Connecting Urban Students with their Rivers Generates Interest and Skills in the Geosciences

This article provides an overview of two different enrichment programs for urban high school students from the Greater Hartford Area of Connecticut that were conducted during the summer of 2002. They were designed to expose students entering the tenth grade to Earth Science as a problem solving science in a challenging and supportive atmosphere. This was done by focusing on understanding watersheds and water quality using primarily chemical techniques on samples collected from the Connecticut River and adjacent waters. The students worked in groups of one to three and student-faculty ratios that did not exceed three to one provided close supervision and individual attention. The majority of the students indicated that the programs were a positive experience and that they developed a greater appreciation for the science and would recommend these programs to other students. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Gaussian belief propagation for real-time decentralised inference

For embodied agents to interact intelligently with their surroundings, they require perception systems that construct persistent 3D representations of their environments. These representations must be rich; capturing 3D geometry, semantics, physical properties, affordances and much more. Constructing the environment representation from sensory observations is done via Bayesian probabilistic inference and in practical systems, inference must take place within the power, compactness and simplicity constraints of real products. Efficient inference within these constraints however remains computationally challenging and current systems often require heavy computational resources while delivering a fraction of the desired capabilities. Decentralised algorithms based on local message passing with in-place processing and storage offer a promising solution to current inference bottlenecks. They are well suited to take advantage of recent rapid developments in distributed asynchronous processing hardware to achieve efficient, scalable and low-power performance. In this thesis, we argue for Gaussian belief propagation (GBP) as a strong algorithmic framework for distributed, generic and incremental probabilistic estimation. GBP operates by passing messages between the nodes on a factor graph and can converge with arbitrary asynchronous message schedules. We envisage the factor graph being the fundamental master environment representation, and GBP the flexible inference tool to compute local in-place probabilistic estimates. In large real-time systems, GBP will act as the `glue' between specialised modules, with attention based processing bringing about local convergence in the graph in a just-in-time manner. This thesis contains several technical and theoretical contributions in the application of GBP to practical real-time inference problems in vision and robotics. Additionally, we implement GBP on novel graph processor hardware and demonstrate breakthrough speeds for bundle adjustment problems. Lastly, we present a prototype system for incrementally creating hierarchical abstract scene graphs by combining neural networks and probabilistic inference via GBP.Open Acces

FutureMapping 2: Gaussian Belief Propagation for Spatial AI

We argue the case for Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) as a strong algorithmic framework for the distributed, generic and incremental probabilistic estimation we need in Spatial AI as we aim at high performance smart robots and devices which operate within the constraints of real products. Processor hardware is changing rapidly, and GBP has the right character to take advantage of highly distributed processing and storage while estimating global quantities, as well as great flexibility. We present a detailed tutorial on GBP, relating to the standard factor graph formulation used in robotics and computer vision, and give several simulation examples with code which demonstrate its properties

The dependence of the molecular first hyperpolarizabilities of merocyanines on ground-state polarization and length

We report here the dipole moment (µ) and first hyperpolarizability (β) determined by electric field-induced second harmonic generation, for several merocyanine dyes containing an 1,3,3-trimethylindoline heterocycle as a ‘donor’ in which the ‘acceptor’ end of the molecule and the polyene bridge length was systematically varied; dyes with hexamethine bridges gave positive β, while that with a dimethine bridge gave a negative β value

Sport Consumer Motivation in Intercollegiate Athletics

Intercollegiate athletics have been struggling to make any sort of revenue despite constant effort to attract students and local residents to attend games. Although there is a large discrepancy between attendance (as well as revenues and budgets) in Division I and Division III athletic contests, all levels of play are continuously looking for tactics to attract more fans to games. In this paper we examine the differences in what motivates people to consume sport contests, whether they choose to stay at home to watch on television, buy a ticket, or simply not watch at all. We will be investigating nonrevenue sports at all different levels and testing what brings people to consume these sports. Data will be collected using a college student sample in both Division I and Division III Universities, and we expect to find which factors lead to their consumption of spectating sports between factors such as empathy, family, skill, entertainment, achievement, drama, and so on. Sport Consumer Motivation scale developed by James and Ross (2004) and Motivation Scale for Sport Consumption (Trail & James, 2001) will be adopted to measure sport fan motivations. A series of Aanalysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and multiple regression analysis will be utilized to analyze the data. By investigating these underlying motives we will develop a broad sense of understanding for the reason of fan attendance in a different level of intercollegiate athletics. In finding what it is that brings students, fans, and family to sport contests, sport managers and marketers can begin to develop tactics and strategies to draw more people to the game, in an effort to either make revenue or refrain from losing revenue depending on the level and size of the school