Journeys of social conscience : Humanities I in Action at Hong Kong International School

In this presentation high school teachers Marty Schmidt and Mike Kersten present a service learning course that they teach at Hong Kong International School called Humanities I in Action that offers students a transformative journey of social conscience. A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary curriculum has been developed in the past ten years that enables students to consider their place in the world. An essential part of the curriculum are ten out-of-the-classroom experiences, including a 4-day trip to an orphanage in China. The depth gained in this course is also due in part to the amount of time, 80 minutes/day for 180 days, with motivated students who have chosen to take the class. Following an introduction of the course curriculum, the presenters will share a recently created video, which provides interview excerpts from students who have participated in and have been deeply impacted by the course. Using Marty\u27s research on social conscience as a guide, student comments in the video are metaphorically placed onto the symbol of a labyrinth to provide a unifying structure for their individual journeys through the course. You may learn more about social conscience curricula from Marty\u27s blog: http://martinschmidtinasia.wordpress.com

Strongly coupled magnon-phonon dynamics in a single nanomagnet.

Polaritons are widely investigated quasiparticles with fundamental and technological significance due to their unique properties. They have been studied most extensively in semiconductors when photons interact with various elementary excitations. However, other strongly coupled excitations demonstrate similar dynamics. Specifically, when magnon and phonon modes are coupled, a hybridized magnon-phonon quasiparticle can form. Here, we report on the direct observation of coupled magnon-phonon dynamics within a single thin nickel nanomagnet. We develop an analytic description to model the dynamics in two dimensions, enabling us to isolate the parameters influencing the frequency splitting. Furthermore, we demonstrate tuning of the magnon-phonon interaction into the strong coupling regime via the orientation of the applied magnetic field

The politics of the excluded: abjection and reconciliation amongst the British precariat

In this paper, we use a powerful empirical resource to address what the popular politics of disadvantage might entail in contemporary Britain. We take advantage of the unusually rich qualitative data from the British National Child Development Study, a cohort of Britons born in 1 week in 1958, to focus specifically on the accounts of those who are particularly disadvantaged. By concentrating on these a small number of qualitative accounts, which have been rigorously selected from the wider nationally representative sample on the basis of their relatively small amounts of economic and cultural capital, we will explore in detail the accounts and identities of these disadvantaged Britons with a view to explicating their political frameworks, their social identities and more broadly their orientations towards mobilisation

Soil biological quality in short- and long-term field trials with conventional and organic fertility input types

Soils of the DOK trial and three other field trials with manure input were analysed for effects on soil biology. While long-term effects indicate a new steady state at the DOK trial site, differences at the other field trials suggest that fresh manure at the Bonn trial and chicken manure at the UK sites are at least temporarily advantageous, probably due to their relatively fast mineralization

Climate change coverage: more politics, less weather

Climate change is a global problem, and according to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, it is currently the “greatest challenge facing humanity.” But it is a long-term, slow developing, and often invisible phenomenon so most people do not experience it first hand. Research has shown that news outlets are people’s main source of information on climate change. But how much attention do media professionals pay to the topic

Two-stage study designs for analyzing disease-associated covariates: linkage thresholds and case-selection strategies

The incorporation of disease-associated covariates into studies aiming to identify susceptibility genes for complex human traits is a challenging problem. Accounting for such covariates in genetic linkage and association analyses may help reduce the genetic heterogeneity inherent in these complex phenotypes. For Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW15) Problem 3 simulated data, our goal was to compare the power of several two-stage study designs to identify rheumatoid arthritis-related genes on chromosome 9 (disease severity), 11 (IgM), and 18 (anti-cyclic citrinullated protein), with knowledge of the answers. Five study designs incorporating an initial linkage step, followed by a case-selection scheme and case-control association analysis by logistic regression, were considered. The linkage step was either qualitative-trait linkage analysis as implemented in MERLIN-nonparametric linkage (NPL), or quantitative-trait locus analysis as implemented in MERLIN-REGRESS. A set of cases representing either one case from each available family, one case per linked family (NPL ≥ 0), or one case from each family identified by ordered-subset analysis was chosen for comparison with the full set of 2000 simulated controls. As expected, the performance of these study designs depended on the disease model used to generate the data, especially the simulated allele frequency difference between cases and controls. The quantitative trait loci analysis performed well in identifying these loci, and the power to identify disease-associated alleles was increased by using ordered-subset analysis as a case selection tool

ThreatCrawl: A BERT-based Focused Crawler for the Cybersecurity Domain

Publicly available information contains valuable information for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). This can be used to prevent attacks that have already taken place on other systems. Ideally, only the initial attack succeeds and all subsequent ones are detected and stopped. But while there are different standards to exchange this information, a lot of it is shared in articles or blog posts in non-standardized ways. Manually scanning through multiple online portals and news pages to discover new threats and extracting them is a time-consuming task. To automize parts of this scanning process, multiple papers propose extractors that use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) from documents. However, while this already solves the problem of extracting the information out of documents, the search for these documents is rarely considered. In this paper, a new focused crawler is proposed called ThreatCrawl, which uses Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based models to classify documents and adapt its crawling path dynamically. While ThreatCrawl has difficulties to classify the specific type of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) named in texts, e.g., IOC content, it can successfully find relevant documents and modify its path accordingly. It yields harvest rates of up to 52%, which are, to the best of our knowledge, better than the current state of the art.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Paper Session III-A - Space Transportation Options for the 21st Century

As NASA\u27s designated Center of Excellence in Space Propulsion, Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) recently established the Propulsion Research and Technology Division (PRTD), an organization responsible for the theoretical and experimental study of advanced propulsion concepts and technologies. Although the scope of the division is broad, the mission is quite focused - to demonstrate the critical propulsion functions and technologies underpinning the transportation systems and spacecraft needed to achieve NASA\u27s Grand Vision for exploration, commercial development and ultimately human settlement of space. The division is intended to serve as a bridge that takes promising technologies from the conceptual or early experimental stage to proof-of-concept. The aim is to address the key issues associated with promising high-payoff technologies, some of which were conceived decades ago, to where they can be seriously considered for advanced development. This paper describes the division\u27s research strategy and summarizes its current activities