An epistemology and expectations survey about experimental physics: Development and initial results

In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments in the contexts of laboratory courses and the professional research laboratory. The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) evaluates students' epistemology at the beginning and end of a semester. Students respond to paired questions about how they personally perceive doing experiments in laboratory courses and how they perceive an experimental physicist might respond regarding their research. Also, at the end of the semester, the E-CLASS assesses a third dimension of laboratory instruction, students' reflections on their course's expectations for earning a good grade. By basing survey statements on widely embraced learning goals and common critiques of teaching labs, the E-CLASS serves as an assessment tool for lab courses across the undergraduate curriculum and as a tool for physics education research. We present the development, evidence of validation, and initial formative assessment results from a sample that includes 45 classes at 20 institutions. We also discuss feedback from instructors and reflect on the challenges of large-scale online administration and distribution of results.Comment: 31 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev. - PE

Development and results from a survey on students views of experiments in lab classes and research

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) was developed as a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. At the beginning and end of the semester, the E-CLASS assesses students views about their strategies, habits of mind, and attitudes when doing experiments in lab classes. Students also reflect on how those same strategies, habits-of-mind, and attitudes are practiced by professional researchers. Finally, at the end of the semester, students reflect on how their own course valued those practices in terms of earning a good grade. In response to frequent calls to transform laboratory curricula to more closely align it with the skills and abilities needed for professional research, the E-CLASS is a tool to assess students' perceptions of the gap between classroom laboratory instruction and professional research. The E-CLASS has been validated and administered in all levels of undergraduate physics classes. To aid in its use as a formative assessment tool, E-CLASS provides all participating instructors with a detailed feedback report. Example figures and analysis from the report are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the E-CLASS. The E-CLASS is actively administered through an online interface and all interested instructors are invited to administer the E-CLASS their own classes and will be provided with a summary of results at the end of the semester

Aligning Regulation with the Informational Need: Ecosystem Services and the Next Generation of Environmental Law

This article explores the Clinch Coalition decision to understand why the court would perpetuate a process that systematically rejects the relevance and value of ecosystem processes in the information gathering exercise entailed in these environmental regulations. The discussion begins with an introduction to ecosystem services as a study of human dependency on the services provided by functioning ecosystems. In the second section, the article turns to the Clinch Coalition decision to outline the arguments relied upon by the court to legitimize the Forest Service’s decision to avoid an ecosystem services analysis. The article then presents the Clinch Coalition decision as an illustration of a fundamental misunderstanding of ecosystem services and their relevance and value in environmental regulation. This article suggests that, by characterizing ecosystem services valuation as merely an alternative economic analysis or accounting method, the court highlighted an important informational goal for the next generation of environmental law: if environmental regulation is intended to facilitate a more efficient management of resources by correcting for resource market inefficiencies resulting from incomplete information, regulatory intervention should employ investigatory methodologies that result in the production of a more informed resource management decision. This article first questions whether ecosystem services valuation is indeed an alternative methodology. This section describes ecosystem services analysis as a means of economic and environmental valuation that is more inclusive than a commodity-based analysis: an analysis of ecosystem services is a more relevant and complete understanding of economics and environmental decision-making, not alternative methodology. Therefore, by rejecting the call for an ecosystem services analysis, the court allowed the agency to ignore relevant information about ecosystem impacts: ecosystem services analysis demands a more inclusive estimation of the opportunity cost of using and losing the ecosystems that produce timber, fish, and other goods and services, as well as the benefits of maintaining the flow of the goods and services that ecosystems produce. Second, this article concerns how to construct the notion of “information” to improve the information gathering exercise that is found in “action-forcing” statutes such as NEPA. Ecosystem services research supplies information on both economic values and ecosystem processes. Excluding an accounting of “ecosystem services” can produce decisions that do not accurately or efficiently reflect the interdependency between ecological and economic wealth. Understanding natural resources in terms of the value of ecosystem services that they produce helps to contextualize the relationships between public needs, private wealth, and the cost of ecosystem loss. Such information falls squarely into the informational mandate of our resource management goals, but more importantly, such information is currently excluded from most environmental and economic valuations

