Foreword to Symposium on School Finance Litigation: Emerging Trends or New Dead Ends?

Equality of educational opportunity is an elusive goal. Advocates for underprivileged students have pursued it relentlessly in the courts since the landmark decision fifty years ago in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet children across the United States still attend schools that are both separate and unequal. The United States contains approximately 15,000 school districts. This fragmentation, along with the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Milliken v. Bradley to prohibit mandatory busing across district lines, allows patterns of residential segregation to produce segregated schools. In 2000-01, seventy-two percent of African-American and seventy-six percent of Latino students attended predominantly minority schools. Thirty-seven percent of African- American and Latino students attended schools that were 90-100% minority. One-sixth of African-American and one-ninth of Latino students attended schools that were 99-100% minority

Southern Ocean mesopelagic fish comply with Bergmann’s Rule

The applicability of macroecological rules to patterns in body size varies between taxa. One of the most examined is Bergmann’s rule, which states that body size increases with decreasing temperature and increasing latitude, although the rule is not universal and the proposed mechanisms underpinning it are multifarious and lack congruence. This study considers the degree to which Bergmann’s rule applies to the Southern Ocean mesopelagic fish community. We studied patterns in body size, temperature, and latitude across a 12° latitudinal gradient within the Scotia-Weddell sector. Intraspecific Bergmann’s rule was found to apply to 8 of the 11 biomass-dominant species in the family Myctophidae. The rule was also apparent at an interspecific level. Our study suggests that greater attainable body size in this community is a necessary attribute to reach colder regions further south. The adherence of these taxa to Bergmann’s rule enables such species to act as sentinels for identifying the drivers and consequences of ocean warming for the Southern Ocean ecosystem

Enactivism and Robotic Language Acquisition: A Report from the Frontier

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Radiation Modeling for the Reentry of the Hayabusa Sample Return Capsule

Predicted shock-layer emission signatures during the reentry of the Japanese Hayabusa capsule are presented and compared with flight measurements conducted during an airborne observation mission in NASA's DC-8 Airborne Laboratory. For selected altitudes at 11 points along the flight trajectory of the capsule, lines of sight were extracted from flow field solutions computed using the in-house high-fidelity CFD code, DPLR. These lines of sight were used as inputs for the line-by-line radiation code NEQAIR, and emission spectra of the air plasma were computed in the wavelength range from 300 nm to 1600 nm, a range which covers all of the different experiments onboard the DC-8. In addition, the computed flow field solutions were post-processed with the material thermal response code FIAT, and the resulting surface temperatures of the heat shield were used to generate thermal emission spectra based on Planck radiation. Both spectra were summed and integrated over the flow field. The resulting emission at each trajectory point was propagated to the DC-8 position and transformed into incident irradiance to be finally compared with experimental data

Homelessness and the meaning of home: rooflessness or rootlessness?

This paper has several objectives. These are: (1) to analyse the meaning of homelessness in the light of recent contributions on the meaning of home: (2) to criticize some current perspectives on homelessness as a social problem; (3) to identify and explore a number of different dimensions of the meaning of home and homelessness; (4) to reassess the evidence on the context of home and homelessness, and re-examine the meaning of homelessness in the light of that reassessed evidence; and (5) to explain the political meaning of homelessness as expressed in official definitions, legislation and state provision (or lack of it)

Respiration rates and active carbon flux of mesopelagic fishes (Family Myctophidae) in the Scotia Sea, Southern Ocean

Mesopelagic fish have recently been highlighted as an important, but poorly studied component of marine ecosystems, particularly regarding their role in the marine pelagic food webs and biogeochemical cycles. Myctophids (Family Myctophidae) are one of the most biomass-dominant groups of mesopelagic fishes, and their large vertical migrations provide means of rapid transfer of carbon to the deep ocean where it can be sequestered for centuries or more. In this study, we develop a simple regression for the respiration rate of myctophid fish using literature-based wet mass and habitat temperature data. We apply this regression to net haul data collected across the Scotia-Weddell sector of the Southern Ocean to estimate respiration rates of the biomass-dominant myctophid species. Electrona carlsbergi, Electrona antarctica, and Gymnoscopelus braueri made a high contribution (up to 85%) to total myctophid respiration. Despite the lower temperatures of the southern Scotia Sea (-1.46 to 0.95°C), total respiration here was as high (reaching 1.1 mg C m-2 d-1) as in the warmer waters of the mid and northern Scotia Sea. The maximum respiratory carbon flux of the vertically migrating community was 0.05 to 0.28 mg C m-2 d-1, equivalent to up to 47% of the gravitational particulate organic carbon flux in some parts of the Scotia-Weddell region. Our study provides the first baseline estimates of respiration rates and carbon flux of myctophids in the Southern Ocean. However, direct measurements of myctophid respiration, and of mesopelagic fish generally, are needed to constrain these estimates further and incorporate these fluxes into carbon budgets

