Teaching with Enterprise Systems

With the wide-spread adoption of Enterprise Systems (ES), such as SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft, in medium and large-sized organizations, there is increasing demand for students who know how to work with such systems. While the demand for ES developers and integrators has declined, the demand for employees that can help companies achieve benefits from these systems continues to grow. Such employees need skills in decision-making and process design in an integrated, data-rich environment enabled by an ES. This paper provides advice about teaching with enterprise systems at the undergraduate and graduate levels within the IS curriculum and across management and engineering curricula. This advice is provided by five professors from five different schools, California State University at Chico, Louisiana State University, Queensland University of Technology, Bentley College, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute that together have many years of experience in teaching with SAP or with the Oracle e-business suite. This paper includes a summary of the experiences at each of these schools, advice based on questions from the audience at an AMCIS 2005 panel, and references to resources that may be helpful to those considering, or already engaged in, teaching with enterprise systems

High Repetition Rate, LINAC-based Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence FY 2009 Final Report

Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence (NRF), which is possible for nuclei with atomic numbers greater than helium (Z=2), occurs when a nuclear level is excited by resonant absorption of a photon and subsequently decays by reemission of a photon. The excited nuclear states can become readily populated, provided the incident photon’s energy is within the Doppler-broadened width of the energy level being excited. Utilizing continuous energy photon spectra, as is characteristic of a bremsstrahlung photon beam, as the inspection source, ensures that at least some fraction of the impinging beam will contribute to the population of the excited energy levels in the material of interest. Upon de-excitation, either to the ground state or to a lower-energy excited state, the emitted fluorescence photon’s energy will correspond to the energy difference between the excited state and the state to which it decays. As each isotope inherently contains unique nuclear energy levels, the NRF states for each isotope are also unique. By exploiting this phenomenon, NRF photon detection provides a well-defined signature for identifying the presence of individual nuclear species. This report summarizes the second year (Fiscal Year [FY] 2009) of a collaborative research effort between Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho State University’s Idaho Accelerator Center, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This effort focused on continuing to assess and optimize NRF-based detection techniques utilizing a slightly modified, commercially available, pulsed medical electron accelerator

Policy options for the world’s primary forests in multilateral environmental agreements

We identify policies that would provide a solid foundation in key international negotiations to ensure that primary forests persist into the 21st Century. A novel compilation of primary forest cover and other data revealed that protection of primary forests is a matter of global concern being equally distributed between developed and developing countries. Almost all (98%) of primary forest is found within 25 countries with around half in five developed ones (USA, Canada, Russia, Australia, and NZ). Only approximate to 22% of primary forest is found in IUCN Protected Areas Categories I-VI, which is approximately 5% of preagriculture natural forest cover. Rates of deforestation and forest degradation are rapid and extensive, and the long-term integrity of primary forest cannot be assumed. We recommend four new actions that could be included in climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development negotiations: (1) recognize primary forests as a matter of global concern within international negotiations; (2) incorporate primary forests into environmental accounting; (3) prioritize the principle of avoided loss; and (4) universally accept the important role of indigenous and community conserved areas. In the absence of specific policies for primary forest protection, their unique biodiversity values and ecosystem services will continue to erode

Estimation of the performance of multiple active neutron interrogation signatures for detecting shielded HEU

A comprehensive modeling study has been carried out to evaluate the utility of multiple active neutron interrogation signatures for detecting shielded highly enriched uranium (HEU). The modeling effort focused on varying HEU masses from 1 kg to 20 kg; varying types of shields including wood, steel, cement, polyethylene, and borated polyethylene; varying depths of the HEU in the shields, and varying engineered shields immediately surrounding the HEU including steel, tungsten, and cadmium. Neutron and gamma-ray signatures were the focus of the study and false negative detection probabilities versus measurement time were used as a performance metric. To facilitate comparisons among different approaches an automated method was developed to generate receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for different sets of model variables for multiple background count rate conditions. This paper summarizes results or the analysis, including laboratory benchmark comparisons between simulations and experiments. The important impact engineered shields can play towards degrading detectability and methods for mitigating this will be discussed

