Pwning Level Bosses in MATLAB: Student Reactions to a Game-Inspired Computational Physics Course

We investigated student reactions to two computational physics courses incorporating several videogame-like aspects. These included use of gaming terminology such as "levels," "weapons," and "bosses"; a game-style point system linked to course grades; a self-paced schedule with no deadlines; a mastery design in which only entirely correct attempts earn credit, but students can retry until they succeed; immediate feedback via self-test code; an assignment progression from "minions" (small, focused tasks) to "level bosses" (integrative tasks); and believable, authentic assignment scenarios. Through semi-structured interviews and course evaluations, we found that a majority of students considered the courses effective and the game-like aspects beneficial. In particular, many claimed that the point system increased their motivation; the self-paced nature caused them to reflect on their self-discipline; the possibility and necessity of repeating assignments until perfect aided learning; and the authentic tasks helped them envision using course skills in their professional futures.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2014 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC

California’s Draft Water Resilience Portfolio: Improving Public Health and Achieving Long Term Water Resilience Through Investments in California Water Infrastructure

With public health at the forefront of everyone’s mind, refocusing on investing in California’s aging water infrastructure presents key opportunities to provide clean, safe drinking water to all and begin to sustainably rebuild state water infrastructure resources. It is no secret that clean safe drinking water is necessary for a healthy life, nor is it a secret that significant portions of California’s water infrastructure, including distribution and transmission pipelines, water storage facilities and water treatment facilities, are well past their expiration dates. In the unfortunate wake of COVID-19, it will be critical for local and state level decision makers to keep in mind the direct correlation between clean water and human health. The health and well-being of Californians has always been connected to water. The state has made major strides toward a resilient water future by recognizing the human right to safe drinking water and creating the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund. And to address water infrastructure issues head on, including drinking water supply, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-10-19, directing state agencies to commission the first Water Resilience Portfolio

Heavy Quark Production at HERA

Heavy flavour production is one of the key components of the HERA II physics programme. While most of the results presented use leptons or the reconstruction of charmed mesons to identify heavy flavour production, both the H1 and ZEUS experiments now have working microvertex detectors that are being used more and more. In this talk I will summarise a selection of the recent results obtained by the two collaborations.Comment: 10 pages, 18 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Hyperons, Charm and Beauty Hadrons (BEACH2008), 22-28 June 2008, University of South Carolina, Columbi

Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset

CRU TS (Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series) is a widely used climate dataset on a 0.5 degrees latitude by 0.5 degrees longitude grid over all land domains of the world except Antarctica. It is derived by the interpolation of monthly climate anomalies from extensive networks of weather station observations. Here we describe the construction of a major new version, CRU TS v4. It is updated to span 1901-2018 by the inclusion of additional station observations, and it will be updated annually. The interpolation process has been changed to use angular-distance weighting (ADW), and the production of secondary variables has been revised to better suit this approach. This implementation of ADW provides improved traceability between each gridded value and the input observations, and allows more informative diagnostics that dataset users can utilise to assess how dataset quality might vary geographically