Experiences of revalidating the undergraduate and postgraduate courses within the information systems curricula at University of Westminster, UK

Information systems (IS) is the commonly accepted title for academic programs focusing on applied information technology provided by a range of Universities in the UK. The University of Westminster based in central London has successfully run BSc and MSc courses in IS for more than a decade. The courses underwent a major revision in 2002 focusing on subject content, construction of courses and teaching/learning strategies. We address the purpose of course reviews within the UK higher education (HE) environment, gives a rationale for our curriculum changes, describes the revalidated IS courses at both BSc and MSc levels including our teaching and assessment strategies, and comments on our progress to date

Asteroids Observed by The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We announce the first public release of the SDSS Moving Object Catalog, with SDSS observations for 58,117 asteroids. The catalog lists astrometric and photometric data for moving objects observed prior to Dec 15, 2001, and also includes orbital elements for 10,592 previously known objects. We analyze the correlation between the orbital parameters and optical colors for the known objects, and confirm that asteroid dynamical families, defined as clusters in orbital parameter space, also strongly segregate in color space. Their distinctive optical colors indicate that the variations in chemical composition within a family are much smaller than the compositional differences between families, and strongly support earlier suggestions that asteroids belonging to a particular family have a common origin.Comment: 6 pages, 1 color figure, to be presented at "Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation", SPIE 200

Radio Astronomy in LSST Era

A community meeting on the topic of "Radio Astronomy in the LSST Era" was hosted by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, VA (2013 May 6--8). The focus of the workshop was on time domain radio astronomy and sky surveys. For the time domain, the extent to which radio and visible wavelength observations are required to understand several classes of transients was stressed, but there are also classes of radio transients for which no visible wavelength counterpart is yet known, providing an opportunity for discovery. From the LSST perspective, the LSST is expected to generate as many as 1 million alerts nightly, which will require even more selective specification and identification of the classes and characteristics of transients that can warrant follow up, at radio or any wavelength. The LSST will also conduct a deep survey of the sky, producing a catalog expected to contain over 38 billion objects in it. Deep radio wavelength sky surveys will also be conducted on a comparable time scale, and radio and visible wavelength observations are part of the multi-wavelength approach needed to classify and understand these objects. Radio wavelengths are valuable because they are unaffected by dust obscuration and, for galaxies, contain contributions both from star formation and from active galactic nuclei. The workshop touched on several other topics, on which there was consensus including the placement of other LSST "Deep Drilling Fields," inter-operability of software tools, and the challenge of filtering and exploiting the LSST data stream. There were also topics for which there was insufficient time for full discussion or for which no consensus was reached, which included the procedures for following up on LSST observations and the nature for future support of researchers desiring to use LSST data products.Comment: Conference summary, 29 pages, 1 figure; to be published in the Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific; full science program and presentations available at http://science.nrao.edu/science/event/RALSST201

Neutron Rich Hypernuclei in Chiral Soliton Model

The binding energies of neutron rich strangeness $S=-1$ hypernuclei are estimated in the chiral soliton approach using the bound state rigid oscillator version of the SU(3) quantization model. Additional binding of strange hypernuclei in comparison with nonstrange neutron rich nuclei takes place at not large values of atomic (baryon) numbers, $A=B\leq\sim 10$. This effect becomes stronger with increasing isospin of nuclides, and for "nuclear variant" of the model with rescaled Skyrme constant $e$. Total binding energies of (Lambda)He-8 and recently discovered (Lambda)H-6 satisfactorily agree with experimental data. Hypernuclei (Lambda)H-7, (Lambda)He-9 are predicted to be bound stronger in comparison with their nonstrange analogues H-7, He-9; hypernuclei (Lambda)Li-10, (Lambda)Li-11, (Lambda)Be-12, (Lambda)Be-13, etc. are bound stronger in the nuclear variant of the model.Comment: 8 pages, 4 tables; amendments made, data on binding energy of (Lambda)He-8 and references added; prepared for the conferences Quarks-2012 and HYP201