39,256 research outputs found
The Impact of Early Positive Results on a Mathematics and Science Partnership: The Experience of the Institute for Chemistry Literacy Through Computational Science
After one year of implementation, the Institute for Chemistry Literacy through Computational Science, an NSF Mathematics and Science Partnership Institute Project led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Chemistry, College of Medicine, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, experienced statistically significant gains in chemistry content knowledge among students of the rural high school teachers participating in its intensive, year-round professional development course, compared to a control group. The project utilizes a two-cohort, delayed-treatment, random control trial, quasi-experimental research design with the second cohort entering treatment one year following the first. The three-year treatment includes intensive two-week summer institutes, occasional school year workshops and year-round, on-line collaborative lesson development, resource sharing, and expert support. The means of student pre-test scores for Cohort I (η=963) and Cohort II (η=862) teachers were not significantly different. The mean gain (difference between pre-test and post-test scores) after seven months in the classroom for Cohort I was 9.8 percentage points, compared to 6.7 percentage points for Cohort II. This statistically significant difference (p\u3c.001) represented an effect size of .25 standard deviation units, and indicated unusually early confirmation of treatment effects. When post-tests were compared, Cohort I students scored significantly higher than Cohort II and supported the gain score differences. The impact of these results on treatment and research plans is discussed. concentrating on the effect of lessening rural teachers’ isolation and increasing access to tools to facilitate learning
A new way to see inside black holes
Black holes are real astrophysical objects, but their interiors are hidden
and can only be "observed" through mathematics. The structure of rotating black
holes is typically illustrated with the help of special coordinates. But any
such coordinate choice necessarily results in a distorted view, just as the
choice of projection distorts a map of the Earth. The truest way to depict the
properties of a black hole is through quantities that are coordinate-invariant.
We compute and plot all the independent curvature invariants of rotating,
charged black holes for the first time, revealing a landscape that is much more
beautiful and complex than usually thought.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, published in Bridges Baltimore 2015: Mathematics,
Music, Art, Architecture, Culture (Phoenix, AZ: Tessellations Publishing,
2015), 479-482. Revised to fix a referenc
The Evolution of Male-Biased Dispersal under the Joint Selective Forces of Inbreeding Load and Demographic and Environmental Stochasticity
Acknowledgments We thank G. Bocedi, S. Palmer, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. R.C.H. was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (1271380). Simulations were performed on the University of Aberdeen’s Maxwell high performance computing cluster.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
The Solar Neighborhood VIII: Discovery of New High Proper Motion Nearby Stars Using the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey
Five new objects with proper motions between 1.0 arcsec/yr and 2.6 arcsec/yr
have been discovered via a new RECONS search for high proper motion stars
utilizing the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey. The first portion of the search,
discussed here, is centered on the south celestial pole and covers declinations
-90 degrees to -57.5 degrees.
Photographic photometry from SuperCOSMOS and JHKs near-infrared photometry
from 2MASS for stars nearer than 10 pc are combined to provide a suite of new
M_Ks-color relations useful for estimating distances to main sequence stars.
These relations are then used to derive distances to the new proper motion
objects as well as previously known stars with mu >= 1.0 arcsec/yr (many of
which have no trigonometric parallaxes) recovered during this phase of the
survey.
Four of the five new stars have red dwarf colors, while one is a nearby white
dwarf. Two of the red dwarfs are likely to be within the RECONS 10 pc sample,
and the white dwarf probably lies between 15 and 25 pc. Among the 23 known
stars recovered during the search, there are three additional candidates for
the RECONS sample that have no trigonometric parallaxes.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Astronomy Journa
Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many
people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently
lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people.
The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments,
which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body.
We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the
robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also
show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model
with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use
haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are
readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical
human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk.
Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely
self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our
approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms
of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller
succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment
around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction
horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching
on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's
predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep
predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily
penalizes high forces.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Diffuse Background Radiation
A new determination of the upper limit to the cosmic diffuse background
radiation, at ~110 nm, of 300 photons s-1 cm-2 sr-1 nm-1, is placed in the
context of diffuse background measurements across the entire electromagnetic
spectrum, including new optical, infrared, visible, and gamma-ray background
measurements. The possibility that observed excess diffuse visible radiation is
due to redshifted cosmological Lyman alpha recomination radiation is explored.
Also, a new standard of units for the display of spectra is advocated.Comment: Nine pages and one figur
Surface Encapsulation for Low-Loss Silicon Photonics
Encapsulation layers are explored for passivating the surfaces of silicon to
reduce optical absorption in the 1500-nm wavelength band. Surface-sensitive
test structures consisting of microdisk resonators are fabricated for this
purpose. Based on previous work in silicon photovoltaics, coatings of SiNx and
SiO2 are applied under varying deposition and annealing conditions. A short dry
thermal oxidation followed by a long high-temperature N2 anneal is found to be
most effective at long-term encapsulation and reduction of interface
absorption. Minimization of the optical loss is attributed to simultaneous
reduction in sub-bandgap silicon surface states and hydrogen in the capping
material.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
- …