A Case Study in Getting Faculty to Change

Academic support professionals have a lot to share with faculty, but it is our special challenge that faculty do not always welcome our help. We can achieve greater success and suffer less frustration by understanding some principles about the process of change. This article offers four principles of implementing change and illustrates their application to a project. If academic support professionals prepare to offset resistance, model a vision of success, involve key people, and match strategies to the stages faculty move through in accepting a change, we can enhance adoption of new approaches

What do we learn from correlations of local and global network properties?

In complex networks a common task is to identify the most important or "central" nodes. There are several definitions, often called centrality measures, which often lead to different results. Here we study extensively correlations between four local and global measures namely the degree, the shortest-path-betweenness, the random-walk betweenness and the subgraph centrality on different random-network models like Erdos-Renyi, Small-World and Barabasi-Albert as well as on different real networks like metabolic pathways, social collaborations and computer networks. Correlations are quite different between the real networks and the model networks questioning whether the models really reflect all important properties of the real world

Population based Ant Colony Optmization on FPGA

We propose to modify a type of ant algorithm called Population based Ant Colony Optimization (P-ACO) to allow implementation on an FPGA architecture. Ant algorithms are adapted from the natural behavior of ants and used to find good solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. General layout on the FPGA and algorithmic description are covered. The most notable achievements featured in this paper are a runtime reduction and including the approximation of the heuristic function by a small set of favored decisions which changes over time

Adaptive structure tensors and their applications

The structure tensor, also known as second moment matrix or Förstner interest operator, is a very popular tool in image processing. Its purpose is the estimation of orientation and the local analysis of structure in general. It is based on the integration of data from a local neighborhood. Normally, this neighborhood is defined by a Gaussian window function and the structure tensor is computed by the weighted sum within this window. Some recently proposed methods, however, adapt the computation of the structure tensor to the image data. There are several ways how to do that. This article wants to give an overview of the different approaches, whereas the focus lies on the methods based on robust statistics and nonlinear diffusion. Furthermore, the dataadaptive structure tensors are evaluated in some applications. Here the main focus lies on optic flow estimation, but also texture analysis and corner detection are considered

Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperatezone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues. The tropics are engines of Earth systems that regulate global cycles of carbon and water, and are thus critical for management of greenhouse gases. Compared with higher-latitude areas, tropical regions contain a greater diversity of biomes, organisms, and complexity of biological interactions. The tropics house the majority of the world’s human population and provide important global commodities from species that originated there: coffee, chocolate, palm oil, and species that yield the cancer drugs vincristine and vinblastine. Tropical regions, especially biodiversity hotspots, harbor zoonoses, thereby having an important role in emerging infectious diseases amidst the complex interactions of global environmental change and wildlife migration [1]. These well-known roles are oversimplified, but serve to highlight the global biological importance of tropical systems. Despite the importance of tropical regions, biology curricula worldwide generally lack coverage of tropical research. Given logistical, economic, or other barriers, it is difficult for undergraduate biology instructors to provide their students with field-based experience in tropical biology research in a diverse range of settings, an issue exacerbated by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Even in the tropics, field-based experience may be limited to home regions. When tropical biology is introduced in curricula, it is often through a temperate- zone lens that does not do justice to the distinct ecosystems, sociopolitical histories, and conservation issues that exist across tropical countries and regions [2]. The tropics are often caricatured as distant locations known for their remarkable biodiversity, complicated species interactions, and unchecked deforestation. This presentation, often originating from a colonial and culturally biased perspective, may fail to highlight the role of tropical ecosystems in global environmental and social challenges that accompany rising temperatures, worldwide biodiversity loss, zoonotic pandemics, and the environmental costs of ensuring food, water, and other ecosystem services for humans [3]

Highlights from the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest cosmic ray observatory. Our current exposure reaches nearly 40,000 km$^2$ str and provides us with an unprecedented quality data set. The performance and stability of the detectors and their enhancements are described. Data analyses have led to a number of major breakthroughs. Among these we discuss the energy spectrum and the searches for large-scale anisotropies. We present analyses of our X$_{max}$ data and show how it can be interpreted in terms of mass composition. We also describe some new analyses that extract mass sensitive parameters from the 100% duty cycle SD data. A coherent interpretation of all these recent results opens new directions. The consequences regarding the cosmic ray composition and the properties of UHECR sources are briefly discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, talk given at the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Rio de Janeiro 201

A search for point sources of EeV photons

Measurements of air showers made using the hybrid technique developed with the fluorescence and surface detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory allow a sensitive search for point sources of EeV photons anywhere in the exposed sky. A multivariate analysis reduces the background of hadronic cosmic rays. The search is sensitive to a declination band from -85{\deg} to +20{\deg}, in an energy range from 10^17.3 eV to 10^18.5 eV. No photon point source has been detected. An upper limit on the photon flux has been derived for every direction. The mean value of the energy flux limit that results from this, assuming a photon spectral index of -2, is 0.06 eV cm^-2 s^-1, and no celestial direction exceeds 0.25 eV cm^-2 s^-1. These upper limits constrain scenarios in which EeV cosmic ray protons are emitted by non-transient sources in the Galaxy.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Reconstruction of inclined air showers detected with the Pierre Auger Observatory

We describe the method devised to reconstruct inclined cosmic-ray air showers with zenith angles greater than $60^\circ$ detected with the surface array of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The measured signals at the ground level are fitted to muon density distributions predicted with atmospheric cascade models to obtain the relative shower size as an overall normalization parameter. The method is evaluated using simulated showers to test its performance. The energy of the cosmic rays is calibrated using a sub-sample of events reconstructed with both the fluorescence and surface array techniques. The reconstruction method described here provides the basis of complementary analyses including an independent measurement of the energy spectrum of ultra-high energy cosmic rays using very inclined events collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP