An integrated view of complex landscapes: a big data-model integration approach to trans-disciplinary science

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

The Earth is a complex system comprised of many interacting spatial and temporal scales. Understanding, predicting, and managing for these dynamics requires a trans-disciplinary integrated approach. Although there have been calls for this integration, a general approach is needed. We developed a Tra...

Future Phenology: Challenges for an Integrative Environmental Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schwartz, M. D.

2004-12-01

Phenology is an interdisciplinary environmental science, and as such brings together individuals from many different scientific backgrounds, but the full benefits of their combined disciplinary perspectives to enrich phenological research have yet to be realized. The last few years have seen rapid progress in the transmission of "phenological perspectives" into the mainstream of science, especially related to the needs of global change research. While other parts of phenological research are still important and need to progress, it is global change science that will stimulate, challenge, and transform the discipline of phenology most in the coming decades. In order to maximize the benefits of phenology for global change research as rapidly as possible, commitments to integrative thinking and large-scale data collection must be accelerated. First of all, the limitations of the primary forms of data collection (remote sensing derived, native species, cloned indicator species, and model output) must be accepted. None of these data sources can meet the needs of all research questions, and an "integrative approach" that combines data types provides synergistic benefits. The most needed data are traditional native and cloned plant species observations. Networks that select a small number of common plants for coordinated observation among national and global scale networks will prove the most useful. These networks should be embraced and integrated into the missions of national weather services around the world, as is now the case in many European countries. A little more than one hundred years ago, the countries of the world began to cooperate in a global-scale network of weather and climate monitoring stations. The results of this long-term investment are the considerable progress that has been made in understanding the workings of the earth's climate systems. We have a similar opportunity with phenological data--small investments in national and global-scale observation networks are crucial to global change science, and will yield an impressive return in the years ahead.

Scale and the Evolutionarily Based Approximate Number System: An Exploratory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Delgado, Cesar; Jones, M. Gail; You, Hye Sun; Robertson, Laura; Chesnutt, Katherine; Halberda, Justin

2017-01-01

Crosscutting concepts such as "scale, proportion, and quantity" are recognised by U.S. science standards as a potential vehicle for students to integrate their scientific and mathematical knowledge; yet, U.S. students and adults trail their international peers in scale and measurement estimation. Culturally based knowledge of scale such…

Toward a first-principles integrated simulation of tokamak edge plasmas

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chang, C S; Klasky, Scott A; Cummings, Julian

2008-01-01

Performance of the ITER is anticipated to be highly sensitive to the edge plasma condition. The edge pedestal in ITER needs to be predicted from an integrated simulation of the necessary firstprinciples, multi-scale physics codes. The mission of the SciDAC Fusion Simulation Project (FSP) Prototype Center for Plasma Edge Simulation (CPES) is to deliver such a code integration framework by (1) building new kinetic codes XGC0 and XGC1, which can simulate the edge pedestal buildup; (2) using and improving the existing MHD codes ELITE, M3D-OMP, M3D-MPP and NIMROD, for study of large-scale edge instabilities called Edge Localized Modes (ELMs); andmore » (3) integrating the codes into a framework using cutting-edge computer science technology. Collaborative effort among physics, computer science, and applied mathematics within CPES has created the first working version of the End-to-end Framework for Fusion Integrated Simulation (EFFIS), which can be used to study the pedestal-ELM cycles.« less

Integrating Technology, Curriculum, and Online Resources: A Multilevel Model Study of Impacts on Science Teachers and Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ye, Lei

2013-01-01

This scale-up study investigated the impact of a teacher technology tool (Curriculum Customization Service, CCS), curriculum, and online resources on earth science teachers' attitudes, beliefs, and practices and on students' achievement and engagement with science learning. Participants included 73 teachers and over 2,000 ninth-grade students…

Compensatory mitigation for streams under the Clean Water Act: reassessing science and redirecting policy

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

Considerable public funds are annually expended on stream restoration projects, but available science suggests that stream restoration as currently practiced is not effective in recovering ecosystem functional integrity. The physical scale of most stream restoration projects is insufficient because...

Estimating ecological integrity in the interior Columbia River basin.

Treesearch

Thomas M. Quigley; Richard W. Haynes; Wendel J. Hann

2001-01-01

The adoption of ecosystem-based management strategies focuses attention on the need for broad scale estimates of ecological conditions; this poses two challenges for the science community: estimating broad scale ecosystem conditions from highly disparate data, often observed at different spatial scales, and interpreting these conditions relative to goals such as...

Cross-scale phenological data integration to benefit resource management and monitoring

USGS Publications Warehouse

Richardson, Andrew D.; Weltzin, Jake F.; Morisette, Jeffrey T.

2017-01-01

Climate change is presenting new challenges for natural resource managers charged with maintaining sustainable ecosystems and landscapes. Phenology, a branch of science dealing with seasonal natural phenomena (bird migration or plant flowering in response to weather changes, for example), bridges the gap between the biosphere and the climate system. Phenological processes operate across scales that span orders of magnitude—from leaf to globe and from days to seasons—making phenology ideally suited to multiscale, multiplatform data integration and delivery of information at spatial and temporal scales suitable to inform resource management decisions.A workshop report: Workshop held June 2016 to investigate opportunities and challenges facing multi-scale, multi-platform integration of phenological data to support natural resource management decision-making.

Building a multi-scaled geospatial temporal ecology database from disparate data sources: fostering open science and data reuse.

PubMed

Soranno, Patricia A; Bissell, Edward G; Cheruvelil, Kendra S; Christel, Samuel T; Collins, Sarah M; Fergus, C Emi; Filstrup, Christopher T; Lapierre, Jean-Francois; Lottig, Noah R; Oliver, Samantha K; Scott, Caren E; Smith, Nicole J; Stopyak, Scott; Yuan, Shuai; Bremigan, Mary Tate; Downing, John A; Gries, Corinna; Henry, Emily N; Skaff, Nick K; Stanley, Emily H; Stow, Craig A; Tan, Pang-Ning; Wagner, Tyler; Webster, Katherine E

2015-01-01

Although there are considerable site-based data for individual or groups of ecosystems, these datasets are widely scattered, have different data formats and conventions, and often have limited accessibility. At the broader scale, national datasets exist for a large number of geospatial features of land, water, and air that are needed to fully understand variation among these ecosystems. However, such datasets originate from different sources and have different spatial and temporal resolutions. By taking an open-science perspective and by combining site-based ecosystem datasets and national geospatial datasets, science gains the ability to ask important research questions related to grand environmental challenges that operate at broad scales. Documentation of such complicated database integration efforts, through peer-reviewed papers, is recommended to foster reproducibility and future use of the integrated database. Here, we describe the major steps, challenges, and considerations in building an integrated database of lake ecosystems, called LAGOS (LAke multi-scaled GeOSpatial and temporal database), that was developed at the sub-continental study extent of 17 US states (1,800,000 km(2)). LAGOS includes two modules: LAGOSGEO, with geospatial data on every lake with surface area larger than 4 ha in the study extent (~50,000 lakes), including climate, atmospheric deposition, land use/cover, hydrology, geology, and topography measured across a range of spatial and temporal extents; and LAGOSLIMNO, with lake water quality data compiled from ~100 individual datasets for a subset of lakes in the study extent (~10,000 lakes). Procedures for the integration of datasets included: creating a flexible database design; authoring and integrating metadata; documenting data provenance; quantifying spatial measures of geographic data; quality-controlling integrated and derived data; and extensively documenting the database. Our procedures make a large, complex, and integrated database reproducible and extensible, allowing users to ask new research questions with the existing database or through the addition of new data. The largest challenge of this task was the heterogeneity of the data, formats, and metadata. Many steps of data integration need manual input from experts in diverse fields, requiring close collaboration.

Building a multi-scaled geospatial temporal ecology database from disparate data sources: Fostering open science through data reuse

USGS Publications Warehouse

Soranno, Patricia A.; Bissell, E.G.; Cheruvelil, Kendra S.; Christel, Samuel T.; Collins, Sarah M.; Fergus, C. Emi; Filstrup, Christopher T.; Lapierre, Jean-Francois; Lotting, Noah R.; Oliver, Samantha K.; Scott, Caren E.; Smith, Nicole J.; Stopyak, Scott; Yuan, Shuai; Bremigan, Mary Tate; Downing, John A.; Gries, Corinna; Henry, Emily N.; Skaff, Nick K.; Stanley, Emily H.; Stow, Craig A.; Tan, Pang-Ning; Wagner, Tyler; Webster, Katherine E.

2015-01-01

Although there are considerable site-based data for individual or groups of ecosystems, these datasets are widely scattered, have different data formats and conventions, and often have limited accessibility. At the broader scale, national datasets exist for a large number of geospatial features of land, water, and air that are needed to fully understand variation among these ecosystems. However, such datasets originate from different sources and have different spatial and temporal resolutions. By taking an open-science perspective and by combining site-based ecosystem datasets and national geospatial datasets, science gains the ability to ask important research questions related to grand environmental challenges that operate at broad scales. Documentation of such complicated database integration efforts, through peer-reviewed papers, is recommended to foster reproducibility and future use of the integrated database. Here, we describe the major steps, challenges, and considerations in building an integrated database of lake ecosystems, called LAGOS (LAke multi-scaled GeOSpatial and temporal database), that was developed at the sub-continental study extent of 17 US states (1,800,000 km2). LAGOS includes two modules: LAGOSGEO, with geospatial data on every lake with surface area larger than 4 ha in the study extent (~50,000 lakes), including climate, atmospheric deposition, land use/cover, hydrology, geology, and topography measured across a range of spatial and temporal extents; and LAGOSLIMNO, with lake water quality data compiled from ~100 individual datasets for a subset of lakes in the study extent (~10,000 lakes). Procedures for the integration of datasets included: creating a flexible database design; authoring and integrating metadata; documenting data provenance; quantifying spatial measures of geographic data; quality-controlling integrated and derived data; and extensively documenting the database. Our procedures make a large, complex, and integrated database reproducible and extensible, allowing users to ask new research questions with the existing database or through the addition of new data. The largest challenge of this task was the heterogeneity of the data, formats, and metadata. Many steps of data integration need manual input from experts in diverse fields, requiring close collaboration.

The Monsoon-90 / SALSA / EOS / SUDMED / SAHRA / HELP / USPP Experience: A Progression of Interdisciplinary Integration of Science and Decision Making over 20 years.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chehbouni, G.; Goodrich, D.; Kustas, B.; Sorooshian, S.; Shuttleworth, J.; Richter, H.

2008-12-01

The Monsoon'90 Experiment conducted at the USDA-ARS Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed in southeast Arizona was the start of a long arc of subsequent experiments and research that were larger, longer-term, more international, more interdisciplinary, and led to more direct integration of science for decision making and watershed management. In this era, much of our research and science must be more directly relevant to decision-makers and natural resource managers as they increasingly require sophisticated levels of expert findings and scientific results (e.g. interdisciplinary) to make informed decisions. Significant effort beyond focused, single disciplinary research is required conduct interdisciplinary science typical in large scale field experiments. Even greater effort is required to effectively integrate our research across the physical and ecological sciences for direct use by policy and decision makers. This presentation will provide an overview of the evolution of this arc of experiments and long-term projects into a mature integrated science and decision making program. It will discuss the transition in project focus from science and research for understanding; through science for addressing a need; to integrated science and policy development. At each stage the research conducted became more interdisciplinary, first across abiotic disciplines (hydrology, remote sensing, atmospheric science), then by merging abiotic and biotic disciplines (adding ecology and plant physiology), and finally a further integration of economic and social sciences with and policy and decision making for resource management. Lessons learned from this experience will be reviewed with the intent providing guidance to ensure that the resulting research is socially and scientifically relevant and will not only result in cutting edge science but will also directly address the needs of policy makers and resource managers.

An Integrative Landscape-Scale Exercise for Introductory Soil Science Classes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Levy, D. B.; Graham, R. C.

1993-01-01

Describes how teachers can improve introductory soil science courses by applying concepts taught in the classroom to actual field situations. Presents a specific example of a field exercise designed to illustrate soil properties and processes with respect to their environmental settings. (11 references) (Author/MCO)

Great Basin Integrated Landscape Monitoring Pilot Summary Report

USGS Publications Warehouse

Finn, Sean P.; Kitchell, Kate; Baer, Lori Anne; Bedford, David R.; Brooks, Matthew L.; Flint, Alan L.; Flint, Lorraine E.; Matchett, J.R.; Mathie, Amy; Miller, David M.; Pilliod, David S.; Torregrosa, Alicia; Woodward, Andrea

2010-01-01

The Great Basin Integrated Landscape Monitoring Pilot project (GBILM) was one of four regional pilots to implement the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Science Thrust on Integrated Landscape Monitoring (ILM) whose goal was to observe, understand, and predict landscape change and its implications on natural resources at multiple spatial and temporal scales and address priority natural resource management and policy issues. The Great Basin is undergoing rapid environmental change stemming from interactions among global climate trends, increasing human populations, expanding and accelerating land and water uses, invasive species, and altered fire regimes. GBLIM tested concepts and developed tools to store and analyze monitoring data, understand change at multiple scales, and forecast landscape change. The GBILM endeavored to develop and test a landscape-level monitoring approach in the Great Basin that integrates USGS disciplines, addresses priority management questions, catalogs and uses existing monitoring data, evaluates change at multiple scales, and contributes to development of regional monitoring strategies. GBILM functioned as an integrative team from 2005 to 2010, producing more than 35 science and data management products that addressed pressing ecosystem drivers and resource management agency needs in the region. This report summarizes the approaches and methods of this interdisciplinary effort, identifies and describes the products generated, and provides lessons learned during the project.

Emerging concepts for management of river ecosystems and challenges to applied integration of physical and biological sciences in the Pacific Northwest, USA

Treesearch

Bruce E. Rieman; Jason B. Dunham; James L. Clayton

2006-01-01

Integration of biological and physical concepts is necessary to understand and conserve the ecological integrity of river systems. Past attempts at integration have often focused at relatively small scales and on mechanistic models that may not capture the complexity of natural systems leaving substantial uncertainty about ecological responses to management actions....

GEWEX America Prediction Project (GAPP) Science and Implementation Plan

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2004-01-01

The purpose of this Science and Implementation Plan is to describe GAPP science objectives and the activities required to meet these objectives, both specifically for the near-term and more generally for the longer-term. The GEWEX Americas Prediction Project (GAPP) is part of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) initiative that is aimed at observing, understanding and modeling the hydrological cycle and energy fluxes at various time and spatial scales. The mission of GAPP is to demonstrate skill in predicting changes in water resources over intraseasonal-to-interannual time scales, as an integral part of the climate system.

Materials integrity in microsystems: a framework for a petascale predictive-science-based multiscale modeling and simulation system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

To, Albert C.; Liu, Wing Kam; Olson, Gregory B.; Belytschko, Ted; Chen, Wei; Shephard, Mark S.; Chung, Yip-Wah; Ghanem, Roger; Voorhees, Peter W.; Seidman, David N.; Wolverton, Chris; Chen, J. S.; Moran, Brian; Freeman, Arthur J.; Tian, Rong; Luo, Xiaojuan; Lautenschlager, Eric; Challoner, A. Dorian

2008-09-01

Microsystems have become an integral part of our lives and can be found in homeland security, medical science, aerospace applications and beyond. Many critical microsystem applications are in harsh environments, in which long-term reliability needs to be guaranteed and repair is not feasible. For example, gyroscope microsystems on satellites need to function for over 20 years under severe radiation, thermal cycling, and shock loading. Hence a predictive-science-based, verified and validated computational models and algorithms to predict the performance and materials integrity of microsystems in these situations is needed. Confidence in these predictions is improved by quantifying uncertainties and approximation errors. With no full system testing and limited sub-system testings, petascale computing is certainly necessary to span both time and space scales and to reduce the uncertainty in the prediction of long-term reliability. This paper presents the necessary steps to develop predictive-science-based multiscale modeling and simulation system. The development of this system will be focused on the prediction of the long-term performance of a gyroscope microsystem. The environmental effects to be considered include radiation, thermo-mechanical cycling and shock. Since there will be many material performance issues, attention is restricted to creep resulting from thermal aging and radiation-enhanced mass diffusion, material instability due to radiation and thermo-mechanical cycling and damage and fracture due to shock. To meet these challenges, we aim to develop an integrated multiscale software analysis system that spans the length scales from the atomistic scale to the scale of the device. The proposed software system will include molecular mechanics, phase field evolution, micromechanics and continuum mechanics software, and the state-of-the-art model identification strategies where atomistic properties are calibrated by quantum calculations. We aim to predict the long-term (in excess of 20 years) integrity of the resonator, electrode base, multilayer metallic bonding pads, and vacuum seals in a prescribed mission. Although multiscale simulations are efficient in the sense that they focus the most computationally intensive models and methods on only the portions of the space time domain needed, the execution of the multiscale simulations associated with evaluating materials and device integrity for aerospace microsystems will require the application of petascale computing. A component-based software strategy will be used in the development of our massively parallel multiscale simulation system. This approach will allow us to take full advantage of existing single scale modeling components. An extensive, pervasive thrust in the software system development is verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (UQ). Each component and the integrated software system need to be carefully verified. An UQ methodology that determines the quality of predictive information available from experimental measurements and packages the information in a form suitable for UQ at various scales needs to be developed. Experiments to validate the model at the nanoscale, microscale, and macroscale are proposed. The development of a petascale predictive-science-based multiscale modeling and simulation system will advance the field of predictive multiscale science so that it can be used to reliably analyze problems of unprecedented complexity, where limited testing resources can be adequately replaced by petascale computational power, advanced verification, validation, and UQ methodologies.

An Integrated Assessment Approach to Address Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana.

PubMed

Basu, Niladri; Renne, Elisha P; Long, Rachel N

2015-09-17

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is growing in many regions of the world including Ghana. The problems in these communities are complex and multi-faceted. To help increase understanding of such problems, and to enable consensus-building and effective translation of scientific findings to stakeholders, help inform policies, and ultimately improve decision making, we utilized an Integrated Assessment approach to study artisanal and small-scale gold mining activities in Ghana. Though Integrated Assessments have been used in the fields of environmental science and sustainable development, their use in addressing specific matter in public health, and in particular, environmental and occupational health is quite limited despite their many benefits. The aim of the current paper was to describe specific activities undertaken and how they were organized, and the outputs and outcomes of our activity. In brief, three disciplinary workgroups (Natural Sciences, Human Health, Social Sciences and Economics) were formed, with 26 researchers from a range of Ghanaian institutions plus international experts. The workgroups conducted activities in order to address the following question: What are the causes, consequences and correctives of small-scale gold mining in Ghana? More specifically: What alternatives are available in resource-limited settings in Ghana that allow for gold-mining to occur in a manner that maintains ecological health and human health without hindering near- and long-term economic prosperity? Several response options were identified and evaluated, and are currently being disseminated to various stakeholders within Ghana and internationally.

An Integrated Assessment Approach to Address Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana

PubMed Central

Basu, Niladri; Renne, Elisha P.; Long, Rachel N.

2015-01-01

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is growing in many regions of the world including Ghana. The problems in these communities are complex and multi-faceted. To help increase understanding of such problems, and to enable consensus-building and effective translation of scientific findings to stakeholders, help inform policies, and ultimately improve decision making, we utilized an Integrated Assessment approach to study artisanal and small-scale gold mining activities in Ghana. Though Integrated Assessments have been used in the fields of environmental science and sustainable development, their use in addressing specific matter in public health, and in particular, environmental and occupational health is quite limited despite their many benefits. The aim of the current paper was to describe specific activities undertaken and how they were organized, and the outputs and outcomes of our activity. In brief, three disciplinary workgroups (Natural Sciences, Human Health, Social Sciences and Economics) were formed, with 26 researchers from a range of Ghanaian institutions plus international experts. The workgroups conducted activities in order to address the following question: What are the causes, consequences and correctives of small-scale gold mining in Ghana? More specifically: What alternatives are available in resource-limited settings in Ghana that allow for gold-mining to occur in a manner that maintains ecological health and human health without hindering near- and long-term economic prosperity? Several response options were identified and evaluated, and are currently being disseminated to various stakeholders within Ghana and internationally. PMID:26393627

Data integration in the era of omics: current and future challenges

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

To integrate heterogeneous and large omics data constitutes not only a conceptual challenge but a practical hurdle in the daily analysis of omics data. With the rise of novel omics technologies and through large-scale consortia projects, biological systems are being further investigated at an unprecedented scale generating heterogeneous and often large data sets. These data-sets encourage researchers to develop novel data integration methodologies. In this introduction we review the definition and characterize current efforts on data integration in the life sciences. We have used a web-survey to assess current research projects on data-integration to tap into the views, needs and challenges as currently perceived by parts of the research community. PMID:25032990

Integrating Cognitive Science and Technology Improves Learning in a STEM Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Andrew C.; Marsh, Elizabeth J.; Slavinsky, J. P.; Baraniuk, Richard G.

2014-01-01

The most effective educational interventions often face significant barriers to widespread implementation because they are highly specific, resource intense, and/or comprehensive. We argue for an alternative approach to improving education: leveraging technology and cognitive science to develop interventions that generalize, scale, and can be…

Views of Science and Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Regarding STEM

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cinar, Sinan; Pirasa, Nimet; Sadoglu, Gunay Palic

2016-01-01

STEM education is an integrated approach that combines science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines with different subjects in real life situations, together and simultaneously. The views of pre-service teachers introduced to STEM by means of workshops that presented information and scales on STEM education regarding the subject…

The Saskatchewan River Basin - a large scale observatory for water security research (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wheater, H. S.

2013-12-01

The 336,000 km2 Saskatchewan River Basin (SaskRB) in Western Canada illustrates many of the issues of Water Security faced world-wide. It poses globally-important science challenges due to the diversity in its hydro-climate and ecological zones. With one of the world's more extreme climates, it embodies environments of global significance, including the Rocky Mountains (source of the major rivers in Western Canada), the Boreal Forest (representing 30% of Canada's land area) and the Prairies (home to 80% of Canada's agriculture). Management concerns include: provision of water resources to more than three million inhabitants, including indigenous communities; balancing competing needs for water between different uses, such as urban centres, industry, agriculture, hydropower and environmental flows; issues of water allocation between upstream and downstream users in the three prairie provinces; managing the risks of flood and droughts; and assessing water quality impacts of discharges from major cities and intensive agricultural production. Superimposed on these issues is the need to understand and manage uncertain water futures, including effects of economic growth and environmental change, in a highly fragmented water governance environment. Key science questions focus on understanding and predicting the effects of land and water management and environmental change on water quantity and quality. To address the science challenges, observational data are necessary across multiple scales. This requires focussed research at intensively monitored sites and small watersheds to improve process understanding and fine-scale models. To understand large-scale effects on river flows and quality, land-atmosphere feedbacks, and regional climate, integrated monitoring, modelling and analysis is needed at large basin scale. And to support water management, new tools are needed for operational management and scenario-based planning that can be implemented across multiple scales and multiple jurisdictions. The SaskRB has therefore been developed as a large scale observatory, now a Regional Hydroclimate Project of the World Climate Research Programme's GEWEX project, and is available to contribute to the emerging North American Water Program. State-of-the-art hydro-ecological experimental sites have been developed for the key biomes, and a river and lake biogeochemical research facility, focussed on impacts of nutrients and exotic chemicals. Data are integrated at SaskRB scale to support the development of improved large scale climate and hydrological modelling products, the development of DSS systems for local, provincial and basin-scale management, and the development of related social science research, engaging stakeholders in the research and exploring their values and priorities for water security. The observatory provides multiple scales of observation and modelling required to develop: a) new climate, hydrological and ecological science and modelling tools to address environmental change in key environments, and their integrated effects and feedbacks at large catchment scale, b) new tools needed to support river basin management under uncertainty, including anthropogenic controls on land and water management and c) the place-based focus for the development of new transdisciplinary science.

An Integrated Knowledge Framework to Characterize and Scaffold Size and Scale Cognition (FS2C)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Magana, Alejandra J.; Brophy, Sean P.; Bryan, Lynn A.

2012-09-01

Size and scale cognition is a critical ability associated with reasoning with concepts in different disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As such, researchers and educators have identified the need for young learners and their educators to become scale-literate. Informed by developmental psychology literature and recent findings in nanoscale science and engineering education, we propose an integrated knowledge framework for characterizing and scaffolding size and scale cognition called the FS2C framework. Five ad hoc assessment tasks were designed informed by the FS2C framework with the goal of identifying participants' understandings of size and scale. Findings identified participants' difficulties to discern different sizes of microscale and nanoscale objects and a low level of sophistication on identifying scale worlds among participants. Results also identified that as bigger the difference between the sizes of the objects is, the more difficult was for participants to identify how many times an object is bigger or smaller than another one. Similarly, participants showed difficulties to estimate approximate sizes of sub-macroscopic objects as well as a difficulty for participants to estimate the size of very large objects. Participants' accurate location of objects on a logarithmic scale was also challenging.

Moditored unsaturated soil transport processes as a support for large scale soil and water management

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vanclooster, Marnik

2010-05-01

The current societal demand for sustainable soil and water management is very large. The drivers of global and climate change exert many pressures on the soil and water ecosystems, endangering appropriate ecosystem functioning. The unsaturated soil transport processes play a key role in soil-water system functioning as it controls the fluxes of water and nutrients from the soil to plants (the pedo-biosphere link), the infiltration flux of precipitated water to groundwater and the evaporative flux, and hence the feed back from the soil to the climate system. Yet, unsaturated soil transport processes are difficult to quantify since they are affected by huge variability of the governing properties at different space-time scales and the intrinsic non-linearity of the transport processes. The incompatibility of the scales between the scale at which processes reasonably can be characterized, the scale at which the theoretical process correctly can be described and the scale at which the soil and water system need to be managed, calls for further development of scaling procedures in unsaturated zone science. It also calls for a better integration of theoretical and modelling approaches to elucidate transport processes at the appropriate scales, compatible with the sustainable soil and water management objective. Moditoring science, i.e the interdisciplinary research domain where modelling and monitoring science are linked, is currently evolving significantly in the unsaturated zone hydrology area. In this presentation, a review of current moditoring strategies/techniques will be given and illustrated for solving large scale soil and water management problems. This will also allow identifying research needs in the interdisciplinary domain of modelling and monitoring and to improve the integration of unsaturated zone science in solving soil and water management issues. A focus will be given on examples of large scale soil and water management problems in Europe.

Sport science integration: An evolutionary synthesis.

PubMed

Balagué, N; Torrents, C; Hristovski, R; Kelso, J A S

2017-02-01

The aim of the paper is to point out one way of integrating the supposedly incommensurate disciplines investigated in sports science. General, common principles can be found among apparently unrelated disciplines when the focus is put on the dynamics of sports-related phenomena. Dynamical systems approaches that have recently changed research in biological and social sciences among others, offer key concepts to create a common pluricontextual language in sport science. This common language, far from being homogenising, offers key synthesis between diverse fields, respecting and enabling the theoretical and experimental pluralism. It forms a softly integrated sports science characterised by a basic dynamic explanatory backbone as well as context-dependent theoretical flexibility. After defining the dynamic integration in living systems, unable to be captured by structural static approaches, we show the commonalities between the diversity of processes existing on different levels and time scales in biological and social entities. We justify our interpretation by drawing on some recent scientific contributions that use the same general principles and concepts, and diverse methods and techniques of data analysis, to study different types of phenomena in diverse disciplines. We show how the introduction of the dynamic framework in sport science has started to blur the boundaries between physiology, biomechanics, psychology, phenomenology and sociology. The advantages and difficulties of sport science integration and its consequences in research are also discussed.

Sustainable NREL: From Integration to Innovation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

2015-09-01

NREL's sustainability practices are integrated throughout the laboratory and are essential to our mission to develop clean energy and energy efficiency technologies and practices, advance related science and engineering, and provide knowledge and innovations to integrate energy systems at all scales. Sustainability initiatives are integrated through our campus, our staff, and our environment allowing NREL to provide leadership in modeling a sustainability energy future for companies, organizations, governments, and communities.

HNSciCloud - Overview and technical Challenges

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gasthuber, Martin; Meinhard, Helge; Jones, Robert

2017-10-01

HEP is only one of many sciences with sharply increasing compute requirements that cannot be met by profiting from Moore’s law alone. Commercial clouds potentially allow for realising larger economies of scale. While some small-scale experience requiring dedicated effort has been collected, public cloud resources have not been integrated yet with the standard workflows of science organisations in their private data centres; in addition, European science has not ramped up to significant scale yet. The HELIX NEBULA Science Cloud project - HNSciCloud, partly funded by the European Commission, addresses these points. Ten organisations under CERN’s leadership, covering particle physics, bioinformatics, photon science and other sciences, have joined to procure public cloud resources as well as dedicated development efforts towards this integration. The HNSciCloud project faces the challenge to accelerate developments performed by the selected commercial providers. In order to guarantee cost efficient usage of IaaS resources across a wide range of scientific communities, the technical requirements had to be carefully constructed. With respect to current IaaS offerings, dataintensive science is the biggest challenge; other points that need to be addressed concern identity federations, network connectivity and how to match business practices of large IaaS providers with those of public research organisations. In the first section, this paper will give an overview of the project and explain the findings so far. The last section will explain the key points of the technical requirements and present first results of the experience of the procurers with the services in comparison to their’on-premise’ infrastructure.

STEM Integration in Middle School Life Science: Student Learning and Attitudes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guzey, S. Selcen; Moore, Tamara J.; Harwell, Michael; Moreno, Mario

2016-08-01

In many countries around the world, there has been an increasing emphasis on improving science education. Recent reform efforts in the USA call for teachers to integrate scientific and engineering practices into science teaching; for example, science teachers are asked to provide learning experiences for students that apply crosscutting concepts (e.g., patterns, scale) and increase understanding of disciplinary core ideas (e.g., physical science, earth science). Engineering practices and engineering design are essential elements of this new vision of science teaching and learning. This paper presents a research study that evaluates the effects of an engineering design-based science curriculum on student learning and attitudes. Three middle school life science teachers and 275 seventh grade students participated in the study. Content assessments and attitude surveys were administered before and after the implementation of the curriculum unit. Statewide mathematics test proficiency scores were included in the data analysis as well. Results provide evidence of the positive effects of implementing the engineering design-based science unit on student attitudes and learning.

Photonic Integrated Circuits

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Krainak, Michael; Merritt, Scott

2016-01-01

Integrated photonics generally is the integration of multiple lithographically defined photonic and electronic components and devices (e.g. lasers, detectors, waveguides passive structures, modulators, electronic control and optical interconnects) on a single platform with nanometer-scale feature sizes. The development of photonic integrated circuits permits size, weight, power and cost reductions for spacecraft microprocessors, optical communication, processor buses, advanced data processing, and integrated optic science instrument optical systems, subsystems and components. This is particularly critical for small spacecraft platforms. We will give an overview of some NASA applications for integrated photonics.

Enabling and Challenging Factors in Institutional Reform: The Case of SCALE-UP

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foote, Kathleen; Knaub, Alexis; Henderson, Charles; Dancy, Melissa; Beichner, Robert J.

2016-01-01

While many innovative teaching strategies exist, integration into undergraduate science teaching has been frustratingly slow. This study aims to understand the low uptake of research-based instructional innovations by studying 21 successful implementations of the Student Centered Active Learning with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) instructional…

75 FR 28018 - Science Advisory Board Staff Office; Notification of a Public Teleconference of the Science...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-05-19

... conducting a study to evaluate the need for integrated research and management strategies to reduce reactive nitrogen in the environment. At the global scale, reactive nitrogen from human activities now exceeds that produced by natural terrestrial ecosystems. Reactive nitrogen both benefits and impacts the health and...

