Integrating Theatre and Biology: How Embodied Performance Can Enhance Empathy Among College Science Students

In these field notes, we examine the integration of the arts into a 20-person honors biology seminar at UC Riverside “Beyond Science: Being Humane Amid Human Rights Crises.” We held a four-hour workshop to examine the ways in which performance and theatrical storytelling can enhance science learning. The workshop provided a unique avenue for exploring how human activities result in downward consequences including refugee displacement, one of the course objectives. In addition to the workshop, we conducted surveys and a focus group with the students to better understand their experience incorporating the arts into their science class. A key concept that arose in the focus group was how engaging with theatre contributed to students’ empathy

A Look-Ahead Feature - Sow Stalls for Indiviudal Feeding

Overfeeding sows and gilts during gestation is a common mismanagement practice. Here\u27s how concrete stalls were built for individual feeding to assure a minimum, but adequate, amount of feed for each animal

An off-shell I.R. regularization strategy in the analysis of collinear divergences

We present a method for the analysis of singularities of Feynman amplitudes based on the Speer sector decomposition of the Schwinger parametric integrals combined with the Mellin-Barnes transform. The sector decomposition method is described in some details. We suggest the idea of applying the method to the analysis of collinear singularities in inclusive QCD cross sections in the mass-less limit regularizing the forward amplitudes by an off-shell choice of the initial particle momenta. It is shown how the suggested strategy works in the well known case of the one loop corrections to Deep Inelastic Scattering.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure

Corn Silage for Sows

Experiments with more than 2,000 pigs farrowed at Iowa State College show that corn silage- properly supplemented- makes an excellent and low-cost base ration for sows during pre-gestation and gestation

Exact solutions for a mean-field Abelian sandpile

We introduce a model for a sandpile, with N sites, critical height N and each site connected to every other site. It is thus a mean-field model in the spin-glass sense. We find an exact solution for the steady state probability distribution of avalanche sizes, and discuss its asymptotics for large N.Comment: 10 pages, LaTe

Graphene Field Effect Transistor for Radiation Detection on a Micron to Millimeter Scale

Novel technology in radiation detection is critical to advancing radiation detectors for their many applications. Graphene has shown to be able to change its conductivity in the presence of an electric field; this makes it an excellent candidate to be used as a radiation detector for the detection of the charges generated during radiation interactions. Research has been done on making micron scale graphene field effect transistors (GFET) with graphene on a Si/SiO2 wafer, but it is critical that we try to increase the scale. Unknowns persist in scaling graphene to millimeter sizes. This study plans to elucidate any of the unknowns in graphene conductivity by using 4 different sized GFETs: graphene strip sizes of 10um x 60um, 50um x 300um, 100um x 600um, and 500um x 3000um. These strips of graphene will be etched out of a graphene sheet on Si/SiO2 wafers. Gold pads were connected to these strips of graphene via optical lithography. These devices will have their electrical properties characterized in future experiments to determine if mm scale graphene radiation detection is a worthwhile pursuit

Comparison of Semi-confined and Pasture-based August Calving Beef Cow Systems

Limited pasture availability and increased pasture rental rates have generated a need to evaluate alternative cow-calf production systems. The current study compared cow and calf performance in two August-calving cow systems that combined corn residue grazing with 1) perennial forage grazing and hay or 2) summer drylot feeding and fall cover crop grazing. Differences in pregnancy rates between systems within year were not observed; however, the effect of production system on cow body condition and calf body weight at different time points varied across years. Overall, cow and calf performance were not negatively impacted in the drylot/cropland system, suggesting that it is a potential alternative to a perennial forage-based system

Spontaneous symmetry breaking: exact results for a biased random walk model of an exclusion process

It has been recently suggested that a totally asymmetric exclusion process with two species on an open chain could exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking in some range of the parameters defining its dynamics. The symmetry breaking is manifested by the existence of a phase in which the densities of the two species are not equal. In order to provide a more rigorous basis to these observations we consider the limit of the process when the rate at which particles leave the system goes to zero. In this limit the process reduces to a biased random walk in the positive quarter plane, with specific boundary conditions. The stationary probability measure of the position of the walker in the plane is shown to be concentrated around two symmetrically located points, one on each axis, corresponding to the fact that the system is typically in one of the two states of broken symmetry in the exclusion process. We compute the average time for the walker to traverse the quarter plane from one axis to the other, which corresponds to the average time separating two flips between states of broken symmetry in the exclusion process. This time is shown to diverge exponentially with the size of the chain.Comment: 42 page