Museums Connect: Teaching Public History through Transnational Museum Partnerships

Museums Connect is a program funded by the US Department of State and administered by the American Alliance of Museums that sponsors transnational museum partnerships. This program provides one model for teaching public history in a transnational context, and this article analyzes the experiences of two university-museums—the Museum of History and Holocaust Education (MHHE) in the United States and the Ben M’sik Community Museum (BMCM) in Morocco—during two grants between 2009 and 2012. In exploring the impact of the program on the staff, faculty, and students involved and by analyzing the experiences and reflections of participants, I argue that this program can generate positive pedagogical experiences. However, in addition to the successes of the MHHE and BMCM during their two grants, the participants encountered significant power differentials that manifested themselves in both the processes and products of the grants. It is the conclusion of this article that both partners in a public history project need to address and confront potential power issues at the outset in order to achieve a more balanced, collaborative partnership

A Shared Authority? Museums Connect, Public Diplomacy, And Transnational Public History

Museums Connect stands at the intersection of public history and public diplomacy. The program, which has both public history and public diplomacy agendas, is sponsored by the United States Department of State and administered by the American Alliance of Museums. This dissertation examines the competing impulses of transnational public history and public diplomacy made manifest in Museums Connect and its ramifications for public history theory and practice. The project demonstrates both the seeming similarities between public history’s ideas of shared authority, dialogic museum practice, and community engagement and public diplomacy’s “people-to-people” diplomacy, as well as the limits of these similarities. This dissertation also considers the ramifications of these dynamics on museum and public history practice and theory. It is shown that the assumptions of public diplomacy found in Museums Connect inform the program’s structure and operation, while also precluding a truly shared authority between the American museums and their international partners. The appointment of the American museums as “lead” museums and the Department of State’s choice to focus on young people as the target audience for the program foregrounds didactic relationships between the museums and their “communities” for the projects. Through three case studies of Museums Connect projects between the United States and Afghanistan, Morocco, and South Africa, this dissertation challenges the seminal theoretical literature of public history, articulated in Michael Frisch’s A Shared Authority, that interpretive and meaning-making authority in public history is inherently shared. Each case study reveals different factors that either promote or preclude more balanced power dynamics between the museums and their communities within the broader power dynamics established by the grant. Staff reflection-in-action, project activity and partner museum choice, and the non-American public history and museological contexts are all revealed to uniquely influence the dynamics between the museums and their communities. Throughout, the agency of the non-American participants, highlighted through the responses and reactions to the unequal dynamics of the projects, complicates notions of the singular democratic public sphere that underpin the paradigm of the museum as forum

Effects Of The Ionosphere On Ground-Based Detection Of The Global 21 CM Signal From The Cosmic Dawn And The Dark Ages

Detection of the global HI 21 cm signal from Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization is the key science driver for several ongoing ground-based and future ground/space-based experiments. The crucial spectral features in the global 21 cm signal (turning points) occur at low radio frequencies <100 MHz. In addition to the human-generated RFI, Earth's ionosphere drastically corrupts low-frequency radio observations from the ground. In this paper, we examine the effects of time-varying ionospheric refraction, absorption and thermal emission at these low radio frequencies and their combined effect on any ground-based global 21 cm experiment. It should be noted that this is the first study of the effect of a dynamic ionosphere on global 21 cm experiments. The fluctuations in the ionosphere are influenced by solar activity with flicker noise characteristics. The same characteristics are reflected in the ionospheric corruption to any radio signal passing through the ionosphere. As a result, any ground based observations of the faint global 21 cm signal are corrupted by flicker noise (or "$1/f$" noise, where "$f$" is the dynamical frequency) which scales as $\nu^{-2}$ (where $\nu$ is the frequency of observation) in the presence of a bright galactic foreground ($\propto \nu^{-s}$, where $s$ is radio spectral index). Hence, the calibration of the ionosphere for any such experiment is critical. Any attempt to calibrate the ionospheric effects will be subject to the inaccuracies in the current ionospheric measurements using GPS ionospheric measurements, riometer measurements, ionospheric soundings, etc. Even considering an optimistic improvement in the accuracy of GPS-TEC (Total Electron Content) measurements, we conclude that the detection of the global 21 cm signal below 100 MHz is best done from above the Earth's atmosphere in orbit of the Moon.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. This is an updated version after addressing the comments from the refere

Direct Evidence for Octupole Deformation in 146^{146}Ba and the Origin of Large E1E1 Moment Variations in Reflection-Asymmetric Nuclei

Despite the more than one order of magnitude difference between the measured dipole moments in $^{144}$Ba and $^{146}$Ba, the strength of the octupole correlations in $^{146}$Ba are found to be as strong as those in $^{144}$Ba with a similarly large value of $B(E3;3^- \rightarrow 0^+)$ determined as 48($^{+21}_{-29}$) W.u. The new results not only establish unambiguously the presence of a region of octupole deformation centered on these neutron-rich Ba isotopes, but also manifest the dependence of the electric dipole moments on the occupancy of different neutron orbitals in nuclei with enhanced octupole strength, as revealed by fully microscopic calculations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Changing the academic culture: Valuing patents and commercialization toward tenure and career advancement

