70,818 research outputs found
Shaping Attitudes Toward Science in an Introductory Astronomy Class
At many universities, astronomy is a popular way for non-science majors to
fulfill a general education requirement. Because general-education astronomy
may be the only college-level science course taken by these students, it is the
last chance to shape the science attitudes of these future journalists,
teachers, politicians, and voters. I report on an attempt to measure and induce
changes in science attitudes in my general-education astronomy course. I
describe construction of the attitude survey, classroom activities designed to
influence attitudes, and give numerical results indicating a significant
improvement. In contrast, the literature on attitudes in introductory physics
courses generally reports stagnation or decline. I briefly comment on some
plausible explanations for this difference.Comment: v2 includes a copy of the surve
Tribal Corridor Management Planning: Model, Case Study, and Guide for Caltrans District 1, Research Report 10-01
In Northern California, tribal governments and personnel of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 1, have applied innovative context-sensitive solutions to meet a variety of transportation challenges along state highways that traverse tribal lands. This report describes and discusses the efforts under way and offer suggestions for continuing and extending these initiatives through the development of Tribal Corridor Management Plans (TCMPs). The methods employed in this project are multidisciplinary and include: (1) content analysis of existing corridor management plans; (2) literature review to identify “best practices;” (3) participant observation; (4) interviews with local stakeholders; (5) focus group interviews with Caltrans personnel; and (6) landscape analysis. This study’s authors conclude that Caltrans District 1 staff and tribal governments share common goals for highway operations; however, progress —while significant—has been somewhat hampered by geographic and administrative challenges. It is recommended that Caltrans and the tribes seek early and frequent communication and collaboration to overcome these obstacles. Further, they identify several examples of non-standard design elements that could be incorporated into highway improvements to enhance local sense of place among both residents and travelers. A preliminary TCMP for the segment of State Route 96 that lies within the boundaries of the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation is presented as an example. Beyond its role as a guide for initiating tribal corridor projects within Caltrans District 1, the report should prove instructive for any efforts to enhance sense of place within transportation byways, particularly in Native communities
An investigation into the performance and representation of a stochastic evolutionary neural tree
Copyright Springer.The Stochastic Competitive Evolutionary Neural Tree (SCENT) is a new unsupervised neural net that dynamically evolves a representational structure in response to its training data. Uniquely SCENT requires no initial parameter setting as it autonomously creates appropriate parameterisation at runtime. Pruning and convergence are stochastically controlled using locally calculated heuristics. A thorough investigation into the performance of SCENT is presented. The network is compared to other dynamic tree based models and to a high quality flat clusterer over a variety of data sets and runs
Chemistry vs. Physics: A Comparison of How Biology Majors View Each Discipline
A student's beliefs about science and learning science may be more or less sophisticated depending on the specific science discipline. In this study, we used the physics and chemistry versions of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) to measure student beliefs in the large, introductory physics and chemistry courses, respectively. We compare how biology majors -- generally required to take both of the courses -- view these two disciplines. We find that these students' beliefs are more sophisticated about physics (more like the experts in that discipline) than they are about chemistry. At the start of the term, the average % Overall Favorable score on the CLASS is 59% in physics and 53% in chemistry. The students' responses are statistically more expert-like in physics than in chemistry on 10 statements (P lesser-than-or-equal-to 0.01), indicating that these students think chemistry is more about memorizing disconnected pieces of information and sample problems, and has less to do with the real world. In addition, these students' view of chemistry degraded over the course of the term. Their favorable scores shifted -5.7% and -13.5% in 'Overall' and the 'Real World Connection' category, respectively; in the physics course, which used a variety of research-based teaching practices, these scores shifted 0.0% and +0.3%, respectively. The chemistry shifts are comparable to those previously observed in traditional introductory physics courses
Oersted Medal Lecture 2007: Interactive simulations for teaching physics: What works, what doesn't, and why
We give an overview of the Physics Educational Technology (PhET) project to research and develop web-based interactive simulations for teaching and learning physics. The design philosophy, simulation development and testing process, and range of available simulations are described. The highlights of PhET research on simulation design and effectiveness in a variety of educational settings are provided. This work has shown that a well-designed interactive simulation can be an engaging and effective tool for learning physics
Slope of the topological susceptibility at zero temperature and finite temperature in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model
We estimate the slope of the topological susceptibility in the three flavour
Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with the 't Hooft interaction. The results are
consistent with the evaluation from the QCD sum rule in favour of the full
topological susceptibility. We apply it to the Shore-Veneziano formula to find
that it shows satisfactory agreement with the anomalous suppression of the
flavour-singlet axial charge. The behaviour at finite temperature is also
discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Lett.
Deep neutral hydrogen observations of Leo T with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
Leo T is the lowest mass gas-rich galaxy currently known and studies of its
gas content help us understand how such marginal galaxies survive and form
stars. We present deep neutral hydrogen (HI) observations from the Westerbork
Synthesis Radio Telescope in order to understand its HI distribution and
potential for star formation. We find a larger HI line flux than the previously
accepted value, resulting in a 50% larger HI mass of 4.1 x 10^5 Msun. The
additional HI flux is from low surface brightness emission that was previously
missed; with careful masking this emission can be recovered even in shallower
data. We perform a Gaussian spectral decomposition to find a cool neutral
medium component (CNM) with a mass of 3.7 x 10^4 Msun, or almost 10% of the
total HI mass. Leo T has no HI emission extending from the main HI body, but
there is evidence of interaction with the Milky Way circumgalactic medium in
both a potential truncation of the HI body and the offset of the peak HI
distribution from the optical center. The CNM component of Leo T is large when
compared to other dwarf galaxies, even though Leo T is not currently forming
stars and has a lower star formation efficiency than other gas-rich dwarf
galaxies. However, the HI column density associated with the CNM component in
Leo T is low. One possible explanation is the large CNM component is not
related to star formation potential but rather a recent, transient phenomenon
related to the interaction of Leo T with the Milky Way circumgalactic medium.Comment: accepted for publication in A&A; 12 pages, 13 figure
- …