Modeling the History of Astronomy: Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho

This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important observational facts, learn the necessary vocabulary, understand the fundamental properties of different theoretical models, and relate the theoretical models to observational data. After completing these activities students can make observations of a fictitious solar system and use those observations to construct models for that system.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Zones of tension: desertification and despoilation in Frederick Sommer’s Arizona photographs 1939-1945

As a solo authored contribution to one of two panels for a conference at Tate Britain 13 January 2012 organised in collaboration with Martin Myrone, Curator, Tate Britain, and Dr Joy Sleeman, Art Historian, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, my paper looks at desertification and despoilation as themes in the work of the landscape photographer Frederick Sommer (1905-1999). The paper considers the radical innovations in formal composition in Sommer's work as reflective of modernist revisions and breaks with C19th tropes of the sublime. The paper also considers Sommer's influences and legacy in the light of later C20th and contemporary photography

Seeing Earth's Orbit in the Stars: Parallax and Aberration

During the 17th century the idea of an orbiting and rotating Earth became increasingly popular, but opponents of this view continued to point out that the theory had observable consequences that had never, in fact, been observed. Why, for instance, had astronomers failed to detect the annual parallax of the stars that must occur if Earth orbits the Sun? To address this problem, astronomers of the 17th and18th centuries sought to measure the annual parallax of stars using telescopes. None of them succeeded. Annual stellar parallax was not successfully measured until 1838, when Friedrich Bessel detected the parallax of the star 61 Cygni. But the early failures to detect annual stellar parallax led to the discovery of a new (and entirely unexpected) phenomenon: the aberration of starlight. This paper recounts the story of the discovery of stellar aberration. It is accompanied by a set of activities and computer simulations that allow students to explore this fascinating historical episode and learn important lessons about the nature of science.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to The Physics Teache

Mercury cadmium telluride photodiode

High speed (Hg,Cd)Te photodiode detectors sensitive to 10.6 microns radiation with operating temperature range of 77 to 90

Autoarchivo:¿por qué se dificulta su aplicación en bliotecas universitarias argentinas?

Although in the daily thing, and for the most part, do we coincide with the benefits that it implies to guide us for a philosophy of free access in our profession, why the application of the autoarchive is hindered in Argentinean university libraries? The present investigation will treat to give bill of the limitations that arise to the moment to want to apply the autoarchive in institutional repositories / digital libraries. For that which has been carried out a field work, raising information of the situation of eight Argentinean universities and their later analysi

Inclusion and the Gifts of Art

On an early spring day in March 2015, I received the gift of song at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Massachusetts. The gift was offered as part of Sonic Blossom, an exhibit created by internationally acclaimed artist Lee Mingwei. The concept is that an opera singer wanders in the galleries and approaches random visitors asking, “May I give you the gift of song?” If the museum go-er accepts,they take the prepared seat in the gallery and the song is sung

Recognizing Ableism in Educational Initiatives: Reading between the Lines

The ubiquity of ableism in education policy requires being increasingly alert to the portrayal of, (including the absence of), disability within educational initiatives. Ableism is a form of oppression, a largely unconscious acceptance of able-bodied norms from the inaccessibility of instructional materials, to assumptions about the body (a healthy body is within one’s control) to the acceptance of segregated settings. In response to the call for this special issue, previous qualitative inquiry into the unintended consequences of three educational reforms were synthesized using critical disability theory.  Seemingly disparate at first glance, all three initiatives, while ostensibly increasing equity, also contained ableism that reinforced stereotypes about student variability and served to further isolate disabled students. One federal (Alternate Assessment), one state (CCSS modules), and one local (project-based learning) policy implementation are included in this theoretical analysis. Reading between the lines means being alert to ableism, and is essential to prevent the historical marginalization of students with disabilities from continuing within contemporary “progress”