The Drive to Create an Assessment Plan: A Department Head\u27s Roadmap

In an effort to become a data-driven department, the Head of Faculty and Graduate Services, in collaboration with the Office of Library Planning & Assessment, introduced a strategy for developing an assessment plan to instill a culture of assessment in the department; help team members gain confidence in the practice; and effectively utilize in-house resources to create a practical approach to assessment. A three-prong approach is proposed. Destination: Instill a culture of assessment by demonstrating to the team that assessment can be applied on an everyday level, and can lead to effective decision making. Route: Team members participate in a simple assessment project that gives actionable results quickly. A case study will be discussed. Destination: Help team members gain confidence in assessment. Route: Give team members a strong foundation in the various areas of assessment by inviting experts to conduct training. The goal is to equip members with the ability to ask the right questions, and develop their own basic tool boxes. Destination: Effectively utilize in-house resources. Route: Collaborate closely with the Office of Library Planning and Assessment to develop a systematic consulting service for the team. This presentation will be a progress report of the implementation of this roadmap

New Perspectives in Leadership: How to Lead from the Middle with Evidence-Based Decision Making: A Conversation with a New Department Head

An interview with Adriana Gonzalez, head of the faculty and Graduate Services Department at Kansas State University (K-State) Libraries is presented. She relates how she became convinced that high value should be placed on assessment. She suggests several ways for instilling confidence in team members. She describes her approach to creating an assessment plan for her department

Debunking Misconceptions

Students will have spent much of the semester learning about the history of race in American culture from its beginnings up until 1877. This not only includes the history of slavery, but also the racialization of indigenous peoples and various groups of immigrants (including those today deemed “white”). Students will also have studied key concepts and theories central to racial studies, such as proto-racism, racial formation, racial justice, biological racism, etc. We encourage them to interrogate the concept of race as natural and to consider how race is ideological and how it evolves over time. We also explore how we behave, practice, and enact our lives according to these ideologies and consequently experience race as something that is real. Through this foundational historical and ideological context, they will have a vantage point to reflect back on how their notions about race have evolved throughout the semester.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/inclusion-initiative-prompts/1006/thumbnail.jp

AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF IS STRATEGY AND IS CONTRIBUTION TO FIRM PERFORMANCE

Given the important impact that an IS strategy has on the potential value IS brings to an organization, we develop and test a model of IS Strategy and Performance. Our survey-based study provides strong evidence that firms with defined IS strategies perform better than those without defined IS strategies. Our study also provides evidence that the two IS defined strategies -- IS Innovator and IS Conservative -- contribute in very different ways to firm performance: the IS Innovator strategy contributes to strategic growth whereas the IS Conservative strategy contributes to firm efficiency. Organizations without a clearly defined IS strategy experienced a negative contribution of IS to firm performance. The different types of performance had differing affects on satisfaction with the IS department and satisfaction with the CIO such that CIOs overseeing an Innovator strategy experience lower satisfaction from their organizations than do CIOs overseeing a Conservative strategy. The lowest performance and satisfaction levels were seen in firms with no IS strategy. Firms with no IS strategy should realize the negative outcomes of such a lack of strategy and work to extricate themselves before a consistent pattern of investing in IS without clear organizational benefit develops

Evidence of vacuum birefringence from the polarisation of the optical emission from an Isolated Neutron Star

Isolated Neutron Stars are some of the most exciting stellar objects known to astronomers: they have the most extreme magnetic fields, with values up to $10^{15}$ G, and, with the exception of stellar-mass black holes, they are the most dense stars, with densities of $\approx 10^{14}$ g cm$^{-3}$. As such, they are perfect laboratories to test theories of electromagnetism and nuclear physics under conditions of magnetic field and density unattainable on Earth. In particular, the interaction of radiation with strong magnetic fields is the cause of the {\em vacuum birefringence}, an effect predicted by quantum electrodynamics in 1936 but that lacked an observational evidence until now. Here, we show how the study of the polarisation of the optical radiation from the surface of an isolated neutron star yielded such an observational evidence, opening exciting perspectives for similar studies at other wavelengths.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Contributed to the 13th Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs, Thessaloniki, May 15 to 19, 201