NGTS clusters survey -- II. White-light flares from the youngest stars in Orion

We present the detection of high energy white-light flares from pre-main sequence stars associated with the Orion complex, observed as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). With energies up to $5.2\times10^{35}$ erg these flares are some of the most energetic white-light flare events seen to date. We have used the NGTS observations of flaring and non-flaring stars to measure the average flare occurrence rate for 4 Myr M0-M3 stars. We have also combined our results with those from previous studies to predict average rates for flares above $1\times10^{35}$ ergs for early M stars in nearby young associations.STFC ST/M001962/1; ST/P000495/

Oralism: a sign of the times? The contest for deaf communication in education provision in late nineteenth-century Scotland

Disability history is a diverse field. In focussing upon children within deaf education in late nineteenth-century Scotland, this essay reflects some of that diversity. In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan stipulated that speech should have ‘preference’ over signs in the education of deaf children. The mode of achieving this, however, effectively banned sign language. Endeavours to teach deaf children to articulate were not new, but this decision placed pressures on deaf institutions to favour the oral system of deaf communication over other methods. In Scotland efforts were made to adopt oralism, and yet educators were faced with the reality that this was not good educational practice for most pupils. This article will consider responses of Scottish educators of deaf children from the 1870s until the beginning of the twentieth century

BLAST: Correlations in the Cosmic Far-Infrared Background at 250, 350, and 500 microns Reveal Clustering of Star-Forming Galaxies

We detect correlations in the cosmic far-infrared background due to the clustering of star-forming galaxies in observations made with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, BLAST, at 250, 350, and 500 microns. We perform jackknife and other tests to confirm the reality of the signal. The measured correlations are well fit by a power law over scales of 5-25 arcminutes, with Delta I/I = 15.1 +/- 1.7%. We adopt a specific model for submillimeter sources in which the contribution to clustering comes from sources in the redshift ranges 1.3 <= z <= 2.2, 1.5 <= z <= 2.7, and 1.7 <= z <= 3.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, respectively. With these distributions, our measurement of the power spectrum, P(k_theta), corresponds to linear bias parameters, b = 3.8 +/- 0.6, 3.9 +/- 0.6 and 4.4 +/- 0.7, respectively. We further interpret the results in terms of the halo model, and find that at the smaller scales, the simplest halo model fails to fit our results. One way to improve the fit is to increase the radius at which dark matter halos are artificially truncated in the model, which is equivalent to having some star-forming galaxies at z >= 1 located in the outskirts of groups and clusters. In the context of this model we find a minimum halo mass required to host a galaxy is log (M_min / M_sun) = 11.5 (+0.4/-0.1), and we derive effective biases $b_eff = 2.2 +/- 0.2, 2.4 +/- 0.2, and 2.6 +/- 0.2, and effective masses log (M_eff / M_sun) = 12.9 +/- 0.3, 12.8 +/- 0.2, and 12.7 +/- 0.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, corresponding to spatial correlation lengths of r_0 = 4.9, 5.0, and 5.2 +/- 0.7 h^-1 Mpc, respectively. Finally, we discuss implications for clustering measurement strategies with Herschel and Planck.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Maps and other results available at http://blastexperiment.info

Reconstructing the Inflaton Potential---in Principle and in Practice

Generalizing the original work by Hodges and Blumenthal, we outline a formalism which allows one, in principle, to reconstruct the potential of the inflaton field from knowledge of the tensor gravitational wave spectrum or the scalar density fluctuation spectrum, with special emphasis on the importance of the tensor spectrum. We provide some illustrative examples of such reconstruction. We then discuss in some detail the question of whether one can use real observations to carry out this procedure. We conclude that in practice, a full reconstruction of the functional form of the potential will not be possible within the foreseeable future. However, with a knowledge of the dark matter components, it should soon be possible to combine intermediate-scale data with measurements of large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies to yield useful information regarding the potential.Comment: 39 pages plus 2 figures (upon request:[email protected]), LaTeX, FNAL--PUB--93/029-A; SUSSEX-AST 93/3-