Information/Control – Control in the Age of Post-Truth: An Introduction

Guest editors Stacy E. Wood, James Lowry, and Andrew J Lau introduce the issue on Information/Control – Control in the Age of Post-Truth

Exploiting the origins of Ras mediated squamous cell carcinoma to develop novel therapeutic interventions

The small GTPase Ras is activated in a high proportion of human cancers. Attempts to clinically block Ras activity through pharmacological means has proven largely ineffective thus far. We employed an inducible mouse model of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) to study the effect of Ras activation and show that hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs) are a cell of origin for SCC, whereas their more restricted progeny cannot serve as cancer cells of origin and are refractory to Ras activation. We propose that by identifying the unique mechanisms by which HFSCs are mobilized to initiate Ras mediated tumorigenesis, the molecular process behind SCC can be more completely elucidated and context dependent activities for Ras more clearly defined. Here, we summarize our recent results and point to future experiments designed to create novel therapeutics by exploiting the differential sensitivities of various cells within the epidermis to Ras activation

Identification of optimum temperatures for photosynthetic production in subtropical coastal ecosystems – implications for CO2 sequestration in a warming world

Terrestrial ecosystems are often thought to be effective sinks of anthropogenic CO2 emissions with biosphere greening considered unequivocal evidence of this process. Increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 along with other greenhouse gases are however, responsible for global warming. As temperature increases, the rate at which biomes sequester CO2 may decline as the optimum temperature for photosynthetic production is exceeded, thereby reducing their potential to sequester CO2. Here we present evidence from three years of direct measurements of CO2 exchanges over subtropical coastal ecosystems in eastern Australia, that the optimum temperature range for photosynthesis of 24.1 to 27.4 °C is routinely exceeded. This causes a rapid decline in photosynthetic production made worse when soil water content decreases. As climate change continues, both rising temperatures and predicted decline in rainfall will see these coastal ecosystems ability to sequester CO2 decrease further rapidly. We suggest similar research is needed urgently over other terrestrial ecosystems

Undergraduate Research as Pedagogy: Resisting Reproduction by Studying Novice Teachers

In this study, we (a university professor and four undergraduate researchers) conducted an autoethnography to explore the perceptions of the four undergraduate researchers as we studied the decision-making of novice teachers regarding literacy assessment and instruction. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus, the undergraduate researchers learned about the cycle of pedagogical reproduction that often occurs in the first years of teaching. This knowledge provided them with the capital to develop strategies for finding a good-fit teaching position as they entered the teaching profession and to acquire a problem-solving mindset to strategically implement the literacy practices they learned about in their teacher education programs

Ensemble Properties of Comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present the ensemble properties of 31 comets (27 resolved and 4 unresolved) observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This sample of comets represents about 1 comet per 10 million SDSS photometric objects. Five-band (u,g,r,i,z) photometry is used to determine the comets' colors, sizes, surface brightness profiles, and rates of dust production in terms of the Af{\rho} formalism. We find that the cumulative luminosity function for the Jupiter Family Comets in our sample is well fit by a power law of the form N(< H) \propto 10(0.49\pm0.05)H for H < 18, with evidence of a much shallower fit N(< H) \propto 10(0.19\pm0.03)H for the faint (14.5 < H < 18) comets. The resolved comets show an extremely narrow distribution of colors (0.57 \pm 0.05 in g - r for example), which are statistically indistinguishable from that of the Jupiter Trojans. Further, there is no evidence of correlation between color and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters for the observed comets.Comment: 19 pages, 8 tables, 11 figures, to appear in Icaru

The proposed Caroline ESA M3 mission to a Main Belt Comet

We describe Caroline, a mission proposal submitted to the European Space Agency in 2010 in response to the Cosmic Visions M3 call for medium-sized missions. Caroline would have travelled to a Main Belt Comet (MBC), characterizing the object during a flyby, and capturing dust from its tenuous coma for return to Earth. MBCs are suspected to be transition objects straddling the traditional boundary between volatile–poor rocky asteroids and volatile–rich comets. The weak cometary activity exhibited by these objects indicates the presence of water ice, and may represent the primary type of object that delivered water to the early Earth. The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals. Caroline was ultimately not selected by the European Space Agency during the M3 call; we briefly reflect on the pros and cons of the mission as proposed, and how current and future mission MBC mission proposals such as Castalia could best be approached

Models of Resistance: Novice Teachers Negotiating Barriers to Best Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine how graduates from three teacher education programs made decisions regarding literacy instruction and assessment as well as the extent to which they were able to implement practices learned in their education programs. Participants were interviewed and observed multiple times, and a variety of documents, such as lesson plans, assessments, and journal prompts, were collected. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Although the participants initially accepted the existing practices of their schools, they later implemented concepts learned in their education programs. The ways in which they resisted the barriers they faced included resistance with conflict, resistance with an attitude, resistance with relationship, and resistance by making a change

AMPHION: Specification-based programming for scientific subroutine libraries

AMPHION is a knowledge-based software engineering (KBSE) system that guides a user in developing a diagram representing a formal problem specification. It then automatically implements a solution to this specification as a program consisting of calls to subroutines from a library. The diagram provides an intuitive domain oriented notation for creating a specification that also facilitates reuse and modification. AMPHION'S architecture is domain independent. AMPHION is specialized to an application domain by developing a declarative domain theory. Creating a domain theory is an iterative process that currently requires the joint expertise of domain experts and experts in automated formal methods for software development

Sharing and visualizing environmental data using Virtual Globes

Virtual globe technology holds many exciting possibilities for environmental science. These easy-to-use, intuitive systems provide means for simultaneously visualizing four-dimensional environmental data from many different sources, enabling the generation of new hypotheses and driving greater understanding of the Earth system. Through the use of simple markup languages, scientists can publish and consume data in interoperable formats without the need for technical assistance. In this paper we give, with examples from our own work, a number of scientific uses for virtual globes, demonstrating their particular advantages. We explain how we have used Web Services to connect virtual globes with diverse data sources and enable more sophisticated usage such as data analysis and collaborative visualization. We also discuss the current limitations of the technology, with particular regard to the visualization of subsurface data and vertical sections

Age truncation and portfolio effects in Puget Sound Pacific herring

Forage fish undergo dramatic changes in abundance through time. Long-term fluctuations, which have historically been attributed to changes in recruitment, may also be due to changes in adult mortality. Pacific herring, a lightly exploited forage fish in Puget Sound, WA, have exhibited shifts in age structure and decreases in spawning biomass during the past 30 years. Here, we investigate changes in adult mortality as a potential explanation for these shifts. Using a hierarchical, age-structured population model, we indicate that adult natural mortality for Puget Sound Pacific herring has increased since 1973. We find that natural mortality has increased for every age class of adult (age 3+), especially age 4 fish, whose estimated mortality has doubled over the survey time period (from M=0.84 to M=1.76). We demonstrate that long-term shifts in mortality explain changes in age structure, and may explain biomass declines and failure to reach management thresholds for some spawning sites in Puget Sound. Temporal shifts in natural adult mortality could have negative implications for herring and herring predators. For predators, these implications include a reduction in the stability of the herring resource