Decomposing Complex Queries for Tip-of-the-tongue Retrieval

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries

Charge dynamics and spin blockade in a hybrid double quantum dot in silicon

Electron spin qubits in silicon, whether in quantum dots or in donor atoms, have long been considered attractive qubits for the implementation of a quantum computer due to the semiconductor vacuum character of silicon and its compatibility with the microelectronics industry. While donor electron spins in silicon provide extremely long coherence times and access to the nuclear spin via the hyperfine interaction, quantum dots have the complementary advantages of fast electrical operations, tunability and scalability. Here we present an approach to a novel hybrid double quantum dot by coupling a donor to a lithographically patterned artificial atom. Using gate-based rf reflectometry, we probe the charge stability of this double quantum dot system and the variation of quantum capacitance at the interdot charge transition. Using microwave spectroscopy, we find a tunnel coupling of 2.7 GHz and characterise the charge dynamics, which reveals a charge T2* of 200 ps and a relaxation time T1 of 100 ns. Additionally, we demonstrate spin blockade at the inderdot transition, opening up the possibility to operate this coupled system as a singlet-triplet qubit or to transfer a coherent spin state between the quantum dot and the donor electron and nucleus.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, supplementary information (3 pages, 4 figures

DNA Oxidation Photoinduced by Norharmane Rhenium(I) Polypyridyl Complexes: Effect of the Bidentate N,N′-Ligands on the Damage Profile

ReI-polypyridyl complexes have interesting and distinctive photochemical and photosensitizing properties. This work describes the capability to induce (or photoinduce) DNA damage of three ReI-complexes with a naturally occurring alkaloid called norharmane (nHo) as ligand: [Re(CO)3(nHo)(L)]CF3SO3 where L=2,2′-bipyridine (ReBpy), phenanthroline (RePhen) or dipyrido[3,2-a:2′,3′-c]phenazine (ReDppz). The interaction of the complexes with DNA was investigated by steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopy. Data show that the mode and strength of interaction depend on the chemical structure of the bidentate ligand. The complexes show a major static contribution to the overall interaction, giving rise to the formation of noncovalent adducts with DNA, and the particular trend observed was RePhen>ReDppz>ReBpy. Photo-oxidation at the purine bases represents the major DNA damaging mechanism. RePhen also induces single-strand breaks in a yield similar to that of base damage, suggesting an additional photosensitizing pathway. We also performed the Ames test to evaluate the cytotoxic and mutagenic properties of both non-irradiated and photoexcited complexes. RePhen, but not the other complexes, turned out to be both toxic and phototoxic for the bacteria.Fil: Maisuls, Iván. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús). Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús); ArgentinaFil: Cabrerizo, Franco Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús). Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas. Instituto de Investigaciones Biotecnológicas "Dr. Raúl Alfonsín" (sede Chascomús); ArgentinaFil: David Gara, Pedro Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Investigaciones Ópticas. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigaciones Ópticas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Centro de Investigaciones Ópticas; ArgentinaFil: Epe, Bernd. Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz; AlemaniaFil: Ruiz, Gustavo Teodosio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas; Argentin

A Frequency Comb calibrated Solar Atlas

The solar spectrum is a primary reference for the study of physical processes in stars and their variation during activity cycles. In Nov 2010 an experiment with a prototype of a Laser Frequency Comb (LFC) calibration system was performed with the HARPS spectrograph of the 3.6m ESO telescope at La Silla during which high signal-to-noise spectra of the Moon were obtained. We exploit those Echelle spectra to study the optical integrated solar spectrum . The DAOSPEC program is used to measure solar line positions through gaussian fitting in an automatic way. We first apply the LFC solar spectrum to characterize the CCDs of the HARPS spectrograph. The comparison of the LFC and Th-Ar calibrated spectra reveals S-type distortions on each order along the whole spectral range with an amplitude of +/-40 m/s. This confirms the pattern found by Wilken et al. (2010) on a single order and extends the detection of the distortions to the whole analyzed region revealing that the precise shape varies with wavelength. A new data reduction is implemented to deal with CCD pixel inequalities to obtain a wavelength corrected solar spectrum. By using this spectrum we provide a new LFC calibrated solar atlas with 400 line positions in the range of 476-530, and 175 lines in the 534-585 nm range. The new LFC atlas improves the accuracy of individual lines by a significant factor reaching a mean value of about 10 m/s. The LFC--based solar line wavelengths are essentially free of major instrumental effects and provide a reference for absolute solar line positions. We suggest that future LFC observations could be used to trace small radial velocity changes of the whole solar photospheric spectrum in connection with the solar cycle and for direct comparison with the predicted line positions of 3D radiative hydrodynamical models of the solar photosphere.Comment: Accept on the 15th of October 2013. 9 pages, 10 figures. ON-lINE data A&A 201