From the Classroom to the Community: Best Practices in Service-Learning

As a pedagogy, service-learning connects students with the community while focusing on course outcomes. The community becomes a live text for reflection and enriches students’ experiences they otherwise would not have in the classroom. This article provides tips and strategies for implementing service-learning in the classroom. These tips and strategies include developing the structure of the course, linking service-learning to outcomes, creating partnerships, working through logistics with partners, communicating with community partners, setting logistics, preparing students, creating reflections, handling challenging issues, giving credit for the learning, and assessing service-learning

Dignity: The organization (homosexuals, Catholic).

This study examines Dignity, a voluntary organization comprised of gay and lesbian Roman Catholics, and their friends. The research project asks how Dignity can survive in the face of hostility from the Church hierarchy. This opposition has been expressed by the 1986 Vatican document, Letter to the Bishops of the World on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, and in the resulting expulsion of twenty-seven local Dignity chapters from their home parishes. Dignity\u27s position on sexual ethics places it in opposition to traditional Church teaching. This study discusses Dignity\u27s position on sexual ethics, examining Dignity documents and position papers, including its Statement of Position and Purpose, and the Dignity Sexual Ethics Task Force, comparing them to related Church documents. In addition, respondents\u27 views on sexual ethics are presented. The personal interviews show that the research project respondents\u27 sexual ethics are in harmony with the position of the national organization. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 30-04, page: 1057. Director: George H. Crowell. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1990

Cosmological Symmetry Breaking, Pseudo-scale invariance, Dark Energy and the Standard Model

The energy density of the universe today may be dominated by the vacuum energy of a slowly rolling scalar field. Making a quantum expansion around such a time dependent solution is found to break fundamental symmetries of quantum field theory. We call this mechanism cosmological symmetry breaking and argue that it is different from the standard phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We illustrate this with a toy scalar field theory, whose action displays a U(1) symmetry. We identify a symmetry, called pseudo-scale invariance, which sets the cosmological constant exactly equal to zero, both in classical and quantum theory. This symmetry is also broken cosmologically and leads to a nonzero vacuum or dark energy. The slow roll condition along with the observed value of dark energy leads to a value of the background scalar field of the order of Planck mass. We also consider a U(1) gauge symmetry model. Cosmological symmetry breaking, in this case, leads to a non zero mass for the vector field. We also show that a cosmologically broken pseudo-scale invariance can generate a wide range of masses.Comment: 18 pages, no figure

Enterprise Resource Planning and Organizational Knowledge: Patterns of Convergence and Divergence

This paper reports on a qualitative research study to investigate how enterprise resource planning systems impact organizational knowledge. Cognitive mapping methodology was used to capture and analyze the perspectives of senior managers from the IT and user organizations of a major corporation. The results indicate that ERP systems produce effects that make business knowledge become more focused or convergent from the perspective of the organization and more wide-ranging or divergent from the perspective of the individual. Other important effects include changes to the organization\u27s core competencies and changes in the risk profile regarding the loss of organizational knowledge. The research contributes to the knowledge-based view of enterprise systems

Renormalisation Flow and Universality for Ultracold Fermionic Atoms

A functional renormalisation group study for the BEC-BCS crossover for ultracold gases of fermionic atoms is presented. We discuss the fixed point which is at the origin of universality for broad Feshbach resonances. All macroscopic quantities depend only on one relevant parameter, the concentration a k_F, besides their dependence on the temperature in units of the Fermi energy. In particular, we compute the universal ratio between molecular and atomic scattering length in vacuum. We also present an estimate to which level of accuracy universality holds for gases of Li and K atoms.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, to be published in PR

Existence of an information unit as a postulate of quantum theory

Does information play a significant role in the foundations of physics? Information is the abstraction that allows us to refer to the states of systems when we choose to ignore the systems themselves. This is only possible in very particular frameworks, like in classical or quantum theory, or more generally, whenever there exists an information unit such that the state of any system can be reversibly encoded in a sufficient number of such units. In this work we show how the abstract formalism of quantum theory can be deduced solely from the existence of an information unit with suitable properties, together with two further natural assumptions: the continuity and reversibility of dynamics, and the possibility of characterizing the state of a composite system by local measurements. This constitutes a new set of postulates for quantum theory with a simple and direct physical meaning, like the ones of special relativity or thermodynamics, and it articulates a strong connection between physics and information.Comment: Published version - 6 pages, 3 appendices, 3 figure