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kornreich, Drew E; Vaidya, Rajendra U; Ammerman, Curtt N

Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) is a novel overarching approach to bridge length and time scales in computational materials science and engineering. This approach integrates all elements of multi-scale modeling (including various empirical and science-based models) with materials informatics to provide users the opportunity to tailor material selections based on stringent application needs. Typically, materials engineering has focused on structural requirements (stress, strain, modulus, fracture toughness etc.) while multi-scale modeling has been science focused (mechanical threshold strength model, grain-size models, solid-solution strengthening models etc.). Materials informatics (mechanical property inventories) on the other hand, is extensively data focused. All of thesemore » elements are combined within the framework of ICME to create architecture for the development, selection and design new composite materials for challenging environments. We propose development of the foundations for applying ICME to composite materials development for nuclear and high-radiation environments (including nuclear-fusion energy reactors, nuclear-fission reactors, and accelerators). We expect to combine all elements of current material models (including thermo-mechanical and finite-element models) into the ICME framework. This will be accomplished through the use of a various mathematical modeling constructs. These constructs will allow the integration of constituent models, which in tum would allow us to use the adaptive strengths of using a combinatorial scheme (fabrication and computational) for creating new composite materials. A sample problem where these concepts are used is provided in this summary.« less

The development and validation of the Instructional Practices Log in Science: a measure of K-5 science instruction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Adams, Elizabeth L.; Carrier, Sarah J.; Minogue, James; Porter, Stephen R.; McEachin, Andrew; Walkowiak, Temple A.; Zulli, Rebecca A.

2017-02-01

The Instructional Practices Log in Science (IPL-S) is a daily teacher log developed for K-5 teachers to self-report their science instruction. The items on the IPL-S are grouped into scales measuring five dimensions of science instruction: Low-level Sense-making, High-level Sense-making, Communication, Integrated Practices, and Basic Practices. As part of the current validation study, 206 elementary teachers completed 4137 daily log entries. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of validity for the IPL-S's scales, including (a) support for the theoretical framework; (b) cognitive interviews with logging teachers; (c) item descriptive statistics; (d) comparisons of 28 pairs of teacher and rater logs; and (e) an examination of the internal structure of the IPL-S. We present evidence to describe the extent to which the items and the scales are completed accurately by teachers and differentiate various types of science instructional strategies employed by teachers. Finally, we point to several practical implications of our work and potential uses for the IPL-S. Overall, results provide neutral to positive support for the validity of the groupings of items or scales.

Science curiosity in learning environments: developing an attitudinal scale for research in schools, homes, museums, and the community

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weible, Jennifer L.; Toomey Zimmerman, Heather

2016-05-01

Although curiosity is considered an integral aspect of science learning, researchers have debated how to define, measure, and support its development in individuals. Prior measures of curiosity include questionnaire type scales (primarily for adults) and behavioral measures. To address the need to measure scientific curiosity, the Science Curiosity in Learning Environments (SCILE) scale was created and validated as a 12-item scale to measure scientific curiosity in youth. The scale was developed through (a) adapting the language of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II [Kashdan, T. B., Gallagher, M. W., Silvia, P. J., Winterstein, B. P., Breen, W. E., Terhar, D., & Steger, M. F. (2009). The curiosity and exploration inventory-II: Development, factor structure, and psychometrics. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(6), 987-998] for youth and (b) crafting new items based on scientific practices drawn from U.S. science standards documents. We administered a preliminary set of 30 items to 663 youth ages 8-18 in the U.S.A. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis resulted in a three-factor model: stretching, embracing, and science practices. The findings indicate that the SCILE scale is a valid measure of youth's scientific curiosity for boys and girls as well as elementary, middle school, and high school learners.

Brazilian LTER: ecosystem and biodiversity information in support of decision-making.

PubMed

Barbosa, F A R; Scarano, F R; Sabará, M G; Esteves, F A

2004-01-01

Brazil officially joined the International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network in January 2000, when nine research sites were created and funded by the Brazilian Council for Science and Technology (CNPq). Two-years later some positive signs already emerge of the scientific, social and political achievements of the Brazilian LTER program. We discuss examples of how ecosystem and biodiversity information gathered within a long-term research approach are currently subsidizing decision-making as regards biodiversity conservation and watershed management at local and regional scales. Success in this respect has often been related to satisfactory communication between scientists, private companies, government and local citizens. Environmental education programs in the LTER sites are playing an important role in social and political integration. Most examples of integration of ecological research to decision-making in Brazil derive from case studies at local or regional scale. Despite the predominance of a bottom-up integrative pathway (from case studies to models; from local to national scale), some top-down initiatives are also in order, such as the construction of a model to estimate the inpact of different macroeconomic policies and growth trajectories on land use. We believe science and society in Brazil will benefit of the coexistence of bottom-up and top-down integrative approaches.

Useful and Usable Climate Science: Frameworks for Bridging the Social and Physical domains.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Buja, L.

2016-12-01

Society is transforming the Earth's system in unprecedented ways, often with significant variations across space and time. In turn, the impacts of climate change on the human system vary dramatically due to differences in cultural, socioeconomic, institutional, and physical processes at the local level. The Climate Science and Applications Program (CSAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado addresses societal vulnerability, impacts and adaptation to climate change through the development of frameworks and methods for analyzing current and future vulnerability, and integrated analyses of climate impacts and adaptation at local, regional and global scales. CSAP relies heavily on GIS-based scientific data and knowledge systems to bridge social and physical science approaches in its five focus areas: Governance of inter-linked natural and managed resource systems. The role of urban areas in driving emissions of climate change Weather, climate and global human health, GIS-based science data & knowledge systems. Regional Climate Science and Services for Adaptation Advanced methodologies and frameworks for assessing current and future risks to environmental hazards through the integration of physical and social science models, research results, and remote sensing data are presented in the context of recent national and international projects on climate change and food/water security, urban carbon emissions, metropolitan extreme heat and global health. In addition, innovative CSAP international capacity building programs teaching interdisciplinary approaches for using geospatial technologies to integrate multi-scale spatial information of weather, climate change into important sectors such as disaster reduction, agriculture, tourism and society for decision-making are discussed.

NREL Leads Energy Systems Integration, Continuum Magazine: Issue 4 (Book)

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Not Available

2013-04-01

Continuum Magazine showcases NREL's latest and most impactful clean energy innovations. This issue, 'NREL Leads Energy Systems Integration' explores the discipline of energy systems integration, in particular the role of the laboratory's new, one-of-a-kind Energy System Integration Facility. NREL scientists, engineers, and analysts deeply understand the fundamental science and technologies underpinning major energy producing and consuming systems, as well as the transmission infrastructure and communications and data networks required to integrate energy systems at all scales.

Climate Dynamics and Experimental Prediction (CDEP) and Regional Integrated Science Assessments (RISA) Programs at NOAA Office of Global Programs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bamzai, A.

2003-04-01

This talk will highlight science and application activities of the CDEP and RISA programs at NOAA OGP. CDEP, through a set of Applied Research Centers (ARCs), supports NOAA's program of quantitative assessments and predictions of global climate variability and its regional implications on time scales of seasons to centuries. The RISA program consolidates results from ongoing disciplinary process research under an integrative framework. Examples of joint CDEP-RISA activities will be presented. Future directions and programmatic challenges will also be discussed.

Linking Research, Education and Public Engagement in Geoscience: Leadership and Strategic Partnerships

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Spellman, K.

2017-12-01

A changing climate has impacted Alaska communities at unprecedented rates, and the need for efficient and effective climate change learning in the Boreal and Arctic regions is urgent. Learning programs that can both increase personal understanding and connection to climate change science and also inform large scale scientific research about climate change are an attractive option for building community adaptive capacity at multiple scales. Citizen science has emerged as a powerful tool for facilitating learning across scales, and for building partnerships across natural sciences research, education, and outreach disciplines. As an early career scientist and interdisciplinary researcher, citizen science has become the centerpiece of my work and has provided some of the most rewarding moments of my career. I will discuss my early career journey building a research and leadership portfolio integrating climate change research, learning research, and public outreach through citizen science. I will share key experiences from graduate student to early career PI that cultivated my leadership skills and ability to build partnerships necessary to create citizen science programs that emphasize synergy between climate change research and education.

Towards Semantic e-Science for Traditional Chinese Medicine

PubMed Central

Chen, Huajun; Mao, Yuxin; Zheng, Xiaoqing; Cui, Meng; Feng, Yi; Deng, Shuiguang; Yin, Aining; Zhou, Chunying; Tang, Jinming; Jiang, Xiaohong; Wu, Zhaohui

2007-01-01

Background Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science. Results We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research. Conclusion Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline. PMID:17493289

Design of Scalable and Effective Earth Science Collaboration Tool

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maskey, M.; Ramachandran, R.; Kuo, K. S.; Lynnes, C.; Niamsuwan, N.; Chidambaram, C.

2014-12-01

Collaborative research is growing rapidly. Many tools including IDEs are now beginning to incorporate new collaborative features. Software engineering research has shown the effectiveness of collaborative programming and analysis. In particular, drastic reduction in software development time resulting in reduced cost has been highlighted. Recently, we have witnessed the rise of applications that allow users to share their content. Most of these applications scale such collaboration using cloud technologies. Earth science research needs to adopt collaboration technologies to reduce redundancy, cut cost, expand knowledgebase, and scale research experiments. To address these needs, we developed the Earth science collaboration workbench (CWB). CWB provides researchers with various collaboration features by augmenting their existing analysis tools to minimize learning curve. During the development of the CWB, we understood that Earth science collaboration tasks are varied and we concluded that it is not possible to design a tool that serves all collaboration purposes. We adopted a mix of synchronous and asynchronous sharing methods that can be used to perform collaboration across time and location dimensions. We have used cloud technology for scaling the collaboration. Cloud has been highly utilized and valuable tool for Earth science researchers. Among other usages, cloud is used for sharing research results, Earth science data, and virtual machine images; allowing CWB to create and maintain research environments and networks to enhance collaboration between researchers. Furthermore, collaborative versioning tool, Git, is integrated into CWB for versioning of science artifacts. In this paper, we present our experience in designing and implementing the CWB. We will also discuss the integration of collaborative code development use cases for data search and discovery using NASA DAAC and simulation of satellite observations using NASA Earth Observing System Simulation Suite (NEOS3).

Crossing Science-Policy-Societal Boundaries to Reduce Scientific and Institutional Uncertainty in Small-Scale Fisheries.

PubMed

Sutton, Abigail M; Rudd, Murray A

2016-10-01

The governance of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging due to the uncertainty, complexity, and interconnectedness of social, political, ecological, and economical processes. Conventional SSF management has focused on a centralized and top-down approach. A major criticism of conventional management is the over-reliance on 'expert science' to guide decision-making and poor consideration of fishers' contextually rich knowledge. That is thought to exacerbate the already low governance potential of SSF. Integrating scientific knowledge with fishers' knowledge is increasingly popular and is often assumed to help reduce levels of biophysical and institutional uncertainties. Many projects aimed at encouraging knowledge integration have, however, been unsuccessful. Our objective in this research was to assess factors that influence knowledge integration and the uptake of integrated knowledge into policy-making. We report results from 54 semi-structured interviews with SSF researchers and practitioners from around the globe. Our analysis is framed in terms of scientific credibility, societal legitimacy, and policy saliency, and we discuss cases that have been partially or fully successful in reducing uncertainty via push-and-pull-oriented boundary crossing initiatives. Our findings suggest that two important factors affect the science-policy-societal boundary: a lack of consensus among stakeholders about what constitutes credible knowledge and institutional uncertainty resulting from shifting policies and leadership change. A lack of training for scientific leaders and an apparent 'shelf-life' for community organizations highlight the importance of ongoing institutional support for knowledge integration projects. Institutional support may be enhanced through such investments, such as capacity building and specialized platforms for knowledge integration.

Crossing Science-Policy-Societal Boundaries to Reduce Scientific and Institutional Uncertainty in Small-Scale Fisheries

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sutton, Abigail M.; Rudd, Murray A.

2016-10-01

The governance of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging due to the uncertainty, complexity, and interconnectedness of social, political, ecological, and economical processes. Conventional SSF management has focused on a centralized and top-down approach. A major criticism of conventional management is the over-reliance on `expert science' to guide decision-making and poor consideration of fishers' contextually rich knowledge. That is thought to exacerbate the already low governance potential of SSF. Integrating scientific knowledge with fishers' knowledge is increasingly popular and is often assumed to help reduce levels of biophysical and institutional uncertainties. Many projects aimed at encouraging knowledge integration have, however, been unsuccessful. Our objective in this research was to assess factors that influence knowledge integration and the uptake of integrated knowledge into policy-making. We report results from 54 semi-structured interviews with SSF researchers and practitioners from around the globe. Our analysis is framed in terms of scientific credibility, societal legitimacy, and policy saliency, and we discuss cases that have been partially or fully successful in reducing uncertainty via push-and-pull-oriented boundary crossing initiatives. Our findings suggest that two important factors affect the science-policy-societal boundary: a lack of consensus among stakeholders about what constitutes credible knowledge and institutional uncertainty resulting from shifting policies and leadership change. A lack of training for scientific leaders and an apparent `shelf-life' for community organizations highlight the importance of ongoing institutional support for knowledge integration projects. Institutional support may be enhanced through such investments, such as capacity building and specialized platforms for knowledge integration.

Subsurface Hydrology: Data Integration for Properties and Processes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hyndman, David W.; Day-Lewis, Frederick D.; Singha, Kamini

Groundwater is a critical resource and the PrinciPal source of drinking water for over 1.5 billion people. In 2001, the National Research Council cited as a "grand challenge" our need to understand the processes that control water movement in the subsurface. This volume faces that challenge in terms of data integration between complex, multi-scale hydrologie processes, and their links to other physical, chemical, and biological processes at multiple scales. Subsurface Hydrology: Data Integration for Properties and Processes presents the current state of the science in four aspects: • Approaches to hydrologie data integration • Data integration for characterization of hydrologie properties • Data integration for understanding hydrologie processes • Meta-analysis of current interpretations Scientists and researchers in the field, the laboratory, and the classroom will find this work an important resource in advancing our understanding of subsurface water movement.

Climbing the Slope of Enlightenment during NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Griffith, P. C.; Hoy, E.; Duffy, D.; McInerney, M.

2015-12-01

The Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is a new field campaign sponsored by NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program and designed to improve understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of Arctic and boreal social-ecological systems to environmental change (http://above.nasa.gov). ABoVE is integrating field-based studies, modeling, and data from airborne and satellite remote sensing. The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) has partnered with the NASA Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office (CCEO) to create a high performance science cloud for this field campaign. The ABoVE Science Cloud combines high performance computing with emerging technologies and data management with tools for analyzing and processing geographic information to create an environment specifically designed for large-scale modeling, analysis of remote sensing data, copious disk storage for "big data" with integrated data management, and integration of core variables from in-situ networks. The ABoVE Science Cloud is a collaboration that is accelerating the pace of new Arctic science for researchers participating in the field campaign. Specific examples of the utilization of the ABoVE Science Cloud by several funded projects will be presented.

Measuring Graph Comprehension, Critique, and Construction in Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lai, Kevin; Cabrera, Julio; Vitale, Jonathan M.; Madhok, Jacquie; Tinker, Robert; Linn, Marcia C.

2016-08-01

Interpreting and creating graphs plays a critical role in scientific practice. The K-12 Next Generation Science Standards call for students to use graphs for scientific modeling, reasoning, and communication. To measure progress on this dimension, we need valid and reliable measures of graph understanding in science. In this research, we designed items to measure graph comprehension, critique, and construction and developed scoring rubrics based on the knowledge integration (KI) framework. We administered the items to over 460 middle school students. We found that the items formed a coherent scale and had good reliability using both item response theory and classical test theory. The KI scoring rubric showed that most students had difficulty linking graphs features to science concepts, especially when asked to critique or construct graphs. In addition, students with limited access to computers as well as those who speak a language other than English at home have less integrated understanding than others. These findings point to the need to increase the integration of graphing into science instruction. The results suggest directions for further research leading to comprehensive assessments of graph understanding.

A Landscape Model (LEEMATH) to Evaluate Effects of Management Impacts on Timber and Wildlife Habitat

Treesearch

Harbin Li; David L. Gartner; Pu Mou; Carl C. Trettin

2000-01-01

Managing forest resources for sustainability requires the successful integration of economic and ecological goals. To attain such integration, land managers need decision support tools that incorporate science, land-use strategies, and policy options to assess resources sustainability at large scales. Landscape Evaluation of Effects of Management Activities on Timber...

An Integrated Optimal Estimation Approach to Spitzer Space Telescope Focal Plane Survey

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bayard, David S.; Kang, Bryan H.; Brugarolas, Paul B.; Boussalis, D.

2004-01-01

This paper discusses an accurate and efficient method for focal plane survey that was used for the Spitzer Space Telescope. The approach is based on using a high-order 37-state Instrument Pointing Frame (IPF) Kalman filter that combines both engineering parameters and science parameters into a single filter formulation. In this approach, engineering parameters such as pointing alignments, thermomechanical drift and gyro drifts are estimated along with science parameters such as plate scales and optical distortions. This integrated approach has many advantages compared to estimating the engineering and science parameters separately. The resulting focal plane survey approach is applicable to a diverse range of science instruments such as imaging cameras, spectroscopy slits, and scanning-type arrays alike. The paper will summarize results from applying the IPF Kalman Filter to calibrating the Spitzer Space Telescope focal plane, containing the MIPS, IRAC, and the IRS science Instrument arrays.

Great Lakes Integrated Sciences + Assessments: Connecting Users and Generators of Scientific Information to Inform Climate Change Adaptation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baule, W. J.; Briley, L.; Brown, D.; Gibbons, E.

2014-12-01

The Great Lakes Integrated Sciences + Assessments (GLISA) is one of eleven NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISAs) and is a co-hosted by the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The Great Lakes region falls between areas that are typically defined as the Midwest and Northeast in the United States and also includes portions of Ontario in Canada. This unique and complex region holds approximately 21% of global surface fresh water and is home to 23 million people on the United States side of the basin alone. GLISA functions as a bridge between climate science researchers and boundary organizations in the Great Lakes region, with the goals of contributing to the long-term sustainability of the region in face of a changing climate and to facilitate smart decision-making backed by sound scientific knowledge. Faculty and staff associated with GLISA implement physical and social science practices in daily operations, which includes but is not limited to: activating the boundary chain model to facilitate the transfer of knowledge through the community, integrating local and historical climate data into decision-making processes, addressing uncertainty and the downscaling of climate information, and implementing network analyses to find key access points to information networks across the Great Lakes region. GLISA also provides funding for projects related to climate and climate change adaptation in the Great Lakes region, as well as expertise to partner organizations through collaborations. Information from boundary organizations, stakeholders, and collaborators also flows back to GLISA to aid in the determination of the physical and social science needs of the region. Recent findings point to GLISA playing a crucial role in the scaling information across scales of government and ensuring that federal agencies and local stakeholders are able to learn from one another and share experiences and knowledge to continue building climate ready sectors and communities across the Great Lakes region.

Reducing the two-loop large-scale structure power spectrum to low-dimensional, radial integrals

DOE PAGES

Schmittfull, Marcel; Vlah, Zvonimir

2016-11-28

Modeling the large-scale structure of the universe on nonlinear scales has the potential to substantially increase the science return of upcoming surveys by increasing the number of modes available for model comparisons. One way to achieve this is to model nonlinear scales perturbatively. Unfortunately, this involves high-dimensional loop integrals that are cumbersome to evaluate. Here, trying to simplify this, we show how two-loop (next-to-next-to-leading order) corrections to the density power spectrum can be reduced to low-dimensional, radial integrals. Many of those can be evaluated with a one-dimensional fast Fourier transform, which is significantly faster than the five-dimensional Monte-Carlo integrals thatmore » are needed otherwise. The general idea of this fast fourier transform perturbation theory method is to switch between Fourier and position space to avoid convolutions and integrate over orientations, leaving only radial integrals. This reformulation is independent of the underlying shape of the initial linear density power spectrum and should easily accommodate features such as those from baryonic acoustic oscillations. We also discuss how to account for halo bias and redshift space distortions.« less

Interdisciplinary Team Science in Cell Biology.

PubMed

Horwitz, Rick

2016-11-01

The cell is complex. With its multitude of components, spatial-temporal character, and gene expression diversity, it is challenging to comprehend the cell as an integrated system and to develop models that predict its behaviors. I suggest an approach to address this issue, involving system level data analysis, large scale team science, and philanthropy. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

SCIENCE FOR INTEGRATED WATERSHED MANAGEMENT: A MULTI-SCALE EXPERIMENTAL CASE STUDY LINKING LAND USE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND WATER QUALITY IN SOUTHERN OHIO

EPA Science Inventory

Although it is routine for watershed management programs to coincide the monitoring of land use impacts and water quality at different spatial scales, rarely are the data collected in a manner to elucidate the linkages among ecological systems across a drainage network. There rem...

Integrating scientific knowledge into large-scale restoration programs: the CALFED Bay-Delta Program experience

USGS Publications Warehouse

Taylor, Kimberly A.; Short, A.

2009-01-01

Integrating science into resource management activities is a goal of the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, a multi-agency effort to address water supply reliability, ecological condition, drinking water quality, and levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of northern California. Under CALFED, many different strategies were used to integrate science, including interaction between the research and management communities, public dialogues about scientific work, and peer review. This paper explores ways science was (and was not) integrated into CALFED's management actions and decision systems through three narratives describing different patterns of scientific integration and application in CALFED. Though a collaborative process and certain organizational conditions may be necessary for developing new understandings of the system of interest, we find that those factors are not sufficient for translating that knowledge into management actions and decision systems. We suggest that the application of knowledge may be facilitated or hindered by (1) differences in the objectives, approaches, and cultures of scientists operating in the research community and those operating in the management community and (2) other factors external to the collaborative process and organization.

Scale and the evolutionarily based approximate number system: an exploratory study

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Delgado, Cesar; Jones, M. Gail; You, Hye Sun; Robertson, Laura; Chesnutt, Katherine; Halberda, Justin

2017-05-01

Crosscutting concepts such as scale, proportion, and quantity are recognised by U.S. science standards as a potential vehicle for students to integrate their scientific and mathematical knowledge; yet, U.S. students and adults trail their international peers in scale and measurement estimation. Culturally based knowledge of scale such as measurement units may be built on evolutionarily-based systems of number such as the approximate number system (ANS), which processes approximate representations of numerical magnitude. ANS is related to mathematical achievement in pre-school and early elementary students, but there is little research on ANS among older students or in science-related areas such as scale. Here, we investigate the relationship between ANS precision in public school U.S. seventh graders and their accuracy estimating the length of standard units of measurement in SI and U.S. customary units. We also explored the relationship between ANS and science and mathematics achievement. Accuracy estimating the metre was positively and significantly related to ANS precision. Mathematics achievement, science achievement, and accuracy estimating other units were not significantly related to ANS. We thus suggest that ANS precision may be related to mathematics understanding beyond arithmetic, beyond the early school years, and to the crosscutting concepts of scale, proportion, and quantity.

Soil organic carbon across scales.

PubMed

O'Rourke, Sharon M; Angers, Denis A; Holden, Nicholas M; McBratney, Alex B

2015-10-01

Mechanistic understanding of scale effects is important for interpreting the processes that control the global carbon cycle. Greater attention should be given to scale in soil organic carbon (SOC) science so that we can devise better policy to protect/enhance existing SOC stocks and ensure sustainable use of soils. Global issues such as climate change require consideration of SOC stock changes at the global and biosphere scale, but human interaction occurs at the landscape scale, with consequences at the pedon, aggregate and particle scales. This review evaluates our understanding of SOC across all these scales in the context of the processes involved in SOC cycling at each scale and with emphasis on stabilizing SOC. Current synergy between science and policy is explored at each scale to determine how well each is represented in the management of SOC. An outline of how SOC might be integrated into a framework of soil security is examined. We conclude that SOC processes at the biosphere to biome scales are not well understood. Instead, SOC has come to be viewed as a large-scale pool subjects to carbon flux. Better understanding exists for SOC processes operating at the scales of the pedon, aggregate and particle. At the landscape scale, the influence of large- and small-scale processes has the greatest interaction and is exposed to the greatest modification through agricultural management. Policy implemented at regional or national scale tends to focus at the landscape scale without due consideration of the larger scale factors controlling SOC or the impacts of policy for SOC at the smaller SOC scales. What is required is a framework that can be integrated across a continuum of scales to optimize SOC management. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Landscape and climate science and scenarios for Florida

USGS Publications Warehouse

Terando, Adam; Traxler, Steve; Collazo, Jaime

2014-01-01

The Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative (PFLCC) is part of a network of 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) that extend from Alaska to the Caribbean. LCCs are regional-applied conservation-science partnerships among Federal agencies, regional organizations, States, tribes, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private stakeholders, universities, and other entities within a geographic area. The goal of these conservation-science partnerships is to help inform managers and decision makers at a landscape scale to further the principles of adaptive management and strategic habitat conservation. A major focus for LCCs is to help conservation managers and decision makers respond to large-scale ecosystem and habitat stressors, such as climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and water scarcity. The purpose of the PFLCC is to facilitate planning, design, and implementation of conservation strategies for fish and wildlife species at the landscape level using the adaptive management framework of strategic habitat conservation—integrating planning, design, delivery, and evaluation. Florida faces a set of unique challenges when responding to regional and global stressors because of its unique ecosystems and assemblages of species, its geographic location at the crossroads of temperate and tropical climates, and its exposure to both rapid urbanization and rising sea levels as the climate warms. In response to these challenges, several landscape-scale science projects were initiated with the goal of informing decision makers about how potential changes in climate and the built environment could impact habitats and ecosystems of concern in Florida and the Southeast United States. In June 2012, the PFLCC, North Carolina State University, convened a workshop at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coastal and Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg to assess the results of these integrated assessments and to foster an open dialogue about science gaps and future research needs.

Analysis of expert validation on developing integrated science worksheet to improve problem solving skills of natural science prospective teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Widodo, W.; Sudibyo, E.; Sari, D. A. P.

2018-04-01

This study aims to develop student worksheets for higher education that apply integrated science learning in discussing issues about motion in humans. These worksheets will guide students to solve the problem about human movement. They must integrate their knowledge about biology, physics, and chemistry to solve the problem. The worksheet was validated by three experts in Natural Science Integrated Science, especially in Human Movement topic. The aspects of the validation were feasibility of the content, the construction, and the language. This research used the Likert scale to measure the validity of each aspect, which is 4.00 for very good validity criteria, 3.00 for good validity criteria, 2.00 for more or less validity criteria, and 1.00 for not good validity criteria. Data showed that the validity for each aspect were in the range of good validity and very good validity criteria (3.33 to 3.67 for the content aspect, 2.33 to 4.00 for the construction aspect, and 3.33 to 4.00 for language aspect). However, there was a part of construction aspect that needed to improve. Overall, this students’ worksheet can be applied in classroom after some revisions based on suggestions from the validators.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS): Integrating Thematic Services for Solid Earth Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Atakan, Kuvvet; Bailo, Daniele; Consortium, Epos

2016-04-01

The mission of EPOS is to monitor and understand the dynamic and complex Earth system by relying on new e-science opportunities and integrating diverse and advanced Research Infrastructures in Europe for solid Earth Science. EPOS will enable innovative multidisciplinary research for a better understanding of the Earth's physical and chemical processes that control earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, ground instability and tsunami as well as the processes driving tectonics and Earth's surface dynamics. Through integration of data, models and facilities EPOS will allow the Earth Science community to make a step change in developing new concepts and tools for key answers to scientific and socio-economic questions concerning geo-hazards and geo-resources as well as Earth sciences applications to the environment and to human welfare. EPOS, during its Implementation Phase (EPOS-IP), will integrate multidisciplinary data into a single e-infrastructure. Multidisciplinary data are organized and governed by the Thematic Core Services (TCS) and are driven by various scientific communities encompassing a wide spectrum of Earth science disciplines. These include Data, Data-products, Services and Software (DDSS), from seismology, near fault observatories, geodetic observations, volcano observations, satellite observations, geomagnetic observations, as well as data from various anthropogenic hazard episodes, geological information and modelling. In addition, transnational access to multi-scale laboratories and geo-energy test-beds for low-carbon energy will be provided. TCS DDSS will be integrated into Integrated Core Services (ICS), a platform that will ensure their interoperability and access to these services by the scientific community as well as other users within the society. This requires dedicated tasks for interactions with the various TCS-WPs, as well as the various distributed ICS (ICS-Ds), such as High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, large scale data storage facilities, complex processing and visualization tools etc. Computational Earth Science (CES) services are identified as a transversal activity and is planned to be harmonized and provided within the ICS. Currently a comprehensive requirements and use cases elicitation process is started through interactions with the ten different Thematic Core Service work packages. The results of this will be used to harmonize the DDSS elements and prepare for interoperability across the various disciplines. For this purpose a dedicated workshop is planned where the representatives of all the TCS communities will jointly discuss and agree upon the harmonization process. The technical integration of the DDSS elements to a metadata structure adopting CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) standards will start after the harmonization process is completed. Various levels of maturity in the handling and availability of TCS specific DDSS elements among the different TCS groups, is one of the most challenging aspects of this integration. For this reason a roadmap for integration is being prepared where most mature DDSS elements will be implemented during the next 2 years after a community driven testing and validation process. Integration of the remaining DDSS elements will be a continuously evolving process in the coming years.

Embedding Scientific Integrity and Ethics into the Scientific Process and Research Data Lifecycle

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gundersen, L. C.

2016-12-01

Predicting climate change, developing resources sustainably, and mitigating natural hazard risk are complex interdisciplinary challenges in the geosciences that require the integration of data and knowledge from disparate disciplines and scales. This kind of interdisciplinary science can only thrive if scientific communities work together and adhere to common standards of scientific integrity, ethics, data management, curation, and sharing. Science and data without integrity and ethics can erode the very fabric of the scientific enterprise and potentially harm society and the planet. Inaccurate risk analyses of natural hazards can lead to poor choices in construction, insurance, and emergency response. Incorrect assessment of mineral resources can bankrupt a company, destroy a local economy, and contaminate an ecosystem. This paper presents key ethics and integrity questions paired with the major components of the research data life cycle. The questions can be used by the researcher during the scientific process to help ensure the integrity and ethics of their research and adherence to sound data management practice. Questions include considerations for open, collaborative science, which is fundamentally changing the responsibility of scientists regarding data sharing and reproducibility. The publication of primary data, methods, models, software, and workflows must become a norm of science. There are also questions that prompt the scientist to think about the benefit of their work to society; ensuring equity, respect, and fairness in working with others; and always striving for honesty, excellence, and transparency.

Large-Scale NASA Science Applications on the Columbia Supercluster

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Brooks, Walter

2005-01-01

Columbia, NASA's newest 61 teraflops supercomputer that became operational late last year, is a highly integrated Altix cluster of 10,240 processors, and was named to honor the crew of the Space Shuttle lost in early 2003. Constructed in just four months, Columbia increased NASA's computing capability ten-fold, and revitalized the Agency's high-end computing efforts. Significant cutting-edge science and engineering simulations in the areas of space and Earth sciences, as well as aeronautics and space operations, are already occurring on this largest operational Linux supercomputer, demonstrating its capacity and capability to accelerate NASA's space exploration vision. The presentation will describe how an integrated environment consisting not only of next-generation systems, but also modeling and simulation, high-speed networking, parallel performance optimization, and advanced data analysis and visualization, is being used to reduce design cycle time, accelerate scientific discovery, conduct parametric analysis of multiple scenarios, and enhance safety during the life cycle of NASA missions. The talk will conclude by discussing how NAS partnered with various NASA centers, other government agencies, computer industry, and academia, to create a national resource in large-scale modeling and simulation.

The food-energy-water nexus and urban complexity

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Romero-Lankao, Patricia; McPhearson, Timon; Davidson, Debra J.

2017-04-01

While tackling interdependencies among food, energy, and water security is promising, three fundamental challenges to effective operationalization need addressing: the feasibility of science-policy integration, cross-scale inequalities, and path-dependencies in infrastructure and socio-institutional practices.

Making Connections between Coastal Landscapes and Coastal Ecosystems (Presentation to Graduate Students)

EPA Science Inventory

This presentation is to graduate students in Integrated Biological Sciences. It intends to illustrate a problem and the accompanying research and development approach to designing a broad scale monitoring and assessment strategy.

Assessing Science Reasoning and Conceptual Understanding in the Primary Grades Using Standardized and Performance-Based Assessments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Kyung Hee; VanTassel-Baska, Joyce; Bracken, Bruce A.; Feng, Annie; Stambaugh, Tamra

2014-01-01

Project Clarion, a Jacob K. Javits-funded project, focused on the scale-up of primary-grade science curricula. Curriculum units, based on an Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM), were developed for high-ability learners, but tried out with all students in Title I settings to study the efficacy of the units with all learners. The units focus on the…

Watershed System Model: The Essentials to Model Complex Human-Nature System at the River Basin Scale

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Xin; Cheng, Guodong; Lin, Hui; Cai, Ximing; Fang, Miao; Ge, Yingchun; Hu, Xiaoli; Chen, Min; Li, Weiyue

2018-03-01

Watershed system models are urgently needed to understand complex watershed systems and to support integrated river basin management. Early watershed modeling efforts focused on the representation of hydrologic processes, while the next-generation watershed models should represent the coevolution of the water-land-air-plant-human nexus in a watershed and provide capability of decision-making support. We propose a new modeling framework and discuss the know-how approach to incorporate emerging knowledge into integrated models through data exchange interfaces. We argue that the modeling environment is a useful tool to enable effective model integration, as well as create domain-specific models of river basin systems. The grand challenges in developing next-generation watershed system models include but are not limited to providing an overarching framework for linking natural and social sciences, building a scientifically based decision support system, quantifying and controlling uncertainties, and taking advantage of new technologies and new findings in the various disciplines of watershed science. The eventual goal is to build transdisciplinary, scientifically sound, and scale-explicit watershed system models that are to be codesigned by multidisciplinary communities.

Geospatial considerations for a multiorganizational, landscape-scale program

USGS Publications Warehouse

O'Donnell, Michael S.; Assal, Timothy J.; Anderson, Patrick J.; Bowen, Zachary H.

2013-01-01

Geospatial data play an increasingly important role in natural resources management, conservation, and science-based projects. The management and effective use of spatial data becomes significantly more complex when the efforts involve a myriad of landscape-scale projects combined with a multiorganizational collaboration. There is sparse literature to guide users on this daunting subject; therefore, we present a framework of considerations for working with geospatial data that will provide direction to data stewards, scientists, collaborators, and managers for developing geospatial management plans. The concepts we present apply to a variety of geospatial programs or projects, which we describe as a “scalable framework” of processes for integrating geospatial efforts with management, science, and conservation initiatives. Our framework includes five tenets of geospatial data management: (1) the importance of investing in data management and standardization, (2) the scalability of content/efforts addressed in geospatial management plans, (3) the lifecycle of a geospatial effort, (4) a framework for the integration of geographic information systems (GIS) in a landscape-scale conservation or management program, and (5) the major geospatial considerations prior to data acquisition. We conclude with a discussion of future considerations and challenges.

Visualization and Analysis of Multi-scale Land Surface Products via Giovanni Portals

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Shen, Suhung; Kempler, Steven J.; Gerasimov, Irina V.

2013-01-01

Large volumes of MODIS land data products at multiple spatial resolutions have been integrated into the Giovanni online analysis system to support studies on land cover and land use changes,focused on the Northern Eurasia and Monsoon Asia regions through the LCLUC program. Giovanni (Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure) is a Web-based application developed by the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), providing a simple and intuitive way to visualize, analyze, and access Earth science remotely-sensed and modeled data.Customized Giovanni Web portals (Giovanni-NEESPI andGiovanni-MAIRS) have been created to integrate land, atmospheric,cryospheric, and societal products, enabling researchers to do quick exploration and basic analyses of land surface changes, and their relationships to climate, at global and regional scales. This presentation shows a sample Giovanni portal page, lists selected data products in the system, and illustrates potential analyses with imagesand time-series at global and regional scales, focusing on climatology and anomaly analysis. More information is available at the GES DISCMAIRS data support project portal: http:disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.govmairs.

Level-2 Milestone 3244: Deploy Dawn ID Machine for Initial Science Runs

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fox, D

2009-09-21

This report documents the delivery, installation, integration, testing, and acceptance of the Dawn system, ASC L2 milestone 3244: Deploy Dawn ID Machine for Initial Science Runs, due September 30, 2009. The full text of the milestone is included in Attachment 1. The description of the milestone is: This milestone will be a result of work started three years ago with the planning for a multi-petaFLOPS UQ-focused platform (Sequoia) and will be satisfied when a smaller ID version of the final system is delivered, installed, integrated, tested, accepted, and deployed at LLNL for initial science runs in support of SSP mission.more » The deliverable for this milestone will be a LA petascale computing system (named Dawn) usable for code development and scaling necessary to ensure effective use of a final Sequoia platform (expected in 2011-2012), and for urgent SSP program needs. Allocation and scheduling of Dawn as an LA system will likely be performed informally, similar to what has been used for BlueGene/L. However, provision will be made to allow for dedicated access times for application scaling studies across the entire Dawn resource. The milestone was completed on April 1, 2009, when science runs began running on the Dawn system. The following sections describe the Dawn system architecture, current status, installation and integration time line, and testing and acceptance process. A project plan is included as Attachment 2. Attachment 3 is a letter certifying the handoff of the system to a nuclear weapons stockpile customer. Attachment 4 presents the results of science runs completed on the system.« less

Fort Collins Science Center: Ecosystem Dynamics

USGS Publications Warehouse

Bowen, Zack

2004-01-01

Current studies fall into five general areas. Herbivore-Ecosystem Interactions examines the efficacy of multiple controls on selected herbivore populations and cascading effects through predator-herbivore-plant-soil linkages. Riparian Ecology is concerned with interactions among streamflow, fluvial geomorphology, and riparian vegetation. Integrated Fire Science focuses on the effects of fire on plant and animal communities at multiple scales, and on the interactions between post-fire plant, runoff, and erosion processes. Reference Ecosystems comprises long-term, place-based studies of ecosystem biogeochemistry. Finally, Integrated Assessments is investigating how to synthesize multiple ecosystem stressors and responses over complex landscapes in ways that are useful for management and planning.

Nanoscale integration is the next frontier for nanotechnology

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Picraux, Samuel T

2009-01-01

Nanoscale integration of materials and structures is the next critical step to exploit the promise of nanomaterials. Many novel and fascinating properties have been revealed for nanostructured materials. But if nanotechnology is to live up to its promise we must incorporate these nanoscale building blocks into functional systems that connect to the micro- and macroscale world. To do this we will inevitably need to understand and exploit the resulting combined unique properties of these integrated nanosystems. Much science waits to be discovered in the process. Nanoscale integration extends from the synthesis and fabrication of individual nanoscale building blocks, to themore » assembly of these building blocks into composite structures, and finally to the formation of complex functional systems. As illustrated in Figure 1, the building blocks may be homogeneous or heterogeneous, the composite materials may be nanocomposite or patterned structures, and the functional systems will involve additional combinations of materials. Nanoscale integration involves assembling diverse nanoscale materials across length scales to design and achieve new properties and functionality. At each stage size-dependent properties, the influence of surfaces in close proximity, and a multitude of interfaces all come into play. Whether the final system involves coherent electrons in a quantum computing approach, the combined flow of phonons and electrons for a high efficiency thermoelectric micro-generator, or a molecular recognition structure for bio-sensing, the combined effects of size, surface, and interface will be critical. In essence, one wants to combine the novel functions available through nanoscale science to achieve unique multi-functionalities not available in bulk materials. Perhaps the best-known example of integration is that of combining electronic components together into very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI). The integrated circuit has revolutionized electronics in many ways, from exploiting field-effect transistor devices and low power complementary logic to enable the electronic watch and hand calculator in the 1970's, to today's microprocessors and memories with billions of devices and a computational power not imagined a few decades ago. The manipulation of charges on a chip, the new concepts in combining devices for logic functions, and the new approaches to computation, information processing, and imaging have all emerged from Kilby and Noyce's simple concept of integrating devices on a single chip. Moving from hard to soft materials, a second more recent example of integration is the DNA microarray. These microarrays, with up to millions of elements in a planar array that can be optically read out, can simultaneously measure the expression of 10's of thousands of genes to study the effects of disease and treatment, or screen for single nucleotide polymorphisms for uses ranging from forensics to predisposition to disease. While still at an early stage, microarrays have revolutionized biosciences by providing the means to interrogate the complex genetic control of biological functions. Just as integrated circuits and microarrays have led to completely new functionalities and performance, the integration of nanoscale materials and structures is anticipated to lead to new performance and enable the design of new functionalities not previously envisioned. The fundamental questions underlying integration go beyond just complex fabrication or the engineering of known solutions; they lead to new discoveries and new science. The scientific challenges around nanoscale integration necessitate the development of new knowledge that is central to the advance of nanotechnology. To move forward one must address key science questions that arise in nanoscience integration and go beyond a single system or materials area. New science and discoveries especially await around three questions. How does one: (1) Control energy transfer and other interactions across interfaces and over mUltiple length scales? (2) Understand and control the interactions between nanoscale building blocks to assemble specific integrated structures? (3) Design and exploit interactions within assembled structures to achieve new properties and specific functionalities? These high level questions can serve to drive research, and to advance understanding of the complex phenomena and multifunctionality that may emerge from integration. For example, in photonics there is considerable effort to understand and control the response of nanoscale conducting structures on dielectrics, to allow one to localize, manipulate, and control electromagnetic energy in integrated systems such as in the field known as metamaterials. Essential to this area is a fundamental understanding of energy transfer across multiple length scales (question 1 above).« less

IN13B-1660: Analytics and Visualization Pipelines for Big Data on the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) and OpenNEX

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chaudhary, Aashish; Votava, Petr; Nemani, Ramakrishna R.; Michaelis, Andrew; Kotfila, Chris

2016-01-01

We are developing capabilities for an integrated petabyte-scale Earth science collaborative analysis and visualization environment. The ultimate goal is to deploy this environment within the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) and OpenNEX in order to enhance existing science data production pipelines in both high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments. Bridging of HPC and cloud is a fairly new concept under active research and this system significantly enhances the ability of the scientific community to accelerate analysis and visualization of Earth science data from NASA missions, model outputs and other sources. We have developed a web-based system that seamlessly interfaces with both high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments, providing tools that enable science teams to develop and deploy large-scale analysis, visualization and QA pipelines of both the production process and the data products, and enable sharing results with the community. Our project is developed in several stages each addressing separate challenge - workflow integration, parallel execution in either cloud or HPC environments and big-data analytics or visualization. This work benefits a number of existing and upcoming projects supported by NEX, such as the Web Enabled Landsat Data (WELD), where we are developing a new QA pipeline for the 25PB system.

Analytics and Visualization Pipelines for Big ­Data on the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) and OpenNEX

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chaudhary, A.; Votava, P.; Nemani, R. R.; Michaelis, A.; Kotfila, C.

2016-12-01

We are developing capabilities for an integrated petabyte-scale Earth science collaborative analysis and visualization environment. The ultimate goal is to deploy this environment within the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) and OpenNEX in order to enhance existing science data production pipelines in both high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments. Bridging of HPC and cloud is a fairly new concept under active research and this system significantly enhances the ability of the scientific community to accelerate analysis and visualization of Earth science data from NASA missions, model outputs and other sources. We have developed a web-based system that seamlessly interfaces with both high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments, providing tools that enable science teams to develop and deploy large-scale analysis, visualization and QA pipelines of both the production process and the data products, and enable sharing results with the community. Our project is developed in several stages each addressing separate challenge - workflow integration, parallel execution in either cloud or HPC environments and big-data analytics or visualization. This work benefits a number of existing and upcoming projects supported by NEX, such as the Web Enabled Landsat Data (WELD), where we are developing a new QA pipeline for the 25PB system.

Global scale diagnoses of FGGE data

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Paegle, J.

1985-01-01

Descriptive global scale diagnoses of the First Global Atmospheric Research Experiment SOP-1 analyses were made and compared against controlled, real data integrations of the Goddard Laboratory of Atmospheric Science (GLAS) general circulation model (GCM) as well as other data sets. The effects of critical latitudes were studied; the influence of tropical wind data and latent heating upon the GLAS GCM was diagnosed; planetary wave structure on various time scales from the diurnal to the monthly was studied; and the GLAS analyses were compared with other analyses. Short term controlled GLAS GCM integrations show that: (1) the inclusion of tropical wind data in real data integrations has an important influence in the mid-latitude prediction in both hemispheres; and (2) the tropical divergent wind reacts almost immediately to alteration of the tropical latent heating. The presence or absence of zonally averaged easterlies depends strongly upon the presence of tropical latent heating.

Development of Integrated Natural Science Teaching Materials Webbed Type with Applying Discourse Analysis on Students Grade VIII in Physics Class

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sukariasih, Luh

2017-05-01

This study aims to produce teaching materials integrated natural science (IPA) webbed type of handout types are eligible for use in integrated science teaching. This type of research IS a kind of research and development / Research and Development (R & D) with reference to the 4D development model that is (define, design, develop, and disseminate). Data analysis techniques used to process data from the results of the assessment by the validator expert, and the results of the assessment by teachers and learners while testing is limited (12 students of class VIII SMPN 10 Kendari) using quantitative descriptive data analysis techniques disclosed in the distribution of scores on the scale of five categories grading scale that has been determined. The results of due diligence material gain votes validator material in the category of “very good” and “good”, of the data generated in the feasibility test presentation obtained the category of “good” and “excellent”, from the data generated in the feasibility of graphic test obtained the category of “very good “and” good “, as well as of the data generated in the test the feasibility of using words and language obtained the category of“very good “and” good “, so with qualifications gained the teaching materials IPA integrated type webbed by applying discourse analysis on the theme of energy and food for Junior High School (SMP) grade VIII suitable as teaching materials. In limited testing, data generated in response to a science teacher at SMPN 10 Kendari to product instructional materials as “excellent”, and from the data generated while testing is limited by the 12 students of class VIII SMPN 10 Kendari are more students who score indicates category “very good”, so that the qualification obtained by the natural science (IPA) teaching material integrated type webbed by applying discourse analysis on the theme of energy and food for SMP / class VIII fit for use as teaching material.

Scaling participation in payments for ecosystem services programs

PubMed Central

Donlan, C. Josh; Boyle, Kevin J.; Xu, Weibin; Gelcich, Stefan

2018-01-01

Payments for ecosystem services programs have become common tools but most have failed to achieve wide-ranging conservation outcomes. The capacity for scale and impact increases when PES programs are designed through the lens of the potential participants, yet this has received little attention in research or practice. Our work with small-scale marine fisheries integrates the social science of PES programs and provides a framework for designing programs that focus a priori on scaling. In addition to payments, desirable non-monetary program attributes and ecological feedbacks attract a wider range of potential participants into PES programs, including those who have more negative attitudes and lower trust. Designing programs that draw individuals into participating in PES programs is likely the most strategic path to reaching scale. Research should engage in new models of participatory research to understand these dynamics and to design programs that explicitly integrate a broad range of needs, values, and modes of implementation. PMID:29522554

Integrated Modeling for Watershed Ecosystem Services Assessment and Forecasting

EPA Science Inventory

Regional scale watershed management decisions must be informed by the science-based relationship between anthropogenic activities on the landscape and the change in ecosystem structure, function, and services that occur as a result. We applied process-based models that represent...

Integrated Science Assessment (ISA) for Oxides of Nitrogen ...

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

EPA announced the availability of the final report, Integrated Science Assessment (ISA) for Oxides of Nitrogen and Sulfur - Ecological Criteria. This document represents a concise synthesis and evaluation of the most policy-relevant science and will ultimately provide the scientific bases for EPA's decision on retaining or revising the current secondary standards for oxides of nitrogen (NO2 and SO2). The intent of the ISA, according to the CAA, is to “accurately reflect the latest scientific knowledge expected from the presence of [a] pollutant in ambient air” (U.S. Code, 1970a, 1970b). It includes scientific research from atmospheric sciences, exposure and deposition, biogeochemistry, hydrology, soil science, marine science, plant physiology, animal physiology, and ecology conducted at multiple scales (e.g., population, community, ecosystem, landscape levels). Key information and judgments formerly found in the Air Quality Criteria Documents (AQCDs) for NOX and SOX are included; Annexes provide a more detailed discussion of the most pertinent scientific literature. Together, the ISA and Annexes serve to update and revise the last NOX and SOX AQCDs which were published in 1993 and 1982, respectively.

Structure and dynamics of European sports science textual contents: Analysis of ECSS abstracts (1996-2014).

PubMed

Hristovski, Robert; Aceski, Aleksandar; Balague, Natalia; Seifert, Ludovic; Tufekcievski, Aleksandar; Cecilia, Aguirre

2017-02-01

The article discusses general structure and dynamics of the sports science research content as obtained from the analysis of 21998 European College of Sport Science abstracts belonging to 12 science topics. The structural analysis showed intertwined multidisciplinary and unifying tendencies structured along horizontal (scope) and vertical (level) axes. Methodological (instrumental and mode of inquiry) integrative tendencies are dominant. Theoretical integrative tendencies are much less detectable along both horizontal and vertical axes. The dynamic analysis of written abstracts text content over the 19 years reveals the contextualizing and guiding role of thematic skeletons of each sports science topic in forming more detailed contingent research ideas and the role of the latter in stabilizing and procreating the former. This circular causality between both hierarchical levels and functioning on separate characteristic time scales is crucial for understanding how stable research traditions self-maintain and self-procreate through innovative contingencies. The structure of sports science continuously rebuilds itself through use and re-use of contingent research ideas. The thematic skeleton ensures its identity and the contingent conceptual sets its flexibility and adaptability to different research or applicative problems.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Dahlburg, Jill; Corones, James; Batchelor, Donald

Fusion is potentially an inexhaustible energy source whose exploitation requires a basic understanding of high-temperature plasmas. The development of a science-based predictive capability for fusion-relevant plasmas is a challenge central to fusion energy science, in which numerical modeling has played a vital role for more than four decades. A combination of the very wide range in temporal and spatial scales, extreme anisotropy, the importance of geometric detail, and the requirement of causality which makes it impossible to parallelize over time, makes this problem one of the most challenging in computational physics. Sophisticated computational models are under development for many individualmore » features of magnetically confined plasmas and increases in the scope and reliability of feasible simulations have been enabled by increased scientific understanding and improvements in computer technology. However, full predictive modeling of fusion plasmas will require qualitative improvements and innovations to enable cross coupling of a wider variety of physical processes and to allow solution over a larger range of space and time scales. The exponential growth of computer speed, coupled with the high cost of large-scale experimental facilities, makes an integrated fusion simulation initiative a timely and cost-effective opportunity. Worldwide progress in laboratory fusion experiments provides the basis for a recent FESAC recommendation to proceed with a burning plasma experiment (see FESAC Review of Burning Plasma Physics Report, September 2001). Such an experiment, at the frontier of the physics of complex systems, would be a huge step in establishing the potential of magnetic fusion energy to contribute to the world’s energy security. An integrated simulation capability would dramatically enhance the utilization of such a facility and lead to optimization of toroidal fusion plasmas in general. This science-based predictive capability, which was cited in the FESAC integrated planning document (IPPA, 2000), represents a significant opportunity for the DOE Office of Science to further the understanding of fusion plasmas to a level unparalleled worldwide.« less

The role of citizen science in monitoring small-scale pollution events.

PubMed

Hyder, Kieran; Wright, Serena; Kirby, Mark; Brant, Jan

2017-07-15

Small-scale pollution events involve the release of potentially harmful substances into the marine environment. These events can affect all levels of the ecosystem, with damage to both fauna and flora. Numerous reporting structures are currently available to document spills, however there is a lack of information on small-scale events due to their magnitude and patchy distribution. To this end, volunteers may provide a useful tool in filling this data gap, especially for coastal environments with a high usage by members of the public. The potential for citizen scientists to record small-scale pollution events is explored using the UK as an example, with a focus on highlighting methods and issues associated with using this data source. An integrated monitoring system is proposed which combines citizen science and traditional reporting approaches. Crown Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Challenges and Opportunities for Integrating Social Science Perspectives into Climate and Global Change Assessments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Larson, E. K.; Li, J.; Zycherman, A.

2017-12-01

Integration of social science into climate and global change assessments is fundamental for improving understanding of the drivers, impacts and vulnerability of climate change, and the social, cultural and behavioral challenges related to climate change responses. This requires disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge as well as integrational and translational tools for linking this knowledge with the natural and physical sciences. The USGCRP's Social Science Coordinating Committee (SSCC) is tasked with this challenge and is working to integrate relevant social, economic and behavioral knowledge into processes like sustained assessments. This presentation will discuss outcomes from a recent SSCC workshop, "Social Science Perspectives on Climate Change" and their applications to sustained assessments. The workshop brought academic social scientists from four disciplines - anthropology, sociology, geography and archaeology - together with federal scientists and program managers to discuss three major research areas relevant to the USGCRP and climate assessments: (1) innovative tools, methods, and analyses to clarify the interactions of human and natural systems under climate change, (2) understanding of factors contributing to differences in social vulnerability between and within communities under climate change, and (3) social science perspectives on drivers of global climate change. These disciplines, collectively, emphasize the need to consider socio-cultural, political, economic, geographic, and historic factors, and their dynamic interactions, to understand climate change drivers, social vulnerability, and mitigation and adaptation responses. They also highlight the importance of mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to explain impacts, vulnerability, and responses at different time and spatial scales. This presentation will focus on major contributions of the social sciences to climate and global change research. We will discuss future directions for sustained assessments that integrate and reflect the social science understanding of the complex relationships between social and natural worlds in a changing climate, and factors that impact effective mitigation and adaptation strategies that address risks and vulnerabilities of climate change.

Breaking barriers through collaboration: the example of the Cell Migration Consortium.

PubMed

Horwitz, Alan Rick; Watson, Nikki; Parsons, J Thomas

2002-10-15

Understanding complex integrated biological processes, such as cell migration, requires interdisciplinary approaches. The Cell Migration Consortium, funded by a Large-Scale Collaborative Project Award from the National Institute of General Medical Science, develops and disseminates new technologies, data, reagents, and shared information to a wide audience. The development and operation of this Consortium may provide useful insights for those who plan similarly large-scale, interdisciplinary approaches.

The Effect of Physical Activity on Science Competence and Attitude towards Science Content

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Klinkenborg, Ann Maria

This study examines the effect of physical activity on science instruction. To combat the implications of physical inactivity, schools need to be willing to consider all possible opportunities for students to engage in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Integrating physical activity with traditional classroom content is one instructional method to consider. Researchers have typically focused on integration with English/language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of physical activity on science competence and attitude towards science. Fifty-three third grade children participated in this investigation; one group received science instruction with a physical activity intervention while the other group received traditional science instruction. Participants in both groups completed a modified version of What I Really Think of Science attitude scale (Pell & Jarvis, 2001) and a physical science test of competence prior to and following the intervention. Children were videotaped during science instruction and their movement coded to measure the proportion of time spent in MVPA. Results revealed that children in the intervention group demonstrated greater MVPA during the instructional period. A moderate to large effect size (partial eta squared = .091) was seen in the intervention group science competence post-test indicating greater understanding of force, motion, work, and simple machines concepts than that of the control group who were less physically active. There was no statistically significant attitude difference between the intervention and control groups post-test, (F(1,51) = .375, p = .543). These results provide evidence that integration can effectively present physical science content and have a positive impact on the number of minutes of health-enhancing physical activity in a school day.

ROADNET: A Real-time Data Aware System for Earth, Oceanographic, and Environmental Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vernon, F.; Hansen, T.; Lindquist, K.; Ludascher, B.; Orcutt, J.; Rajasekar, A.

2003-12-01

The Real-time Observatories, Application, and Data management Network (ROADNet) Program aims to develop an integrated, seamless, and transparent environmental information network that will deliver geophysical, oceanographic, hydrological, ecological, and physical data to a variety of users in real-time. ROADNet is a multidisciplinary, multinational partnership of researchers, policymakers, natural resource managers, educators, and students who aim to use the data to advance our understanding and management of coastal, ocean, riparian, and terrestrial Earth systems in Southern California, Mexico, and well off shore. To date, project activity and funding have focused on the design and deployment of network linkages and on the exploratory development of the real-time data management system. We are currently adapting powerful "Data Grid" technologies to the unique challenges associated with the management and manipulation of real-time data. Current "Grid" projects deal with static data files, and significant technical innovation is required to address fundamental problems of real-time data processing, integration, and distribution. The technologies developed through this research will create a system that dynamically adapt downstream processing, cataloging, and data access interfaces when sensors are added or removed from the system; provide for real-time processing and monitoring of data streams--detecting events, and triggering computations, sensor and logger modifications, and other actions; integrate heterogeneous data from multiple (signal) domains; and provide for large-scale archival and querying of "consolidated" data. The software tools which must be developed do not exist, although limited prototype systems are available. This research has implications for the success of large-scale NSF initiatives in the Earth sciences (EarthScope), ocean sciences (OOI- Ocean Observatories Initiative), biological sciences (NEON - National Ecological Observatory Network) and civil engineering (NEES - Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation). Each of these large scale initiatives aims to collect real-time data from thousands of sensors, and each will require new technologies to process, manage, and communicate real-time multidisciplinary environmental data on regional, national, and global scales.

Materials @ LANL: Solutions for National Security Challenges

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Teter, David

2012-10-01

Materials science activities impact many programmatic missions at LANL including nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, renewable energy, global security and nonproliferation. An overview of the LANL materials science strategy and examples of materials science programs will be presented. Major materials leadership areas are in materials dynamics, actinides and correlated electron materials, materials in radiation extremes, energetic materials, integrated nanomaterials and complex functional materials. Los Alamos is also planning a large-scale, signature science facility called MaRIE (Matter Radiation Interactions in Extremes) to address in-situ characterization of materials in dynamic and radiation environments using multiple high energy probes. An overview of this facility will also be presented.

River corridor science: Hydrologic exchange and ecological consequences from bedforms to basins

USGS Publications Warehouse

Harvey, Judson; Gooseff, Michael

2015-01-01

Previously regarded as the passive drains of watersheds, over the past 50 years, rivers have progressively been recognized as being actively connected with off-channel environments. These connections prolong physical storage and enhance reactive processing to alter water chemistry and downstream transport of materials and energy. Here we propose river corridor science as a concept that integrates downstream transport with lateral and vertical exchange across interfaces. Thus, the river corridor, rather than the wetted river channel itself, is an increasingly common unit of study. Main channel exchange with recirculating marginal waters, hyporheic exchange, bank storage, and overbank flow onto floodplains are all included under a broad continuum of interactions known as “hydrologic exchange flows.” Hydrologists, geomorphologists, geochemists, and aquatic and terrestrial ecologists are cooperating in studies that reveal the dynamic interactions among hydrologic exchange flows and consequences for water quality improvement, modulation of river metabolism, habitat provision for vegetation, fish, and wildlife, and other valued ecosystem services. The need for better integration of science and management is keenly felt, from testing effectiveness of stream restoration and riparian buffers all the way to reevaluating the definition of the waters of the United States to clarify the regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act. A major challenge for scientists is linking the small-scale physical drivers with their larger-scale fluvial and geomorphic context and ecological consequences. Although the fine scales of field and laboratory studies are best suited to identifying the fundamental physical and biological processes, that understanding must be successfully linked to cumulative effects at watershed to regional and continental scales.

River corridor science: Hydrologic exchange and ecological consequences from bedforms to basins

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Harvey, Jud; Gooseff, Michael

2015-09-01

Previously regarded as the passive drains of watersheds, over the past 50 years, rivers have progressively been recognized as being actively connected with off-channel environments. These connections prolong physical storage and enhance reactive processing to alter water chemistry and downstream transport of materials and energy. Here we propose river corridor science as a concept that integrates downstream transport with lateral and vertical exchange across interfaces. Thus, the river corridor, rather than the wetted river channel itself, is an increasingly common unit of study. Main channel exchange with recirculating marginal waters, hyporheic exchange, bank storage, and overbank flow onto floodplains are all included under a broad continuum of interactions known as "hydrologic exchange flows." Hydrologists, geomorphologists, geochemists, and aquatic and terrestrial ecologists are cooperating in studies that reveal the dynamic interactions among hydrologic exchange flows and consequences for water quality improvement, modulation of river metabolism, habitat provision for vegetation, fish, and wildlife, and other valued ecosystem services. The need for better integration of science and management is keenly felt, from testing effectiveness of stream restoration and riparian buffers all the way to reevaluating the definition of the waters of the United States to clarify the regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act. A major challenge for scientists is linking the small-scale physical drivers with their larger-scale fluvial and geomorphic context and ecological consequences. Although the fine scales of field and laboratory studies are best suited to identifying the fundamental physical and biological processes, that understanding must be successfully linked to cumulative effects at watershed to regional and continental scales.

Impact of Integrated Teaching Sessions for Comprehensive Learning and Rational Pharmacotherapeutics for Medical Undergraduates

PubMed Central

Ambwani, Sneha; Vegada, Bhavisha; Sidhu, Rimple; Charan, Jaykaran

2017-01-01

Background: It is postulated that integrated teaching method may enhance retention of the knowledge and clinical applicability of the basic sciences as compared to the didactic method. Aim: The present study was undertaken to compare the integrated teaching method with the didactic method for the learning ability and clinical applicability of the basic sciences. Materials and Methods: The 2nd year MBBS students were divided into two groups randomly. The study was conducted into two stages. In the first stage, conventional didactic lectures on hypertension (HT) were delivered to one group and multidisciplinary integrated teaching to another group. For the second stage, diabetes mellitus groups were swapped. Retention of the knowledge between the groups were assessed through a multiple choice questions (MCQ) test. Feedback of the students and faculty was obtained on a 5 point Likert scale. For the comparison, student's data were regrouped into four groups, i.e., integrated HT, didactic HT, integrated diabetes and didactic diabetes. Results: There was no significant difference of MCQ score between integrated HT, didactic HT, and integrated diabetes group. However, the score obtained in didactic diabetes was significantly more (P = 0.00) than other groups. Majority of the students favored integrated teaching for clinical application of basic science and learning of the skill for the future clinical practice. Faculties considered integrated method as a useful method and suggested frequent use of this method. Conclusion: There was no clear difference in knowledge acquisition; however, the students and faculties favored integrated teaching method in the feedback questionnaire. PMID:29344460

Integration of Biological and Physical Sciences to Advance Ecological Understanding of Aquatic Ecosystems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Luce, C. H.; Buffington, J. M.; Rieman, B. E.; Dunham, J. B.; McKean, J. A.; Thurow, R. F.; Gutierrez-Teira, B.; Rosenberger, A. E.

2005-05-01

Conservation and restoration of freshwater stream and river habitats are important goals for land management and natural resources research. Several examples of research have emerged showing that many species are adapted to temporary habitat disruptions, but that these adaptations are sensitive to the spatial grain and extent of disturbance as well as to its duration. When viewed from this perspective, questions of timing, spatial pattern, and relevant scales emerge as critical issues. In contrast, much regulation, management, and research remains tied to pollutant loading paradigms that are insensitive to either time or space scales. It is becoming clear that research is needed to examine questions and hypotheses about how physical processes affect ecological processes. Two overarching questions concisely frame the scientific issues: 1) How do we quantify physical watershed processes in a way that is meaningful to biological and ecological processes, and 2) how does the answer to that question vary with changing spatial and temporal scales? A joint understanding of scaling characteristics of physical process and the plasticity of aquatic species will be needed to accomplish this research; hence a strong need exists for integrative and collaborative development. Considering conservation biology problems in this fashion can lead to creative and non-obvious solutions because the integrated system has important non-linearities and feedbacks related to a biological system that has responded to substantial natural variability in the past. We propose that research beginning with ecological theories and principles followed with a structured examination of each physical process as related to the specific ecological theories is a strong approach to developing the necessary science, and such an approach may form a basis for development of scaling theories of hydrologic and geomorphic process. We illustrate the approach with several examples.

Linear units improve articulation between social and physical constructs: An example from caregiver parameterization for children supported by complex medical technologies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bezruczko, N.; Stanley, T.; Battle, M.; Latty, C.

2016-11-01

Despite broad sweeping pronouncements by international research organizations that social sciences are being integrated into global research programs, little attention has been directed toward obstacles blocking productive collaborations. In particular, social sciences routinely implement nonlinear, ordinal measures, which fundamentally inhibit integration with overarching scientific paradigms. The widely promoted general linear model in contemporary social science methods is largely based on untransformed scores and ratings, which are neither objective nor linear. This issue has historically separated physical and social sciences, which this report now asserts is unnecessary. In this research, nonlinear, subjective caregiver ratings of confidence to care for children supported by complex, medical technologies were transformed to an objective scale defined by logits (N=70). Transparent linear units from this transformation provided foundational insights into measurement properties of a social- humanistic caregiving construct, which clarified physical and social caregiver implications. Parameterized items and ratings were also subjected to multivariate hierarchical analysis, then decomposed to demonstrate theoretical coherence (R2 >.50), which provided further support for convergence of mathematical parameterization, physical expectations, and a social-humanistic construct. These results present substantial support for improving integration of social sciences with contemporary scientific research programs by emphasizing construction of common variables with objective, linear units.

Meta-analysis of learning design on sciences to develop a teacher’s professionalism training model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alimah, S.; Anggraito, Y. U.; Prasetyo, A. P. B.; Saptono, S.

2018-03-01

This research explored a meta-analysis ofthe teaching design on sciences teachers’ lesson plans to develop the training model in achieving 21st-century learning competence and the implementation of the scientifically literate school model. This is a qualitative research with descriptively qualitative analysis. The sample was the members of sciences teacher’s organizations in Brebes Central Java Indonesia. Data was collected by documentation, observation, interviews, and questionnaires scale understanding. Analysis of the lesson plans focused on the correctness of development concept and integration of Strengthening Character Education; School Literacy Movement; Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Creativity; and Higher Order Thinking Skill. The sciences teachers had a good understanding of the components of the lesson plan, but needed further training. The integration of the character education by the teacher was not explicitly written into their lesson plan. The teachers’ skill to integrate the components was still needed improvements. It is found that training and mentoring of lesson plan development to improve the skills of science teachers in achieving 21st-century learning competencies are still urgent to be done. The training and mentoring model proposed here is Peretipe model, to help teachers skillfully design good lesson plans based on Technological Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge.

Students' Misconceptions about Medium-Scale Integrated Circuits

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Herman, G. L.; Loui, M. C.; Zilles, C.

2011-01-01

To improve instruction in computer engineering and computer science, instructors must better understand how their students learn. Unfortunately, little is known about how students learn the fundamental concepts in computing. To investigate student conceptions and misconceptions about digital logic concepts, the authors conducted a qualitative…

EPA'S REGIONAL VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT PROGRAM (REVA) DEMONSTRATING RESULTS THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS

EPA Science Inventory

EPA's Regional Vulnerability Assessment (ReVA) program, a regional-scale comparative risk research effort, has been under development since 1998 with a pilot study focused on the Mid- Atlantic region. ReVA is part of the interagency Integrated Science for Ecosystem Challenges ini...

Agriculture, nutrition, and health in global development: typology and metrics for integrated interventions and research.

PubMed

Masters, William A; Webb, Patrick; Griffiths, Jeffrey K; Deckelbaum, Richard J

2014-12-01

Despite rhetoric arguing that enhanced agriculture leads to improved nutrition and health, there is scant empirical evidence about potential synergies across sectors or about the mix of actions that best supports all three sectors. The geographic scale and socioeconomic nature of these interventions require integration of previously separate research methods. This paper proposes a typology of interventions and a metric of integration among them to help researchers build on each other's results, facilitating integration in methods to inform the design of multisector interventions. The typology recognizes the importance of regional effect modifiers that are not themselves subject to randomized assignment, and trade-offs in how policies and programs are implemented, evaluated, and scaled. Using this typology could facilitate methodological pluralism, helping researchers in one field use knowledge generated elsewhere, each using the most appropriate method for their situation. © 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.

Software Engineering Support of the Third Round of Scientific Grand Challenge Investigations: Earth System Modeling Software Framework Survey

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Talbot, Bryan; Zhou, Shu-Jia; Higgins, Glenn; Zukor, Dorothy (Technical Monitor)

2002-01-01

One of the most significant challenges in large-scale climate modeling, as well as in high-performance computing in other scientific fields, is that of effectively integrating many software models from multiple contributors. A software framework facilitates the integration task, both in the development and runtime stages of the simulation. Effective software frameworks reduce the programming burden for the investigators, freeing them to focus more on the science and less on the parallel communication implementation. while maintaining high performance across numerous supercomputer and workstation architectures. This document surveys numerous software frameworks for potential use in Earth science modeling. Several frameworks are evaluated in depth, including Parallel Object-Oriented Methods and Applications (POOMA), Cactus (from (he relativistic physics community), Overture, Goddard Earth Modeling System (GEMS), the National Center for Atmospheric Research Flux Coupler, and UCLA/UCB Distributed Data Broker (DDB). Frameworks evaluated in less detail include ROOT, Parallel Application Workspace (PAWS), and Advanced Large-Scale Integrated Computational Environment (ALICE). A host of other frameworks and related tools are referenced in this context. The frameworks are evaluated individually and also compared with each other.

Integrated Modelling in CRUCIAL Science Education

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mahura, Alexander; Nuterman, Roman; Mukhamedzhanova, Elena; Nerobelov, Georgiy; Sedeeva, Margarita; Suhodskiy, Alexander; Mostamandy, Suleiman; Smyshlyaev, Sergey

2017-04-01

The NordForsk CRUCIAL project (2016-2017) "Critical steps in understanding land surface - atmosphere interactions: from improved knowledge to socioeconomic solutions" as a part of the Pan-Eurasian EXperiment (PEEX; https://www.atm.helsinki.fi/peex) programme activities, is looking for a deeper collaboration between Nordic-Russian science communities. In particular, following collaboration between Danish and Russian partners, several topics were selected for joint research and are focused on evaluation of: (1) urbanization processes impact on changes in urban weather and climate on urban-subregional-regional scales and at contribution to assessment studies for population and environment; (2) effects of various feedback mechanisms on aerosol and cloud formation and radiative forcing on urban-regional scales for better predicting extreme weather events and at contribution to early warning systems, (3) environmental contamination from continues emissions and industrial accidents for better assessment and decision making for sustainable social and economic development, and (4) climatology of atmospheric boundary layer in northern latitudes to improve understanding of processes, revising parameterizations, and better weather forecasting. These research topics are realized employing the online integrated Enviro-HIRLAM (Environment - High Resolution Limited Area Model) model within students' research projects: (1) "Online integrated high-resolution modelling of Saint-Petersburg metropolitan area influence on weather and air pollution forecasting"; (2) "Modeling of aerosol impact on regional-urban scales: case study of Saint-Petersburg metropolitan area"; (3) "Regional modeling and GIS evaluation of environmental pollution from Kola Peninsula sources"; and (4) "Climatology of the High-Latitude Planetary Boundary Layer". The students' projects achieved results and planned young scientists research training on online integrated modelling (Jun 2017) will be presented and discussed.

A Disciplined Architectural Approach to Scaling Data Analysis for Massive, Scientific Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Crichton, D. J.; Braverman, A. J.; Cinquini, L.; Turmon, M.; Lee, H.; Law, E.

2014-12-01

Data collections across remote sensing and ground-based instruments in astronomy, Earth science, and planetary science are outpacing scientists' ability to analyze them. Furthermore, the distribution, structure, and heterogeneity of the measurements themselves pose challenges that limit the scalability of data analysis using traditional approaches. Methods for developing science data processing pipelines, distribution of scientific datasets, and performing analysis will require innovative approaches that integrate cyber-infrastructure, algorithms, and data into more systematic approaches that can more efficiently compute and reduce data, particularly distributed data. This requires the integration of computer science, machine learning, statistics and domain expertise to identify scalable architectures for data analysis. The size of data returned from Earth Science observing satellites and the magnitude of data from climate model output, is predicted to grow into the tens of petabytes challenging current data analysis paradigms. This same kind of growth is present in astronomy and planetary science data. One of the major challenges in data science and related disciplines defining new approaches to scaling systems and analysis in order to increase scientific productivity and yield. Specific needs include: 1) identification of optimized system architectures for analyzing massive, distributed data sets; 2) algorithms for systematic analysis of massive data sets in distributed environments; and 3) the development of software infrastructures that are capable of performing massive, distributed data analysis across a comprehensive data science framework. NASA/JPL has begun an initiative in data science to address these challenges. Our goal is to evaluate how scientific productivity can be improved through optimized architectural topologies that identify how to deploy and manage the access, distribution, computation, and reduction of massive, distributed data, while managing the uncertainties of scientific conclusions derived from such capabilities. This talk will provide an overview of JPL's efforts in developing a comprehensive architectural approach to data science.

Enabling long-term oceanographic research: Changing data practices, information management strategies and informatics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baker, Karen S.; Chandler, Cynthia L.

2008-09-01

Interdisciplinary global ocean science requires new ways of thinking about data and data management. With new data policies and growing technological capabilities, datasets of increasing variety and complexity are being made available digitally and data management is coming to be recognized as an integral part of scientific research. To meet the changing expectations of scientists collecting data and of data reuse by others, collaborative strategies involving diverse teams of information professionals are developing. These changes are stimulating the growth of information infrastructures that support multi-scale sampling, data repositories, and data integration. Two examples of oceanographic projects incorporating data management in partnership with science programs are discussed: the Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research program (Palmer LTER) and the United States Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (US JGOFS). Lessons learned from a decade of data management within these communities provide an experience base from which to develop information management strategies—short-term and long-term. Ocean Informatics provides one example of a conceptual framework for managing the complexities inherent to sharing oceanographic data. Elements are introduced that address the economies-of-scale and the complexities-of-scale pertinent to a broader vision of information management and scientific research.

Computational psychiatry

PubMed Central

Montague, P. Read; Dolan, Raymond J.; Friston, Karl J.; Dayan, Peter

2013-01-01

Computational ideas pervade many areas of science and have an integrative explanatory role in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, computational depictions of cognitive function have had surprisingly little impact on the way we assess mental illness because diseases of the mind have not been systematically conceptualized in computational terms. Here, we outline goals and nascent efforts in the new field of computational psychiatry, which seeks to characterize mental dysfunction in terms of aberrant computations over multiple scales. We highlight early efforts in this area that employ reinforcement learning and game theoretic frameworks to elucidate decision-making in health and disease. Looking forwards, we emphasize a need for theory development and large-scale computational phenotyping in human subjects. PMID:22177032

Ecoinformatics: supporting ecology as a data-intensive science.

PubMed

Michener, William K; Jones, Matthew B

2012-02-01

Ecology is evolving rapidly and increasingly changing into a more open, accountable, interdisciplinary, collaborative and data-intensive science. Discovering, integrating and analyzing massive amounts of heterogeneous data are central to ecology as researchers address complex questions at scales from the gene to the biosphere. Ecoinformatics offers tools and approaches for managing ecological data and transforming the data into information and knowledge. Here, we review the state-of-the-art and recent advances in ecoinformatics that can benefit ecologists and environmental scientists as they tackle increasingly challenging questions that require voluminous amounts of data across disciplines and scales of space and time. We also highlight the challenges and opportunities that remain. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Computational Materials Science and Chemistry: Accelerating Discovery and Innovation through Simulation-Based Engineering and Science

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Crabtree, George; Glotzer, Sharon; McCurdy, Bill

This report is based on a SC Workshop on Computational Materials Science and Chemistry for Innovation on July 26-27, 2010, to assess the potential of state-of-the-art computer simulations to accelerate understanding and discovery in materials science and chemistry, with a focus on potential impacts in energy technologies and innovation. The urgent demand for new energy technologies has greatly exceeded the capabilities of today's materials and chemical processes. To convert sunlight to fuel, efficiently store energy, or enable a new generation of energy production and utilization technologies requires the development of new materials and processes of unprecedented functionality and performance. Newmore » materials and processes are critical pacing elements for progress in advanced energy systems and virtually all industrial technologies. Over the past two decades, the United States has developed and deployed the world's most powerful collection of tools for the synthesis, processing, characterization, and simulation and modeling of materials and chemical systems at the nanoscale, dimensions of a few atoms to a few hundred atoms across. These tools, which include world-leading x-ray and neutron sources, nanoscale science facilities, and high-performance computers, provide an unprecedented view of the atomic-scale structure and dynamics of materials and the molecular-scale basis of chemical processes. For the first time in history, we are able to synthesize, characterize, and model materials and chemical behavior at the length scale where this behavior is controlled. This ability is transformational for the discovery process and, as a result, confers a significant competitive advantage. Perhaps the most spectacular increase in capability has been demonstrated in high performance computing. Over the past decade, computational power has increased by a factor of a million due to advances in hardware and software. This rate of improvement, which shows no sign of abating, has enabled the development of computer simulations and models of unprecedented fidelity. We are at the threshold of a new era where the integrated synthesis, characterization, and modeling of complex materials and chemical processes will transform our ability to understand and design new materials and chemistries with predictive power. In turn, this predictive capability will transform technological innovation by accelerating the development and deployment of new materials and processes in products and manufacturing. Harnessing the potential of computational science and engineering for the discovery and development of materials and chemical processes is essential to maintaining leadership in these foundational fields that underpin energy technologies and industrial competitiveness. Capitalizing on the opportunities presented by simulation-based engineering and science in materials and chemistry will require an integration of experimental capabilities with theoretical and computational modeling; the development of a robust and sustainable infrastructure to support the development and deployment of advanced computational models; and the assembly of a community of scientists and engineers to implement this integration and infrastructure. This community must extend to industry, where incorporating predictive materials science and chemistry into design tools can accelerate the product development cycle and drive economic competitiveness. The confluence of new theories, new materials synthesis capabilities, and new computer platforms has created an unprecedented opportunity to implement a "materials-by-design" paradigm with wide-ranging benefits in technological innovation and scientific discovery. The Workshop on Computational Materials Science and Chemistry for Innovation was convened in Bethesda, Maryland, on July 26-27, 2010. Sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Basic Energy Sciences, the workshop brought together 160 experts in materials science, chemistry, and computational science representing more than 65 universities, laboratories, and industries, and four agencies. The workshop examined seven foundational challenge areas in materials science and chemistry: materials for extreme conditions, self-assembly, light harvesting, chemical reactions, designer fluids, thin films and interfaces, and electronic structure. Each of these challenge areas is critical to the development of advanced energy systems, and each can be accelerated by the integrated application of predictive capability with theory and experiment. The workshop concluded that emerging capabilities in predictive modeling and simulation have the potential to revolutionize the development of new materials and chemical processes. Coupled with world-leading materials characterization and nanoscale science facilities, this predictive capability provides the foundation for an innovation ecosystem that can accelerate the discovery, development, and deployment of new technologies, including advanced energy systems. Delivering on the promise of this innovation ecosystem requires the following: Integration of synthesis, processing, characterization, theory, and simulation and modeling. Many of the newly established Energy Frontier Research Centers and Energy Hubs are exploiting this integration. Achieving/strengthening predictive capability in foundational challenge areas. Predictive capability in the seven foundational challenge areas described in this report is critical to the development of advanced energy technologies. Developing validated computational approaches that span vast differences in time and length scales. This fundamental computational challenge crosscuts all of the foundational challenge areas. Similarly challenging is coupling of analytical data from multiple instruments and techniques that are required to link these length and time scales. Experimental validation and quantification of uncertainty in simulation and modeling. Uncertainty quantification becomes increasingly challenging as simulations become more complex. Robust and sustainable computational infrastructure, including software and applications. For modeling and simulation, software equals infrastructure. To validate the computational tools, software is critical infrastructure that effectively translates huge arrays of experimental data into useful scientific understanding. An integrated approach for managing this infrastructure is essential. Efficient transfer and incorporation of simulation-based engineering and science in industry. Strategies for bridging the gap between research and industrial applications and for widespread industry adoption of integrated computational materials engineering are needed.« less

Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI): Status of Design, Capabilities, and Implementation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Brasseur, L. H.; Banahan, S.; Cowles, T.

2009-05-01

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will implement the construction and operation of an interactive, integrated ocean observing network. This research- driven, multi-scale network will provide the broad ocean science community with access to advanced technology to enable studies of fundamental ocean processes. The OOI will afford observations at coastal, regional, and global scales on timeframes of milliseconds to decades in support of investigations into climate variability, ocean ecosystems, biogeochemical processes, coastal ocean dynamics, circulation and mixing dynamics, fluid-rock interactions, and the sub-seafloor biosphere. The elements of the OOI include arrays of fixed and re-locatable moorings, autonomous underwater vehicles, and cabled seafloor nodes. All assets combined, the OOI network will provide data from over 45 distinct types of sensors, comprising over 800 total sensors distributed in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These core sensors for the OOI were determined through a formal process of science requirements development. This core sensor array will be integrated through a system-wide cyberinfrastructure allowing for remote control of instruments, adaptive sampling, and near-real time access to data. Implementation of the network will stimulate new avenues of research and the development of new infrastructure, instrumentation, and sensor technologies. The OOI is funded by the NSF and managed by the Consortium for Ocean Leadership which focuses on the science, technology, education, and outreach for an emerging network of ocean observing systems.

Bridging the Science/Policy Gap through Boundary Chain Partnerships and Communities of Practice

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kalafatis, S.

2014-12-01

Generating the capacity to facilitate the informed usage of climate change science by decision makers on a large scale is fast becoming an area of great concern. While research demonstrates that sustained interactions between producers of such information and potential users can overcome barriers to information usage, it also demonstrates the high resource demand of these efforts. Our social science work at Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) sheds light on scaling up the usability of climate science through two research areas. The first focuses on partnerships with other boundary organizations that GLISA has leveraged - the "boundary chains" approach. These partnerships reduce the transaction costs involved with outreach and have enhanced the scope of GLISA's climate service efforts to encompass new users such as First Nations groups in Wisconsin and Michigan and underserved neighborhoods in St. Paul, Minnesota. The second research area looks at the development of information usability across the regional scale of the eight Great Lakes states. It has identified the critical role that communities of practice are playing in making information usable to large groups of users who work in similar contexts and have similar information needs. Both these research areas demonstrate the emerging potential of flexible knowledge networks to enhance society's ability to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Establishment of a National Wind Energy Center at University of Houston

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Wang, Su Su

The DOE-supported project objectives are to: establish a national wind energy center (NWEC) at University of Houston and conduct research to address critical science and engineering issues for the development of future large MW-scale wind energy production systems, especially offshore wind turbines. The goals of the project are to: (1) establish a sound scientific/technical knowledge base of solutions to critical science and engineering issues for developing future MW-scale large wind energy production systems, (2) develop a state-of-the-art wind rotor blade research facility at the University of Houston, and (3) through multi-disciplinary research, introducing technology innovations on advanced wind-turbine materials, processing/manufacturingmore » technology, design and simulation, testing and reliability assessment methods related to future wind turbine systems for cost-effective production of offshore wind energy. To achieve the goals of the project, the following technical tasks were planned and executed during the period from April 15, 2010 to October 31, 2014 at the University of Houston: (1) Basic research on large offshore wind turbine systems (2) Applied research on innovative wind turbine rotors for large offshore wind energy systems (3) Integration of offshore wind-turbine design, advanced materials and manufacturing technologies (4) Integrity and reliability of large offshore wind turbine blades and scaled model testing (5) Education and training of graduate and undergraduate students and post- doctoral researchers (6) Development of a national offshore wind turbine blade research facility The research program addresses both basic science and engineering of current and future large wind turbine systems, especially offshore wind turbines, for MW-scale power generation. The results of the research advance current understanding of many important scientific issues and provide technical information for solving future large wind turbines with advanced design, composite materials, integrated manufacturing, and structural reliability and integrity. The educational program have trained many graduate and undergraduate students and post-doctoral level researchers to learn critical science and engineering of wind energy production systems through graduate-level courses and research, and participating in various projects in center’s large multi-disciplinary research. These students and researchers are now employed by the wind industry, national labs and universities to support the US and international wind energy industry. The national offshore wind turbine blade research facility developed in the project has been used to support the technical and training tasks planned in the program to accomplish their goals, and it is a national asset which is available for used by domestic and international researchers in the wind energy arena.« less

Pedotransfer functions in Earth system science: challenges and perspectives

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Van Looy, K.; Minasny, B.; Nemes, A.; Verhoef, A.; Weihermueller, L.; Vereecken, H.

2017-12-01

We make a stronghold for a new generation of Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that is currently developed in the different disciplines of Earth system science, offering strong perspectives for improvement of integrated process-based models, from local to global scale applications. PTFs are simple to complex knowledge rules that relate available soil information to soil properties and variables that are needed to parameterize soil processes. To meet the methodological challenges for a successful application in Earth system modeling, we highlight how PTF development needs to go hand in hand with suitable extrapolation and upscaling techniques such that the PTFs correctly capture the spatial heterogeneity of soils. Most actively pursued recent developments are related to parameterizations of solute transport, heat exchange, soil respiration and organic carbon content, root density and vegetation water uptake. We present an outlook and stepwise approach to the development of a comprehensive set of PTFs that can be applied throughout a wide range of disciplines of Earth system science, with emphasis on land surface models. Novel sensing techniques and soil information availability provide a true breakthrough for this, yet further improvements are necessary in three domains: 1) the determining of unknown relationships and dealing with uncertainty in Earth system modeling; 2) the step of spatially deploying this knowledge with PTF validation at regional to global scales; and 3) the integration and linking of the complex model parameterizations (coupled parameterization). Integration is an achievable goal we will show.

Unravelling the structure of species extinction risk for predictive conservation science.

PubMed

Lee, Tien Ming; Jetz, Walter

2011-05-07

Extinction risk varies across species and space owing to the combined and interactive effects of ecology/life history and geography. For predictive conservation science to be effective, large datasets and integrative models that quantify the relative importance of potential factors and separate rapidly changing from relatively static threat drivers are urgently required. Here, we integrate and map in space the relative and joint effects of key correlates of The International Union for Conservation of Nature-assessed extinction risk for 8700 living birds. Extinction risk varies significantly with species' broad-scale environmental niche, geographical range size, and life-history and ecological traits such as body size, developmental mode, primary diet and foraging height. Even at this broad scale, simple quantifications of past human encroachment across species' ranges emerge as key in predicting extinction risk, supporting the use of land-cover change projections for estimating future threat in an integrative setting. A final joint model explains much of the interspecific variation in extinction risk and provides a remarkably strong prediction of its observed global geography. Our approach unravels the species-level structure underlying geographical gradients in extinction risk and offers a means of disentangling static from changing components of current and future threat. This reconciliation of intrinsic and extrinsic, and of past and future extinction risk factors may offer a critical step towards a more continuous, forward-looking assessment of species' threat status based on geographically explicit environmental change projections, potentially advancing global predictive conservation science.

Scale invariance in natural and artificial collective systems: a review

PubMed Central

Huepe, Cristián

2017-01-01

Self-organized collective coordinated behaviour is an impressive phenomenon, observed in a variety of natural and artificial systems, in which coherent global structures or dynamics emerge from local interactions between individual parts. If the degree of collective integration of a system does not depend on size, its level of robustness and adaptivity is typically increased and we refer to it as scale-invariant. In this review, we first identify three main types of self-organized scale-invariant systems: scale-invariant spatial structures, scale-invariant topologies and scale-invariant dynamics. We then provide examples of scale invariance from different domains in science, describe their origins and main features and discuss potential challenges and approaches for designing and engineering artificial systems with scale-invariant properties. PMID:29093130

Retaining Aspiring Scholars (retention, Students of Color)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Walters, Nancy Bannister

Tinto's retention model provided the theoretical framework for this research study of the academic and social integration of academically talented students of color into the graduate and professional science degree pipeline. The site for this study was the Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program of the University of Minnesota. This program recruits academically talented undergraduates from throughout the nation for participation in two months of research, academic study and orientation to science graduate and professional programs. The quantitative data source consisted of survey responses by 108 alumni of the Summer Undergraduate Research Program to the Institutional Integration Scale developed by Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini. The scale measures academic integration, social integration and institutional and goal commitment of students. The qualitative data source consisted of one-on-one interviews of 14 summer program alumni of Caucasian, Latino and African American background. The quantitative results were not significant, while the qualitative results demonstrated the importance to alumni interviewed of the challenging academic research work, personally confirming peer group socialization, and supportive student faculty interactions. The study showed the importance of programs like these for helping students of color plan upper level college study and graduate/professional school enrollment. Program characteristics that influenced decision making regarding school and career choices by study participants and specifically by students of color were involvement of faculty in recruiting and mentoring students; socialization to the graduate student role through peer group relations and student maturation and empowerment through participation in a high level academic program. Study findings indicated that supportive and empowering faculty contact was considered most important by students of color who continued on to graduate and professional programs.

Ensuring the common for the goose: Implementing effective watershed policies

Treesearch

Hanna J. Cortner; Margaret A. Moote

2000-01-01

Addressing public and scientific concerns about human impacts on long-term ecological sustainability will require new approaches to resource management. These new approaches, which place considerable emphasis on management on the landscape or watershed scale, stress holistic and integrated science, meaningful public involvement to reflect changing social goals and...

Broad-scale consequences of land management: Columbia basin example.

Treesearch

Richard W. Haynes; Thomas M. Quigley

2001-01-01

Integrating management actions to consistently achieve broad ecological and socioeconomic goals is a challenge largely unmet. The presumed or real conflict between these goals establishes a forum for debate. Broad measures are needed to describe tradeoffs, trends in conditions under varying management scenarios, and a transparent science underpinning. The Interior...

Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data

PubMed Central

Juty, Nick; Blomberg, Niklas; Burdett, Tony; Conlin, Tom; Conte, Nathalie; Courtot, Mélanie; Deck, John; Dumontier, Michel; Fellows, Donal K.; Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Gormanns, Philipp; Grethe, Jeffrey; Hastings, Janna; Hériché, Jean-Karim; Hermjakob, Henning; Ison, Jon C.; Jimenez, Rafael C.; Jupp, Simon; Kunze, John; Laibe, Camille; Le Novère, Nicolas; Malone, James; Martin, Maria Jesus; McEntyre, Johanna R.; Morris, Chris; Muilu, Juha; Müller, Wolfgang; Rocca-Serra, Philippe; Sansone, Susanna-Assunta; Sariyar, Murat; Snoep, Jacky L.; Soiland-Reyes, Stian; Stanford, Natalie J.; Swainston, Neil; Washington, Nicole; Williams, Alan R.; Wimalaratne, Sarala M.; Winfree, Lilly M.; Wolstencroft, Katherine; Goble, Carole; Mungall, Christopher J.; Haendel, Melissa A.; Parkinson, Helen

2017-01-01

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure. Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers. We also outline the important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability. We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines. PMID:28662064

Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data.

PubMed

McMurry, Julie A; Juty, Nick; Blomberg, Niklas; Burdett, Tony; Conlin, Tom; Conte, Nathalie; Courtot, Mélanie; Deck, John; Dumontier, Michel; Fellows, Donal K; Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Gormanns, Philipp; Grethe, Jeffrey; Hastings, Janna; Hériché, Jean-Karim; Hermjakob, Henning; Ison, Jon C; Jimenez, Rafael C; Jupp, Simon; Kunze, John; Laibe, Camille; Le Novère, Nicolas; Malone, James; Martin, Maria Jesus; McEntyre, Johanna R; Morris, Chris; Muilu, Juha; Müller, Wolfgang; Rocca-Serra, Philippe; Sansone, Susanna-Assunta; Sariyar, Murat; Snoep, Jacky L; Soiland-Reyes, Stian; Stanford, Natalie J; Swainston, Neil; Washington, Nicole; Williams, Alan R; Wimalaratne, Sarala M; Winfree, Lilly M; Wolstencroft, Katherine; Goble, Carole; Mungall, Christopher J; Haendel, Melissa A; Parkinson, Helen

2017-06-01

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure. Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers. We also outline the important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability. We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines.

GMTIFS: The Giant Magellan Telescope integral fields spectrograph and imager

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sharp, Rob; Bloxham, G.; Boz, R.; Bundy, D.; Davies, J.; Espeland, B.; Fordham, B.; Hart, J.; Herrald, N.; Nielsen, J.; Vaccarella, A.; Vest, C.; Young, P.; McGregor, P.

2016-08-01

GMTIFS is the first-generation adaptive optics integral-field spectrograph for the GMT, having been selected through a competitive review process in 2011. The GMTIFS concept is for a workhorse single-object integral-field spectrograph, operating at intermediate resolution (R 5,000 and 10,000) with a parallel imaging channel. The IFS offers variable spaxel scales to Nyquist sample the diffraction limited GMT PSF from λ 1-2.5 μm as well as a 50 mas scale to provide high sensitivity for low surface brightness objects. The GMTIFS will operate with all AO modes of the GMT (Natural guide star - NGSAO, Laser Tomography - LTAO, and, Ground Layer - GLAO) with an emphasis on achieving high sky coverage for LTAO observations. We summarize the principle science drivers for GMTIFS and the major design concepts that allow these goals to be achieved.

Initial Scientific Assessment of the EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1989-01-01

Crucial to the success of the Earth Observing System (Eos) is the Eos Data and Information System (EosDIS). The goals of Eos depend not only on its instruments and science investigations, but also on how well EosDlS helps scientists integrate reliable, large-scale data sets of geophysical and biological measurements made from Eos data, and on how successfully Eos scientists interact with other investigations in Earth System Science. Current progress in the use of remote sensing for science is hampered by requirements that the scientist understand in detail the instrument, the electromagnetic properties of the surface, and a suite of arcane tape formats, and by the immaturity of some of the techniques for estimating geophysical and biological variables from remote sensing data. These shortcomings must be transcended if remote sensing data are to be used by a much wider population of scientists who study environmental change at regional and global scales.

Integrated bio-photonics to revolutionize health care enabled through PIX4life and PIXAPP

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jans, Hilde; O'Brien, Peter; Artundo, Iñigo; Porcel, Marco A. G.; Hoofman, Romano; Geuzebroek, Douwe; Dumon, Pieter; van der Vliet, Marcel; Witzens, Jeremy; Bourguignon, Eric; Van Dorpe, Pol; Lagae, Liesbet

2018-02-01

Photonics has become critical to life sciences. However, the field is far from benefiting fully from photonics' capabilities. Today, bulky and expensive optical systems dominate biomedical photonics, even though robust optical functionality can be realized cost-effectively on single photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Such chips are commercially available mostly for telecom applications, and at infrared wavelengths. Although proof-of-concept demonstrations for PICs in life sciences, using visible wavelengths are abundant, the gating factor for wider adoption is limited in resource capacity. Two European pilot lines, PIX4life and PIXAPP, were established to facilitate European R and D in biophotonics, by helping European companies and universities bridge the gap between research and industrial development. Through creation of an open-access model, PIX4life aims to lower barriers to entry for prototyping and validating biophotonics concepts for larger scale production. In addition, PIXAPP enables the assembly and packaging of photonic integrated circuits.

Geoinformatics in the public service: building a cyberinfrastructure across the geological surveys

USGS Publications Warehouse

Allison, M. Lee; Gundersen, Linda C.; Richard, Stephen M.; Keller, G. Randy; Baru, Chaitanya

2011-01-01

Advanced information technology infrastructure is increasingly being employed in the Earth sciences to provide researchers with efficient access to massive central databases and to integrate diversely formatted information from a variety of sources. These geoinformatics initiatives enable manipulation, modeling and visualization of data in a consistent way, and are helping to develop integrated Earth models at various scales, and from the near surface to the deep interior. This book uses a series of case studies to demonstrate computer and database use across the geosciences. Chapters are thematically grouped into sections that cover data collection and management; modeling and community computational codes; visualization and data representation; knowledge management and data integration; and web services and scientific workflows. Geoinformatics is a fascinating and accessible introduction to this emerging field for readers across the solid Earth sciences and an invaluable reference for researchers interested in initiating new cyberinfrastructure projects of their own.

Interdisciplinary interpretations and applications of the concept of scale in landscape research.

PubMed

Higgins, Sarah; Mahon, Marie; McDonagh, John

2012-12-30

The spatial dimensions of many social, economic and environmental challenges facing 21st century societies can be addressed through the idea of landscape. The European Landscape Convention--ELC (Council of Europe, 2000--Article 1a) views landscape as representing not simply the environment, but the world "as perceived by people". As a concept, landscape is increasingly understood as uniting the physical, mental, natural and cultural dimensions of human existence; good quality landscapes are thus integral to our well-being. The problems and challenges facing our landscapes require greater understanding of how they function and change, as well as their meanings and values. Scholars working in the area of landscape research have increasingly advocated the need to enhance integrative approaches between the natural, human and applied sciences. However, drawing together the collective insights from across the sciences presents a range of conceptual and methodological issues. The question of scale as it pertains to different scientific realms is a key example of this kind of challenge to integrative approaches. The multi-scale nature of the social, environmental and economic challenges embedded in the landscape demands that scholars address these key issues of scale in their research. The aim of this paper is to review how the concept of scale has been interpreted and applied within the arena of landscape research, focussing specifically on three of the principal disciplinary contributors--ecology/landscape ecology, geography and spatial planning. The objective of this discussion is to synthesise scalar issues that feature within and across these perspectives, to better understand how they impact on the way landscape is conceptualised and thus produced through academic and related policy discourses. It seeks out points of tension as well as convergence when dealing with scale. It reflects on academic, policy and practice-related concerns that would form part of longer-term holistic strategies for landscape protection, planning and management in line with those being advocated by the ELC. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emerging concepts for management of river ecosystems and challenges to applied integration of physical and biological sciences in the Pacific Northwest, USA

USGS Publications Warehouse

Rieman, Bruce; Dunham, Jason B.; Clayton, James

2006-01-01

Integration of biological and physical concepts is necessary to understand and conserve the ecological integrity of river systems. Past attempts at integration have often focused at relatively small scales and on mechanistic models that may not capture the complexity of natural systems leaving substantial uncertainty about ecological responses to management actions. Two solutions have been proposed to guide management in the face of that uncertainty: the use of “natural variability” in key environmental patterns, processes, or disturbance as a reference; and the retention of some areas as essentially unmanaged reserves to conserve and represent as much biological diversity as possible. Both concepts are scale dependent because dominant processes or patterns that might be referenced will change with scale. Context and linkages across scales may be as important in structuring biological systems as conditions within habitats used by individual organisms. Both ideas view the physical environment as a template for expression, maintenance, and evolution of ecological diversity. To conserve or restore a diverse physical template it will be important to recognize the ecologically important differences in physical characteristics and processes among streams or watersheds that we might attempt to mimic in management or represent in conservation or restoration reserves.

Effects of Engineering Design-Based Science on Elementary School Science Students' Engineering Identity Development across Gender and Grade

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Capobianco, Brenda M.; Yu, Ji H.; French, Brian F.

2015-04-01

The integration of engineering concepts and practices into elementary science education has become an emerging concern for science educators and practitioners, alike. Moreover, how children, specifically preadolescents (grades 1-5), engage in engineering design-based learning activities may help science educators and researchers learn more about children's earliest identification with engineering. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which engineering identity differed among preadolescents across gender and grade, when exposing students to engineering design-based science learning activities. Five hundred fifty preadolescent participants completed the Engineering Identity Development Scale (EIDS), a recently developed measure with validity evidence that characterizes children's conceptions of engineering and potential career aspirations. Data analyses of variance among four factors (i.e., gender, grade, and group) indicated that elementary school students who engaged in the engineering design-based science learning activities demonstrated greater improvements on the EIDS subscales compared to those in the comparison group. Specifically, students in the lower grade levels showed substantial increases, while students in the higher grade levels showed decreases. Girls, regardless of grade level and participation in the engineering learning activities, showed higher scores in the academic subscale compared to boys. These findings suggest that the integration of engineering practices in the science classroom as early as grade one shows potential in fostering and sustaining student interest, participation, and self-concept in engineering and science.

The value of the Semantic Web in the laboratory.

PubMed

Frey, Jeremy G

2009-06-01

The Semantic Web is beginning to impact on the wider chemical and physical sciences, beyond the earlier adopted bio-informatics. While useful in large-scale data driven science with automated processing, these technologies can also help integrate the work of smaller scale laboratories producing diverse data. The semantics aid the discovery, reliable re-use of data, provide improved provenance and facilitate automated processing by increased resilience to changes in presentation and reduced ambiguity. The Semantic Web, its tools and collections are not yet competitive with well-established solutions to current problems. It is in the reduced cost of instituting solutions to new problems that the versatility of Semantic Web-enabled data and resources will make their mark once the more general-purpose tools are more available.

The Anthropocene: A Planetary Perspective

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Anbar, A. D.; Hartnett, H. E.; York, A.; Selin, C.

2016-12-01

The Anthropocene is a new planetary epoch defined by the emergence of human activity as one of the most important driving forces on Earth, rivaling and also stressing the other systems that govern the planet's habitability. Public discussions and debates about the challenges of this epoch tend to be polarized. One extreme denies that humans have a planetary-scale impact, while the other wishes that this impact could disappear. The tension between these perspectives is often paralyzing. Effective adaptation and mitigation requires a new perspective that reframes the conversation. We propose a planetary perspective according to which this epoch is the result of a recent major innovation in the 4 ­billion ­year history of life on Earth: the emergence of an energy-intensive planetary civilization. The rate of human energy use is already within an order of magnitude of that of the rest of the biosphere, and rising rapidly, and so this innovation is second only to the evolution of photosynthesis in terms of energy capture and utilization by living systems. Such energy use has and will continue to affect Earth at planetary scale. This reality cannot be denied nor wished away. From this pragmatic perspective, the Anthropocene is not an unnatural event that can be reversed, as though humanity is separate from the Earth systems with which we are co-evolving. Rather, it is an evolutionary transition to be managed. This is the challenge of turning a carelessly altered planet into a carefully designed and managed world, maintaining a "safe operating space" for human civilization (Steffen et al., 2011). To do so, we need an integrated approach to Earth systems science that considers humans as a natural and integral component of Earth's systems. Insights drawn from the humanities and the social sciences must be integrated with the natural sciences in order to thrive in this new epoch. This type of integrated perspective is relatively uncontroversial on personal, local, and even regional scales. It is, however, intimidating at the global scale, for good reason: it is a daunting challenge that we barely understand and for which we are poorly prepared. In this presentation, we will address approaches to adaptation and mitigation that illustrate the promise - and pitfalls - of a planetary design perspective relevant to food, energy, water, and climate.

NASA's Information Power Grid: Large Scale Distributed Computing and Data Management

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Johnston, William E.; Vaziri, Arsi; Hinke, Tom; Tanner, Leigh Ann; Feiereisen, William J.; Thigpen, William; Tang, Harry (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

Large-scale science and engineering are done through the interaction of people, heterogeneous computing resources, information systems, and instruments, all of which are geographically and organizationally dispersed. The overall motivation for Grids is to facilitate the routine interactions of these resources in order to support large-scale science and engineering. Multi-disciplinary simulations provide a good example of a class of applications that are very likely to require aggregation of widely distributed computing, data, and intellectual resources. Such simulations - e.g. whole system aircraft simulation and whole system living cell simulation - require integrating applications and data that are developed by different teams of researchers frequently in different locations. The research team's are the only ones that have the expertise to maintain and improve the simulation code and/or the body of experimental data that drives the simulations. This results in an inherently distributed computing and data management environment.

Science framework for conservation and restoration of the sagebrush biome: Linking the Department of the Interior’s Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy to long-term strategic conservation actions, Part 1. Science basis and applications

USGS Publications Warehouse

Chambers, Jeanne C.; Beck, Jeffrey L.; Bradford, John B.; Bybee, Jared; Campbell, Steve; Carlson, John; Christiansen, Thomas J; Clause, Karen J.; Collins, Gail; Crist, Michele R.; Dinkins, Jonathan B.; Doherty, Kevin E.; Edwards, Fred; Espinosa, Shawn; Griffin, Kathleen A.; Griffin, Paul; Haas, Jessica R.; Hanser, Steven E.; Havlina, Douglas W.; Henke, Kenneth F.; Hennig, Jacob D.; Joyce, Linda A; Kilkenny, Francis F.; Kulpa, Sarah M; Kurth, Laurie L; Maestas, Jeremy D; Manning, Mary E.; Mayer, Kenneth E.; Mealor, Brian A.; McCarthy, Clinton; Pellant, Mike; Perea, Marco A.; Prentice, Karen L.; Pyke, David A.; Wiechman , Lief A.; Wuenschel, Amarina

2017-01-01

The Science Framework is intended to link the Department of the Interior’s Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy with long-term strategic conservation actions in the sagebrush biome. The Science Framework provides a multiscale approach for prioritizing areas for management and determining effective management strategies within the sagebrush biome. The emphasis is on sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystems and Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). The approach provided in the Science Framework links sagebrush ecosystem resilience to disturbance and resistance to nonnative, invasive plant species to species habitat information based on the distribution and abundance of focal species. A geospatial process is presented that overlays information on ecosystem resilience and resistance, species habitats, and predominant threats and that can be used at the mid-scale to prioritize areas for management. A resilience and resistance habitat matrix is provided that can help decisionmakers evaluate risks and determine appropriate management strategies. Prioritized areas and management strategies can be refined by managers and stakeholders at the local scale based on higher resolution data and local knowledge. Decision tools are discussed for determining appropriate management actions for areas that are prioritized for management. Geospatial data, maps, and models are provided through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) ScienceBase and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Landscape Approach Data Portal. The Science Framework is intended to be adaptive and will be updated as additional data become available on other values and species at risk. It is anticipated that the Science Framework will be widely used to: (1) inform emerging strategies to conserve sagebrush ecosystems, sagebrush dependent species, and human uses of the sagebrush system, and (2) assist managers in prioritizing and planning on-the-ground restoration and mitigation actions across the sagebrush biome.

Education and Public Outreach at The Pavilion Lake Research Project: Fusion of Science and Education using Web 2.0

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cowie, B. R.; Lim, D. S.; Pendery, R.; Laval, B.; Slater, G. F.; Brady, A. L.; Dearing, W. L.; Downs, M.; Forrest, A.; Lees, D. S.; Lind, R. A.; Marinova, M.; Reid, D.; Seibert, M. A.; Shepard, R.; Williams, D.

2009-12-01

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) is an international multi-disciplinary science and exploration effort to explain the origin and preservation potential of freshwater microbialites in Pavilion Lake, British Columbia, Canada. Using multiple exploration platforms including one person DeepWorker submersibles, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, and SCUBA divers, the PLRP acts as an analogue research site for conducting science in extreme environments, such as the Moon or Mars. In 2009, the PLRP integrated several Web 2.0 technologies to provide a pilot-scale Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program targeting the internet savvy generation. The seamless integration of multiple technologies including Google Earth, Wordpress, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, facilitated the rapid distribution of exciting and accessible science and exploration information over multiple channels. Field updates, science reports, and multimedia including videos, interactive maps, and immersive visualization were rapidly available through multiple social media channels, partly due to the ease of integration of these multiple technologies. Additionally, the successful application of videoconferencing via a readily available technology (Skype) has greatly increased the capacity of our team to conduct real-time education and public outreach from remote locations. The improved communication afforded by Web 2.0 has increased the quality of EPO provided by the PLRP, and has enabled a higher level of interaction between the science team and the community at large. Feedback from these online interactions suggest that remote communication via Web 2.0 technologies were effective tools for increasing public discourse and awareness of the science and exploration activity at Pavilion Lake.

Operationalizing ecological resilience at a landscape scale: A framework and case study from Silicon Valley

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Beller, E.; Robinson, A.; Grossinger, R.; Grenier, L.; Davenport, A.

2015-12-01

Adaptation to climate change requires redesigning our landscapes and watersheds to maximize ecological resilience at large scales and integrated across urban areas, wildlands, and a diversity of ecosystem types. However, it can be difficult for environmental managers and designers to access, interpret, and apply resilience concepts at meaningful scales and across a range of settings. To address this gap, we produced a Landscape Resilience Framework that synthesizes the latest science on the qualitative mechanisms that drive resilience of ecological functions to climate change and other large-scale stressors. The framework is designed to help translate resilience science into actionable ecosystem conservation and restoration recommendations and adaptation strategies by providing a concise but comprehensive list of considerations that will help integrate resilience concepts into urban design, conservation planning, and natural resource management. The framework is composed of seven principles that represent core attributes which determine the resilience of ecological functions within a landscape. These principles are: setting, process, connectivity, redundancy, diversity/complexity, scale, and people. For each principle we identify several key operationalizable components that help illuminate specific recommendations and actions that are likely to contribute to landscape resilience for locally appropriate species, habitats, and biological processes. We are currently using the framework to develop landscape-scale recommendations for ecological resilience in the heavily urbanized Silicon Valley, California, in collaboration with local agencies, companies, and regional experts. The resilience framework is being applied across the valley, including urban, suburban, and wildland areas and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Ultimately, the framework will underpin the development of strategies that can be implemented to bolster ecological resilience from a site to landscape scale.

The SMART Theory and Modeling Team: An Integrated Element of Mission Development and Science Analysis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hesse, Michael; Birn, J.; Denton, Richard E.; Drake, J.; Gombosi, T.; Hoshino, M.; Matthaeus, B.; Sibeck, D.

2005-01-01

When targeting physical understanding of space plasmas, our focus is gradually shifting away from discovery-type investigations to missions and studies that address our basic understanding of processes we know to be important. For these studies, theory and models provide physical predictions that need to be verified or falsified by empirical evidence. Within this paradigm, a tight integration between theory, modeling, and space flight mission design and execution is essential. NASA's Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission is a pathfinder in this new era of space research. The prime objective of MMS is to understand magnetic reconnection, arguably the most fundamental of plasma processes. In particular, MMS targets the microphysical processes, which permit magnetic reconnection to operate in the collisionless plasmas that permeate space and astrophysical systems. More specifically, MMS will provide closure to such elemental questions as how particles become demagnetized in the reconnection diffusion region, which effects determine the reconnection rate, and how reconnection is coupled to environmental conditions such as magnetic shear angles. Solutions to these problems have remained elusive in past and present spacecraft missions primarily due to instrumental limitations - yet they are fundamental to the large-scale dynamics of collisionless plasmas. Owing to the lack of measurements, most of our present knowledge of these processes is based on results from modern theory and modeling studies of the reconnection process. Proper design and execution of a mission targeting magnetic reconnection should include this knowledge and have to ensure that all relevant scales and effects can be resolved by mission measurements. The SMART mission has responded to this need through a tight integration between instrument and theory and modeling teams. Input from theory and modeling is fed into all aspects of science mission design, and theory and modeling activities are tailored to SMART needs during mission development and science analysis. In this presentation, we will present an overview of SMART theory and modeling team activities. In particular, we will provide examples of science objectives derived from state-of-the art models, and of recent research results that continue to be utilized in SMART mission development.

Evolution of the Tropical Cyclone Integrated Data Exchange And Analysis System (TC-IDEAS)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Turk, J.; Chao, Y.; Haddad, Z.; Hristova-Veleva, S.; Knosp, B.; Lambrigtsen, B.; Li, P.; Licata, S.; Poulsen, W.; Su, H.;

Water Hyacinth in China: A Sustainability Science-Based Management Framework

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lu, Jianbo; Wu, Jianguo; Fu, Zhihui; Zhu, Lei

2007-12-01

The invasion of water hyacinth ( Eichhornia crassipes) has resulted in enormous ecological and economic consequences worldwide. Although the spread of this weed in Africa, Australia, and North America has been well documented, its invasion in China is yet to be fully documented. Here we report that since its introduction about seven decades ago, water hyacinth has infested many water bodies across almost half of China’s territory, causing a decline of native biodiversity, alteration of ecosystem services, deterioration of aquatic environments, and spread of diseases affecting human health. Water hyacinth infestations have also led to enormous economic losses in China by impeding water flows, paralyzing navigation, and damaging irrigation and hydroelectricity facilities. To effectively control the rampage of water hyacinth in China, we propose a sustainability science-based management framework that explicitly incorporates principles from landscape ecology and Integrated Pest Management. This framework emphasizes multiple-scale long-term monitoring and research, integration among different control techniques, combination of control with utilization, and landscape-level adaptive management. Sustainability science represents a new, transdisciplinary paradigm that integrates scientific research, technological innovation, and socioeconomic development of particular regions. Our proposed management framework is aimed to broaden the currently dominant biological control-centered view in China and to illustrate how sustainability science can be used to guide the research and management of water hyacinth.

NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC): an interdisciplinary research program.

PubMed

Justice, Chris; Gutman, Garik; Vadrevu, Krishna Prasad

2015-01-15

Understanding Land Cover/Land Use Change (LCLUC) in diverse regions of the world and at varied spatial scales is one of the important challenges in global change research. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the NASA LCLUC program, its focus areas, and the importance of satellite remote sensing observations in LCLUC research including future directions. The LCLUC Program was designed to be a cross-cutting theme within NASA's Earth Science program. The program aims to develop and use remote sensing technologies to improve understanding of human interactions with the environment. Since 1997, the NASA LCLUC program has supported nearly 280 research projects on diverse topics such as forest loss and carbon, urban expansion, land abandonment, wetland loss, agricultural land use change and land use change in mountain systems. The NASA LCLUC program emphasizes studies where land-use changes are rapid or where there are significant regional or global LCLUC implications. Over a period of years, the LCLUC program has contributed to large regional science programs such as Land Biosphere-Atmosphere (LBA), the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI), and the Monsoon Area Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS). The primary emphasis of the program will remain on using remote sensing datasets for LCLUC research. The program will continue to emphasize integration of physical and social sciences to address regional to global scale issues of LCLUC for the benefit of society. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Imaging Science Panel. Multispectral Imaging Science Working Group joint meeting with Information Science Panel: Introduction

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1982-01-01

The state-of-the-art of multispectral sensing is reviewed and recommendations for future research and development are proposed. specifically, two generic sensor concepts were discussed. One is the multispectral pushbroom sensor utilizing linear array technology which operates in six spectral bands including two in the SWIR region and incorporates capabilities for stereo and crosstrack pointing. The second concept is the imaging spectrometer (IS) which incorporates a dispersive element and area arrays to provide both spectral and spatial information simultaneously. Other key technology areas included very large scale integration and the computer aided design of these devices.

Progress in fast, accurate multi-scale climate simulations

DOE PAGES

Collins, W. D.; Johansen, H.; Evans, K. J.; ...

2015-06-01

We present a survey of physical and computational techniques that have the potential to contribute to the next generation of high-fidelity, multi-scale climate simulations. Examples of the climate science problems that can be investigated with more depth with these computational improvements include the capture of remote forcings of localized hydrological extreme events, an accurate representation of cloud features over a range of spatial and temporal scales, and parallel, large ensembles of simulations to more effectively explore model sensitivities and uncertainties. Numerical techniques, such as adaptive mesh refinement, implicit time integration, and separate treatment of fast physical time scales are enablingmore » improved accuracy and fidelity in simulation of dynamics and allowing more complete representations of climate features at the global scale. At the same time, partnerships with computer science teams have focused on taking advantage of evolving computer architectures such as many-core processors and GPUs. As a result, approaches which were previously considered prohibitively costly have become both more efficient and scalable. In combination, progress in these three critical areas is poised to transform climate modeling in the coming decades.« less

Using Citizen Science Observations to Model Species Distributions Over Space, Through Time, and Across Scales

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kelling, S.

2017-12-01

The goal of Biodiversity research is to identify, explain, and predict why a species' distribution and abundance vary through time, space, and with features of the environment. Measuring these patterns and predicting their responses to change are not exercises in curiosity. Today, they are essential tasks for understanding the profound effects that humans have on earth's natural systems, and for developing science-based environmental policies. To gain insight about species' distribution patterns requires studying natural systems at appropriate scales, yet studies of ecological processes continue to be compromised by inadequate attention to scale issues. How spatial and temporal patterns in nature change with scale often reflects fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, or biology, and we can identify such basic, governing laws only by comparing patterns over a wide range of scales. This presentation will provide several examples that integrate bird observations made by volunteers, with NASA Earth Imagery using Big Data analysis techniques to analyze the temporal patterns of bird occurrence across scales—from hemisphere-wide views of bird distributions to the impact of powerful city lights on bird migration.

InfoSymbiotics/DDDAS - The power of Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems for New Capabilities in Environmental -, Geo-, and Space- Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Darema, F.

2016-12-01

InfoSymbiotics/DDDAS embodies the power of Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS), a concept whereby an executing application model is dynamically integrated, in a feed-back loop, with the real-time data-acquisition and control components, as well as other data sources of the application system. Advanced capabilities can be created through such new computational approaches in modeling and simulations, and in instrumentation methods, and include: enhancing the accuracy of the application model; speeding-up the computation to allow faster and more comprehensive models of a system, and create decision support systems with the accuracy of full-scale simulations; in addition, the notion of controlling instrumentation processes by the executing application results in more efficient management of application-data and addresses challenges of how to architect and dynamically manage large sets of heterogeneous sensors and controllers, an advance over the static and ad-hoc ways of today - with DDDAS these sets of resources can be managed adaptively and in optimized ways. Large-Scale-Dynamic-Data encompasses the next wave of Big Data, and namely dynamic data arising from ubiquitous sensing and control in engineered, natural, and societal systems, through multitudes of heterogeneous sensors and controllers instrumenting these systems, and where opportunities and challenges at these "large-scales" relate not only to data size but the heterogeneity in data, data collection modalities, fidelities, and timescales, ranging from real-time data to archival data. In tandem with this important dimension of dynamic data, there is an extended view of Big Computing, which includes the collective computing by networked assemblies of multitudes of sensors and controllers, this range from the high-end to the real-time seamlessly integrated and unified, and comprising the Large-Scale-Big-Computing. InfoSymbiotics/DDDAS engenders transformative impact in many application domains, ranging from the nano-scale to the terra-scale and to the extra-terra-scale. The talk will address opportunities for new capabilities together with corresponding research challenges, with illustrative examples from several application areas including environmental sciences, geosciences, and space sciences.

Links to Literature--Huge Trees, Small Drawings: Ideas of Relative Sizes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burton, Gail

1996-01-01

Discusses a unit integrating science, mathematics, and environmental education centered around "The Great Kapok Tree," by Lynne Cherry (1990). Ratios are used to make scale drawings of trees in a rain forest. Other activities include a terrarium and problem-solving activities based on eating habits of rain forest animals. (KMC)

Investigating the Effectiveness of Computer Simulations for Chemistry Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Plass, Jan L.; Milne, Catherine; Homer, Bruce D.; Schwartz, Ruth N.; Hayward, Elizabeth O.; Jordan, Trace; Verkuilen, Jay; Ng, Florrie; Wang, Yan; Barrientos, Juan

2012-01-01

Are well-designed computer simulations an effective tool to support student understanding of complex concepts in chemistry when integrated into high school science classrooms? We investigated scaling up the use of a sequence of simulations of kinetic molecular theory and associated topics of diffusion, gas laws, and phase change, which we designed…

Models, Databases, and Simulation Tools Needed for the Realization of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering. Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Materials Science and Technology 2010

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Arnold, Steven M. (Editor); Wong, Terry T. (Editor)

2011-01-01

Topics covered include: An Annotative Review of Multiscale Modeling and its Application to Scales Inherent in the Field of ICME; and A Multiscale, Nonlinear, Modeling Framework Enabling the Design and Analysis of Composite Materials and Structures.

Integrating wetland connectivity into models for watershed ...

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

Geographically isolated wetlands (GIW), or wetlands embedded in uplands, exist along a spatial and temporal hydrologic connectivity continuum to downstream waters. Via these connections and disconnections, GIWs provide numerous hydrological, biogeochemical, and biological functions linked to human health and watershed-scale ecosystem services. Often, a clear demonstration of these functions and the individual and cumulative effects of GIWs on downstream waters is required for their protection or restoration. Measurements alone are typically too resource intensive to do this. In this presentation, we discuss the use of various modeling approaches to quantify the hydrologic connectivity of GIWs and their associated watershed-scale cumulative effects. Our goal is to improve the science behind understanding the functions and connectivity of GIWs via models that are complemented with various types of novel data. We synthesize what is meant by GIW connectivity and its broad significance to science and decision-making. We further discuss case studies that provide insights to diverse modeling approaches, with varying levels of complexity, for how to estimate GIW connectivity and associated watershed-scale impacts to hydrology. We finally provide insights to the key opportunities and priorities for integrating GIW connectivity into the next generation of models. Geographically isolated wetlands (GIW), or wetlands embedded in uplands, exist along a spatial and temporal h

Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kucsko, G.; Maurer, P. C.; Yao, N. Y.; Kubo, M.; Noh, H. J.; Lo, P. K.; Park, H.; Lukin, M. D.

2013-08-01

Sensitive probing of temperature variations on nanometre scales is an outstanding challenge in many areas of modern science and technology. In particular, a thermometer capable of subdegree temperature resolution over a large range of temperatures as well as integration within a living system could provide a powerful new tool in many areas of biological, physical and chemical research. Possibilities range from the temperature-induced control of gene expression and tumour metabolism to the cell-selective treatment of disease and the study of heat dissipation in integrated circuits. By combining local light-induced heat sources with sensitive nanoscale thermometry, it may also be possible to engineer biological processes at the subcellular level. Here we demonstrate a new approach to nanoscale thermometry that uses coherent manipulation of the electronic spin associated with nitrogen-vacancy colour centres in diamond. Our technique makes it possible to detect temperature variations as small as 1.8 mK (a sensitivity of 9 mK Hz-1/2) in an ultrapure bulk diamond sample. Using nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond nanocrystals (nanodiamonds), we directly measure the local thermal environment on length scales as short as 200 nanometres. Finally, by introducing both nanodiamonds and gold nanoparticles into a single human embryonic fibroblast, we demonstrate temperature-gradient control and mapping at the subcellular level, enabling unique potential applications in life sciences.

Linking Environmental Research and Practice: Lessons From The Integration of Climate Science and Water Management in the Western United States

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ferguson, D. B.; Rice, J.; Woodhouse, C. A.

2015-12-01

Efforts to better connect scientific research with people and organizations involved in environmental decision making are receiving increased interest and attention. Some of the challenges we currently face, however—including complex questions associated with climate change—present unique challenges because of their scale and scope. Focused research on the intersections between environment and society has provided substantial insight into dynamics of large-scale environmental change and the related impacts on people, natural resources, and ecosystems, yet our ability to connect this research to real-world decision making remains limited. Addressing these complex environmental problems requires broad cooperation between scientists and those who may apply research results in decision making, but there are few templates for guiding the growing number of scientists and practitioners now engaging in this kind of cooperative work. This presentation will offer a set of heuristics for carrying out collaborative work between scientists and practitioners. These heuristics were derived from research that examined the direct experiences of water resources professionals and climate researchers who have been working to integrate science and practice.

Engineered passive bioreactive barriers: risk-managing the legacy of industrial soil and groundwater pollution.

PubMed

Kalin, Robert M

2004-06-01

Permeable reactive barriers are a technology that is one decade old, with most full-scale applications based on abiotic mechanisms. Though there is extensive literature on engineered bioreactors, natural biodegradation potential, and in situ remediation, it is only recently that engineered passive bioreactive barrier technology is being considered at the commercial scale to manage contaminated soil and groundwater risks. Recent full-scale studies are providing the scientific confidence in our understanding of coupled microbial (and genetic), hydrogeologic, and geochemical processes in this approach and have highlighted the need to further integrate engineering and science tools.

An interdisciplinary assessment of regional-scale nonpoint source ground-water vulnerability; theory and application

USGS Publications Warehouse

Bernknopf, Richard L.; Dinitz, Laura B.; Loague, Keith

2001-01-01

An integrated earth science-economics model, developed within a geographic information system (GIS), combines a regional-scale nonpoint source vulnerability assessment with a specific remediation measure to avoid unnecessary agricultural production costs associated with the use of agrochemicals in the Pearl Harbor basin on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. This approach forms the core of a risk-based regulation for the application of agrochemicals and estimates the benefits of an information-based approach to decisionmaking.

Systems Proteomics for Translational Network Medicine

PubMed Central

Arrell, D. Kent; Terzic, Andre

2012-01-01

Universal principles underlying network science, and their ever-increasing applications in biomedicine, underscore the unprecedented capacity of systems biology based strategies to synthesize and resolve massive high throughput generated datasets. Enabling previously unattainable comprehension of biological complexity, systems approaches have accelerated progress in elucidating disease prediction, progression, and outcome. Applied to the spectrum of states spanning health and disease, network proteomics establishes a collation, integration, and prioritization algorithm to guide mapping and decoding of proteome landscapes from large-scale raw data. Providing unparalleled deconvolution of protein lists into global interactomes, integrative systems proteomics enables objective, multi-modal interpretation at molecular, pathway, and network scales, merging individual molecular components, their plurality of interactions, and functional contributions for systems comprehension. As such, network systems approaches are increasingly exploited for objective interpretation of cardiovascular proteomics studies. Here, we highlight network systems proteomic analysis pipelines for integration and biological interpretation through protein cartography, ontological categorization, pathway and functional enrichment and complex network analysis. PMID:22896016

Multidimensional quantum entanglement with large-scale integrated optics.

PubMed

Wang, Jianwei; Paesani, Stefano; Ding, Yunhong; Santagati, Raffaele; Skrzypczyk, Paul; Salavrakos, Alexia; Tura, Jordi; Augusiak, Remigiusz; Mančinska, Laura; Bacco, Davide; Bonneau, Damien; Silverstone, Joshua W; Gong, Qihuang; Acín, Antonio; Rottwitt, Karsten; Oxenløwe, Leif K; O'Brien, Jeremy L; Laing, Anthony; Thompson, Mark G

2018-04-20

The ability to control multidimensional quantum systems is central to the development of advanced quantum technologies. We demonstrate a multidimensional integrated quantum photonic platform able to generate, control, and analyze high-dimensional entanglement. A programmable bipartite entangled system is realized with dimensions up to 15 × 15 on a large-scale silicon photonics quantum circuit. The device integrates more than 550 photonic components on a single chip, including 16 identical photon-pair sources. We verify the high precision, generality, and controllability of our multidimensional technology, and further exploit these abilities to demonstrate previously unexplored quantum applications, such as quantum randomness expansion and self-testing on multidimensional states. Our work provides an experimental platform for the development of multidimensional quantum technologies. Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

Making an Informed Decision on Freshwater Management by Integrating Remote Sensing Data with Traditional Data

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hyon, Jason J.

2012-01-01

The US National Research Council (NRC) recommended that: "The U.S. government, working in concert with the private sector, academe, the public, and its international partners, should renew its investment in Earth-observing systems and restore its leadership in Earth science and applications." in response to the NASA Earth Science Division's request to prioritize research areas, observations, and notional missions to make those objectives. In this presentation, we will discuss our approach to connect remote sensing science to decision support applications by establishing a framework to integrate direct measurements, earth system models, inventories, and other information to accurately estimate fresh water resources in global, regional, and local scales. We will discuss our demonstration projects and lessons learned from the experience. Deploying a monitoring system that offers sustained, accurate, transparent and relevant information represents a challenge and opportunity to a broad community spanning earth science, water resource accounting and public policy. An introduction to some of the scientific and technical infrastructure issues associated with monitoring systems is offered here to encourage future treatment of these topics by other contributors as a concluding remark.

Concerns and Responses for Integrating Health Systems Science Into Medical Education.

PubMed

Gonzalo, Jed D; Caverzagie, Kelly J; Hawkins, Richard E; Lawson, Luan; Wolpaw, Daniel R; Chang, Anna

2018-06-01

With the aim of improving the health of individuals and populations, medical schools are transforming curricula to ensure physician competence encompasses health systems science (HSS), which includes population health, health policy, high-value care, interprofessional teamwork, leadership, quality improvement, and patient safety. Large-scale, meaningful integration remains limited, however, and a major challenge in HSS curricular transformation efforts relates to the receptivity and engagement of students, educators, clinicians, scientists, and health system leaders. The authors identify several widely perceived challenges to integrating HSS into medical school curricula, respond to each concern, and provide potential strategies to address these concerns, based on their experiences designing and integrating HSS curricula. They identify two broad categories of concerns: the (1) relevance and importance of learning HSS-including the perception that there is inadequate urgency for change; HSS education is too complex and should occur in later years; early students would not be able to contribute, and the roles already exist; and the science is too nascent-and (2) logistics and practicality of teaching HSS-including limited curricular time, scarcity of faculty educators with expertise, lack of support from accreditation agencies and licensing boards, and unpreparedness of evolving health care systems to partner with schools with HSS curricula. The authors recommend the initiation and continuation of discussions between educators, clinicians, basic science faculty, health system leaders, and accrediting and regulatory bodies about the goals and priorities of medical education, as well as about the need to collaborate on new methods of education to reach these goals.

The 300 Area Integrated Field Research Challenge Quality Assurance Project Plan

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Fix, N. J.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a group of expert collaborators are using the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site 300 Area uranium plume within the footprint of the 300-FF-5 groundwater operable unit as a site for an Integrated Field-Scale Subsurface Research Challenge (IFRC). The IFRC is entitled Multi-Scale Mass Transfer Processes Controlling Natural Attenuation and Engineered Remediation: An IFRC Focused on the Hanford Site 300 Area Uranium Plume Project. The theme is investigation of multi-scale mass transfer processes. A series of forefront science questions on mass transfer are posed for research that relate to the effect of spatial heterogeneities; themore » importance of scale; coupled interactions between biogeochemical, hydrologic, and mass transfer processes; and measurements/approaches needed to characterize and model a mass transfer-dominated system. This Quality Assurance Project Plan provides the quality assurance requirements and processes that will be followed by the 300 Area IFRC Project. This plan is designed to be used exclusively by project staff.« less

ICAT: Integrating data infrastructure for facilities based science

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Flannery, Damian; Matthews, Brian; Griffin, Tom

2009-12-21

ICAT: Integrating data infrastructure for facilities based science Damian Flannery, Brian Matthews, Tom Griffin, Juan Bicarregui, Michael Gleaves, Laurent Lerusse, Roger Downing, Alun Ashton, Shoaib Sufi, Glen Drinkwater, Kerstin Kleese Abstract— Scientific facilities, in particular large-scale photon and neutron sources, have demanding requirements to manage the increasing quantities of experimental data they generate in a systematic and secure way. In this paper, we describe the ICAT infrastructure for cataloguing facility generated experimental data which has been in development within STFC and DLS for several years. We consider the factors which have influenced its design and describe its architecture and metadatamore » model, a key tool in the management of data. We go on to give an outline of its current implementation and use, with plans for its future development.« less

The roles of integration in molecular systems biology.

PubMed

O'Malley, Maureen A; Soyer, Orkun S

2012-03-01

A common way to think about scientific practice involves classifying it as hypothesis- or data-driven. We argue that although such distinctions might illuminate scientific practice very generally, they are not sufficient to understand the day-to-day dynamics of scientific activity and the development of programmes of research. One aspect of everyday scientific practice that is beginning to gain more attention is integration. This paper outlines what is meant by this term and how it has been discussed from scientific and philosophical points of view. We focus on methodological, data and explanatory integration, and show how they are connected. Then, using some examples from molecular systems biology, we will show how integration works in a range of inquiries to generate surprising insights and even new fields of research. From these examples we try to gain a broader perspective on integration in relation to the contexts of inquiry in which it is implemented. In today's environment of data-intensive large-scale science, integration has become both a practical and normative requirement with corresponding implications for meta-methodological accounts of scientific practice. We conclude with a discussion of why an understanding of integration and its dynamics is useful for philosophy of science and scientific practice in general. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Mainstreaming the social sciences in conservation.

PubMed

Bennett, Nathan J; Roth, Robin; Klain, Sarah C; Chan, Kai M A; Clark, Douglas A; Cullman, Georgina; Epstein, Graham; Nelson, Michael Paul; Stedman, Richard; Teel, Tara L; Thomas, Rebecca E W; Wyborn, Carina; Curran, Deborah; Greenberg, Alison; Sandlos, John; Veríssimo, Diogo

2017-02-01

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers-ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity-to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation. We provide practical guidance on overcoming these barriers to mainstream the social sciences in conservation science, practice, and policy. Broadly, we recommend fostering knowledge on the scope and contributions of the social sciences to conservation, including social scientists from the inception of interdisciplinary research projects, incorporating social science research and insights during all stages of conservation planning and implementation, building social science capacity at all scales in conservation organizations and agencies, and promoting engagement with the social sciences in and through global conservation policy-influencing organizations. Conservation social scientists, too, need to be willing to engage with natural science knowledge and to communicate insights and recommendations clearly. We urge the conservation community to move beyond superficial engagement with the conservation social sciences. A more inclusive and integrative conservation science-one that includes the natural and social sciences-will enable more ecologically effective and socially just conservation. Better collaboration among social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and policy makers will facilitate a renewed and more robust conservation. Mainstreaming the conservation social sciences will facilitate the uptake of the full range of insights and contributions from these fields into conservation policy and practice. © 2016 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.

Science Enabled by Ocean Observatory Acoustics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Howe, B. M.; Lee, C.; Gobat, J.; Freitag, L.; Miller, J. H.; Committee, I.

2004-12-01

Ocean observatories have the potential to examine the physical, chemical, biological, and geological parameters and processes of the ocean at time and space scales previously unexplored. Acoustics provides an efficient and cost-effective means by which these parameters and processes can be measured and information can be communicated. Integrated acoustics systems providing navigation and communications for mobile platforms and conducting acoustical measurements in support of science objectives are critical and essential elements of the ocean observatories presently in the planning and implementation stages. The ORION Workshop (Puerto Rico, 4-8 January 2004) developed science themes that can be addressed utilizing ocean observatory infrastructure. The use of acoustics to sense the 3-d/volumetric ocean environment on all temporal and spatial scales was discussed in many ORION working groups. Science themes that are related to acoustics and measurements using acoustics are reviewed and tabulated, as are the related and sometimes competing requirements for passive listening, acoustic navigation and acoustic communication around observatories. Sound in the sea, brought from observatories to universities and schools via the internet, will also be a major education and outreach mechanism.

Biological materials: a materials science approach.

PubMed

Meyers, Marc A; Chen, Po-Yu; Lopez, Maria I; Seki, Yasuaki; Lin, Albert Y M

2011-07-01

The approach used by Materials Science and Engineering is revealing new aspects in the structure and properties of biological materials. The integration of advanced characterization, mechanical testing, and modeling methods can rationalize heretofore unexplained aspects of these structures. As an illustration of the power of this methodology, we apply it to biomineralized shells, avian beaks and feathers, and fish scales. We also present a few selected bioinspired applications: Velcro, an Al2O3-PMMA composite inspired by the abalone shell, and synthetic attachment devices inspired by gecko. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Integrated Science and Logistical Planning to Support Big Questions in Antarctic Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vaughan, D. G.; Stockings, T. M.

2015-12-01

Each year, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) supports an extensive programme of science at five Antarctic and sub-Antarctic stations, ranging from the tiny Bird Island Research Station at 54°S in the South Atlantic, to the massive, and fully re-locatable, Halley Research Station on Brunt Ice Shelf at 75°S. The BAS logistics hub, Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula supports deployment of deep-field and airborne field campaigns through much of the Antarctic continent, and an innovative new UK polar research vessel is under design, and planned to enter service in the Southern Ocean in 2019. BAS's core science programme covering all aspects of physical, biological and geological science is delivered by our own science teams, but every year many other UK scientists and overseas collaborators also access BAS's Antarctic logistics to support their own programmes. As an integrated science and logistics provider, BAS is continuously reviewing its capabilities and operational procedures to ensure that the future long-term requirements of science are optimally supported. Current trends are towards providing the capacity for heavier remote operations and larger-scale field camps, increasing use of autonomous ocean and airborne platforms, and increasing opportunities to provide turnkey solutions for low-cost experimental deployments. This talk will review of expected trends in Antarctic science and the opportunities to conduct science in Antarctica. It will outline the anticipated logistic developments required to support future stakeholder-led and strategically-directed science programmes, and the long-term ambitions of our science communities indentified in several recent horizon-scanning activities.

Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

McMurry, Julie A.; Juty, Nick; Blomberg, Niklas

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure. Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers. We also outline themore » important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability. We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines.« less

SDN-NGenIA, a software defined next generation integrated architecture for HEP and data intensive science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Balcas, J.; Hendricks, T. W.; Kcira, D.; Mughal, A.; Newman, H.; Spiropulu, M.; Vlimant, J. R.

2017-10-01

The SDN Next Generation Integrated Architecture (SDN-NGeNIA) project addresses some of the key challenges facing the present and next generations of science programs in HEP, astrophysics, and other fields, whose potential discoveries depend on their ability to distribute, process and analyze globally distributed Petascale to Exascale datasets. The SDN-NGenIA system under development by Caltech and partner HEP and network teams is focused on the coordinated use of network, computing and storage infrastructures, through a set of developments that build on the experience gained in recently completed and previous projects that use dynamic circuits with bandwidth guarantees to support major network flows, as demonstrated across LHC Open Network Environment [1] and in large scale demonstrations over the last three years, and recently integrated with PhEDEx and Asynchronous Stage Out data management applications of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In addition to the general program goals of supporting the network needs of the LHC and other science programs with similar needs, a recent focus is the use of the Leadership HPC facility at Argonne National Lab (ALCF) for data intensive applications.

Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data

DOE PAGES

McMurry, Julie A.; Juty, Nick; Blomberg, Niklas; ...

2017-06-29

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure. Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers. We also outline themore » important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability. We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines.« less

Five Years of NASA Science and Engineering in the Classroom: The Integrated Product Team/NASA Space Missions Course

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hakkila, Jon; Runyon, Cassndra; Benfield, M. P. J.; Turner, Matthew W.; Farrington, Phillip A.

2015-08-01

We report on five years of an exciting and successful educational collaboration in which science undergraduates at the College of Charleston work with engineering seniors at the University of Alabama in Huntsville to design a planetary science mission in response to a mock announcement of opportunity. Alabama high schools are also heavily involved in the project, and other colleges and universities have also participated. During the two-semester course students learn about scientific goals, past missions, methods of observation, instrumentation, and component integration, proposal writing, and presentation. More importantly, students learn about real-world communication and teamwork, and go through a series of baseline reviews before presenting their results at a formal final review for a panel of NASA scientists and engineers. The project is competitive, with multiple mission designs competing with one another for the best review score. Past classes have involved missions to Venus, Europa, Titan, Mars, asteroids, comets, and even the Moon. Classroom successes and failures have both been on epic scales.

DataONE: A Distributed Environmental and Earth Science Data Network Supporting the Full Data Life Cycle

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cook, R.; Michener, W.; Vieglais, D.; Budden, A.; Koskela, R.

2012-04-01

Addressing grand environmental science challenges requires unprecedented access to easily understood data that cross the breadth of temporal, spatial, and thematic scales. Tools are needed to plan management of the data, discover the relevant data, integrate heterogeneous and diverse data, and convert the data to information and knowledge. Addressing these challenges requires new approaches for the full data life cycle of managing, preserving, sharing, and analyzing data. DataONE (Observation Network for Earth) represents a virtual organization that enables new science and knowledge creation through preservation and access to data about life on Earth and the environment that sustains it. The DataONE approach is to improve data collection and management techniques; facilitate easy, secure, and persistent storage of data; continue to increase access to data and tools that improve data interoperability; disseminate integrated and user-friendly tools for data discovery and novel analyses; work with researchers to build intuitive data exploration and visualization tools; and support communities of practice via education, outreach, and stakeholder engagement.

The Advanced Modeling, Simulation and Analysis Capability Roadmap Vision for Engineering

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zang, Thomas; Lieber, Mike; Norton, Charles; Fucik, Karen

2006-01-01

This paper summarizes a subset of the Advanced Modeling Simulation and Analysis (AMSA) Capability Roadmap that was developed for NASA in 2005. The AMSA Capability Roadmap Team was chartered to "To identify what is needed to enhance NASA's capabilities to produce leading-edge exploration and science missions by improving engineering system development, operations, and science understanding through broad application of advanced modeling, simulation and analysis techniques." The AMSA roadmap stressed the need for integration, not just within the science, engineering and operations domains themselves, but also across these domains. Here we discuss the roadmap element pertaining to integration within the engineering domain, with a particular focus on implications for future observatory missions. The AMSA products supporting the system engineering function are mission information, bounds on information quality, and system validation guidance. The Engineering roadmap element contains 5 sub-elements: (1) Large-Scale Systems Models, (2) Anomalous Behavior Models, (3) advanced Uncertainty Models, (4) Virtual Testing Models, and (5) space-based Robotics Manufacture and Servicing Models.

First integrals of the axisymmetric shape equation of lipid membranes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Yi-Heng; McDargh, Zachary; Tu, Zhan-Chun

2018-03-01

The shape equation of lipid membranes is a fourth-order partial differential equation. Under the axisymmetric condition, this equation was transformed into a second-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) by Zheng and Liu (Phys. Rev. E 48 2856 (1993)). Here we try to further reduce this second-order ODE to a first-order ODE. First, we invert the usual process of variational calculus, that is, we construct a Lagrangian for which the ODE is the corresponding Euler–Lagrange equation. Then, we seek symmetries of this Lagrangian according to the Noether theorem. Under a certain restriction on Lie groups of the shape equation, we find that the first integral only exists when the shape equation is identical to the Willmore equation, in which case the symmetry leading to the first integral is scale invariance. We also obtain the mechanical interpretation of the first integral by using the membrane stress tensor. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11274046) and the National Science Foundation of the United States (Grant No. 1515007).

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Services for Solid Earth Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cocco, Massimo; Atakan, Kuvvet; Pedersen, Helle; Consortium, Epos

2016-04-01

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) aims to create a pan-European infrastructure for solid Earth science to support a safe and sustainable society. The main vision of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is to address the three basic challenges in Earth Sciences: (i) unravelling the Earth's deformational processes which are part of the Earth system evolution in time, (ii) understanding the geo-hazards and their implications to society, and (iii) contributing to the safe and sustainable use of geo-resources. The mission of EPOS is to monitor and understand the dynamic and complex Earth system by relying on new e-science opportunities and integrating diverse and advanced Research Infrastructures in Europe for solid Earth Science. EPOS will enable innovative multidisciplinary research for a better understanding of the Earth's physical and chemical processes that control earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, ground instability and tsunami as well as the processes driving tectonics and Earth's surface dynamics. EPOS will improve our ability to better manage the use of the subsurface of the Earth. Through integration of data, models and facilities EPOS will allow the Earth Science community to make a step change in developing new concepts and tools for key answers to scientific and socio-economic questions concerning geo-hazards and geo-resources as well as Earth sciences applications to the environment and to human welfare. EPOS has now started its Implementation Phase (EPOS-IP). One of the main challenges during the implementation phase is the integration of multidisciplinary data into a single e-infrastructure. Multidisciplinary data are organized and governed by the Thematic Core Services (TCS) and are driven by various scientific communities encompassing a wide spectrum of Earth science disciplines. These include Data, Data-products, Services and Software (DDSS), from seismology, near fault observatories, geodetic observations, volcano observations, satellite observations, geomagnetic observations, as well as data from various anthropogenic hazard episodes, geological information and modelling. In addition, transnational access to multi-scale laboratories and geo-energy test-beds for low-carbon energy will be provided. TCS DDSS will be integrated into Integrated Core Services (ICS), a platform that will ensure their interoperability and access to these services by the scientific community as well as other users within the society. This requires dedicated tasks for interactions with the various TCS-WPs, as well as the various distributed ICS (ICS-Ds), such as High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, large scale data storage facilities, complex processing and visualization tools etc. Computational Earth Science (CES) services are identified as a transversal activity and is planned to be harmonized and provided within the ICS. The EPOS Thematic Services will rely in part on strong and sustainable participation by national organisations and international consortia. While this distributed architecture will contribute to ensure pan European involvement in EPOS, it also raises specific challenges: ensuring similar granularity of services, compatibility of technical solutions, homogeneous legal agreements and sustainable financial engagement from the partner institutions and organisations. EPOS is engaging actions to address all of these issues during 2016-2017, after which the services will enter a final validation phase by the EPOS Board of Governmental Representatives.

An integrative view of phylogenetic comparative methods: connections to population genetics, community ecology, and paleobiology.

PubMed

Pennell, Matthew W; Harmon, Luke J

2013-06-01

Recent innovations in phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) have spurred a renaissance of research into the causes and consequences of large-scale patterns of biodiversity. In this paper, we review these advances. We also highlight the potential of comparative methods to integrate across fields and focus on three examples where such integration might be particularly valuable: quantitative genetics, community ecology, and paleobiology. We argue that PCMs will continue to be a key set of tools in evolutionary biology, shedding new light on how evolutionary processes have shaped patterns of biodiversity through deep time. © 2013 New York Academy of Sciences.

Future Earth, Global Science and Regional Programs: Building regional integrated science capacities in a global science organization

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tewksbury, J.

2016-12-01

Future Earth has emerged from the more than 30-year history of Global Change Research Programs, including IGBP, DIVERSITAS and IHDP. These programs supported interdisciplinary science in service of societies around the world. Now, their focus on building a greater understanding of changing Earth systems and their couplings with society has passed to Future Earth - with an important addition: Future Earth was also established to focus global change efforts around key societal challenges. The implications for the structure of Future Earth are large. Many challenges within topics, such as the water, energy, food nexus or the future of cities, are manifested within local, national, and regional contexts. How should we organize globally to most effectively confront these multi-scale challenges? The solution proposed in the framing of Future Earth was the formation of regional as well as national committees, as well as the formation of regional centers and offices. Regional Committees serve to both advocate for Future Earth in their regions and to advocate for regional interests in the global Future Earth platform, while regional Centers and offices are built into the Future Earth secretariat to perform a parallel regional implementation function. Implementation has not been easy, and the process has placed regionally-focused projects in an awkward place. Programs such as the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS), the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI), and the South/Southeast Asia Research Initiative (SARI) represent some of the best global change communities in the world, but by design, their focus is regional. The effective integration of these communities into the Future Earth architecture will be critical, and this integration will require the formation of strong regional committees and regional centers.

Expanding Approaches for Understanding Impact: Integrating Technology, Curriculum, and Open Educational Resources in Science Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ye, Lei; Recker, Mimi; Walker, Andrew; Leary, Heather; Yuan, Min

2015-01-01

This article reports results from a scale-up study of the impact of a software tool designed to support teachers in the digital learning era. This tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), enables teachers to access open educational resources from multiple providers, customize them for classroom instruction, and share them with other…

Institute for Science and Engineering Simulation (ISES)

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-12-18

performance and other functionalities such as electrical , magnetic, optical, thermal, biological, chemical, and so forth. Structural integrity...transmission electron microscopy (HRSTEM) and three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP) tomography , the true atomic scale structure and change in chemical...atom probe tomography (3DAP) techniques, has permitted characterizing and quantifying the multimodal size distribution of different generations of γ

Technical Assessment: Integrated Photonics

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-10-01

in global internet protocol traffic as a function of time by local access technology. Photonics continues to play a critical role in enabling this...communication networks. This has enabled services like the internet , high performance computing, and power-efficient large-scale data centers. The...signal processing, quantum information science, and optics for free space applications. However major obstacles challenge the implementation of

Making fire and fire surrogate science available: a summary of regional workshops with clients

Treesearch

Andrew Youngblood; Heidi Bigler-Cole; Christopher J. Fettig; Carl Fiedler; Eric E. Knapp; John F. Lehmkuhl; Kenneth W. Outcalt; Carl N. Skinner; Scott L. Stephens; Thomas A. Waldrop

2007-01-01

Operational-scale experiments that evaluate the consequences of fire and mechanical "surrogates" for natural disturbance events are essential to better understand strategies for reducing the incidence and severity of wildfire. The national Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) study was initiated in 1999 to establish an integrated network of long-term studies...

Early Engagement in Course-Based Research Increases Graduation Rates and Completion of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Degrees

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rodenbusch, Stacia E.; Hernandez, Paul R.; Simmons, Sarah L.; Dolan, Erin L.

2016-01-01

National efforts to transform undergraduate biology education call for research experiences to be an integral component of learning for all students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, have been championed for engaging students in research at a scale that is not possible through apprenticeships in faculty research…

Forests, people, fire: Integrating the sciences to build capacity for an “All Lands” approach to forest restoration

Treesearch

Marie Oliver; Susan Charnley; Thomas Spies; Jeff Kline; Eric White

2017-01-01

Interest in landscape-scale approaches to fire management and forest restoration is growing with the realization that these approaches are critical to maintaining healthy forests and protecting nearby communities. However, coordinated planning and action across multiple ownerships have been elusive because of differing goals and forest management styles among...

On the Use of Analogy to Connect Core Physical and Chemical Concepts to Those at the Nanoscale

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muniz, Marc N.; Oliver-Hoyo, Maria T.

2014-01-01

Nanoscale science remains at the forefront of modern scientific endeavors. As such, students in chemistry need to be prepared to navigate the physical and chemical concepts that describe the unique phenomena observed at this scale. Current approaches to integrating nanoscale topics into undergraduate chemistry curricula range from the design of…

Integrating Technology in Today's Undergraduate Classrooms: A Look at Students' Perspectives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meehan, Kimberly C.; Salmun, Haydee

2016-01-01

The authors present the findings of a small-scale study of student opinions drawn from an anonymous and voluntary survey in an undergraduate science classroom. The survey questions focused on the use of basic tools in a college classroom. The tools included in the survey were PowerPoint, overhead projectors/chalkboards, personal response units,…

Water security and the science agenda

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wheater, Howard S.; Gober, Patricia

2015-07-01

The freshwater environment is facing unprecedented global pressures. Unsustainable use of surface and groundwater is ubiquitous. Gross pollution is seen in developing economies, nutrient pollution is a global threat to aquatic ecosystems, and flood damage is increasing. Droughts have severe local consequences, but effects on food can be global. These current pressures are set in the context of rapid environmental change and socio-economic development, population growth, and weak and fragmented governance. We ask what should be the role of the water science community in addressing water security challenges. Deeper understanding of aquatic and terrestrial environments and their interactions with the climate system is needed, along with trans-disciplinary analysis of vulnerabilities to environmental and societal change. The human dimension must be fully integrated into water science research and viewed as an endogenous component of water system dynamics. Land and water management are inextricably linked, and thus more cross-sector coordination of research and policy is imperative. To solve real-world problems, the products of science must emerge from an iterative, collaborative, two-way exchange with management and policy communities. Science must produce knowledge that is deemed to be credible, legitimate, and salient by relevant stakeholders, and the social process of linking science to policy is thus vital to efforts to solve water problems. The paper shows how a large-scale catchment-based observatory can be used to practice trans-disciplinary science integration and address the Anthropocene's water problems.

A Comparison of Student Teachers' Beliefs from Four Different Science Teaching Domains Using a Mixed Methods Design

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Markic, Silvija; Eilks, Ingo

2012-03-01

The study presented in this paper integrates data from four combined research studies, which are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The studies describe freshman science student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning. These freshmen intend to become teachers in Germany in one of four science teaching domains (secondary biology, chemistry, and physics, respectively, as well as primary school science). The qualitative data from the first study are based on student teachers' drawings of themselves in teaching situations. It was formulated using Grounded Theory to test three scales: Beliefs about Classroom Organisation, Beliefs about Teaching Objectives, and Epistemological Beliefs. Three further quantitative studies give insight into student teachers' curricular beliefs, their beliefs about the nature of science itself, and about the student- and/or teacher-centredness of science teaching. This paper describes a design to integrate all these data within a mixed methods framework. The aim of the current study is to describe a broad, triangulated picture of freshman science student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning within their respective science teaching domain. The study reveals clear tendencies between the sub-groups. The results suggest that freshman chemistry and-even more pronouncedly-freshman physics student teachers profess quite traditional beliefs about science teaching and learning. Biology and primary school student teachers express beliefs about their subjects which are more in line with modern educational theory. The mixed methods approach towards the student teachers' beliefs is reflected upon and implications for science education and science teacher education are discussed.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative: Getting Wet Behind the Ears

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Given, H. K.; Banahan, S.

2007-12-01

The U.S. National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is constructing an integrated network to provide the oceanographic research and education communities with continuous, interactive access to the oceans. The program will build permanent science-focused infrastructure that will enable geoscientists to simultaneously study multiple phenomena in the oceans over time scales from milliseconds to decades, and over spatial scales from sub-meter to global. An integrative computer architecture or cyberinfrastructure will allow researchers to communicate with and configure globally situated experiments in near-real time, forming virtual observatories by designing customized data streams readily incorporated into adaptive models. The project, approved for planning activities by the National Science Board in 2000, will undergo its Preliminary Design Review for readiness in December 2007 and is expected to receive the first installment of a total anticipated capital investment of $330M in 2008. Specific assets include autonomous platforms at high-latitude sites in the northern and southern hemispheres, a submarine ackbone cable spanning the seafloor of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, and moorings and mobile assets studying the coastal ocean continental shelf and slope in the Middle Atlantic Bight and offshore the Pacific Northwest. With its global dimension and unifying cyberinfrastructure, the OOI is expected to catalyze new understanding of the oceans in a way that ship-based measurements and experiments, with their shorter observation window and inherent limitations on power and bandwidth, are unable to accomplish.

Integrated environmental modeling: a vision and roadmap for the future

USGS Publications Warehouse

Laniak, Gerard F.; Olchin, Gabriel; Goodall, Jonathan; Voinov, Alexey; Hill, Mary; Glynn, Pierre; Whelan, Gene; Geller, Gary; Quinn, Nigel; Blind, Michiel; Peckham, Scott; Reaney, Sim; Gaber, Noha; Kennedy, Philip R.; Hughes, Andrew

2013-01-01

Integrated environmental modeling (IEM) is inspired by modern environmental problems, decisions, and policies and enabled by transdisciplinary science and computer capabilities that allow the environment to be considered in a holistic way. The problems are characterized by the extent of the environmental system involved, dynamic and interdependent nature of stressors and their impacts, diversity of stakeholders, and integration of social, economic, and environmental considerations. IEM provides a science-based structure to develop and organize relevant knowledge and information and apply it to explain, explore, and predict the behavior of environmental systems in response to human and natural sources of stress. During the past several years a number of workshops were held that brought IEM practitioners together to share experiences and discuss future needs and directions. In this paper we organize and present the results of these discussions. IEM is presented as a landscape containing four interdependent elements: applications, science, technology, and community. The elements are described from the perspective of their role in the landscape, current practices, and challenges that must be addressed. Workshop participants envision a global scale IEM community that leverages modern technologies to streamline the movement of science-based knowledge from its sources in research, through its organization into databases and models, to its integration and application for problem solving purposes. Achieving this vision will require that the global community of IEM stakeholders transcend social, and organizational boundaries and pursue greater levels of collaboration. Among the highest priorities for community action are the development of standards for publishing IEM data and models in forms suitable for automated discovery, access, and integration; education of the next generation of environmental stakeholders, with a focus on transdisciplinary research, development, and decision making; and providing a web-based platform for community interactions (e.g., continuous virtual workshops).

Realist complex intervention science: Applying realist principles across all phases of the Medical Research Council framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions

PubMed Central

Fletcher, Adam; Jamal, Farah; Moore, Graham; Evans, Rhiannon E.; Murphy, Simon; Bonell, Chris

2016-01-01

The integration of realist evaluation principles within randomised controlled trials (‘realist RCTs’) enables evaluations of complex interventions to answer questions about what works, for whom and under what circumstances. This allows evaluators to better develop and refine mid-level programme theories. However, this is only one phase in the process of developing and evaluating complex interventions. We describe and exemplify how social scientists can integrate realist principles across all phases of the Medical Research Council framework. Intervention development, modelling, and feasibility and pilot studies need to theorise the contextual conditions necessary for intervention mechanisms to be activated. Where interventions are scaled up and translated into routine practice, realist principles also have much to offer in facilitating knowledge about longer-term sustainability, benefits and harms. Integrating a realist approach across all phases of complex intervention science is vital for considering the feasibility and likely effects of interventions for different localities and population subgroups. PMID:27478401

Integrated Satellite Control in REIMEI (INDEX) Satellite

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fukuda, Seisuke; Mizuno, Takahide; Sakai, Shin-Ichiro; Fukushima, Yousuke; Saito, Hirobumi

REIMEI/INDEX (INnovative-technology Demonstration EXperiment) is a 70kg class small satellite which the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Exploration Agency, ISAS/JAXA, has developed for observation of auroral small-scale dynamics as well as demonstration of advanced satellite technologies. An important engineering mission of REIMEI is integrated satellite control using commercial RISC CPUs with a triple voting system in order to ensure fault-tolerance against radiation hazards. Software modules concerning every satellite function, such as attitude control, data handling, and mission applications, work cooperatively so that highly sophisticated satellite control can be performed. In this paper, after a concept of the integrated satellite control is introduced, the Integrated Controller Unit (ICU) is described in detail. Also unique topics in developing the integrated control system are shown.

Collaboratively Architecting a Scalable and Adaptable Petascale Infrastructure to Support Transdisciplinary Scientific Research for the Australian Earth and Environmental Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyborn, L. A.; Evans, B. J. K.; Pugh, T.; Lescinsky, D. T.; Foster, C.; Uhlherr, A.

2014-12-01

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) is a partnership between CSIRO, ANU, Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and Geoscience Australia. Recent investments in a 1.2 PFlop Supercomputer (Raijin), ~ 20 PB data storage using Lustre filesystems and a 3000 core high performance cloud have created a hybrid platform for higher performance computing and data-intensive science to enable large scale earth and climate systems modelling and analysis. There are > 3000 users actively logging in and > 600 projects on the NCI system. Efficiently scaling and adapting data and software systems to petascale infrastructures requires the collaborative development of an architecture that is designed, programmed and operated to enable users to interactively invoke different forms of in-situ computation over complex and large scale data collections. NCI makes available major and long tail data collections from both the government and research sectors based on six themes: 1) weather, climate and earth system science model simulations, 2) marine and earth observations, 3) geosciences, 4) terrestrial ecosystems, 5) water and hydrology and 6) astronomy, bio and social. Collectively they span the lithosphere, crust, biosphere, hydrosphere, troposphere, and stratosphere. Collections are the operational form for data management and access. Similar data types from individual custodians are managed cohesively. Use of international standards for discovery and interoperability allow complex interactions within and between the collections. This design facilitates a transdisciplinary approach to research and enables a shift from small scale, 'stove-piped' science efforts to large scale, collaborative systems science. This new and complex infrastructure requires a move to shared, globally trusted software frameworks that can be maintained and updated. Workflow engines become essential and need to integrate provenance, versioning, traceability, repeatability and publication. There are also human resource challenges as highly skilled HPC/HPD specialists, specialist programmers, and data scientists are required whose skills can support scaling to the new paradigm of effective and efficient data-intensive earth science analytics on petascale, and soon to be exascale systems.

Measurement of the integrated Luminosities of cross-section scan data samples around the {\\rm{\\psi }}(3770) mass region

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ablikim, M.; Achasov, M. N.; Ahmed, S.; Albrecht, M.; Alekseev, M.; Amoroso, A.; An, F. F.; An, Q.; Bai, Y.; Bakina, O.; Baldini Ferroli, R.; Ban, Y.; Begzsuren, K.; Bennett, D. W.; Bennett, J. V.; Berger, N.; Bertani, M.; Bettoni, D.; Bianchi, F.; Boger, E.; Boyko, I.; Briere, R. A.; Cai, H.; Cai, X.; Cakir, O.; Calcaterra, A.; Cao, G. F.; Cetin, S. A.; Chai, J.; Chang, J. F.; Chang, W. L.; Chelkov, G.; Chen, G.; Chen, H. S.; Chen, J. C.; Chen, M. L.; Chen, P. L.; Chen, S. J.; Chen, X. R.; Chen, Y. B.; Chu, X. K.; Cibinetto, G.; Cossio, F.; Dai, H. L.; Dai, J. P.; Dbeyssi, A.; Dedovich, D.; Deng, Z. Y.; Denig, A.; Denysenko, I.; Destefanis, M.; De Mori, F.; Ding, Y.; Dong, C.; Dong, J.; Dong, L. Y.; Dong, M. Y.; Dou, Z. L.; Du, S. X.; Duan, P. F.; Fang, J.; Fang, S. S.; Fang, Y.; Farinelli, R.; Fava, L.; Fegan, S.; Feldbauer, F.; Felici, G.; Feng, C. Q.; Fioravanti, E.; Fritsch, M.; Fu, C. D.; Gao, Q.; Gao, X. L.; Gao, Y.; Gao, Y. G.; Gao, Z.; Garillon, B.; Garzia, I.; Gilman, A.; Goetzen, K.; Gong, L.; Gong, W. X.; Gradl, W.; Greco, M.; Gu, L. M.; Gu, M. H.; Gu, Y. T.; Guo, A. Q.; Guo, L. B.; Guo, R. P.; Guo, Y. P.; Guskov, A.; Haddadi, Z.; Han, S.; Hao, X. Q.; Harris, F. A.; He, K. L.; He, X. Q.; Heinsius, F. H.; Held, T.; Heng, Y. K.; Holtmann, T.; Hou, Z. L.; Hu, H. M.; Hu, J. F.; Hu, T.; Hu, Y.; Huang, G. S.; Huang, J. S.; Huang, X. T.; Huang, X. Z.; Huang, Z. L.; Hussain, T.; Ikegami Andersson, W.; Irshad, M.; Ji, Q.; Ji, Q. P.; Ji, X. B.; Ji, X. L.; Jiang, X. S.; Jiang, X. Y.; Jiao, J. B.; Jiao, Z.; Jin, D. P.; Jin, S.; Jin, Y.; Johansson, T.; Julin, A.; Kalantar-Nayestanaki, N.; Kang, X. S.; Kavatsyuk, M.; Ke, B. C.; Khan, T.; Khoukaz, A.; Kiese, P.; Kliemt, R.; Koch, L.; Kolcu, O. B.; Kopf, B.; Kornicer, M.; Kuemmel, M.; Kuessner, M.; Kupsc, A.; Kurth, M.; Kühn, W.; Lange, J. S.; Lara, M.; Larin, P.; Lavezzi, L.; Leiber, S.; Leithoff, H.; Li, C.; Li, Cheng; Li, D. M.; Li, F.; Li, F. Y.; Li, G.; Li, H. B.; Li, H. J.; Li, J. C.; Li, J. W.; Li, K. J.; Li, Kang; Li, Ke; Li, Lei; Li, P. L.; Li, P. R.; Li, Q. Y.; Li, T.; Li, W. D.; Li, W. G.; Li, X. L.; Li, X. N.; Li, X. Q.; Li, Z. B.; Liang, H.; Liang, Y. F.; Liang, Y. T.; Liao, G. R.; Liao, L. Z.; Libby, J.; Lin, C. X.; Lin, D. X.; Liu, B.; Liu, B. J.; Liu, C. X.; Liu, D.; Liu, D. Y.; Liu, F. H.; Liu, Fang; Liu, Feng; Liu, H. B.; Liu, H. L.; Liu, H. M.; Liu, Huanhuan; Liu, Huihui; Liu, J. B.; Liu, J. Y.; Liu, K.; Liu, K. Y.; Liu, Ke; Liu, L. D.; Liu, Q.; Liu, S. B.; Liu, X.; Liu, Y. B.; Liu, Z. A.; Liu, Zhiqing; Long, Y. F.; Lou, X. C.; Lu, H. J.; Lu, J. G.; Lu, Y.; Lu, Y. P.; Luo, C. L.; Luo, M. X.; Luo, X. L.; Lusso, S.; Lyu, X. R.; Ma, F. C.; Ma, H. L.; Ma, L. L.; Ma, M. M.; Ma, Q. M.; Ma, X. N.; Ma, X. Y.; Ma, Y. M.; Maas, F. E.; Maggiora, M.; Malik, Q. A.; Mangoni, A.; Mao, Y. J.; Mao, Z. P.; Marcello, S.; Meng, Z. X.; Messchendorp, J. G.; Mezzadri, G.; Min, J.; Min, T. J.; Mitchell, R. E.; Mo, X. H.; Mo, Y. J.; Morales Morales, C.; Morello, G.; Muchnoi, N. Yu; Muramatsu, H.; Mustafa, A.; Nakhoul, S.; Nefedov, Y.; Nerling, F.; Nikolaev, I. B.; Ning, Z.; Nisar, S.; Niu, S. L.; Niu, X. Y.; Olsen, S. L.; Ouyang, Q.; Pacetti, S.; Pan, Y.; Papenbrock, M.; Patteri, P.; Pelizaeus, M.; Pellegrino, J.; Peng, H. P.; Peng, Z. Y.; Peters, K.; Pettersson, J.; Ping, J. L.; Ping, R. G.; Pitka, A.; Poling, R.; Prasad, V.; Qi, H. R.; Qi, M.; Qi, T. Y.; Qian, S.; Qiao, C. F.; Qin, N.; Qin, X. S.; Qin, Z. H.; Qiu, J. F.; Rashid, K. H.; Redmer, C. F.; Richter, M.; Ripka, M.; Rolo, M.; Rong, G.; Rosner, Ch.; Ruan, X. D.; Sarantsev, A.; Savrié, M.; Schnier, C.; Schoenning, K.; Shan, W.; Shan, X. Y.; Shao, M.; Shen, C. P.; Shen, P. X.; Shen, X. Y.; Sheng, H. Y.; Shi, X.; Song, J. J.; Song, W. M.; Song, X. Y.; Sosio, S.; Sowa, C.; Spataro, S.; Sun, G. X.; Sun, J. F.; Sun, L.; Sun, S. S.; Sun, X. H.; Sun, Y. J.; Sun, Y. K.; Sun, Y. Z.; Sun, Z. J.; Sun, Z. T.; Tan, Y. T.; Tang, C. J.; Tang, G. Y.; Tang, X.; Tapan, I.; Tiemens, M.; Tsednee, B.; Uman, I.; Varner, G. S.; Wang, B.; Wang, B. L.; Wang, C. W.; Wang, D.; Wang, D. Y.; Wang, Dan; Wang, K.; Wang, L. L.; Wang, L. S.; Wang, M.; Wang, Meng; Wang, P.; Wang, P. L.; Wang, W. P.; Wang, X. F.; Wang, Y.; Wang, Y. F.; Wang, Y. Q.; Wang, Z.; Wang, Z. G.; Wang, Z. Y.; Wang, Zongyuan; Weber, T.; Wei, D. H.; Weidenkaff, P.; Wen, S. P.; Wiedner, U.; Wolke, M.; Wu, L. H.; Wu, L. J.; Wu, Z.; Xia, L.; Xia, X.; Xia, Y.; Xiao, D.; Xiao, Y. J.; Xiao, Z. J.; Xie, Y. G.; Xie, Y. H.; Xiong, X. A.; Xiu, Q. L.; Xu, G. F.; Xu, J. J.; Xu, L.; Xu, Q. J.; Xu, Q. N.; Xu, X. P.; Yan, F.; Yan, L.; Yan, W. B.; Yan, W. C.; Yan, Y. H.; Yang, H. J.; Yang, H. X.; Yang, L.; Yang, S. L.; Yang, Y. H.; Yang, Y. X.; Yang, Yifan; Ye, M.; Ye, M. H.; Yin, J. H.; You, Z. Y.; Yu, B. X.; Yu, C. X.; Yu, J. S.; Yuan, C. Z.; Yuan, Y.; Yuncu, A.; Zafar, A. A.; Zallo, A.; Zeng, Y.; Zeng, Z.; Zhang, B. X.; Zhang, B. Y.; Zhang, C. C.; Zhang, D. H.; Zhang, H. H.; Zhang, H. Y.; Zhang, J.; Zhang, J. L.; Zhang, J. Q.; Zhang, J. W.; Zhang, J. Y.; Zhang, J. Z.; Zhang, K.; Zhang, L.; Zhang, S. F.; Zhang, T. J.; Zhang, X. Y.; Zhang, Y.; Zhang, Y. H.; Zhang, Y. T.; Zhang, Yang; Zhang, Yao; Zhang, Yu; Zhang, Z. H.; Zhang, Z. P.; Zhang, Z. Y.; Zhao, G.; Zhao, J. W.; Zhao, J. Y.; Zhao, J. Z.; Zhao, Lei; Zhao, Ling; Zhao, M. G.; Zhao, Q.; Zhao, S. J.; Zhao, T. C.; Zhao, Y. B.; Zhao, Z. G.; Zhemchugov, A.; Zheng, B.; Zheng, J. P.; Zheng, W. J.; Zheng, Y. H.; Zhong, B.; Zhou, L.; Zhou, Q.; Zhou, X.; Zhou, X. K.; Zhou, X. R.; Zhou, X. Y.; Zhu, A. N.; Zhu, J.; Zhu, J.; Zhu, K.; Zhu, K. J.; Zhu, S.; Zhu, S. H.; Zhu, X. L.; Zhu, Y. C.; Zhu, Y. S.; Zhu, Z. A.; Zhuang, J.; Zou, B. S.; Zou, J. H.; BESIII Collaboration

2018-05-01

To investigate the nature of the {{\\psi }}(3770) resonance and to measure the cross section for {{{e}}}+{{{e}}}-\\to {{D}}\\bar{{{D}}}, a cross-section scan data sample, distributed among 41 center-of-mass energy points from 3.73 to 3.89 GeV, was taken with the BESIII detector operated at the BEPCII collider in the year 2010. By analyzing the large angle Bhabha scattering events, we measure the integrated luminosity of the data sample at each center-of-mass energy point. The total integrated luminosity of the data sample is 76.16+/- 0.04+/- 0.61 {pb}}-1, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. Supported by National Key Basic Research Program of China (2015CB856700), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (11235011, 11335008, 11425524, 11625523, 11635010), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Large-Scale Scientific Facility Program, the CAS Center for Excellence in Particle Physics (CCEPP), Joint Large-Scale Scientific Facility Funds of the NSFC and CAS (U1332201, U1532257, U1532258), CAS Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences (QYZDJ-SSW-SLH003, QYZDJ-SSW-SLH040), 100 Talents Program of CAS, National 1000 Talents Program of China, INPAC and Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, German Research Foundation DFG under Contracts Nos. Collaborative Research Center CRC 1044, FOR 2359, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) (530-4CDP03), Ministry of Development of Turkey (DPT2006K-120470), National Science and Technology fund, The Swedish Research Council, U. S. Department of Energy (DE-FG02-05ER41374, DE-SC-0010118, DE-SC-0010504, DE-SC-0012069), University of Groningen (RuG) and the Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung GmbH (GSI), Darmstadt, WCU Program of National Research Foundation of Korea (R32-2008-000-10155-0)

Design and Performance of A High Resolution Micro-Spec: An Integrated Sub-Millimeter Spectrometer

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Barrentine, Emily M.; Cataldo, Giuseppe; Brown, Ari D.; Ehsan, Negar; Noroozian, Omid; Stevenson, Thomas R.; U-Yen, Kongpop; Wollack, Edward J.; Moseley, S. Harvey

2016-01-01

Micro-Spec is a compact sub-millimeter (approximately 100 GHz--1:1 THz) spectrometer which uses low loss superconducting microstrip transmission lines and a single-crystal silicon dielectric to integrate all of the components of a diffraction grating spectrometer onto a single chip. We have already successfully evaluated the performance of a prototype Micro-Spec, with spectral resolving power, R=64. Here we present our progress towards developing a higher resolution Micro-Spec, which would enable the first science returns in a balloon flight version of this instrument. We describe modifications to the design in scaling from a R=64 to a R=256 instrument, as well as the ultimate performance limits and design concerns when scaling this instrument to higher resolutions.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Collins, William D; Johansen, Hans; Evans, Katherine J

We present a survey of physical and computational techniques that have the potential to con- tribute to the next generation of high-fidelity, multi-scale climate simulations. Examples of the climate science problems that can be investigated with more depth include the capture of remote forcings of localized hydrological extreme events, an accurate representation of cloud features over a range of spatial and temporal scales, and parallel, large ensembles of simulations to more effectively explore model sensitivities and uncertainties. Numerical techniques, such as adaptive mesh refinement, implicit time integration, and separate treatment of fast physical time scales are enabling improved accuracy andmore » fidelity in simulation of dynamics and allow more complete representations of climate features at the global scale. At the same time, part- nerships with computer science teams have focused on taking advantage of evolving computer architectures, such as many-core processors and GPUs, so that these approaches which were previously considered prohibitively costly have become both more efficient and scalable. In combination, progress in these three critical areas is poised to transform climate modeling in the coming decades.« less

Star Formation Properties of Irregular Galaxies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hunter, D. A.; Elmegreen, B. G.

2003-12-01

What regulates star formation in gas-rich dwarf galaxies on global and local scales? To address this question, we have conducted a survey of a large sample of reasonably normal, relatively nearby, non-interacting galaxies without spiral arms. The sample includes 94 Im galaxies, 26 Blue Compact Dwarfs, and 20 Sm systems. The data consist of UBV and Hα images for the entire sample, and JHK images, HI maps, CO observations, and HII region spectrophotometry for a sub-sample. The Hα , UBV, and JHK image sets act as probes of star formation on three different times scales: Hα images trace the most recent star formation (≤10 Myrs) through the ionization of natal clouds by the short-lived massive stars; UBV, while a more complicated clue, integrates over the past Gyr; and JHK integrates over the lifetime of the galaxy where even in Im galaxies global JHK colors are characteristic of old stellar populations. These data are being used to determine the nature and distribution of the star formation activity, to characterize the interstellar medium out of which the clouds and stars are forming, and to develop models that describe the important processes that drive star formation in these tiny systems. Here we present the Hα data: integrated star formation rates, azimuthally-averaged Hα surface brightnesses, and extents of star formation, and explore the relationship of the star formation properties to other integrated parameters of the galaxies. One TI CCD used in this work was provided to Lowell by the National Science Foundation and another was on loan from the U. S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff. The Hα filters were purchased with funds provided by a Small Research Grant from the American Astronomical Society, National Science Foundation grant AST-9022046, and grant 960355 from JPL. Funding for carrying out this work was provided by the Lowell Research Fund and by the National Science Foundation through grants AST-0204922 to DAH and AST-0205097 to BGE.

Learning biology through connecting mathematics to scientific mechanisms: Student outcomes and teacher supports

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schuchardt, Anita

Integrating mathematics into science classrooms has been part of the conversation in science education for a long time. However, studies on student learning after incorporating mathematics in to the science classroom have shown mixed results. Understanding the mixed effects of including mathematics in science has been hindered by a historical focus on characteristics of integration tangential to student learning (e.g., shared elements, extent of integration). A new framework is presented emphasizing the epistemic role of mathematics in science. An epistemic role of mathematics missing from the current literature is identified: use of mathematics to represent scientific mechanisms, Mechanism Connected Mathematics (MCM). Building on prior theoretical work, it is proposed that having students develop mathematical equations that represent scientific mechanisms could elevate their conceptual understanding and quantitative problem solving. Following design and implementation of an MCM unit in inheritance, a large-scale quantitative analysis of pre and post implementation test results showed MCM students, compared to traditionally instructed students) had significantly greater gains in conceptual understanding of mathematically modeled scientific mechanisms, and their ability to solve complex quantitative problems. To gain insight into the mechanism behind the gain in quantitative problem solving, a small-scale qualitative study was conducted of two contrasting groups: 1) within-MCM instruction: competent versus struggling problem solvers, and 2) within-competent problem solvers: MCM instructed versus traditionally instructed. Competent MCM students tended to connect their mathematical inscriptions to the scientific phenomenon and to switch between mathematical and scientifically productive approaches during problem solving in potentially productive ways. The other two groups did not. To address concerns about teacher capacity presenting barriers to scalability of MCM approaches, the types and amount of teacher support needed to achieve these types of student learning gains were investigated. In the context of providing teachers with access to educative materials, students achieved learning gains in both areas in the absence of face-to-face teacher professional development. However, maximal student learning gains required the investment of face-to-face professional development. This finding can govern distribution of scarce resources, but does not preclude implementation of MCM instruction even where resource availability does not allow for face-to-face professional development.

Romanian contribution to research infrastructure database for EPOS

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ionescu, Constantin; Craiu, Andreea; Tataru, Dragos; Balan, Stefan; Muntean, Alexandra; Nastase, Eduard; Oaie, Gheorghe; Asimopolos, Laurentiu; Panaiotu, Cristian

2014-05-01

European Plate Observation System - EPOS is a long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, models and facilities from mainly distributed existing, but also new, research infrastructures for solid Earth Science. In EPOS Preparatory Phase were integrated the national Research Infrastructures at pan European level in order to create the EPOS distributed research infrastructures, structure in which, at the present time, Romania participates by means of the earth science research infrastructures of the national interest declared on the National Roadmap. The mission of EPOS is to build an efficient and comprehensive multidisciplinary research platform for solid Earth Sciences in Europe and to allow the scientific community to study the same phenomena from different points of view, in different time periods and spatial scales (laboratory and field experiments). At national scale, research and monitoring infrastructures have gathered a vast amount of geological and geophysical data, which have been used by research networks to underpin our understanding of the Earth. EPOS promotes the creation of comprehensive national and regional consortia, as well as the organization of collective actions. To serve the EPOS goals, in Romania a group of National Research Institutes, together with their infrastructures, gathered in an EPOS National Consortium, as follows: 1. National Institute for Earth Physics - Seismic, strong motion, GPS and Geomagnetic network and Experimental Laboratory; 2. National Institute of Marine Geology and Geoecology - Marine Research infrastructure and Euxinus integrated regional Black Sea observation and early-warning system; 3. Geological Institute of Romania - Surlari National Geomagnetic Observatory and National lithoteque (the latter as part of the National Museum of Geology) 4. University of Bucharest - Paleomagnetic Laboratory After national dissemination of EPOS initiative other Research Institutes and companies from the potential stakeholders group also show their interest to participate in the EPOS National Consortium.

Satellite Observations for Detecting and Tracking Changes in Atmospheric Composition

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Neil, Doreen O.; Kondragunbta, Shobha; Osterman, Gregory; Pickering, Kenneth; Pinder, Robert W.; Prados, Ana I.; Szykman, James

2009-01-01

The satellite observations provide constraints on detailed atmospheric modeling, including emissions inventories, indications of transport, harmonized data over vast areas suitable for trends analysis, and a link between spatial scales ranging from local to global, and temporal scales from diurnal to interannual. 1 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) long-term commitments help provide these observations in cooperation with international meteorological organizations. NASA s long-term commitments will advance scientifically important observations as part of its Earth Science Program, and will assist the transition of the science measurements to applied analyses through the Applied Science Program. Both NASA and NOAA have begun to provide near realtime data and tools to visualize and analyze satellite data,2 while maintaining data quality, validation, and standards. Consequently, decision-makers can expect satellite data services to support air quality decision making now and in the future. The international scientific community's Integrated Global Atmosphere Chemistry Observation System Report3 outlined a plan for ground-based, airborne and satellite measurements and models to integrate the observations into a four-dimensional representation of the atmosphere (space and time) to support assessment and policy information needs. This plan is being carried out under the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Demonstrations of such an integrated capability4 provide new understanding of the changing atmosphere and link policy decisions to benefits for society. In this article, we highlight the use of satellite data to constrain biomass burning emissions, to assess oxides of nitrogen (NO(x)) emission reductions, and to contribute to state implementation plans, as examples of the use of satellite observations for detecting and tracking changes in atmospheric composition.

Nanometer scale thermometry in a living cell

PubMed Central

Kucsko, G.; Maurer, P. C.; Yao, N. Y.; Kubo, M.; Noh, H. J.; Lo, P. K.; Park, H.; Lukin, M. D.

2014-01-01

Sensitive probing of temperature variations on nanometer scales represents an outstanding challenge in many areas of modern science and technology1. In particular, a thermometer capable of sub-degree temperature resolution over a large range of temperatures as well as integration within a living system could provide a powerful new tool for many areas of biological, physical and chemical research; possibilities range from the temperature-induced control of gene expression2–5 and tumor metabolism6 to the cell-selective treatment of disease7,8 and the study of heat dissipation in integrated circuits1. By combining local light-induced heat sources with sensitive nanoscale thermometry, it may also be possible to engineer biological processes at the sub-cellular level2–5. Here, we demonstrate a new approach to nanoscale thermometry that utilizes coherent manipulation of the electronic spin associated with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers in diamond. We show the ability to detect temperature variations down to 1.8 mK (sensitivity of 9mK/Hz) in an ultra-pure bulk diamond sample. Using NV centers in diamond nanocrystals (nanodiamonds, NDs), we directly measure the local thermal environment at length scales down to 200 nm. Finally, by introducing both nanodiamonds and gold nanoparticles into a single human embryonic fibroblast, we demonstrate temperature-gradient control and mapping at the sub-cellular level, enabling unique potential applications in life sciences. PMID:23903748

Progressing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in North Dakota with near-space ballooning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Saad, Marissa Elizabeth

The United States must provide quality science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in order to maintain a leading role in the global economy. Numerous initiatives have been established across the United States that promote and encourage STEM education within the middle school curriculum. Integrating active learning pedagogy into instructors' lesson plans will prepare the students to think critically - a necessary skill for the twenty first century. This study integrated a three-week long Near Space Balloon project into six eighth grade Earth Science classes from Valley Middle School in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It was hypothesized that after the students designed, constructed, launched, and analyzed their payload experiments, they would have an increased affinity for high school science and math classes. A pre- and post-survey was distributed to the students (n=124), before and after the project to analyze how effective this engineering and space mission was regarding high school STEM interests. The surveys were statistically analyzed, comparing means by the Student's t-Test, specifically the Welch-Satterthwaite test. Female students displayed a 57.1% increase in math and a 63.6% increase in science; male students displayed a 46.6% increase in science and 0% increase in math. Most Likert-scale survey questions experienced no statistically significant change, supporting the null hypothesis. The only survey question that supported the hypothesis was, "I Think Engineers Work Alone," which experienced a 0.24% decrease in student understanding. The results suggest that integrating a three-week long Near Space Balloon project into middle school curricula will not directly influence the students' excitement to pursue STEM subjects and careers. An extensive, yearlong ballooning mission is recommended so that it can be integrated with multiple core subjects. Using such an innovative pedagogy method as with this balloon launch will help students master the scientific process and experience real team collaboration, as they did in this successful mission.

Food-based Science Curriculum Increases 4th Graders Multidisciplinary Science Knowledge

PubMed Central

Hovland, Jana A.; Carraway-Stage, Virginia G.; Cela, Artenida; Collins, Caitlin; Díaz, Sebastián R.; Collins, Angelo; Duffrin, Melani W.

2013-01-01

Health professionals and policymakers are asking educators to place more emphasis on food and nutrition education. Integrating these topics into science curricula using hand-on, food-based activities may strengthen students’ understanding of science concepts. The Food, Math, and Science Teaching Enhancement Resource (FoodMASTER) Initiative is a compilation of programs aimed at using food as a tool to teach mathematics and science. Previous studies have shown that students experiencing the FoodMASTER curriculum were very excited about the activities, became increasingly interested in the subject matter of food, and were able to conduct scientific observations. The purpose of this study was to: 1) assess 4th graders food-related multidisciplinary science knowledge, and 2) compare gains in food-related science knowledge after implementation of an integrated, food-based curriculum. During the 2009–2010 school year, FoodMASTER researchers implemented a hands-on, food-based intermediate curriculum in eighteen 4th grade classrooms in Ohio (n=9) and North Carolina (n=9). Sixteen classrooms in Ohio (n=8) and North Carolina (n=8), following their standard science curricula, served as comparison classrooms. Students completed a researcher-developed science knowledge exam, consisting of 13 multiple-choice questions administered pre- and post-test. Only subjects with pre- and post-test scores were entered into the sample (Intervention n=343; Control n=237). No significant differences were observed between groups at pre-test. At post-test, the intervention group scored (9.95±2.00) significantly higher (p=.000) than the control group (8.84±2.37) on a 13-point scale. These findings suggest the FoodMASTER intermediate curriculum is more effective than a standard science curriculum in increasing students’ multidisciplinary science knowledge related to food. PMID:25152539

Finding the Connections between a High-School Chemistry Curriculum and Nano-Scale Science and Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blonder, Ron; Sakhnini, Sohair

2017-01-01

The high-school chemistry curriculum is loaded with many important chemical concepts that are taught at the high-school level and it is therefore very difficult to add modern contents to the existing curriculum. However, many studies have underscored the importance of integrating modern chemistry contents such as nanotechnology into a high-school…

The Human Genome Project: big science transforms biology and medicine.

PubMed

Hood, Leroy; Rowen, Lee

2013-01-01

The Human Genome Project has transformed biology through its integrated big science approach to deciphering a reference human genome sequence along with the complete sequences of key model organisms. The project exemplifies the power, necessity and success of large, integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts - so-called 'big science' - directed towards complex major objectives. In this article, we discuss the ways in which this ambitious endeavor led to the development of novel technologies and analytical tools, and how it brought the expertise of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians together with biologists. It established an open approach to data sharing and open-source software, thereby making the data resulting from the project accessible to all. The genome sequences of microbes, plants and animals have revolutionized many fields of science, including microbiology, virology, infectious disease and plant biology. Moreover, deeper knowledge of human sequence variation has begun to alter the practice of medicine. The Human Genome Project has inspired subsequent large-scale data acquisition initiatives such as the International HapMap Project, 1000 Genomes, and The Cancer Genome Atlas, as well as the recently announced Human Brain Project and the emerging Human Proteome Project.

The Data Conservancy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Choudhury, S.; Duerr, R. E.

2009-12-01

NSF's Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners program is an ambitious attempt to integrate a wide variety of expertise and infrastructure into a network for providing "reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science." One of the first two DataNet award recipients, the Data Conservancy, is itself a network of widely diverse partners led by the libraries at the Johns Hopkins University. The Data Conservancy is built on existing exemplar scientific projects, communities, and virtual organizations that have deep engagement with their user communities, and extensive experience with large-scale distributed system development. Data Conservancy members embrace a shared vision that data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data needed to address the grand research challenges that face society. Data Conservancy members holdings encompass the entire range of earth, life, and space science data. New to the Data Conservancy is the concept that University libraries will be part of the distributed network of data centers and that data science will become a path in the library and information science curricula. As noted by Winston Tabb (JHU Dean of Libraries) "Data Centers are the new library stacks."

Situating and teaching 21st century zoology: revealing pattern in the form and function of animals.

PubMed

Russell, Anthony P

2009-09-01

The current challenges (increasing levels of integration in the biological sciences) facing the teaching of zoology and the structure of the zoology curriculum are explored herein. General context is provided and a more focused scrutiny of the situation in North America is presented. The changing emphases in more broadly-based biological sciences programs in North America are outlined, and their influence on the role of zoology as part of fundamental biological training is considered. The longer term impact of such changes in emphasis on the teaching of zoology is discussed, and the central role that zoology can play in dealing with both science content and science education is advanced. Based upon a focal workshop on the future of the zoology curriculum in Canada, a perspective on the challenges facing curriculum evolution is provided. Extensive curriculum redesign is called for to ensure that zoology provides a broad-scale integrative approach to the understanding of biodiversity in evolutionary, ecological and functional contexts. Barriers to, and drivers of change are identified and the need for collaborative approaches to curricular evolution is emphasized. © 2009 ISZS, Blackwell Publishing and IOZ/CAS.

Preface: Special Topic on Frontiers in Molecular Scale Electronics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evers, Ferdinand; Venkataraman, Latha

2017-03-01

The electronic, mechanical, and thermoelectric properties of molecular scale devices have fascinated scientists across several disciplines in natural sciences and engineering. The interest is partially technological, driven by the fast miniaturization of integrated circuits that now have reached characteristic features at the nanometer scale. Equally important, a very strong incentive also exists to elucidate the fundamental aspects of structure-function relations for nanoscale devices, which utilize molecular building blocks as functional units. Thus motivated, a rich research field has established itself, broadly termed "Molecular Electronics," that hosts a plethora of activities devoted to this goal in chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering. This Special Topic on Frontiers of Molecular Scale Electronics captures recent theoretical and experimental advances in the field.

UK Environmental Prediction - integration and evaluation at the convective scale

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lewis, Huw; Brunet, Gilbert; Harris, Chris; Best, Martin; Saulter, Andrew; Holt, Jason; Bricheno, Lucy; Brerton, Ashley; Reynard, Nick; Blyth, Eleanor; Martinez de la Torre, Alberto

2015-04-01

It has long been understood that accurate prediction and warning of the impacts of severe weather requires an integrated approach to forecasting. This was well demonstrated in the UK throughout winter 2013/14 when an exceptional run of severe winter storms, often with damaging high winds and intense rainfall led to significant damage from the large waves and storm surge along coastlines, and from saturated soils, high river flows and significant flooding inland. The substantial impacts on individuals, businesses and infrastructure indicate a pressing need to understand better the value that might be delivered through more integrated environmental prediction. To address this need, the Met Office, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and National Oceanography Centre have begun to develop the foundations of a coupled high resolution probabilistic forecast system for the UK at km-scale. This links together existing model components of the atmosphere, coastal ocean, land surface and hydrology. Our initial focus on a 2-year Prototype project will demonstrate the UK coupled prediction concept in research mode, including an analysis of the winter 2013/14 storms and its impacts. By linking science development to operational collaborations such as the UK Natural Hazards Partnership, we can ensure that science priorities are rooted in user requirements. This presentation will provide an overview of UK environmental prediction activities and an update on progress during the first year of the Prototype project. We will present initial results from the coupled model development and discuss the challenges to realise the potential of integrated regional coupled forecasting for improving predictions and applications.

