2,197 research outputs found
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
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