Students\u27 Scientific Evaluations of Water Resources

Socially-relevant and controversial topics, such as water issues, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public (herein, students) find plausible. Students need to be more evaluative of the validity of explanations (e.g., explanatory models) based on evidence when addressing such topics. We compared two activities where students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations. In one activity, students were given four evidence statements and two models (one scientific and one non-scientific alternative); in the other, students chose four out of eight evidence statements and three models (two scientific and one non-scientific). Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that both activities engaged students\u27 evaluations and differentially shifted students\u27 plausibility judgments and knowledge. A structural equation model suggested that students\u27 evaluation may influence post-instructional plausibility and knowledge; when students chose their lines of evidence and explanatory models, their evaluations were deeper, with stronger shifts toward a scientific stance and greater levels of post-instructional knowledge. The activities may help to develop students\u27 critical evaluation skills, a scientific practice that is key to understanding both scientific content and science as a process. Although effect sizes were modest, the results provided critical information for the final development and testing stage of these water resource instructional activities

Just how difficult can it be counting up R&D funding for emerging technologies (and is tech mining with proxy measures going to be any better?)

Decision makers considering policy or strategy related to the development of emerging technologies expect high quality data on the support for different technological options. A natural starting point would be R&D funding statistics. This paper explores the limitations of such aggregated data in relation to the substance and quantification of funding for emerging technologies. Using biotechnology as an illustrative case, we test the utility of a novel taxonomy to demonstrate the endemic weaknesses in the availability and quality of data from public and private sources. Using the same taxonomy, we consider the extent to which tech-mining presents an alternative, or potentially complementary, way to determine support for emerging technologies using proxy measures such as patents and scientific publications

Observing the Evolution of the Universe

How did the universe evolve? The fine angular scale (l>1000) temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB are a Rosetta stone for understanding the evolution of the universe. Through detailed measurements one may address everything from the physics of the birth of the universe to the history of star formation and the process by which galaxies formed. One may in addition track the evolution of the dark energy and discover the net neutrino mass. We are at the dawn of a new era in which hundreds of square degrees of sky can be mapped with arcminute resolution and sensitivities measured in microKelvin. Acquiring these data requires the use of special purpose telescopes such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), located in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). These new telescopes are outfitted with a new generation of custom mm-wave kilo-pixel arrays. Additional instruments are in the planning stages.Comment: Science White Paper submitted to the US Astro2010 Decadal Survey. Full list of 177 author available at http://cmbpol.uchicago.ed

First attempt at measuring the CMB cross-polarization

We compute upper limits on CMB cross-polarization by cross-correlating the PIQUE and Saskatoon experiments. We also discuss theoretical and practical issues relevant to measuring cross-polarization and illustrate them with simulations of the upcoming BOOMERanG 2002 experiment. We present a method that separates all six polarization power spectra (TT, EE, BB, TE, TB, EB) without any other "leakage" than the familiar EE-BB mixing caused by incomplete sky coverage. Since E and B get mixed, one might expect leakage between TE and TB, between EE and EB and between BB and EB - our method eliminates this by preserving the parity symmetry under which TB and EB are odd and the other four power spectra are even.Comment: Polarization movies can be found at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/polarization.htm