Terrainosaurus: realistic terrain synthesis using genetic algorithms

Synthetically generated terrain models are useful across a broad range of applications, including computer generated art & animation, virtual reality and gaming, and architecture. Existing algorithms for terrain generation suffer from a number of problems, especially that of being limited in the types of terrain that they can produce and of being difficult for the user to control. Typical applications of synthetic terrain have several factors in common: first, they require the generation of large regions of believable (though not necessarily physically correct) terrain features; and second, while real-time performance is often needed when visualizing the terrain, this is generally not the case when generating the terrain. In this thesis, I present a new, design-by-example method for synthesizing terrain height fields. In this approach, the user designs the layout of the terrain by sketching out simple regions using a CAD-style interface, and specifies the desired terrain characteristics of each region by providing example height fields displaying these characteristics (these height fields will typically come from real-world GIS data sources). A height field matching the user's design is generated at several levels of detail, using a genetic algorithm to blend together chunks of elevation data from the example height fields in a visually plausible manner. This method has the advantage of producing an unlimited diversity of reasonably realistic results, while requiring relatively little user effort and expertise. The guided randomization inherent in the genetic algorithm allows the algorithm to come up with novel arrangements of features, while still approximating user-specified constraints

How Gender and Race Stereotypes Impact the Advancement of Scholars in STEM: Professors’ Biased Evaluations of Physics and Biology Post-doctoral Candidates

The current study examines how intersecting stereotypes about gender and race influence faculty perceptions of post-doctoral candidates in STEM fields in the United States. Using a fully-crossed, between-subjects experimental design biology and physics professors (N = 251) from eight large, public, U.S. research universities were asked to read one of eight identical curriculum vitae (CVs) depicting a hypothetical doctoral graduate applying for a post-doctoral position in their relevant field and rate them for competence, hireability, and likeability. The candidate’s name on the CV was used to manipulate race (Asian, Black, Latinx, and White) and gender (female or male), with all other aspects of the CV held constant across conditions. Faculty in physics exhibited a gender bias favoring the male candidates as more competent and more hirable than the otherwise identical female candidates. Faculty in both biology and physics demonstrated a racial bias, rating the Asian and White candidates as more competent than Black candidates overall. Further, physics faculty rated Asian and White candidates as more hirable than Black and Latinx candidates, whereas those in biology rated the Asian candidates as more hirable than the Black candidates. An interaction between candidate gender and race emerged for those in physics whereby women Black and Latinx candidates were rated the lowest in competence compared to all others. Women were rated more likeable than men candidates across departments. Our results highlight how understanding the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in STEM requires examining both racial and gender biases as well as how they intersect

Mirror on the Field: Gender, Authorship, and Research Methods in Higher Education’s Leading Journals

Framed conceptually by gender equity, gender homophily, the contest regime of blind peer-review publishing, and the gendered nature of the quantitative–qualitative debate, this study investigated the intersection of authorship, gender, and methodological characteristics of 408 articles published from 2006 to 2010 in 3 major higher education journals. Nonbinary coding of author gender based on pronouns identified via Web searches virtually eliminated missing data and likely reduced error. Results suggest movement toward gender parity over time; however, women’s representation among authors does not appear commensurate with representation in the field. Findings revealed gendered use of research methods, with qualitative articles more likely to be first-authored by women and quantitative articles more likely to be first-authored by men. Nevertheless, articles first-authored by both women and men were more likely to use quantitative than qualitative methods. Quantitative research, more so than qualitative research, appears to be a site of cogender collaboration, which has increased over time. This portrait of the intersection of authorship, gender, and research methods provides an empirical foundation for discussion and inquiry about gender and scholarship in the field, and the results of our study are generative for future research