Climate Choices: How Should We Meet the Challenges of a Warming Planet?

This issue guide was prepared for the National Issues Forums Institute in collaboration with the Kettering Foundation and the North American Association for Environmental Education. The Environment and Society Series is designed to promote meaningful, productive deliberation, convened locally and online, about difficult issues that affect the environment and communities.All around is evidence that the climate is changing. Summers are starting earlier and lasting longer. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense. Dry regions are getting drier and wet regions are seeing heavier rains. Record cold and snowfalls blanket some parts of the country, while record fires ravage forests across the West.The effects are being felt across many parts of the United States. Farmworkers in California's Central Valley, snow-weary New England business owners, crab fishermen in Alaska, and cattle ranchers across the Great Plains have all seen uncommon and extreme weather. Occasional odd weather and weather cycles are nothing unusual.But the more extreme and unpredictable weather being experienced around the world points to dramatic changes in climate -- the conditions that take place over years, decades, and longer.Climate disruptions have some people worried about their health, their children, their homes, their livelihoods, their communities, and even their personal safety. They wonder about the future of the natural areas they enjoy and the wild animals and plants that live there. In addition, there are growing concerns about our national security and how climate change might affect scarce resources around the planet and increase global tensions

A discriminating probe of gravity at cosmological scales

The standard cosmological model is based on general relativity and includes dark matter and dark energy. An important prediction of this model is a fixed relationship between the gravitational potentials responsible for gravitational lensing and the matter overdensity. Alternative theories of gravity often make different predictions for this relationship. We propose a set of measurements which can test the lensing/matter relationship, thereby distinguishing between dark energy/matter models and models in which gravity differs from general relativity. Planned optical, infrared and radio galaxy and lensing surveys will be able to measure $E_G$, an observational quantity whose expectation value is equal to the ratio of the Laplacian of the Newtonian potentials to the peculiar velocity divergence, to percent accuracy. We show that this will easily separate alternatives such as $\Lambda$CDM, DGP, TeVeS and $f(R)$ gravity.Comment: v2: minor revisions in the main text, fig, table and references. Slightly longer than the PRL version in press. V3: update the figure (minor change due to a coding bug. No other change

Galaxy-CMB Cross-Correlation as a Probe of Alternative Models of Gravity

Bekenstein's alternative to general relativity, TeVeS, reduces to Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) in the galactic limit. On cosmological scales, the (potential well overdensity) relationship is quite different than in standard general relativity. Here we investigate the possibility of cross-correlating galaxies with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to probe this relationship. At redshifts of order 2, the sign of the CMB-galaxy correlation differs in TeVeS from that in general relativity. We show that this effect is detectable and hence can serve as a powerful discriminator of these two models of gravity.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, revised version re-submitted to Phys. Rev.

Student Affairs Divisions as Learning Organizations: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Organizational Improvement

The American higher education system is in crisis and in need of reform in order to remain competitive in the 21st century (Commission on the Future of Higher Education, 2006). Given the calls for accountability and transparency by diverse stakeholders seeking improved fiscal, academic, and more importantly, student learning and engagement outcomes, a grounded understanding of organizational improvement is in order. This dissertation is a qualitative research study in higher education management and on student affairs divisions in particular. The purpose is to develop a conceptual framework for pursuing organizational improvement in student affairs divisions toward the distal goal of improving student learning and engagement outcomes. In doing so, the researcher re-appropriates the concept of a "Learning Organization," and uses it as the foundation upon which to develop the conceptual framework. The researches questions guiding the study instantiate elements of grounded theory methodology and also align with a social constructivist research paradigm. An extensive literature analysis and semi-structured interviews using a modified Delphi process were the primary data collection methods for developing, validating, and revising the conceptual framework. NUD*IST (N6) was used for systematic data analysis. Study results indicated that student affairs divisions face at least four major challenges: developing a professional identity, aligning diverging interests, understanding the changing student culture, and developing a global perspective for practice. Effectively addressing these challenges, while supporting a culture of risk-taking and learning, was reported as an indicators of a high quality student affairs organization. Findings also indicated that the revised framework should be practical when tested in student affairs divisions. Results of the study demonstrated that the framework will be practical to scholars seeking to frame critical dialogue and debate about the future direction of the student affairs profession and also found the framework to be a practical tool for encouraging dialogue in higher education and student affairs discourse. Practitioners seeking to improve student learning and engagement outcomes from an organizational perspective, found the revised framework practical for encouraging and pursuing a learning-orientated organizational culture. This research extends and deepens one's conceptual understanding of organizational improvement and culture in student affairs organizations, as well as frame practical opportunities for pursuing organizational improvement in the broader higher education community. This study contributes to the theoretical and practical discourses on organizational improvement in student affairs, and offers plausible directions for future empirical study

How Much of the Web Is Archived?

Although the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the largest and most well-known web archive, there have been a number of public web archives that have emerged in the last several years. With varying resources, audiences and collection development policies, these archives have varying levels of overlap with each other. While individual archives can be measured in terms of number of URIs, number of copies per URI, and intersection with other archives, to date there has been no answer to the question "How much of the Web is archived?" We study the question by approximating the Web using sample URIs from DMOZ, Delicious, Bitly, and search engine indexes; and, counting the number of copies of the sample URIs exist in various public web archives. Each sample set provides its own bias. The results from our sample sets indicate that range from 35%-90% of the Web has at least one archived copy, 17%-49% has between 2-5 copies, 1%-8% has 6-10 copies, and 8%-63% has more than 10 copies in public web archives. The number of URI copies varies as a function of time, but no more than 31.3% of URIs are archived more than once per month.Comment: This is the long version of the short paper by the same title published at JCDL'11. 10 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables. Version 2 includes minor typographical correction

Can Cosmic Structure form without Dark Matter?

One of the prime pieces of evidence for dark matter is the observation of large overdense regions in the universe. Since we know from the cosmic microwave background that the regions that contained the most baryons when the universe was ~400,000 years old were overdense by only one part in ten thousand, perturbations had to have grown since then by a factor greater than $(1+z_*)\simeq 1180$ where $z_*$ is the epoch of recombination. This enhanced growth does not happen in general relativity, so dark matter is needed in the standard theory. We show here that enhanced growth can occur in alternatives to general relativity, in particular in Bekenstein's relativistic version of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). The vector field introduced in that theory for a completely different reason plays a key role in generating the instability that produces large cosmic structures today.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure