Historical Study in the U.S.: Assessing the Impact of Tuning within a Professional Disciplinary Society

The U.S.-based American Historical Association (AHA), the largest – and most influential – professional organization for historians, was the first disciplinary society in the world to lead a Tuning project, launching its work in 2012. This essay analyzes a survey distributed to historians on campuses that have taken part in the AHA Tuning project. The purpose is to understand, after six years of work on the project, what practical difference Tuning has made for historians, students, courses, curricula, and departments. Survey data indicate that, under the disciplinary society’s guidance and encouragement, historians have created meaningful learning outcomes, implemented the objectives in courses and curricula, and begun work in the measurement of student learning. Not surprisingly, the project has faced limits and obstacles, particularly with leadership of the work, faculty buy-in, administrative support, follow-up assistance, enrollment concerns, student engagement, and outreach to stakeholders. However, after half a dozen years of activity, U.S. historians have made marked progress not only in articulating disciplinary learning outcomes (as have colleagues in other parts of the world) but also in implementing and assessing those objectives. While precise readings of “impact” remain elusive, a Tuning project under the direction of a disciplinary society has helped generate significant pedagogical, curricular, and cultural changes in the field of history.

Optical Bistability in Semiconductor Injection Lasers

This paper reviews optical bistability in semiconductor lasers, with particular reference to the potential switching speeds of the systems demonstrated to date. Devices which switch by redistributing a nearly constant number of carriers within the active region should be faster, though less stable, than systems whose transitions are attended by changes in carrier numbers. One system of the former type, the self-focused coupled cavity laser, is analysed in some detail and is compared with the twin stripe laser and the Fabry-Perot laser amplifier

Multi-Disciplinary Forest Fire Danger Assessment in Europe: The Potential to Integrate Long-Term Drought Information

A key motivation for multi-disciplinary collaborations is the inclusion of data and knowledge from contributing disciplines for the further development of existing models. The objective of this research is to evaluate the potential of using drought information from the European Drought Observatory (EDO) to complement the forest fire danger assessment of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). Drought conditions are provided through the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which is a spatially invariant and probabilistic year-round index based on precipitation alone. For verifying the hypothesis that drought information can improve the danger assessment of forest fires, we statistically analyse the correspondence between multi-timescale drought condition information with the incidence of forest fires. Within this paper, we perform a detailed comparative analysis of the SPI frequencies for burnt areas with the respective SPI frequencies for the total study area during the same period. The research is carried out in the Iberian Peninsula for the reference year 2009, using the burnt areas mapped by the EFFIS Rapid Damage Assessment. The results clearly show that the frequencies of burnt areas in Iberian Peninsula relate to the regions with abnormal 24-month accumulated precipitation totals, as mapped by the SPI. This suggests that the long-term lack of water contributes to vegetation dryness in the region and thereby increases its risk of fire danger. The added value of including drought information in the fire danger assessment lies in particular outside the forest fire season, when it provides complementary information on areas under risk that are not necessarily marked with a high fire risk following the risk assessment of EFFIS. Based on the results of the study, we suggest an operational integration of drought information coming from EDO into EFFIS using the existing web service infrastructure

Developing a forest data portal to support multi-scale decision making

Forests play a pivotal role in timber production, maintenance and development of biodiversity and in carbon sequestration and storage in the context of the Kyoto Protocol. Policy makers and forest experts therefore require reliable information on forest extent, type and change for management, planning and modeling purposes. It is becoming increasingly clear that such forest information is frequently inconsistent and unharmonised between countries and continents. This research paper presents a forest information portal that has been developed in line with the GEOSS and INSPIRE frameworks. The web portal provides access to forest resources data at a variety of spatial scales, from global through to regional and local, as well as providing analytical capabilities for monitoring and validating forest change. The system also allows for the utilisation of forest data and processing services within other thematic areas. The web portal has been developed using open standards to facilitate accessibility, interoperability and data transfer

Which service interfaces fit the model web?

Ponència presentada a The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services, GEOProcessing 2012, celebrat a València del 30 de gener al 4 de febrer de 2012The Model Web has been proposed as a concept for integrating scientific models in an interoperable and collaborative manner. However, four years after the initial idea was formulated, there is still no stable long term solution. Multiple authors propose Web Service based approaches to model publication and chaining, but current implementations are highly case specific and lack flexibility. This paper discusses the Web Service interfaces, which are required for supporting integrated environmental modeling in a sustainable manner. We explore ways to expose environmental models and their components using Web Service interfaces. Our discussions present work in progress for establishing the Web Services technological grounds for simp lifying information publication and exchange within the Model We b. As a main outcome, this contribution identifies challenges in respect to the required geo- processing and relates them to currently available Web Service standards

MERRA Analytic Services: Meeting the Big Data Challenges of Climate Science Through Cloud-enabled Climate Analytics-as-a-service

Climate science is a Big Data domain that is experiencing unprecedented growth. In our efforts to address the Big Data challenges of climate science, we are moving toward a notion of Climate Analytics-as-a-Service (CAaaS). We focus on analytics, because it is the knowledge gained from our interactions with Big Data that ultimately produce societal benefits. We focus on CAaaS because we believe it provides a useful way of thinking about the problem: a specialization of the concept of business process-as-a-service, which is an evolving extension of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS enabled by Cloud Computing. Within this framework, Cloud Computing plays an important role; however, we it see it as only one element in a constellation of capabilities that are essential to delivering climate analytics as a service. These elements are essential because in the aggregate they lead to generativity, a capacity for self-assembly that we feel is the key to solving many of the Big Data challenges in this domain. MERRA Analytic Services (MERRAAS) is an example of cloud-enabled CAaaS built on this principle. MERRAAS enables MapReduce analytics over NASAs Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) data collection. The MERRA reanalysis integrates observational data with numerical models to produce a global temporally and spatially consistent synthesis of 26 key climate variables. It represents a type of data product that is of growing importance to scientists doing climate change research and a wide range of decision support applications. MERRAAS brings together the following generative elements in a full, end-to-end demonstration of CAaaS capabilities: (1) high-performance, data proximal analytics, (2) scalable data management, (3) software appliance virtualization, (4) adaptive analytics, and (5) a domain-harmonized API. The effectiveness of MERRAAS has been demonstrated in several applications. In our experience, Cloud Computing lowers the barriers and risk to organizational change, fosters innovation and experimentation, facilitates technology transfer, and provides the agility required to meet our customers' increasing and changing needs. Cloud Computing is providing a new tier in the data services stack that helps connect earthbound, enterprise-level data and computational resources to new customers and new mobility-driven applications and modes of work. For climate science, Cloud Computing's capacity to engage communities in the construction of new capabilies is perhaps the most important link between Cloud Computing and Big Data