Does science need computer science?

IBM Hursley Talks Series 3An afternoon of talks, to be held on Wednesday March 10 from 2:30pm in Bldg 35 Lecture Room A, arranged by the School of Chemistry in conjunction with IBM Hursley and the Combechem e-Science Project.The talks are aimed at science students (undergraduate and post-graduate) from across the faculty. This is the third series of talks we have organized, but the first time we have put them together in an afternoon. The talks are general in nature and knowledge of computer science is certainly not necessary. After the talks there will be an opportunity for a discussion with the lecturers from IBM.Does Science Need Computer Science?Chair and Moderator - Jeremy Frey, School of Chemistry.- 14:00 "Computer games for fun and profit" (*) - Andrew Reynolds - 14:45 "Anyone for tennis? The science behind WIBMledon" (*) - Matt Roberts - 15:30 Tea (Chemistry Foyer, Bldg 29 opposite bldg 35) - 15:45 "Disk Drive physics from grandmothers to gigabytes" (*) - Steve Legg - 16:35 "What could happen to your data?" (*) - Nick Jones - 17:20 Panel Session, comprising the four IBM speakers and May Glover-Gunn (IBM) - 18:00 Receptio

Does public interest in specific injuries increase when they occur during mixed martial arts bouts? A study of Google search patterns

Introduction: Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a combat sport that combines fighting techniques from many disciplines, such as wrestling, boxing, karate, Muay Thai, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. In the early 1990s MMA entered the United States as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Both the internet and social media have advanced the popularity of MMA and have increased the public's exposure to fighting injuries. Here we examine injuries from popular UFC bouts and observe whether the volume of Google searches for specific injuries increases after the associated fights.Study Design: Our sample of injuries was gathered from "Sherdog's Top 10 Worst UFC Injuries" available from www.sherdog.com. Injury information, the injured fighter's name, date of injury, and the popularity of the fighter (measured by number of Twitter followers) were gathered from Google Trends searches.Results: Searches for the fighter and for the injury (i.e., an alignment) had a co-occurring pattern in 9 of 10 cases. The percent change in search interest for injuries increased in 9 of 10 cases (Mdn = 446%, IQR: 168.75%-1643.75%).Conclusions: Search interest in fighters and injuries appears to increase shortly after injury occurrence, possibly providing an opportunity for the timely dissemination of evidence-based information about particular injuries by sports medicine personnel. This study highlights how investigation of public search interest may ultimately have a positive impact on health care outcomes

Effects of environmental weathering on the acute toxicity of tire wear particle eluate to the mysid shrimp, Americamysis bahia

For this study seven tire groups (six used-tire groups and one new-tire group) of the same brand and model tire spanning manufacture year 2013 to 2018 were used. Tire particles were artificially created and baseline toxicity was measured using the eluate from unweathered tire particle groups through 96-hour acute toxicity tests using Americamysis bahia. These results were then compared to toxicity results from a subset of the same tire groups that were deployed in a marine environment for weathering. Toxicity of unweathered tire particle groups had an LC50 range of 1.97 to 3.51 g/L and the toxicity of weathered tire groups had an LC50 range of 3.67 to 12.09 g/L. These toxicities were found to span four distinct toxicity categories based on ratio tests of the LC50 values. Eluate from each test treatment was analyzed for metals by ICP-MS. Cu and Ni were the only metals found to be significantly lower after weathering. The concentrations of Cu, Ni, and Zn at the LC50s were correlated with their respective LC50s based on the tire wear particle concentrations. Cu and Ni had strong positive correlations showing an inverse relationship with toxicity, indicating that these metals likely do not contribute to toxicity but instead that the tires are the source of the metals. Zn concentrations showed no correlation and was at the approximate LC50 for Zn alone, indicating that it may be contributing to toxicity

The use of national datasets to baseline science education reform: exploring value-added approaches