The dependency pair framework: Combining techniques for automated termination proofs

Abstract. The dependency pair approach is one of the most powerful techniques for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems. Up to now, it was regarded as one of several possible methods to prove termination. In this paper, we show that dependency pairs can instead be used as a general concept to integrate arbitrary techniques for termination analysis. In this way, the benefits of different techniques can be combined and their modularity and power are increased significantly. We refer to this new concept as the “dependency pair framework ” to distinguish it from the old “dependency pair approach”. Moreover, this framework facilitates the development of new methods for termination analysis. To demonstrate this, we present several new techniques within the dependency pair framework which simplify termination problems considerably. We implemented the dependency pair framework in our termination prover AProVE and evaluated it on large collections of examples.

Reducing relative termination to dependency pair problems

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21401-6_11Relative termination, a generalized notion of termination, has been used in a number of different contexts like proving the confluence of rewrite systems or analyzing the termination of narrowing. In this paper, we introduce a new technique to prove relative termination by reducing it to dependency pair problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first significant contribution to Problem #106 of the RTA List of Open Problems. The practical significance of our method is illustrated by means of an experimental evaluation.Germán Vidal is partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under grant TIN2013-44742-C4-R and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII201/013. Akihisa Yamadais supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Y757Iborra, J.; Nishida, N.; Vidal Oriola, GF.; Yamada, A. (2015). Reducing relative termination to dependency pair problems. En Automated Deduction - CADE-25. Springer. 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21401-6_11S163178Alarcón, B., Lucas, S., Meseguer, J.: A dependency pair framework for A $$\vee$$ C-termination. In: Ölveczky, P.C. (ed.) WRLA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6381, pp. 35–51. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Arts, T., Giesl, J.: Termination of term rewriting using dependency pairs. Theor. Comput. Sci. 236(1–2), 133–178 (2000)Arts, T., Giesl, J.: A collection of examples for termination of term rewriting using dependency pairs. Technical report AIB-2001-09, RWTH Aachen (2001)Baader, F., Nipkow, T.: Term Rewriting and All That. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)Dershowitz, N.: Termination of rewriting. J. Symb. Comput. 3(1&2), 69–115 (1987)Endrullis, J., Waldmann, J., Zantema, H.: Matrix interpretations for proving termination of term rewriting. J. Autom. Reasoning 40(2–3), 195–220 (2008)Geser, A.: Relative termination. Dissertation, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Universität Passau, Germany (1990)Giesl, J., Kapur, D.: Dependency pairs for equational rewriting. In: Middeldorp, A. (ed.) RTA 2001. LNCS, vol. 2051, pp. 93–107. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)Giesl, J., Schneider-Kamp, P., Thiemann, R.: AProVE 1.2: automatic termination proofs in the dependency pair framework. In: Furbach, U., Shankar, N. (eds.) IJCAR 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4130, pp. 281–286. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Giesl, J., Thiemann, R., Schneider-Kamp, P., Falke, S.: Mechanizing and improving dependency pairs. J. Autom. Reasoning 37(3), 155–203 (2006)Hirokawa, N., Middeldorp, A.: Polynomial interpretations with negative coefficients. In: Buchberger, B., Campbell, J. (eds.) AISC 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3249, pp. 185–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Hirokawa, N., Middeldorp, A.: Dependency pairs revisited. In: van Oostrom, V. (ed.) RTA 2004. LNCS, vol. 3091, pp. 249–268. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Hirokawa, N., Middeldorp, A.: Decreasing diagrams and relative termination. J. Autom. Reasoning 47(4), 481–501 (2011)Hullot, J.M.: Canonical forms and unification. CADE-5. LNCS, vol. 87, pp. 318–334. Springer, Heidelberg (1980)Iborra, J., Nishida, N., Vidal, G.: Goal-directed and relative dependency pairs for proving the termination of narrowing. In: De Schreye, D. (ed.) LOPSTR 2009. LNCS, vol. 6037, pp. 52–66. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Kamin, S., Lévy, J.J.: Two generalizations of the recursive path ordering (1980, unpublished note)Klop, J.W.: Term rewriting systems: a tutorial. Bull. Eur. Assoc. Theor. Comput. Sci. 32, 143–183 (1987)Koprowski, A., Zantema, H.: Proving liveness with fairness using rewriting. In: Gramlich, B. (ed.) FroCos 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3717, pp. 232–247. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Koprowski, A.: TPA: termination proved automatically. In: Pfenning, F. (ed.) RTA 2006. LNCS, vol. 4098, pp. 257–266. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Korp, M., Sternagel, C., Zankl, H., Middeldorp, A.: Tyrolean termination tool 2. In: Treinen, R. (ed.) RTA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5595, pp. 295–304. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Lankford, D.: Canonical algebraic simplification in computational logic. Technical report ATP-25, University of Texas (1975)Liu, J., Dershowitz, N., Jouannaud, J.-P.: Confluence by critical pair analysis. In: Dowek, G. (ed.) RTA-TLCA 2014. LNCS, vol. 8560, pp. 287–302. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)Nishida, N., Sakai, M., Sakabe, T.: Narrowing-based simulation of term rewriting systems with extra variables. ENTCS 86(3), 52–69 (2003)Nishida, N., Vidal, G.: Termination of narrowing via termination of rewriting. Appl. Algebra Eng. Commun. Comput. 21(3), 177–225 (2010)Ohlebusch, E.: Advanced Topics in Term Rewriting. Springer-Verlag, London (2002)Thiemann, R., Allais, G., Nagele, J.: On the formalization of termination techniques based on multiset orderings. In: RTA 2012. LIPIcs, vol. 15, pp. 339–354. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2012)Vidal, G.: Termination of narrowing in left-linear constructor systems. In: Garrigue, J., Hermenegildo, M.V. (eds.) FLOPS 2008. LNCS, vol. 4989, pp. 113–129. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Yamada, A., Kusakari, K., Sakabe, T.: Nagoya termination tool. In: Dowek, G. (ed.) RTA-TLCA 2014. LNCS, vol. 8560, pp. 466–475. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)Yamada, A., Kusakari, K., Sakabe, T.: A unified ordering for termination proving. Sci. Comput. Program. (2014). doi: 10.1016/j.scico.2014.07.009Zantema, H.: Termination of term rewriting by semantic labelling. Fundamenta Informaticae 24(1/2), 89–105 (1995)Zantema, H.: Termination. In: Bezem, M., Klop, J.W., de Vrijer, R. (eds.) Term Rewriting Systems. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 55, pp. 181–259. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003

