524 research outputs found
A Problem with STEM
Striking differences between physics and biology have important
implications for interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) education. I am a physicist
with interdisciplinary connections. The research group
in which I work, the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the
University of Texas at Austin, is converting into the physics
department home for biological physics. Many ofmycollaborations
have been with faculty in engineering. For the past 15
years, I have been codirector of the program at the University
of Texas at Austin that prepares secondary science and mathematics
teachers (UTeach, 2012). The future teachers take a
course on scientific research I developed and deliver together
with colleagues from biology, astronomy, chemistry, and biochemistry
(Marder, 2011). This background naturally makes
me an enthusiastic advocate of interdisciplinary education
at the secondary and undergraduate levels. Yet at the same
time, I am worried by some features of what may be coming.
These worries have to do with what can happen as we are all
lumped together under the heading of STEM.National Science FoundationPhysic
Numerical Method for Shock Front Hugoniot States
We describe a Continuous Hugoniot Method for the efficient simulation of
shock wave fronts. This approach achieves significantly improved efficiency
when the generation of a tightly spaced collection of individual steady-state
shock front states is desired, and allows for the study of shocks as a function
of a continuous shock strength parameter, . This is, to our knowledge, the
first attempt to map the Hugoniot continuously. We apply the method to shock
waves in Lennard-Jonesium along the direction. We obtain very good
agreement with prior simulations, as well as our own benchmark comparison runs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, from Shock Compression of Condensed Matter 200
“Higher than Actuality” - The Possibility of Phenomenology in Heidegger
This paper proceeds from a schematic analysis of Heidegger's notion of 'possibility' to consider the methodological significance of Heidegger's conception of what is essential in phenomenology as inhering not "in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement’", but in the understanding of phenomenology "as a possibility". In conclusion, the paper points to the efficacy of possibility and its mode of fulfilment as radically different from the actualization of latent potentiality.Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 5, Edition 2 December 200
Exilic Ecologies
A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast majority of ecosystems on the planet are subject to environmental upheavals and ecological crises, but also that ecology as the crossroads of dwelling and articulation is in crisis, having come into its own and made explicit what was silently present in its historical enunciation. As a result, ecology needs to be deromanticized, decoupled from the bucolic and the picturesque, and dissociated from nativism and autochthony. Every organism, ecosystem, or place is affected by the forces of unsettlement and displacement; all dwellings and their articulations are shaken to the core and set in motion, rendering ecologies exilic. Ecologies today share the exilic condition, which also threatens to level the differences among them, without the chance of returning to a stable origin, itself nothing other than a theoretical fiction. In what follows, I propose to chalk out the outlines of exilic ecologies.This article has benefited from the contribution of the project PID2021-126611NB-I00 Socioecos. Building sustainable society: Mobilization, participation and management of socio-ecological practices, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
The Ecological Literacies of St. Hildegard of Bingen
Literacy is, literally, a question not of education but of the letter. More than that, it is the question of the letter in the two senses the word has in English: as a symbol of the alphabet and a piece of correspondence. It is my hypothesis that ecological literacies may learn a great deal from the literalization, or even the hyper-literalization, of the letter and that they may do so by turning to the corpus of twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, polymath, and mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen. After all, Hildegard, who was exquisitely attuned to the vegetal world, which was at the core of her theological and scientific endeavors, corresponded through letters with the leading personalities of her times and also invented a language, called lingua ignota (the unknown language) replete with ignotas litteras (the unknown letters). Who better than her can spell out the senses of ecological literacy
Patterns in Illinois Educational School Data
We examine Illinois educational data from standardized exams and analyze
primary factors affecting the achievement of public school students. We focus
on the simplest possible models: representation of data through visualizations
and regressions on single variables. Exam scores are shown to depend on school
type, location, and poverty concentration. For most schools in Illinois,
student test scores decline linearly with poverty concentration. However
Chicago must be treated separately. Selective schools in Chicago, as well as
some traditional and charter schools, deviate from this pattern based on
poverty. For any poverty level, Chicago schools perform better than those in
the rest of Illinois. Selective programs for gifted students show high
performance at each grade level, most notably at the high school level, when
compared to other Illinois school types. The case of Chicago charter schools is
more complex. In the last six years, their students' scores overtook those of
students in traditional Chicago high schools.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
The Chernobyl herbarium: Fragments of an exploded consciousness
We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living
2008 Progress Report on Brain Research
Highlights new research on various disorders, nervous system injuries, neuroethics, neuroimmunology, pain, sense and body function, stem cells and neurogenesis, and thought and memory. Includes essays on arts and cognition and on deep brain stimulation
Writing Phytophilia: Philosophers and Poets as Lovers of Plants
This essay considers the effects of phytophilia (the love of plants) in philosophy and in literature through an analysis of texts by French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros. In his relation to vegetal beings, the phytophile philosopher grapples with something as elusive as sophia, namely the process of plant growth. Such an encounter radically changes the philosopher in that it opens his thought to the flux of becoming and metamorphosis, inaccessible from the standpoint of Western metaphysics. Like philosophers, phytophile poets are transformed by their love of plants. Through literary imagination, they can portray the being-in-the-world of plants, an experience that, in turn, will profoundly impact their poetic language and praxis
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