Considering the non-programming geographer\u27s perspective when designing extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops

Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important scientific skill, but geographers are not necessarily receiving this training as part of their formal education. While there are efforts to promote and support extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops, there remain questions about how best to deliver these workshops. Therefore, as part of a recent introductory programming extracurricular workshop I organized for non-programing geographers, I tried to understand more about their perceptions of computer programming. I identify that one of the most important aspects for geographers to learn to computer program is to have training that is domain specific to ensure that the training is relevant and achieves a deeper learning outcome

Mahalanobis distances and ecological niche modelling: correcting a chi-squared probability error

The Mahalanobis distance is a statistical technique that can be used to measure how distant a point is from the centre of a multivariate normal distribution. By measuring Mahalanobis distances in environmental space ecologists have also used the technique to model: ecological niches, habitat suitability, species distributions, and resource selection functions. Unfortunately, the original description of the Mahalanobis distance technique for ecological modelling contained an error describing how Mahalanobis distances could be converted into probabilities using a chi-squared distribution. This error has been repeated in the literature, and is present in popular modelling software. In the hope of correcting this error to maximise the potential application of the Mahalanobis distance technique within the ecological modelling community, I explain how Mahalanobis distances are calculated, and through a virtual ecology experiment demonstrate how to correctly produce probabilities and discuss the implications of the error for previous Mahalanobis distance studies

Evaluation of Technology Concepts for Energy, Automation, and System State Awareness in Commercial Airline Flight Decks

A pilot-in-the-loop flight simulation study was conducted at NASA Langley Research Center to evaluate flight deck systems that (1) provide guidance for recovery from low energy states and stalls, (2) present the current state and expected future state of automated systems, and/or (3) show the state of flight-critical data systems in use by automated systems and primary flight instruments. The study was conducted using 13 commercial airline crews from multiple airlines, paired by airline to minimize procedural effects. Scenarios spanned a range of complex conditions and several emulated causal and contributing factors found in recent accidents involving loss of state awareness by pilots (e.g., energy state, automation state, and/or system state). Three new technology concepts were evaluated while used in concert with current state-of-the-art flight deck systems and indicators. The technologies include a stall recovery guidance algorithm and display concept, an enhanced airspeed control indicator that shows when automation is no longer actively controlling airspeed, and enhanced synoptic pages designed to work with simplified interactive electronic checklists. An additional synoptic was developed to provide the flight crew with information about the effects of loss of flight critical data. Data was collected via questionnaires administered at the completion of flight scenarios, audio/video recordings, flight data, head and eye tracking data, pilot control inputs, and researcher observations. This paper presents findings derived from the questionnaire responses and subjective data measures including workload, situation awareness, usability, and acceptability as well as analyses of two low-energy flight events that resulted in near-stall conditions

Ecosystem services show variable responses to future climate conditions in the Colombian páramos

Background: The páramos, the high-elevation ecosystems of the northern Andes, are well-known for their high species richness and provide a variety of ecosystem services to local subsistence-based communities and regional urbanizations. Climate change is expected to negatively affect the provision of these services, but the level of this impact is still unclear. Here we assess future climate change impact on the ecosystem services provided by the critically important páramos of the department of Boyacá in Colombia, of which over 25% of its territory is páramo. Methods: We first performed an extensive literature review to identify useful species of Boyacá, and selected 103 key plant species that, based on their uses, support the provision of ecosystem services in the páramos. We collated occurrence information for each key species and using a Mahalanobis distance approach we applied climate niche modelling for current and future conditions. Results: We show an overall tendency of reduction in area for all ecosystem services under future climate conditions (mostly a loss of 10% but reaching up to a loss of 40%), but we observe also increases, and responses differ in intensity loss. Services such as Food for animals, Material and Medicinal, show a high range of changes that includes both positive and negative outcomes, while for Food for humans the responses are mostly substantially negative. Responses are less extreme than those projected for individual species but are often complex because a given ecosystem service is provided by several species. As the level of functional or ecological redundancy between species is not yet known, there is an urgency to expand our knowledge on páramos ecosystem services for more species. Our results are crucial for decision-makers, social and conservation organizations to support sustainable strategies to monitor and mitigate the potential consequences of climate change for human livelihoods in mountainous settings.publishedVersio

Tackling Labour Market Injustice and Organising Workers: The View from a Northern Heartland

This report, based on 42 interviews with workers, trade unionists and other stakeholders, examines the phenomena of low-paid and precarious work in Sheffield. It focuses on the factors driving the prevalence of such work (including the links with welfare reform), the experiences of workers in seven distinct employment sectors, as well as trade union responses to the challenges of organising in these areas. The report also includes a major addition of a postscript focused on the impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic and how this relates to the wider findings of the study

The contributions of molecular vibrations and higher triplet levels to the intersystem crossing mechanism in metal-free organic emitters.

Intense, simultaneous, room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) and thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) is observed in a series of donor-acceptor-donor (D–A–D) molecules. This dual-luminescence is stronger in the “angular” isomers, compared to their “linear” regioisomers, which is consistent with an enhanced intersystem crossing (ISC) in the former. Herein, we demonstrate that the small energy gap between the triplet levels, T1-Tn, below the lowest singlet state, S1, in the “angular” regioisomers, enhances the coupling between S1 and T1 states and favors ISC and reverse ISC (rISC). This is consistent with a spin-vibronic mechanism. In the absence of this “triplet ladder”, due to the larger energy difference between T1 and Tn in the “linear” regioisomers, the ISC and rISC are not efficient. Remarkably the enhancement on the ISC rate in the “angular” regioisomers is accompanied by an increase on the rate of internal conversion (IC). These results highlight the contributions of higher triplet excited states and molecular vibronic coupling to harvest triplet states in organic compounds, and casts the TADF and RTP mechanisms into a common conceptual framework

SDSS-IV MaNGA: Spatially resolved star formation histories in galaxies as a function of galaxy mass and type

© 2016 The Authors. We study the internal gradients of stellar population propertieswithin 1.5 Re for a representative sample of 721 galaxies, with stellar masses ranging between 109M⊙ and 1011.5M⊙ from the SDSS-IV MaNGA Integral-Field-Unit survey. Through the use of our full spectral fitting code FIREFLY, we derive light- and mass-weighted stellar population properties and their radial gradients, as well as full star formation and metal enrichment histories. We also quantify the impact that different stellar population models and full spectral fitting routines have on the derived stellar population properties and the radial gradient measurements. In our analysis, we find that age gradients tend to be shallow for both early-type and late-type galaxies. Mass-weighted age gradients of early-types arepositive (~0.09 dex/Re) pointing to 'outside- in' progression of star formation, while late-type galaxies have negative light-weighted age gradients (~-0.11 dex/Re), suggesting an 'inside-out' formation of discs. We detect negative metallicity gradients in both early- and late-type galaxies, but these are significantly steeper in late-types, suggesting that the radial dependence of chemical enrichment processes and the effect of gas inflow and metal transport are far more pronounced in discs. Metallicity gradients of both morphological classes correlate with galaxy mass, with negative metallicity gradients becoming steeper with increasing galaxy mass. The correlation with mass is stronger for late-type galaxies, with a slope of d(∇[Z/H])/d(logM) ~ -0.2 ± 0.05, compared to d(∇[Z/H])/d(logM) ~ -0.05 ± 0.05 for early-types. This result suggests that the merger history plays a relatively small role in shaping metallicity gradients of galaxies