservation, water problem awareness, willingness to sacrifice, reported water-saving behavior, and frugality. A Heckit model is applied to a sample of 681 tourists. Results show that 44.3% of tourists would pay a premium to stay in a hotel that had installed water-saving devices in rooms. The average price premium they would pay is 4.29 euros. These findings help hotel managers identify tourists who could contribute to reducing the costs of going green.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under research project INTETUR (RTI2018-099467-B-I00) and Emerging Project grant of the University of Alicante (GRE17-15)

High-resolution temperature variability reconstructed from black pine tree ring densities in Southern Spain

The presence of an ancient, high-elevation pine forest in the Natural Park of Sierras de Cazorla in southern Spain, including some trees reaching &gt;700 years, stimulated efforts to develop high-resolution temperature reconstructions in an otherwise drought-dominated region. Here, we present a reconstruction of spring and fall temperature variability derived from black pine tree ring maximum densities reaching back to 1350 Coefficient of Efficiency (CE). The reconstruction is accompanied by large uncertainties resulting from low interseries correlations among the single trees and a limited number of reliable instrumental stations in the study region. The reconstructed temperature history reveals warm conditions during the early 16th and 19th centuries that were of similar magnitude to the warm temperatures recorded since the late 20th century. A sharp transition from cold conditions in the late 18th century (t1781–1810 = −1.15 °C ± 0.64 °C) to warm conditions in the early 19th century (t1818–1847 = −0.06 °C ± 0.49 °C) is centered around the 1815 Tambora eruption (t1816 = −2.1 °C ± 0.55 °C). The new reconstruction from southern Spain correlates significantly with high-resolution temperature histories from the Pyrenees located ~600 km north of the Cazorla Natural Park, an association that is temporally stable over the past 650 years (r1350–2005 &gt; 0.3, p &lt; 0.0001) and particularly strong in the high-frequency domain (rHF &gt; 0.4). Yet, only a few of the reconstructed cold extremes (1453, 1601, 1816) coincide with large volcanic eruptions, suggesting that the severe cooling events in southern Spain are controlled by internal dynamics rather than external (volcanic) forcing.</jats:p

Radial Growth of Qilian Juniper on the Northeast Tibetan Plateau and Potential Climate Associations

There is controversy regarding the limiting climatic factor for tree radial growth at the alpine treeline on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. In this study, we collected 594 increment cores from 331 trees, grouped within four altitude belts spanning the range 3550 to 4020 m.a.s.l. on a single hillside. We have developed four equivalent ring-width chronologies and shown that there are no significant differences in their growth-climate responses during 1956 to 2011 or in their longer-term growth patterns during the period AD 1110–2011. The main climate influence on radial growth is shown to be precipitation variability. Missing ring analysis shows that tree radial growth at the uppermost treeline location is more sensitive to climate variation than that at other elevations, and poor tree radial growth is particularly linked to the occurrence of serious drought events. Hence water limitation, rather than temperature stress, plays the pivotal role in controlling the radial growth of Sabina przewalskii Kom. at the treeline in this region. This finding contradicts any generalisation that tree-ring chronologies from high-elevation treeline environments are mostly indicators of temperature changes

Aplicación de fractales a muestras estratigrafías: consideraciones al aspecto metodológico

Se evalúa el potencial de esta técnica aplicada al análisis de las dimensiones fractales resultantes de las mediciones de espesores en dos perfiles de la Formación Puncoviscana a orillas de la Quebrada del Toro y del Grupo Mesón en la localidad de la Pedrera, en la provincia de Salta (noroeste argentino), donde aflora una secuencia completa (comprimida) con tres formaciones, que de base a techo son: Lizoite, Campanario y Chaualmayoc. El comportamiento fractal se evidencia como una línea recta en un gráfica log-log de una ley potencial, donde el eje de las abscisas representa la medida del espesor del estrato y el eje de las ordenadas representa el logaritmo de N, siendo N el número de estrato con un espesor más grande que uno dado. Los apartamientos de esta recta en las zonas extremas de la escala del eje x, son interpretados como limites a la fractalidad; aún mas, algunos autores incluso distinguen intervalos de comportamiento lineal. Esto se contrapone con la esencia misma de la fractalidad cuya característica es la autosimilitud. Cuando se incluyen todas las medidas de espesores de estrato, el comportamiento no es lineal, sino cuadrático, e incluso de tercer orden. Esto se interpreta a un ordenamiento en las estructuras y que se extiende a todos los tamaños de muestras. Podemos concluir que para toda la escala dimensional es un proceso mixto, con componentes fractales de diversos órdenes.Fractal property as an analysis tool is evaluated in fractal dimension calculations carried on data resulting from profile thickness measurements at the Puncoviscana formation bordering the Toro river canyon and the Mesón group in La Pedrera, both in the province of Salta (NW of Argentina). The latter exhibiting a complete (compressed) sequence of three formations (in bottom to top order): Lizoite, Campanario and Chaualmayoc. Fractal behavior is evidenced as a straight line in a log-log plot of a power law, where abscissas represent strata thickness, ordinates the logarithm of N, N designating the number of strata with a larger thickness than a given one. Some degree of departure from a straight line can be expected both, at the lowest dimension value and at the highest value ends of x, which can be taken as limits to the fractal property. Yet some authors distinguish intervals of linear, that is, fractal behavior. Which is in contraption with fractal primary concepts such as self-similarity. When all of the data are included, the resultant plot is no longer a straight line rather a quadratic (even a cubic) behavior is exhibited which in turn can be attributed to an order in the structures extending to the whole sample span. Therefore, it can be concluded we are dealing with a mixed process with higher order fractal components.Asociación Argentina de Geofísicos y Geodesta

A matter of divergence: Tracking recent warming at hemispheric scales using tree ring data

No current tree ring (TR) based reconstruction of extratropical Northern Hemisphere (ENH) temperatures that extends into the 1990s captures the full range of late 20th century warming observed in the instrumental record. Over recent decades, a divergence between cooler reconstructed and warmer instrumental large-scale temperatures is observed. We hypothesize that this problem is partly related to the fact that some of the constituent chronologies used for previous reconstructions show divergence against local temperatures in the recent period. In this study, we compiled TR data and published local/regional reconstructions that show no divergence against local temperatures. These data have not been included in other large-scale temperature reconstructions. Utilizing this data set, we developed a new, completely independent reconstruction of ENH annual temperatures (1750–2000). This record is not meant to replace existing reconstructions but allows some degree of independent validation of these earlier studies as well as demonstrating that TR data can better model recent warming at large scales when careful selection of constituent chronologies is made at the local scale. Although the new series tracks the increase in ENH annual temperatures over the last few decades better than any existing reconstruction, it still slightly under predicts values in the post-1988 period. We finally discuss possible reasons why it is so difficult to model post-mid-1980s warming, provide some possible alternative approaches with regards to the instrumental target and detail several recommendations that should be followed in future large-scale reconstruction attempts that may result in more robust temperature estimates