Slaves to the Rhythm: An Approach to ITT Beyond Competence

This, our first article for the Journal of Design and Technology Education, introduces our thoughts on assessment as being at the heart of the curriculum. We believe that too often trainees are encouraged to see coursework assessment as a series of hoop jumping exercises rather than an aid to understanding their own performance and thus improving on it.We suggest that this might be so because, within the conflicting roles of assessment in both selection and diagnosis and remediation, selection so often wins out. Therefore, it is up to the tutor to seek out ways to reward the student for considering their own performance as a learner and importantly how to improve that performance.We put forward some tentative approaches we have used with initial teacher training (ITT) trainees to encourage the understanding of their own learning processes and development of schemata. It is our belief that the development metacognitive acti

The New Normal, Adjuncts and Part-Time Instructors

Department chairs are under increasing pressure from administration to replace departing full-time professors with adjuncts. The chair is faced with a challenging environment that includes navigating personalities, workloads, student perception, varied commitment levels, and meeting accreditation standards. Strategies are discussed as participants share ideas to navigate this complicated issue

Supporting Service-Learning in an Existing Curriculum

This group presentation is interactive and provides a solution-based approach to service-learning. Participants may be involved in a variety of ways such as taking part in small-group activities, role playing, case studies, simulations, problem solving or other hands-on instructional activities and will leave with service-learning ideas for their course(s)

Polyphase Laramide Structures and Possible Folded Tertiary(?) Sills at Dagger mountain, Big Bend National Park, Texas

Dagger Mountain, in Sierra del Carmen within Big Bend National Park, Texas, is a 5 km-long, doubly-plunging, southwest-vergent anticline adjacent to a doubly plunging syncline. Dagger Mountain lies near the eastern margins of the Cordilleran orogen and the Basin and Range province. Mapping at 1:12,000 scale reveals details about three phases of Laramide and Basin and Range structures. Mapping and descriptive structural analysis complement previous mapping at 1:12,000 – 1:75,000 scales (Poth, 1979; Moustafa, 1988; Cooper and others, 2011; Turner and others, 2011; Maxwell and others, 1967). Four distinctive formations of Cretaceous age crop out on Dagger Mountain: Santa Elena Limestone, Del Rio Clay, Buda Limestone, and Boquillas Formation. At least two phaneritic, mafic, feldpathoid-rich sills intrude the Boquillas Formation. A similar, possibly correlative sill south of Dagger Mountain is dated at 32.47 ± 0.41 Ma ( 40Ar/39 Ar on groundmass; Morgan and Shanks, 2008). One well-exposed Dagger Mountain sill can be traced from one map-scale fold limb, through the hinge, and into the other limb. The Dagger Mountain anticline is a first-phase (D1) fold. D1 map- and outcrop-scale folds contain subvertical NNW-striking axial planes and subhorizontal fold axes. Second-phase (D2) folds produced NNW and SSE plunges of the DM anticline. D2 map- and outcrop-scale folds display subvertical NE-striking axial planes and subhorizontal fold axes. Third-phase (D3) high-angle faults strike NNW and NW and cross-cut D1 folds and Tertiary sills. Drag during D3 faulting produced D3 folds. Dagger Mountain structures are significant because: a) few polyphase folds have been documented in the Big Bend region, b) the west-verging Dagger Mountain anticline and other D1 folds show fault-propagation fold characteristics, c) the apparently folded Tertiary(?) sill suggests that Laramide deformation at Dagger Mountain is post-32 Ma and unusually recent. Alternatively, the sill could be as old as Cretaceous, or the sill could have intruded both limbs and hinge of an existing fold

BLAST: Correlations in the Cosmic Far-Infrared Background at 250, 350, and 500 microns Reveal Clustering of Star-Forming Galaxies

We detect correlations in the cosmic far-infrared background due to the clustering of star-forming galaxies in observations made with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, BLAST, at 250, 350, and 500 microns. We perform jackknife and other tests to confirm the reality of the signal. The measured correlations are well fit by a power law over scales of 5-25 arcminutes, with Delta I/I = 15.1 +/- 1.7%. We adopt a specific model for submillimeter sources in which the contribution to clustering comes from sources in the redshift ranges 1.3 <= z <= 2.2, 1.5 <= z <= 2.7, and 1.7 <= z <= 3.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, respectively. With these distributions, our measurement of the power spectrum, P(k_theta), corresponds to linear bias parameters, b = 3.8 +/- 0.6, 3.9 +/- 0.6 and 4.4 +/- 0.7, respectively. We further interpret the results in terms of the halo model, and find that at the smaller scales, the simplest halo model fails to fit our results. One way to improve the fit is to increase the radius at which dark matter halos are artificially truncated in the model, which is equivalent to having some star-forming galaxies at z >= 1 located in the outskirts of groups and clusters. In the context of this model we find a minimum halo mass required to host a galaxy is log (M_min / M_sun) = 11.5 (+0.4/-0.1), and we derive effective biases $b_eff = 2.2 +/- 0.2, 2.4 +/- 0.2, and 2.6 +/- 0.2, and effective masses log (M_eff / M_sun) = 12.9 +/- 0.3, 12.8 +/- 0.2, and 12.7 +/- 0.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, corresponding to spatial correlation lengths of r_0 = 4.9, 5.0, and 5.2 +/- 0.7 h^-1 Mpc, respectively. Finally, we discuss implications for clustering measurement strategies with Herschel and Planck.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Maps and other results available at http://blastexperiment.info

Shared genome analyses of notable listeriosis outbreaks, highlighting the critical importance of epidemiological evidence, input datasets and interpretation criteria

The persuasiveness of genomic evidence has pressured scientific agencies to supplement or replace well-established methodologies to inform public health and food safety decision-making. This study of 52 epidemiologically defined Listeria monocytogenes isolates, collected between 1981 and 2011, including nine outbreaks, was undertaken (1) to characterize their phylogenetic relationship at finished genome-level resolution, (2) to elucidate the underlying genetic diversity within an endemic subtype, CC8, and (3) to re-evaluate the genetic relationship and epidemiology of a CC8-delimited outbreak in Canada in 2008. Genomes representing Canadian Listeria outbreaks between 1981 and 2010 were closed and manually annotated. Single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and horizontally acquired traits were used to generate phylogenomic models. Phylogenomic relationships were congruent with classical subtyping and epidemiology, except for CC8 outbreaks, wherein the distribution of SNV and prophages revealed multiple co-evolving lineages. Chronophyletic reconstruction of CC8 evolution indicates that prophage-related genetic changes among CC8 strains manifest as PFGE subtype reversions, obscuring the relationship between CC8 isolates, and complicating the public health interpretation of subtyping data, even at maximum genome resolution. The size of the shared genome interrogated did not change the genetic relationship measured between highly related isolates near the tips of the phylogenetic tree, illustrating the robustness of these approaches for routine public health applications where the focus is recent ancestry. The possibility exists for temporally and epidemiologically distinct events to appear related even at maximum genome resolution, highlighting the continued importance of epidemiological evidence

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Project Report No. 62, Site Index Equations for Loblolly and Slash Pine Plantations in East Texas, Update: Fall 1998

This update utilizes height-age pairs measured from 1982 - 1998. As a result, the number of observations available for analysis is 1,814 loblolly and 788 slash. It is anticipated that the equations in this Fall 1998 update may quantify the productivity of East Texas loblolly and slash pine plantations in a more accurate and reliable manner than the seven previous sets of equations

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie