The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Relative size perception at a distance is best at eye level

Relative size judgments were collected for two objects at 30.5 m and 23.8 m from the observer in order to assess how performance depends on the relationship between the size of the objects and the eye level of the observer. In three experiments in an indoor hallway and in one experiment outdoors, accuracy was higher for objects in the neighborhood of eye level. We consider these results in the light of two hypotheses. One proposes that observers localize the horizon as a reference for judging relative size, and the other proposes that observers perceive the general neighborhood of the horizon and then employ a height-in-visual-field heuristic. The finding that relative size judgments are best around the horizon implies that information that is independent of distance perception is used in perceiving size. Size constancy and size perception at a distance are old problems with theoretical implications for the nature of the perceptual process. Is perception of size derived inferentially from information about distance? Does perception of size rely on the general characteristics of the terrestrial environment in which we evolved? The current studies focus on the use of one source of information abou

Art and Aging: Digital Projects for Individuals With Dementia

In action teaching, assignments are created that simultaneously benefit students and society by directly connecting classroom material to a community intervention. We designed an entire course rooted in the principles of action teaching in which students facilitated the positive effects of art, nature, and music on the well-being of individuals diagnosed with dementia. Groups of three students worked with a local elderly couple, one member of whom had dementia, to create multimedia digital projects (e.g., online scrapbooks, interactive DVDs) involving experiences with art or nature tailored to the needs of their specific community partners. Students met weekly with their assigned couple to discuss their families’ interests, goals for the project, and to obtain feedback on the impact of their project on their families’ well-being. Through these weekly meetings, students took an iterative approach to designing and improving their final projects, applying material learned through classroom lectures to their projects. In this field experience, students went beyond traditional lecture learning by developing a customized project that promoted the well-being of someone experiencing dementia. This course fostered values of citizenship, developed students’ research skills, and highlighted the reciprocal nature between knowledge learned in the classroom and knowledge acquired through real-world experiences

Cooperative bimanual action

We present an experiment on cooperative bimanual action. Right-handed subjects manipulated a pair of physical objects, a tool and a target object, so that the tool would touch a target on the object @g. 1). For this task, there is a marked specialization of the hands. Performance is best when the left hand orients the target object and the right hand manipulates the tool, but is significantly reduced when these roles are reversed. This suggests that the right hand operates relative to the frame-of-reference of the left hand. Furthermore, when physical constraints guide the tool placement, this fundamentally changes the type of motor control required. The task is tremendously simplified for both hands, and reversing roles of the hands is no longer an important factor. Thus, specialization of the roles of the hands is significant only for skilled manipulation