There is national and international recognition of the importance of innovation, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship for sustained economic revival. With the decline of industrial research laboratories in the United States, research universities are being asked to play a central role in our knowledge-centered economy by the technology transfer of their discoveries, innovations, and inventions. In response to this challenge, innovation ecologies at and around universities are starting to change. However, the change has been slow and limited. The authors believe this can be attributed partially to a lack of change in incentives for the central stakeholder, the faculty member. The authors have taken the position that universities should expand their criteria to treat patents, licensing, and commercialization activity by faculty as an important consideration for merit, tenure, and career advancement, along with publishing, teaching, and service. This position is placed in a historical context with a look at the history of tenure in the United States, patents, and licensing at universities, the current status of university tenure and career advancement processes, and models for the future

Constraining Cometary Crystal Shapes from IR Spectral Features

A major challenge in deriving the silicate mineralogy of comets is ascertaining how the anisotropic nature of forsterite crystals affects the spectral features' wavelength, relative intensity, and asymmetry. Forsterite features are identified in cometary comae near 10, 11.05-11.2, 16, 19, 23.5, 27.5 and 33 microns [1-10], so accurate models for forsterite's absorption efficiency (Qabs) are a primary requirement to compute IR spectral energy distributions (SEDs, lambdaF lambda vs. lambda) and constrain the silicate mineralogy of comets. Forsterite is an anisotropic crystal, with three crystallographic axes with distinct indices of refraction for the a-, b-, and c-axis. The shape of a forsterite crystal significantly affects its spectral features [13-16]. We need models that account for crystal shape. The IR absorption efficiencies of forsterite are computed using the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) code DDSCAT [11,12]. Starting from a fiducial crystal shape of a cube, we systematically elongate/reduce one of the crystallographic axes. Also, we elongate/reduce one axis while the lengths of the other two axes are slightly asymmetric (0.8:1.2). The most significant grain shape characteristic that affects the crystalline spectral features is the relative lengths of the crystallographic axes. The second significant grain shape characteristic is breaking the symmetry of all three axes [17]. Synthetic spectral energy distributions using seven crystal shape classes [17] are fit to the observed SED of comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp). The Hale-Bopp crystalline residual better matches equant, b-platelets, c-platelets, and b-columns spectral shape classes, while a-platelets, a-columns and c-columns worsen the spectral fits. Forsterite condensation and partial evaporation experiments demonstrate that environmental temperature and grain shape are connected [18-20]. Thus, grain shape is a potential probe for protoplanetary disk temperatures where the cometary crystalline forsterite formed. The forsterite crystal shapes (equant, b-platelets, c-platelets, b-columns - excluding a- and c-columns) derived from our modeling [17] of comet Hale- Bopp, compared to laboratory synthesis experiments [18], suggests that these crystals are high temperature condensates. By observing and modeling the crystalline features in comet ISON, we may constrain forsterite crystal shape(s) and link to their formation temperature(s) and environment(s)

LASER EXCITATION SPECTROSCOPY OF 58^{58}NiH IN A MAGNETIC FIELD

Author Institution: LASIM, Universite Lyon 1 \&amp; CNRS, 43 Bd du 11 novembre 1918, F-69622 Villeurbanne, France; Department of Physics and Center for Laser, Atomic, and Molecular Sciences, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada E3B 5A3Recent laboratory measurements of isotopologue $^{58}$NiH by laser excitation around 17000$-$18000 cm$^{-1}$ in a magnetic field have allowed us to study several electronic systems of this molecule. Zeeman patterns were analysed using literature values for ground state Lande factors (1997) 4179}. Effective electronic Lande factors g_{\emph{eff}} have been determined. They show strong variation with parity in the rotational levels in some $\Omega'$=3/2 states, giving evidence for extensive mixing between excited electronic states. \newline %\begin{table}[h] % \scriptsize \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|} \multicolumn{5}{c}{Effective electronic Lande factors g_{\emph{eff}}} \\ \multicolumn{5}{c}{}\\ \hline &amp;\multicolumn{2}{|c|}{$E(\Omega=3/2),v=1$} &amp; \multicolumn{2}{|c|}{$I(\Omega=3/2),v=0$}\\ \hline $J$ &amp; $e$ &amp; $f$ &amp; $e$ &amp; $f$ \\ \hline 1.5 &amp; 1.058 &amp; 1.142 &amp; 1.640 &amp; 1.638 \\ 2.5 &amp; 0.992 &amp; 1.365 &amp; 1.937 &amp; 1.895 \\ 3.5 &amp; 0.844 &amp; 1.737 &amp; 2.371 &amp; 2.294 \\ 4.5 &amp; 0.587 &amp; 2.238 &amp; 2.870 &amp; 2.734 \\ 5.5 &amp; 0.415 &amp; 2.933 &amp; 3.552 &amp; 3.328 \\ 6.5 &amp; 0.233 &amp; 3.671 &amp; 4.326 &amp; 4.110 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{center} % aption{Effective electronic Lande factors $g_{eff}$} %\end{table