Fruits, Flowers, and Foam Wars

Postcard from Stacey Strovink, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuado

Person to Person in Japan

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Stacey Strovink describes her observations during her study abroad program at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan

Yet More Smooth Mapping Spaces and Their Smoothly Local Properties

Motivated by the definition of the smooth manifold structure on a suitable mapping space, we consider the general problem of how to transfer local properties from a smooth space to an associated mapping space. This leads to the notion of smoothly local properties. In realising the definition of a local property at a particular point it may be that there are choices that need to be made. To say that the local property is smoothly local is to say that those choices can be made smoothly dependent on the point. In particular, that a manifold has charts is a local property. A local addition is the structure needed to say that there is a way to choose a chart about each point so that it varies smoothly with that point. To be able to extend these ideas beyond that of the local additivity of manifolds we work in a category of generalised smooth spaces. We are thus are able to consider more general mapping spaces than just those arising from the maps from one smooth manifold to another and thus able to generalise the standard result on when this space of maps is again a smooth manifold. As applications of this generalisation we show that the mapping spaces involving the various figure 8s from String Topology are manifolds, and that they embed as submanifolds with tubular neighbourhoods in the corresponding loop spaces. We also show that applying the mapping space functor to a regular map of manifolds produces a regular map on the mapping spaces

Information Literacy Instruction for Upper-Year Undergraduate Students: A Stratified Course-Integrated Approach

Undergraduate students face many potential barriers to learning about the process of conducting research. Information literacy instruction provided through faculty-librarian collaboration in an effort to expand the abilities of the “novice researcher” can ease the experience of undergraduate students. In addition, information literacy instruction may invoke increased student participation in the scholarly discourse of their chosen discipline. The implementation of a stratified course-integrated approach may be particularly valuable to upper-level undergraduates in preparation for completing a thesis or other culminating project in their final year of study. This claim is examined within the context of an instruction session observed as a component of a third-year undergraduate Materials Science and Engineering course