Is there a transition flux? Incorporating a research element into an undergraduate engineering laboratory

It is frequently remarked that the modern student has an excellent ability to recall information but cannot think independently and does not show initiative. While the secondary school curriculum is a major factor in this regard, it must be said that large parts of the third level experience perpetuate this problem. However, increased use of active learning, problem based learning and research-based learning should help to encourage independent thinking. In most degree courses in Engineering/Science, a final year project is the first true taste of scientific research encountered by undergraduate students. The final year research project can often prove an extremely daunting task, and the amount of time and effort required by the undergraduate student to settle into this new type of work can be detrimental to the work of the student on core subjects that are assessed by written examination. We present here the incorporation of real research into an engineering laboratory module taught in the third year of a Biotechnology degree program. This is achieved by challenging the students with a hypothesis to be investigated using the laboratory session, rather than the traditional prescriptive approach resulting in a defined laboratory report. Each laboratory group conducts their experiment using unique experimental conditions and the results are collated into a body of work to challenge the hypothesis presented to the students. The students learn to disseminate their results effectively by including the requirement that the report be constructed in the form of a journal article. By adopting this approach to teaching in the laboratory, students are introduced at an earlier stage to the skills needed to conduct meaningful scientific research. In particular, it encourages students to evaluate experimental data without bias. By performing experiments for which the outcome is not known in advance, student interest and enthusiasm is significantly increased

Turning Brownfields into Jobfields

A handbook for practitioners and citizens on making brownfields development work

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three-year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high-resolution (R ~ 22,500), high signal-to-noise ratio (>100), infrared (1.51–1.70 μm) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design—hardware, field placement, target selection, operations—and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis, and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity, and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12 and later releases, all of the APOGEE data products are publicly available

SDSS-III: Massive Spectroscopic Surveys of the Distant Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, and Extra-Solar Planetary Systems

Building on the legacy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-I and II), SDSS-III is a program of four spectroscopic surveys on three scientific themes: dark energy and cosmological parameters, the history and structure of the Milky Way, and the population of giant planets around other stars. In keeping with SDSS tradition, SDSS-III will provide regular public releases of all its data, beginning with SDSS DR8 (which occurred in Jan 2011). This paper presents an overview of the four SDSS-III surveys. BOSS will measure redshifts of 1.5 million massive galaxies and Lya forest spectra of 150,000 quasars, using the BAO feature of large scale structure to obtain percent-level determinations of the distance scale and Hubble expansion rate at z<0.7 and at z~2.5. SEGUE-2, which is now completed, measured medium-resolution (R=1800) optical spectra of 118,000 stars in a variety of target categories, probing chemical evolution, stellar kinematics and substructure, and the mass profile of the dark matter halo from the solar neighborhood to distances of 100 kpc. APOGEE will obtain high-resolution (R~30,000), high signal-to-noise (S/N>100 per resolution element), H-band (1.51-1.70 micron) spectra of 10^5 evolved, late-type stars, measuring separate abundances for ~15 elements per star and creating the first high-precision spectroscopic survey of all Galactic stellar populations (bulge, bar, disks, halo) with a uniform set of stellar tracers and spectral diagnostics. MARVELS will monitor radial velocities of more than 8000 FGK stars with the sensitivity and cadence (10-40 m/s, ~24 visits per star) needed to detect giant planets with periods up to two years, providing an unprecedented data set for understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of giant planet systems. (Abridged)Comment: Revised to version published in The Astronomical Journa

Uniform Spanning Forests and Bi-Laplacian Gaussian Field

We construct the bi-Laplacian Gaussian field on $R^4$ as a scaling limit of a field in $Z^4$ constructed using a wired spanning forest. The proof requires improving the known results about four dimensional loop-erased random walk. There are similar (and somewhat easier) results for higher dimensions. This is joint work with Xin Sun and Wei Wu.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of ChicagoFacult

Minkowski content and exceptional sets for Brownian paths

Hausdorff measure is often used to measure fractal sets. However, there is a more natural quantity, Minkowski content, which more closely matches the scaling limit of discrete counting measures and is closely related to the idea of local time. I will discuss this in the context of several sets for which Chris Burdzy made fundamental contributions: cut points for Brownian paths and outer boundary of two-dimensional Brownian motion. The latter is closely related to the Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE). I will include joint work with Mohammad Rezaei and recent work with Nina Holden, Xinyi Li, and Xin Sun.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of ChicagoFacult

Conformal Invariance of Loop­Erased Random Walk Green's function

Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of ChicagoFacult