Data in Depth: Web 3-D Technologies Provide New Approaches to the Presentation of Course Content

For nearly two decades, the Web has provided the classroom with vast, ever-expanding volumes of browseraccessible information. As the web has evolved so too has our desire to become more involved with the process of content-creation and content-sharing. Now new web-based technologies look to provide smarter, more meaningful content and present that content with a new level of depth and interactivity. No longer are faculty and students browsing for information that is largely static; instead, these users are interacting through their three-dimensional (3-D) proxies (their avatars) and are querying applications (semantic web agents) soliciting them to collect, filter, verify, correlate, and present answers to their queries. Yet, all of this capability is not without potential challenges. There is an evolving need for faculty and students to find and build out new structure in their 3-D virtual surroundings that visually enables their content, making it more palatable to the user while presenting it in a 3-D format verses the typical 2-D format that has been the mainstay for the past two decades. With the maturation of virtual world (3-D Web) and semantic web technologies, the web-based content available in the classroom increases exponentially and takes on a new look. Following a brief overview of these two technologies and their overall impact in the classroom, this article presents several practical approaches for presenting course content in 3-D Web environments based on recent implementation efforts. In- World lectures and lab assignments, project team briefing sessions, student mentoring activities, and open conference forums are just a few of the areas discussed. Further discussions also focus on setup and future evaluation studies planned in the near-term to further evaluate course content presentation techniques

Design Considerations for Virtual Classroom and Laboratory Environments

With the ever-increasing demand for distance education one of the key challenges facing faculty is not only delivering effective instruction through both lecture-style and laboratory means, but also giving students an environment with a sense of presence. The key challenge here is to improve on the distance student‟s capabilities for interaction and collaboration thereby enhancing their ability to work in more group and team settings. In short, virtual environments present distance students with exciting new forums for meeting and sharing their thoughts and ideas in real-time. Today‟s virtual environments like Second Life (SL) provide students with open-ended opportunities for exploration and invention. This has broad reaching implications for faculty, and allows for the delivery of course content in stimulating and highly engaging manners. However, before these virtual environments can be implemented as academic tools, virtual spaces in the form of classrooms and laboratories need to be designed and developed to facilitate student and faculty interaction. This effort describes considerations made when designing some of the early virtual classroom and laboratory spaces developed within a newly established virtual campus. Once these spaces were built, class sessions were conducted and the students were surveyed in order to document their first impressions of the experience. Finally, the survey responses are analyzed and consideration is made for the establishment of design criteria for further virtual site development

Enhancing the Distance Learning Experience: Designing Virtual Classroom and Laboratory Environments

New virtual environments are evolving to a point where academics can visualize the benefits of these more socially interactive distance media. A first step in evaluating these virtual environments is to build virtual classrooms, meeting spaces, and laboratories that look to improve the distance student‟s ability to collaborate and interact. The next step is to identify new ways to interface with existing classroom and lab materials. The goal is to accelerate the process of building out new virtual course offerings and also provide distance-based class platforms for further study and analysis. Finally, evaluating the effectiveness of these newly built virtual classrooms and laboratories is critical to any proposed pedagogical presentation. Current efforts have focused on the building of several classroom and laboratory environments in the Second Life virtual space. Discussion includes efforts to identify, design and develop virtual environments that enhance the learning experience for distance students. Further observations describe the conduct of several other academic events conducted in these newly established virtual spaces including holding office hours, completing lab assignments, giving group presentations, working with student project teams, and conducting class lecture meetings virtually. This paper documents courses of action taken by the authors in the development of virtual classrooms, meeting spaces, and learning labs in the realm of Second Life where students and faculty can conduct effective and meaningful academic activities. Key discussion areas include choosing a virtual environment, virtual classroom and meeting room design considerations; virtual lab and workspace design considerations; preparations for successful initial virtual meetings; and a look toward future virtual design efforts

Snowmass 2021 Underground Facilities & Infrastructure Frontier Report

The decade since Snowmass 2013 has seen extraordinary progress of high energy physics research performed--or planned for--at underground facilities. Drs. T. Kajita and A.B. McDonald were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillation, which show that neutrinos have mass. The U.S. has embarked on the development of the world-class LBNF/DUNE science program to investigate neutrino properties. The Generation 2 dark matter program is advancing to full data collection in the coming 5 years, a Dark Matter New Initiatives program has begun, and the U.S. dark matter community is looking toward a Generation 3 program of large-scale dark matter direct detection searches. The Sanford Underground Research Facility has become a focal point for U.S. underground facilities and infrastructure investment. The status since the 2013 Snowmass process as well as the outcome from the 2014 P5 program of recommendations is reviewed. These are then evaluated based on the activities and discussions of the Snowmass 2021 process resulting in conclusions looking forward to the coming decade of high energy physics research performed in underground facilities.Comment: Snowmass 2021 Underground Facilities & Infrastructure Frontier Repor

Innovations in the development of socio-economic systems: microeconomic, macroeconomic and mesoeconomic levels. – Collective monograph. – Vol. 2. Lithuania: “Izdevnieciba “Baltija Publishing”, 2016. – 332 р.

The paper researches the state of economy clustering in the countries of the European Union. There are considered the legal and regulatory frameworks as well as informational regulations of the clustering processes in the European community. There is substantiated the urgency of the clustering issues along with the preeminence, the cluster participants are able to take advantage of. There is provided insight into the main EU organizations, indulged into the issues of clustering development. The Ukrainian experience in developing cluster initiatives as well as the state of their information support is analyzed. There are determined the factors, which negatively influence the information support to clustering processes in Ukraine. With the aim of improving the information support to clustering processes there are suggested measures, which include the improvement of legal and regulatory frameworks and information support to cluster economics

A geoneutrino experiment at Homestake

A significant fraction of the 44TW of heat dissipation from the Earth's interior is believed to originate from the decays of terrestrial uranium and thorium. The only estimates of this radiogenic heat, which is the driving force for mantle convection, come from Earth models based on meteorites, and have large systematic errors. The detection of electron antineutrinos produced by these uranium and thorium decays would allow a more direct measure of the total uranium and thorium content, and hence radiogenic heat production in the Earth. We discuss the prospect of building an electron antineutrino detector approximately 700m^3 in size in the Homestake mine at the 4850' level. This would allow us to make a measurement of the total uranium and thorium content with a statistical error less than the systematic error from our current knowledge of neutrino oscillation parameters. It would also allow us to test the hypothesis of a naturally occurring nuclear reactor at the center of the Earth.Comment: proceedings for Neutrino Sciences 2005, submitted to Earth, Moon, and Planet