Enhancing the Quality of Argumentation in School Science

The research reported in this paper focussed on the design of learning environments that support the teaching and learning of argumentation in a scientific context. The research took place over two years between 1999 and 2001 in junior high schools in the greater London area. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first developmental phase, working with a group of 12 science teachers, the main emphasis was to develop sets of materials and strategies to support argumentation in the classroom and to assess teachers‘ development with teaching argumentation. Data were collected by videoing and audio recording the teachers attempts to implement these lessons at the beginning and end of the year. During this phase, analytical tools for evaluating the quality of argumentation were developed based on Toulmin‘s argument pattern. Analysis of the data shows that there was significant development in the majority of teachers use of argumentation across the year. Results indicate that the pattern of use of argumentation is teacher specific, as is the nature of the change. In the second phase of the project, teachers taught the experimental groups a minimum of nine lessons which involved socioscientific or scientific argumentation. In addition, these teachers taught similar lessons to a control group at the beginning and end of the year. Here the emphasis lay on assessing the progression in student capabilities with argumentation. Hence data were collected from several lessons of two groups of students engaging in argumentation. Using a framework for evaluating the nature of the discourse and its quality, the findings show that there was an improvement in the quality of students‘ argumentation. In addition, the research offers methodological developments for work in this field

Extragalactic Foreground Contamination in Temperature-based CMB Lens Reconstruction

We discuss the effect of unresolved point source contamination on estimates of the CMB lensing potential, from components such as the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, radio point sources, and the Cosmic Infrared Background. We classify the possible trispectra associated with such source populations, and construct estimators for the amplitude and scale-dependence of several of the major trispectra. We show how to propagate analytical models for these source trispectra to biases for lensing. We also construct a "source-hardened" lensing estimator which experiences significantly smaller biases when exposed to unresolved point sources than the standard quadratic lensing estimator. We demonstrate these ideas in practice using the sky simulations of Sehgal et. al., for cosmic-variance limited experiments designed to mimic ACT, SPT, and Planck

A time-dependent variational principle for dissipative dynamics

We extend the time-dependent variational principle to the setting of dissipative dynamics. This provides a locally optimal (in time) approximation to the dynamics of any Lindblad equation within a given variational manifold of mixed states. In contrast to the pure-state setting there is no canonical information geometry for mixed states and this leads to a family of possible trajectories --- one for each information metric. We focus on the case of the operationally motivated family of monotone riemannian metrics and show further, that in the particular case where the variational manifold is given by the set of fermionic gaussian states all of these possible trajectories coincide. We illustrate our results in the case of the Hubbard model subject to spin decoherence.Comment: Published versio

The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles. CSO presents two main advantages over the alternatives: i) it includes a very large number of topics that do not appear in other classifications, and ii) it can be updated automatically by running Klink-2 on recent corpora of publications. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. To facilitate the uptake of CSO we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO at different levels. Users can use the portal to rate topics and relationships, suggest missing relationships, and visualise sections of the ontology. The portal will support the publication of and access to regular new releases of CSO, with the aim of providing a comprehensive resource to the various communities engaged with scholarly data

The Cast[e]ing of Heroic Landscapes of Power: Constructing Canada's Pantheon on Parliament Hill

This paper explores Canada's strategy of nurturing a collective memory and social cohesion by the construction of a memorial-complex in the evolving capitol-capital complex. It called for the representation of national narratives in monumental forms, the construction and consecration of a symbolic topography, and the performance of identity through commemorative activities. It is argued here that the ever-expanding pantheon of national heroes on Parliament Hill is intended to materialize the abstract ideas of the "nationalizing-state" as they evolved through the trajectory of dependent-colony, imperial-nation, state-nation, and consensual community. That is, the cultivation of a collective memory grounded in a mythic past, reified in the present, and projected into the future. The question is posed whether such strategies are sensitive to Canada's role in a globalizing world. Résumé Cet article se penche sur la stratégie de construction d'un complexe commémoratif au sein d'un ensemble capitole-capitale en évolution, qu'a utilisée le Canada pour alimenter la mémoire collective et favoriser la cohésion sociale. Cette stratégie reposait sur la représentation de récits nationaux sous forme de monuments, la construction et la consécration d'une topographie symbolique et la mise en scène de l'identité par des activités commémoratives. Les auteurs considèrent que le panthéon toujours grandissant de héros nationaux sur la colline du Parlement a pour fin de matérialiser les idées abstraites d'État nationalisâtes, qui ont évolué au fil des ans suivant la trajectoire menant de colonie dépendante à nation impériale, puis à nation-État et collectivité consensuelle. Il s'agit de la culture d'une mémoire collective ancrée sur un passé mythique, réifiée dans le présent et projetée dans l'avenir. La question est maintenant de savoir si de telles stratégies prennent en compte le rôle du Canada dans un contexte de mondialisation