Science and Engineering Labor Force

[Excerpt] Like most developed economies, the United States increasingly depends on a technically skilled workforce, including scientists and engineers. Workers for whom knowledge and skill in S&E are central to their jobs have an effect on the economy and the wider society that is disproportionate to their numbers: they contribute to research and development, increased knowledge, technological innovation, and economic growth. Moreover, the knowledge and skills associated with science and engineering have diffused across occupations and become more important in jobs that are not traditionally associated with S&E

RAPID: A regional plan to rescue the orphaned University of Louisiana Monroe Fish Collection

Award to enable the rescue of the orphaned Fish Collection of the University of Louisiana Monroe by a consortium of other regional fish collectionsNational Science FoundationIntegrative Biolog

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering provides statistical information about the participation of these three groups in science and engineering education and employment. Its primary purpose is to serve as an information source. It offers no endorsement of or recommendations about policies or programs. National Science Foundation reporting on this topic is mandated by the Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act (Public Law 96-516). This digest highlights key statistics drawn from a wide variety of data sources. Data and figures in this digest are organized into topical areas—enrollment, field of degree, occupation, employment status, and academic employment. Surveys conducted by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) at the National Science Foundation provided a large portion of the data used in this report. NCSES has a central role in the collection, interpretation, analysis, and dissemination of objective data on the science and engineering enterprise

What Makes Some People Think Astrology Is Scientific?

Citizens in both North America and Europe are apt to read horoscope columns in newspapers and magazines. While some people read these casually and purely for entertainment, some believe that astrology has scientific status and can provide real insight into events and personality. Using data from a European survey, this article explores some of the reasons why some people think that astrology is scientific and how astrology is viewed in relation to other knowledge-producing practices. Three hypotheses in particular are tested. The first is that some Europeans lack the necessary scientific literacy to distinguish science from pseudoscience. The second is that people are confused about what astrology actually is. The third is derived from Adorno’s work on authoritarianism and the occult and postulates that those who adhere to authoritarian values are more likely to believe in astrological claims. Support is found for all three hypotheses. </jats:p

Hybrid approximate message passing

Gaussian and quadratic approximations of message passing algorithms on graphs have attracted considerable recent attention due to their computational simplicity, analytic tractability, and wide applicability in optimization and statistical inference problems. This paper presents a systematic framework for incorporating such approximate message passing (AMP) methods in general graphical models. The key concept is a partition of dependencies of a general graphical model into strong and weak edges, with the weak edges representing interactions through aggregates of small, linearizable couplings of variables. AMP approximations based on the Central Limit Theorem can be readily applied to aggregates of many weak edges and integrated with standard message passing updates on the strong edges. The resulting algorithm, which we call hybrid generalized approximate message passing (HyGAMP), can yield significantly simpler implementations of sum-product and max-sum loopy belief propagation. By varying the partition of strong and weak edges, a performance--complexity trade-off can be achieved. Group sparsity and multinomial logistic regression problems are studied as examples of the proposed methodology.The work of S. Rangan was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1116589, 1302336, and 1547332, and in part by the industrial affiliates of NYU WIRELESS. The work of A. K. Fletcher was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1254204 and 1738286 and in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-15-1-2677. The work of V. K. Goyal was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1422034. The work of E. Byrne and P. Schniter was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCF-1527162. (1116589 - National Science Foundation; 1302336 - National Science Foundation; 1547332 - National Science Foundation; 1254204 - National Science Foundation; 1738286 - National Science Foundation; 1422034 - National Science Foundation; CCF-1527162 - National Science Foundation; NYU WIRELESS; N00014-15-1-2677 - Office of Naval Research

Positive law and the idea of freedom

The project was financed by National Science Centre Poland (decision no. DEC-2012/05/B/HS5/01111); The following text was prepared as a part of a research grant financed by the National Science Center (Poland), No. DEC-2012/05/B/HS5/01111

Ecological Impacts of the 2015/16 El Niño in the Central Equatorial Pacific

The authors thank Cisco Werner (NOAA/NMFS) for proposing this special issue and encouraging our submission. We thank each of the editors, Stephanie Herring, Peter Stott, and Nikos Christidis, for helpful guidance and support throughout the submittal process. We also thank each of the anonymous external reviewers for thoughtful guidance and suggestions to improve the manuscript. REB, TO, RV, AH, and BVA are grateful for support from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program. AC acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation for the following awards: OCE 1537338, OCE 1605365, and OCE 1031971. This is PMEL contribution no. 4698. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government. The views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the U.S. government. (NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program; OCE 1537338 - National Science Foundation; OCE 1605365 - National Science Foundation; OCE 1031971 - National Science Foundation