Absence of Ground States for a Class of Translation Invariant Models of Non-relativistic QED

We consider a class of translation invariant models of non-relativistic QED with net charge. Under certain natural assumptions we prove that ground states do not exist in the Fock space

Stochastic modeling of cargo transport by teams of molecular motors

Many different types of cellular cargos are transported bidirectionally along microtubules by teams of molecular motors. The motion of this cargo-motors system has been experimentally characterized in vivo as processive with rather persistent directionality. Different theoretical approaches have been suggested in order to explore the origin of this kind of motion. An effective theoretical approach, introduced by M\"uller et al., describes the cargo dynamics as a tug-of-war between different kinds of motors. An alternative approach has been suggested recently by Kunwar et al., who considered the coupling between motor and cargo in more detail. Based on this framework we introduce a model considering single motor positions which we propagate in continuous time. Furthermore, we analyze the possible influence of the discrete time update schemes used in previous publications on the system's dynamic.Comment: Cenference proceedings - Traffic and Granular Flow 1

First-order formative rules

This paper discusses the method of formative rules for first-order term rewriting, which was previously defined for a higher-order setting. Dual to the well-known usable rules, formative rules allow dropping some of the term constraints that need to be solved during a termination proof. Compared to the higher-order definition, the first-order setting allows for significant improvements of the technique