The atmospheric effects of stratospheric aircraft. Report of the 1992 Models and Measurements Workshop. Volume 1: Workshop objectives and summary

This Workshop on Stratospheric Models and Measurements (M&M) marks a significant expansion in the history of model intercomparisons. It provides a foundation for establishing the credibility of stratospheric models used in environmental assessments of chlorofluorocarbons, aircraft emissions, and climate-chemistry interactions. The core of the M&M comparisons involves the selection of observations of the current stratosphere (i.e., within the last 15 years): these data are believed to be accurate and representative of certain aspects of stratospheric chemistry and dynamics that the models should be able to simulate

Structured turing machines

A structured decomposition theorem for Turing machines is given. The nature of the building blocks and the form of the connections allowed suggest a parallel to the Bohm-Jacopini theorem on structured flowcharts. Thus in a broadest sense, there is obtained an independent machine-theoretic restatement of the fundamental precepts of structured programming. At the same time, the characteristics of the decomposition offer several obvious advantages over known results of this type. In particular, the building blocks (the “simple” machines) are seen to perform total and regular word functions. Furthermore, the connections themselves should prove to be useful as pedagogical tools in the Turing machine theory and as a theoretical framework for top-down machine (or algorithmic) design

It's Just as Easy to Marry a Rich Man as a Poor One! Students' Accounts of Parental Messages About Marital Partners

What's happening in the 1980s concerning marital choices? Parents of today's college students were themselves seeking marital partners in the 1960s when traditional sexual norms were challenged including "living together" and innovative weddings. How are these parents responding to the dating choices and practices of their children? This paper presents some exploratory research on the mate selection socialization process as recalled by college students

From A Systematic Investigation of Faculty-Produced Think-Pair-Share Questions to Frameworks for Characterizing and Developing Fluency-Inspiring Activities

Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members' ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and astronomy. The results of this work illustrate that, for many topics, there is a lack of variety in the representations featured, intellectual tasks posed, and levels of complexity fostered by the questions faculty develop. These efforts motivated and informed the development of two frameworks: (1) a curriculum characterization framework that allows us to systematically code active learning strategies in terms of the discipline representations, intellectual tasks, and reasoning complexity that an activity offers the learner; and (2) a curriculum development framework that guides the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners' discipline fluency. We analyze the faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions with our curriculum characterization framework, then apply our curriculum development framework to generate (1) Fluency-Inspiring Questions, a more pedagogically powerful extension of a well-established instructional strategy, and (2) Student Representation Tasks, a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that shifts the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of Fluency-Inspiring Questions and Student Representation Tasks, detailing their usage of Pedagogical Discipline Representations coupled with novel question and activity formats.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, accepted to "Physical Review Physics Education Research Focused Collection Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching about Molecular Excitations and Synchrotron Radiation

Light and spectroscopy are among the most important and frequently taught topics in introductory, college-level, general education astronomy courses. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of observational data studied by astronomers arrives at Earth in the form of light. While there are many processes by which matter can emit and absorb light, Astro 101 courses typically limit their instruction to the Bohr model of the atom and electron energy level transitions. In this paper, we report on the development of a new Lecture-Tutorial to help students learn about other processes that are responsible for the emission and absorption of light, namely molecular rotations, molecular vibrations, and the acceleration of charged particles by magnetic fields.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures Accepted for publication in The Physics Teache