This paper uses data from the National Pupil Database to investigate the differences in ‘performance’ across the range of science courses available following the 2006 Key Stage 4 (KS4) science reforms in England. This is a value-added exploration (from Key Stage 3 [KS3] to KS4) aimed not at the student or the school level, but rather at that of the course. Different methodological approaches to carrying out such an analysis, ranging from simple non-contextualized techniques, to more complex fully contextualized multilevel models, are investigated and their limitations and benefits are evaluated. Important differences between courses are found in terms of the typical ‘value’ they add to the students studying them with particular applied science courses producing higher mean KS4 outcomes for the same KS3 level compared with other courses. The implications of the emergence of such differences, in a context where schools are judged to a great extent on their value-added performance, are discussed. The relative importance of a variety of student characteristics in determining KS4 outcomes are also investigated. Substantive findings are that across all types of course, science prior attainment at KS3, rather than that of mathematics or English, is the most important predictor of KS4 performance in science, and that students of lower socio-economic status consistently make less progress over KS4 than might be expected, despite prior attainment being accounted for in the modelling

Breathe the Machine

Breathe the Machine interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins Teresa Carmody Dengke Chen Matt Roberts Terri Witek The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be? A collaborative group composed of a prose writer, new media artist, 3-D animator, and poet enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch. An animated video conference offers the project\u27s conceptual framework, including questions about invasive species and intimacy in this new world where we stand masked and apart, not quite meeting another’s onscreen eyes. Participants in Breathe the Machine will each breathe into their own computer mics to both create onscreen reactions and change an animated world. Each transformation will become part of a larger story built from the computers’ individual data. At a designated moment in the conference, we\u27ll combine breaths in a synched group Blow-In. Their conceiving mind quit avoiding their body; their body, they realized, had already FaaD. Donna Haraway is just one theorist who argues that as we acquire more mechanical parts, and as technology takes on increasingly human functions, we are already participants in interspecies interactions; a fact made disturbingly clear and re-capitalized by the unseen transmissions of a global pandemic. Breathe the Machine challenges us to think of screens as partners in new, combinatory narratives that converge technology and the human into uneasy, resilient allies. Each breath, then, can become a cross-species touch, an interactive installation, an archive, a fiction, a world and a landscape. A prompt. This is how we morph. Project website: https://btm19.weebly.com/ To participate in this event, download and open the app, then blow onto your computer’s microphone. Using this app, we will meet at a specific time to participate in a live streamed event. The app, instructions, and story of the FaaS can be found on our project website

Sound and The Moving Image:Critical Characteristics for Spectator Response

The prevailing wisdom in the film and video production industries is that audio information outweighs visual information when it comes to spectator responses, but there are few empirical studies to support this claim. In previous research, four critical characteristics of sound have been identified: (1) Music, (2) visual/sound contradictions (defined as sound that is inconsistent with audience expectations based on visual information), (3) multi-channel sound, and (4) sound quality. Building on our previous research into music and film, we have found that many researchers have looked into the question of how music affects emotions (Eschrich et al., 2008; Have, 2008; Konecni, 2008; etc.), but few have investigated how music affects spectators’ perception of a film. Research into the effects of the other characteristics is almost non-existent and does not include any empirical studies. We propose four experiments to investigate the four different characteristics and how they affect spectators (e.g., their presence responses, affective measures, enjoyment). We have produced a short film, “Chase Her,” that will be manipulated in various ways (including adding music representative of different genres and recording realistic sounds and “contradictory” sounds in our new Foley studio) to test the four characteristics’ effects on audiences

Improving photometric redshift estimation using GPz: size information, post processing and improved photometry

The next generation of large-scale imaging surveys (such as those conducted with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Euclid) will require accurate photometric redshifts in order to optimally extract cosmological information. Gaussian Process for photometric redshift estimation (GPZ) is a promising new method that has been proven to provide efficient, accurate photometric redshift estimations with reliable variance predictions. In this paper, we investigate a number of methods for improving the photometric redshift estimations obtained using GPZ (but which are also applicable to others). We use spectroscopy from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Data Release 2 with a limiting magnitude of r < 19.4 along with corresponding Sloan Digital Sky Survey visible (ugriz) photometry and the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey near-IR (YJHK) photometry. We evaluate the effects of adding near-IR magnitudes and angular size as features for the training, validation, and testing of GPZ and find that these improve the accuracy of the results by ~15–20 per cent. In addition, we explore a post-processing method of shifting the probability distributions of the estimated redshifts based on their Quantile–Quantile plots and find that it improves the bias by ~40 per cent. Finally, we investigate the effects of using more precise photometry obtained from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Data Release 1 and find that it produces significant improvements in accuracy, similar to the effect of including additional features.ScopusIS