Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Designing and conducting an open-ended experiment as an organic chemistry laboratory practical

An open-ended laboratory practical has been developed that challenges students to evaluate the synthesis of aspirin, which is a typical experiment of organic synthesis. In contrast to a traditional textbook laboratory practical, the overall grade includes an evaluation of the experimental preparation, process, report, and PowerPoint presentation of the student. This practical improves undergraduate students’ ability to think innovatively and the skills pertaining for team cooperation, which would exhibit importance in the organic chemistry teaching experiment’s course

Glueball relevant study on isoscalars from Nf=2N_f=2 lattice QCD

We perform a glueball-relevant study on isoscalars based on anisotropic $N_f=2$ lattice QCD gauge configurations. In the scalar channel, we identify the ground state obtained through gluonic operators to be a single-particle state through its dispersion relation. When $q\bar{q}$ operator is included, we find the mass of this state does not change, and the $q\bar{q}$ operator couples very weakly to this state. So this state is most likely a glueball state. For pseudoscalars, along with the exiting lattice results, our study implies that both the conventional $q\bar{q}$ state $\eta_2$ (or $\eta'$ in flavor $SU(3)$) and a heavier glueball-like state with a mass of roughly 2.6 GeV exist in the spectrum of lattice QCD with dynamical quarks.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, talk presented at the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 18-24 June 2017, Granada, Spai