Caring for nanotechnology? Being an integrated social scientist.

PubMed

Viseu, Ana

2015-10-01

One of the most significant shifts in science policy of the past three decades is a concern with extending scientific practice to include a role for 'society'. Recently, this has led to legislative calls for the integration of the social sciences and humanities in publicly funded research and development initiatives. In nanotechnology--integration's primary field site--this policy has institutionalized the practice of hiring social scientists in technical facilities. Increasingly mainstream, the workings and results of this integration mechanism remain understudied. In this article, I build upon my three-year experience as the in-house social scientist at the Cornell NanoScale Facility and the United States' National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network to engage empirically and conceptually with this mode of governance in nanotechnology. From the vantage point of the integrated social scientist, I argue that in its current enactment, integration emerges as a particular kind of care work, with social scientists being fashioned as the main caretakers. Examining integration as a type of care practice and as a 'matter of care' allows me to highlight the often invisible, existential, epistemic, and affective costs of care as governance. Illuminating a framework where social scientists are called upon to observe but not disturb, to reify boundaries rather than blur them, this article serves as a word of caution against integration as a novel mode of governance that seemingly privileges situatedness, care, and entanglement, moving us toward an analytically skeptical (but not dismissive) perspective on integration.

Exploring culture, language and the perception of the nature of science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sutherland, Dawn

2002-01-01

One dimension of early Canadian education is the attempt of the government to use the education system as an assimilative tool to integrate the First Nations and Me´tis people into Euro-Canadian society. Despite these attempts, many First Nations and Me´tis people retained their culture and their indigenous language. Few science educators have examined First Nations and Western scientific worldviews and the impact they may have on science learning. This study explored the views some First Nations (Cree) and Euro-Canadian Grade-7-level students in Manitoba had about the nature of science. Both qualitative (open-ended questions and interviews) and quantitative (a Likert-scale questionnaire) instruments were used to explore student views. A central hypothesis to this research programme is the possibility that the different world-views of two student populations, Cree and Euro-Canadian, are likely to influence their perceptions of science. This preliminary study explored a range of methodologies to probe the perceptions of the nature of science in these two student populations. It was found that the two cultural groups differed significantly between some of the tenets in a Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS). Cree students significantly differed from Euro-Canadian students on the developmental, testable and unified tenets of the nature of scientific knowledge scale. No significant differences were found in NSKS scores between language groups (Cree students who speak English in the home and those who speak English and Cree or Cree only). The differences found between language groups were primarily in the open-ended questions where preformulated responses were absent. Interviews about critical incidents provided more detailed accounts of the Cree students' perception of the nature of science. The implications of the findings of this study are discussed in relation to the challenges related to research methodology, further areas for investigation, science teaching in First Nations communities and science curriculum development.

Assessing clinical competency in the health sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Panzarella, Karen Joanne

To test the success of integrated curricula in schools of health sciences, meaningful measurements of student performance are required to assess clinical competency. This research project analyzed a new performance assessment tool, the Integrated Standardized Patient Examination (ISPE), for assessing clinical competency: specifically, to assess Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students' clinical competence as the ability to integrate basic science knowledge with clinical communication skills. Thirty-four DPT students performed two ISPE cases, one of a patient who sustained a stroke and the other a patient with a herniated lumbar disc. Cases were portrayed by standardized patients (SPs) in a simulated clinical setting. Each case was scored by an expert evaluator in the exam room and then by one investigator and the students themselves via videotape. The SPs scored each student on an overall encounter rubric. Written feedback was obtained from all participants in the study. Acceptable reliability was demonstrated via inter-rater agreement as well as inter-rater correlations on items that used a dichotomous scale, whereas the items requiring the use of the 4-point rubric were somewhat less reliable. For the entire scale both cases had a significant correlation between the Expert-Investigator pair of raters, for the CVA case r = .547, p < .05 and for the HD case r = .700, p < .01. The SPs scored students higher than the other raters. Students' self-assessments were most closely aligned with the investigator. Effects were apparent due to case. Content validity was gathered in the process of developing cases and patient scenarios that were used in this study. Construct validity was obtained from the survey results analyzed from the experts and students. Future studies should examine the effect of rater training upon the reliability. Criterion or predictive validity could be further studied by comparing students' performances on the ISPE with other independent estimates of students' competence. The unique integration questions of the ISPE were judged to have good content validity from experts and students, suggestive that integration, a most crucial element of clinical competence, while done in the mind of the student, can be practiced, learned and assessed.

Workflow based framework for life science informatics.

PubMed

Tiwari, Abhishek; Sekhar, Arvind K T

2007-10-01

Workflow technology is a generic mechanism to integrate diverse types of available resources (databases, servers, software applications and different services) which facilitate knowledge exchange within traditionally divergent fields such as molecular biology, clinical research, computational science, physics, chemistry and statistics. Researchers can easily incorporate and access diverse, distributed tools and data to develop their own research protocols for scientific analysis. Application of workflow technology has been reported in areas like drug discovery, genomics, large-scale gene expression analysis, proteomics, and system biology. In this article, we have discussed the existing workflow systems and the trends in applications of workflow based systems.

NCI's High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data (HPD) Computing Platform for Environmental and Earth System Data Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evans, Ben; Allen, Chris; Antony, Joseph; Bastrakova, Irina; Gohar, Kashif; Porter, David; Pugh, Tim; Santana, Fabiana; Smillie, Jon; Trenham, Claire; Wang, Jingbo; Wyborn, Lesley

2015-04-01

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has established a powerful and flexible in-situ petascale computational environment to enable both high performance computing and Data-intensive Science across a wide spectrum of national environmental and earth science data collections - in particular climate, observational data and geoscientific assets. This paper examines 1) the computational environments that supports the modelling and data processing pipelines, 2) the analysis environments and methods to support data analysis, and 3) the progress so far to harmonise the underlying data collections for future interdisciplinary research across these large volume data collections. NCI has established 10+ PBytes of major national and international data collections from both the government and research sectors based on six themes: 1) weather, climate, and earth system science model simulations, 2) marine and earth observations, 3) geosciences, 4) terrestrial ecosystems, 5) water and hydrology, and 6) astronomy, social and biosciences. Collectively they span the lithosphere, crust, biosphere, hydrosphere, troposphere, and stratosphere. The data is largely sourced from NCI's partners (which include the custodians of many of the major Australian national-scale scientific collections), leading research communities, and collaborating overseas organisations. New infrastructures created at NCI mean the data collections are now accessible within an integrated High Performance Computing and Data (HPC-HPD) environment - a 1.2 PFlop supercomputer (Raijin), a HPC class 3000 core OpenStack cloud system and several highly connected large-scale high-bandwidth Lustre filesystems. The hardware was designed at inception to ensure that it would allow the layered software environment to flexibly accommodate the advancement of future data science. New approaches to software technology and data models have also had to be developed to enable access to these large and exponentially increasing data volumes at NCI. Traditional HPC and data environments are still made available in a way that flexibly provides the tools, services and supporting software systems on these new petascale infrastructures. But to enable the research to take place at this scale, the data, metadata and software now need to evolve together - creating a new integrated high performance infrastructure. The new infrastructure at NCI currently supports a catalogue of integrated, reusable software and workflows from earth system and ecosystem modelling, weather research, satellite and other observed data processing and analysis. One of the challenges for NCI has been to support existing techniques and methods, while carefully preparing the underlying infrastructure for the transition needed for the next class of Data-intensive Science. In doing so, a flexible range of techniques and software can be made available for application across the corpus of data collections available, and to provide a new infrastructure for future interdisciplinary research.

The Education and Public Engagement (EPE) Component of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI): Enabling Near Real-Time Data Use in Undergraduate Classrooms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Glenn, S. M.; Companion, C.; Crowley, M.; deCharon, A.; Fundis, A. T.; Kilb, D. L.; Levenson, S.; Lichtenwalner, C. S.; McCurdy, A.; McDonnell, J. D.; Overoye, D.; Risien, C. M.; Rude, A.; Wieclawek, J., III

2011-12-01

The National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is constructing observational and computer infrastructure that will provide sustained ocean measurements to study climate variability, ocean circulation, ecosystem dynamics, air-sea exchange, seafloor processes, and plate-scale geodynamics over the next ~25-30 years. To accomplish this, the Consortium for Ocean Leadership established four Implementing Organizations: (1) Regional Scale Nodes; (2) Coastal and Global Scale Nodes; (3) Cyberinfrastructure (CI); and (4) Education and Public Engagement (EPE). The EPE, which we represent, was just recently established to provide a new layer of cyber-interactivity for educators to bring near real-time data, images and videos of our Earth's oceans into their learning environments. Our focus over the next four years is engaging educators of undergraduates and free-choice learners. Demonstration projects of the OOI capabilities will use an Integrated Education Toolkit to access OOI data through the Cyberinfrastructure's On Demand Measurement Processing capability. We will present our plans to develop six education infrastructure software modules: Education Web Services (middleware), Visualization Tools, Concept Map and Lab/Lesson Builders, Collaboration Tools, and an Education Resources Database. The software release of these tools is staggered to coincide with other major OOI releases. The first release will include stand-alone versions of the first four EPE modules (Fall 2012). Next, all six EPE modules will be integrated within the OOI cyber-framework (Fall 2013). The last release will include advanced capabilities for all six modules within a collaborative network that leverages the CI's Integrated Observatory Network (Fall 2014). We are looking for undergraduate and informal science educators to provide feedback and guidance on the project, please contact us if you are interested in partnering with us.

Climate Change: Integrating Science and Economics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Prinn, R. G.

2008-12-01

The world is facing an ever-growing conflict between environment and development. Climate change is a century-scale threat requiring a century-long effort in science, technology and policy analysis, and institutions that can sustain this effort over generations. To inform policy development and implementation there is urgent need for better integration of the diverse components of the problem. Motivated by this challenge, we have developed the Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) at MIT. It comprises coupled sub- models of economic development, atmospheric chemistry, climate dynamics and ecosystems. The results of a recent uncertainty analysis involving hundreds of runs of the IGSM imply that, without mitigation policies, the global average surface temperature may rise much faster than previously estimated. Polar temperatures are projected to rise even faster than the average rate with obvious great risks for high latitude ecosystems and ice sheets at the high end of this range. Analysis of policies for climate mitigation, show that the greatest effect of these policies is to lower the probability of extreme changes as opposed to lowering the medians. Faced with the above estimated impacts, the long lifetimes of most greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the long delay in ultimate warming due to ocean heat uptake, and the capital-intensive global energy infrastructure, the case is strong for concerted action now. Results of runs of the IGSM indicate the need for transformation of the global energy industry on a very large scale to mitigate climate change. Carbon sequestration, renewable energy sources, and nuclear present new economic, technological, and environmental challenges when implemented at the needed scales. Economic analyses using the IGSM indicate that global implementation of efficient policies could allow the needed transformations at bearable costs.

A long time span relativistic precession model of the Earth

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tang, Kai; Soffel, Michael H.; Tao, Jin-He; Han, Wen-Biao; Tang, Zheng-Hong

2015-04-01

A numerical solution to the Earth's precession in a relativistic framework for a long time span is presented here. We obtain the motion of the solar system in the Barycentric Celestial Reference System by numerical integration with a symplectic integrator. Special Newtonian corrections accounting for tidal dissipation are included in the force model. The part representing Earth's rotation is calculated in the Geocentric Celestial Reference System by integrating the post-Newtonian equations of motion published by Klioner et al. All the main relativistic effects are included following Klioner et al. In particular, we consider several relativistic reference systems with corresponding time scales, scaled constants and parameters. Approximate expressions for Earth's precession in the interval ±1 Myr around J2000.0 are provided. In the interval ±2000 years around J2000.0, the difference compared to the P03 precession theory is only several arcseconds and the results are consistent with other long-term precession theories. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Integrating across scales: Effectively applying science for the successful conservation of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar)

USGS Publications Warehouse

Mather, M. E.; Parrish, D.L.; Folt, C.L.; DeGraaf, R.M.

1998-01-01

Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is an excellent species on which to focus synthetic, integrative investigations because it is an economically important species that captures the public imagination, is heavily impacted by humans, uses several ecosystems over its life, and is the subject of a large body of extant literature. The following 24 papers were solicited to provide the biological basis for effective and innovative approaches that biologists, managers, and social scientists can use to develop policies that sustain Atlantic salmon and related species. Together these papers highlight the need for and benefits of (a) synthesizing within populations, (b) choosing the appropriate scale, (c) comparing across populations using rigorous, focused, question-oriented methods, (d) integrating across disciplines, (e) incorporating the human perspective, (f) linking multiple ecosystems, and (g) applied problem solving. To show how Atlantic salmon can guide research and conservation efforts for other species in other systems, we review the justification for the supplement and summarize the defining concepts that emerge from the volume.

Managing consequences of climate-driven species redistribution requires integration of ecology, conservation and social science.

PubMed

Bonebrake, Timothy C; Brown, Christopher J; Bell, Johann D; Blanchard, Julia L; Chauvenet, Alienor; Champion, Curtis; Chen, I-Ching; Clark, Timothy D; Colwell, Robert K; Danielsen, Finn; Dell, Anthony I; Donelson, Jennifer M; Evengård, Birgitta; Ferrier, Simon; Frusher, Stewart; Garcia, Raquel A; Griffis, Roger B; Hobday, Alistair J; Jarzyna, Marta A; Lee, Emma; Lenoir, Jonathan; Linnetved, Hlif; Martin, Victoria Y; McCormack, Phillipa C; McDonald, Jan; McDonald-Madden, Eve; Mitchell, Nicola; Mustonen, Tero; Pandolfi, John M; Pettorelli, Nathalie; Possingham, Hugh; Pulsifer, Peter; Reynolds, Mark; Scheffers, Brett R; Sorte, Cascade J B; Strugnell, Jan M; Tuanmu, Mao-Ning; Twiname, Samantha; Vergés, Adriana; Villanueva, Cecilia; Wapstra, Erik; Wernberg, Thomas; Pecl, Gretta T

2018-02-01

Climate change is driving a pervasive global redistribution of the planet's species. Species redistribution poses new questions for the study of ecosystems, conservation science and human societies that require a coordinated and integrated approach. Here we review recent progress, key gaps and strategic directions in this nascent research area, emphasising emerging themes in species redistribution biology, the importance of understanding underlying drivers and the need to anticipate novel outcomes of changes in species ranges. We highlight that species redistribution has manifest implications across multiple temporal and spatial scales and from genes to ecosystems. Understanding range shifts from ecological, physiological, genetic and biogeographical perspectives is essential for informing changing paradigms in conservation science and for designing conservation strategies that incorporate changing population connectivity and advance adaptation to climate change. Species redistributions present challenges for human well-being, environmental management and sustainable development. By synthesising recent approaches, theories and tools, our review establishes an interdisciplinary foundation for the development of future research on species redistribution. Specifically, we demonstrate how ecological, conservation and social research on species redistribution can best be achieved by working across disciplinary boundaries to develop and implement solutions to climate change challenges. Future studies should therefore integrate existing and complementary scientific frameworks while incorporating social science and human-centred approaches. Finally, we emphasise that the best science will not be useful unless more scientists engage with managers, policy makers and the public to develop responsible and socially acceptable options for the global challenges arising from species redistributions. © 2017 Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Sustainability. Systems integration for global sustainability.

PubMed

Liu, Jianguo; Mooney, Harold; Hull, Vanessa; Davis, Steven J; Gaskell, Joanne; Hertel, Thomas; Lubchenco, Jane; Seto, Karen C; Gleick, Peter; Kremen, Claire; Li, Shuxin

2015-02-27

Global sustainability challenges, from maintaining biodiversity to providing clean air and water, are closely interconnected yet often separately studied and managed. Systems integration—holistic approaches to integrating various components of coupled human and natural systems—is critical to understand socioeconomic and environmental interconnections and to create sustainability solutions. Recent advances include the development and quantification of integrated frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, environmental footprints, planetary boundaries, human-nature nexuses, and telecoupling. Although systems integration has led to fundamental discoveries and practical applications, further efforts are needed to incorporate more human and natural components simultaneously, quantify spillover systems and feedbacks, integrate multiple spatial and temporal scales, develop new tools, and translate findings into policy and practice. Such efforts can help address important knowledge gaps, link seemingly unconnected challenges, and inform policy and management decisions. Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

WikiPEATia - a web based platform for assembling peatland data through ‘crowd sourcing’

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wisser, D.; Glidden, S.; Fieseher, C.; Treat, C. C.; Routhier, M.; Frolking, S. E.

2009-12-01

The Earth System Science community is realizing that peatlands are an important and unique terrestrial ecosystem that has not yet been well-integrated into large-scale earth system analyses. A major hurdle is the lack of accessible, geospatial data of peatland distribution, coupled with data on peatland properties (e.g., vegetation composition, peat depth, basal dates, soil chemistry, peatland class) at the global scale. This data, however, is available at the local scale. Although a comprehensive global database on peatlands probably lags similar data on more economically important ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, croplands, a large amount of field data have been collected over the past several decades. A few efforts have been made to map peatlands at large scales but existing data have not been assembled into a single geospatial database that is publicly accessible or do not depict data with a level of detail that is needed in the Earth System Science Community. A global peatland database would contribute to advances in a number of research fields such as hydrology, vegetation and ecosystem modeling, permafrost modeling, and earth system modeling. We present a Web 2.0 approach that uses state-of-the-art webserver and innovative online mapping technologies and is designed to create such a global database through ‘crowd-sourcing’. Primary functions of the online system include form-driven textual user input of peatland research metadata, spatial data input of peatland areas via a mapping interface, database editing and querying editing capabilities, as well as advanced visualization and data analysis tools. WikiPEATia provides an integrated information technology platform for assembling, integrating, and posting peatland-related geospatial datasets facilitates and encourages research community involvement. A successful effort will make existing peatland data much more useful to the research community, and will help to identify significant data gaps.

Deciphering Biochemical Network: from particles to planes then to spaces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ye, Xinhao; Zhang, Siliang; Engineer Research CenterBiotechnology, National

2004-03-01

Today when we are still infatuated with the booming systematic fashion in life science, we, especially as biologist, ironically have fallen down into a sub-systematic maze. That is, although rapid advances in "omics" sciences ceaselessly provided so-called global or large-scale maps to exhibit the corresponding subnet, seldom paid attention to connecting these distinct but close-knit functional modules. Fortunately, a group of physicists recently cast off this natural moat and integrated multi-scale biological network into a simple life's pyramid. However, if extended this pyramid to a 3D structure in view of XYZ axis constructed by the temporal, spatial and organized characteristics respectively, it should be noted that this from-universal-to-particular pyramid is only a transverse section while the achievements in diverse "omics" sciences consist of relative longitudinal ones. On that footing, if analogizing the development of systems biology in last decades as a huge leap from discrete particles (typically in "a paper = a gene" era) to several planes (that is relative to corresponding OMICS science), we might rationally predict a next "space" era is coming soon to untangle and map the multi-tiered biological network really in a whole.

The TeraShake Computational Platform for Large-Scale Earthquake Simulations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cui, Yifeng; Olsen, Kim; Chourasia, Amit; Moore, Reagan; Maechling, Philip; Jordan, Thomas

Geoscientific and computer science researchers with the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) are conducting a large-scale, physics-based, computationally demanding earthquake system science research program with the goal of developing predictive models of earthquake processes. The computational demands of this program continue to increase rapidly as these researchers seek to perform physics-based numerical simulations of earthquake processes for larger meet the needs of this research program, a multiple-institution team coordinated by SCEC has integrated several scientific codes into a numerical modeling-based research tool we call the TeraShake computational platform (TSCP). A central component in the TSCP is a highly scalable earthquake wave propagation simulation program called the TeraShake anelastic wave propagation (TS-AWP) code. In this chapter, we describe how we extended an existing, stand-alone, wellvalidated, finite-difference, anelastic wave propagation modeling code into the highly scalable and widely used TS-AWP and then integrated this code into the TeraShake computational platform that provides end-to-end (initialization to analysis) research capabilities. We also describe the techniques used to enhance the TS-AWP parallel performance on TeraGrid supercomputers, as well as the TeraShake simulations phases including input preparation, run time, data archive management, and visualization. As a result of our efforts to improve its parallel efficiency, the TS-AWP has now shown highly efficient strong scaling on over 40K processors on IBM’s BlueGene/L Watson computer. In addition, the TSCP has developed into a computational system that is useful to many members of the SCEC community for performing large-scale earthquake simulations.

Atomic-order thermal nitridation of group IV semiconductors for ultra-large-scale integration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Murota, Junichi; Le Thanh, Vinh

2015-03-01

One of the main requirements for ultra-large-scale integration (ULSI) is atomic-order control of process technology. Our concept of atomically controlled processing for group IV semiconductors is based on atomic-order surface reaction control in Si-based CVD epitaxial growth. On the atomic-order surface nitridation of a few nm-thick Ge/about 4 nm-thick Si0.5Ge0.5/Si(100) by NH3, it is found that N atoms diffuse through nm-order thick Ge layer into Si0.5Ge0.5/Si(100) substrate and form Si nitride, even at 500 °C. By subsequent H2 heat treatment, although N atomic amount in Ge layer is reduced drastically, the reduction of the Si nitride is slight. It is suggested that N diffusion in Ge layer is suppressed by the formation of Si nitride and that Ge/atomic-order N layer/Si1-xGex/Si (100) heterostructure is formed. These results demonstrate the capability of CVD technology for atomically controlled nitridation of group IV semiconductors for ultra-large-scale integration. Invited talk at the 7th International Workshop on Advanced Materials Science and Nanotechnology IWAMSN2014, 2-6 November, 2014, Ha Long, Vietnam.

Navigating north: how body mass and winds shape avian flight behaviours across a North American migratory flyway.

PubMed

Horton, Kyle G; Van Doren, Benjamin M; La Sorte, Frank A; Fink, Daniel; Sheldon, Daniel; Farnsworth, Andrew; Kelly, Jeffrey F

2018-05-07

The migratory patterns of birds have been the focus of ecologists for millennia. What behavioural traits underlie these remarkably consistent movements? Addressing this question is central to advancing our understanding of migratory flight strategies and requires the integration of information across levels of biological organisation, e.g. species to communities. Here, we combine species-specific observations from the eBird citizen-science database with observations aggregated from weather surveillance radars during spring migration in central North America. Our results confirm a core prediction of migration theory at an unprecedented national scale: body mass predicts variation in flight strategies across latitudes, with larger-bodied species flying faster and compensating more for wind drift. We also find evidence that migrants travelling northward earlier in the spring increasingly compensate for wind drift at higher latitudes. This integration of information across biological scales provides new insight into patterns and determinants of broad-scale flight strategies of migratory birds. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS.

New Tools and New Biology: Recent Miniaturized Systems for Molecular and Cellular Biology

PubMed Central

Hamon, Morgan; Hong, Jong Wook

2013-01-01

Recent advances in applied physics and chemistry have led to the development of novel microfluidic systems. Microfluidic systems allow minute amounts of reagents to be processed using μm-scale channels and offer several advantages over conventional analytical devices for use in biological sciences: faster, more accurate and more reproducible analytical performance, reduced cell and reagent consumption, portability, and integration of functional components in a single chip. In this review, we introduce how microfluidics has been applied to biological sciences. We first present an overview of the fabrication of microfluidic systems and describe the distinct technologies available for biological research. We then present examples of microsystems used in biological sciences, focusing on applications in molecular and cellular biology. PMID:24305843

Integrating Phenological, Trait and Environmental Data For Continental Scale Analysis: A Community Approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weltzin, J. F.; Walls, R.; Guralnick, R. P.; Rosemartin, A.; Deck, J.; Powers, L. A.

2014-12-01

There is a wealth of biodiversity and environmental data that can provide the basis for addressing global scale questions of societal concern. However, our ability to discover, access and integrate these data for use in broader analyses is hampered by the lack of standardized languages and systems. New tools (e.g. ontologies, data standards, integration tools, unique identifiers) are being developed that enable establishment of a framework for linked and open data. Relative to other domains, these tools are nascent in biodiversity and environmental sciences and will require effort to develop, though work can capitalize on lessons learned from previous efforts. Here we discuss needed next steps to provide consistently described and formatted ecological data for immediate application in ecological analysis, focusing on integrating phenology, trait and environmental data to understand local to continental-scale biophysical processes and inform natural resource management practices. As more sources of data become available at finer spatial and temporal resolution, e.g., from national standardized earth observing systems (e.g., NEON, LTER and LTAR Networks, USA NPN), these challenges will become more acute. Here we provide an overview of the standards and ontology development landscape specifically related to phenological and trait data, and identify requirements to overcome current challenges. Second, we outline a workflow for formatting and integrating existing datasets to address key scientific and resource management questions such as: "What traits determine differential phenological responses to changing environmental conditions?" or "What is the role of granularity of observation, and of spatiotemporal scale, in controlling phenological responses to different driving variables?" Third, we discuss methods to semantically annotate datasets to greatly decrease time needed to assemble heterogeneous data for use in ecological analyses on varying spatial scales. We close by making a call to interested community members for a working group to model phenology, trait and environmental data products from continental-scale efforts (e.g. NEON, USA-NPN and others) focusing on ways to assure discoverability and interoperability.

Integrating Mercury Science and Policy in the Marine Context: Challenges and Opportunities

PubMed Central

Lambert, Kathleen F.; Evers, David C.; Warner, Kimberly A.; King, Susannah L.; Selin, Noelle E.

2014-01-01

Mercury is a global pollutant and presents policy challenges at local, regional, and global scales. Mercury poses risks to the health of people, fish, and wildlife exposed to elevated levels of mercury, most commonly from the consumption of methylmercury in marine and estuarine fish. The patchwork of current mercury abatement efforts limits the effectiveness of national and multi-national policies. This paper provides an overview of the major policy challenges and opportunities related to mercury in coastal and marine environments, and highlights science and policy linkages of the past several decades. The U.S. policy examples explored here point to the need for a full life cycle approach to mercury policy with a focus on source reduction and increased attention to: (1) the transboundary movement of mercury in air, water, and biota; (2) the coordination of policy efforts across multiple environmental media; (3) the cross-cutting issues related to pollutant interactions, mitigation of legacy sources, and adaptation to elevated mercury via improved communication efforts; and (4) the integration of recent research on human and ecological health effects into benefits analyses for regulatory purposes. Stronger science and policy integration will benefit national and international efforts to prevent, control, and minimize exposure to methylmercury. PMID:22901766

The infrared imaging spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: overview of innovative science programs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wright, Shelley A.; Larkin, James E.; Moore, Anna M.; Do, Tuan; Simard, Luc; Adamkovics, Maté; Armus, Lee; Barth, Aaron J.; Barton, Elizabeth; Boyce, Hope; Cooke, Jeffrey; Cote, Patrick; Davidge, Timothy; Ellerbroek, Brent; Ghez, Andrea M.; Liu, Michael C.; Lu, Jessica R.; Macintosh, Bruce A.; Mao, Shude; Marois, Christian; Schoeck, Matthias; Suzuki, Ryuji; Tan, Jonathan C.; Treu, Tommaso; Wang, Lianqi; Weiss, Jason

2014-07-01

IRIS (InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph) is a first light near-infrared diffraction limited imager and integral field spectrograph being designed for the future Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). IRIS is optimized to perform astronomical studies across a significant fraction of cosmic time, from our Solar System to distant newly formed galaxies (Barton et al. [1]). We present a selection of the innovative science cases that are unique to IRIS in the era of upcoming space and ground-based telescopes. We focus on integral field spectroscopy of directly imaged exoplanet atmospheres, probing fundamental physics in the Galactic Center, measuring 104 to 1010 M supermassive black hole masses, resolved spectroscopy of young star-forming galaxies (1 < z < 5) and first light galaxies (6 < z < 12), and resolved spectroscopy of strong gravitational lensed sources to measure dark matter substructure. For each of these science cases we use the IRIS simulator (Wright et al. [2], Do et al. [3]) to explore IRIS capabilities. To highlight the unique IRIS capabilities, we also update the point and resolved source sensitivities for the integral field spectrograph (IFS) in all five broadband filters (Z, Y, J, H, K) for the finest spatial scale of 0.004" per spaxel. We briefly discuss future development plans for the data reduction pipeline and quicklook software for the IRIS instrument suite.

The role of the "socio" in socio-hydrology: equal partner or a marriage of convenience (and necessity)?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lindquist, Eric

2016-04-01

Socio-hydrology as a concept has been in vogue for past 10-15 years and has been defined as a means to better integrate hydrological and societal processes and connections. Rarely, however, do we reflect on the balance between the two elements in the concept, and all too often the "socio" is seen as a necessary evil in support of hydrological sciences, rather than as an equal partner. The objective of this contribution is to assess the "socio" component of socio-hydrology, a fairly recent and accepted genre within the hydrological sciences. A brief history of the term and related research is outlined, followed by a discussion of the current balance between socio and hydrology in this science, and directions for future research and integration. This contribution also introduces the concept of a "water policy cycle" as a way to integrate the "socio" into the more traditional (and engineering and bio-physical biased) hydrological cycle. Finally, we use an ongoing case of coproduction of knowledge and decision making in a dynamic southwest Idaho river basin to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of socio-hydrology at the local and regional scale. This contribution will address the "Society co-production of knowledge and policy" theme of HS 5.5.

HESS Opinions "Integration of groundwater and surface water research: an interdisciplinary problem?"

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barthel, R.

2014-02-01

Today there is a great consensus that water resources research needs to become more holistic, integrating perspectives of a large variety of disciplines. Groundwater and surface water (hereafter: GW and SW) are typically identified as different compartments of the hydrological cycle and were traditionally often studied and managed separately. However, despite this separation, these respective fields of study are usually not considered to be different disciplines. They are often seen as different specialisations of hydrology with different focus, yet similar theory, concepts, methodology. The present article discusses how this notion may form a substantial obstacle in the further integration of GW and SW research and management. The article focusses on the regional scale (areas of approx. 103 to 106 km2), which is identified as the scale where integration is most greatly needed, but ironically the least amount of fully integrated research seems to be undertaken. The state of research on integrating GW and SW research is briefly reviewed and the most essential differences between GW hydrology (or hydrogeology, geohydrology) and SW hydrology are presented. Groundwater recharge and baseflow are used as examples to illustrate different perspectives on similar phenomena that can cause severe misunderstandings and errors in the conceptualisation of integration schemes. It is also discussed that integration of GW and SW research on the regional scale necessarily must move beyond the hydrological aspects, by collaborating with social sciences and increasing the interaction between science and the society in general. The typical elements of an ideal interdisciplinary workflow are presented and their relevance with respect to integration of GW and SW is discussed. The overall conclusions are that GW hydrology and SW hydrogeology study rather different objects of interest, using different types of observation, working on different problem settings. They have thus developed different theory, methodology and terminology. Yet, there seems to be a widespread lack of awareness of these differences which hinders the detection of the existing interdisciplinary aspects of GW and SW integration and consequently the development of truly unifying, interdisciplinary theory and methodology. Thus, despite having the ultimate goal of creating a more holistic approach, we should start integration by analysing potential disciplinary differences. Improved understanding among hydrologists of what interdisciplinary means and how it works is needed. Hydrologists, despite frequently being involved in multidisciplinary projects, are not sufficiently involved in developing interdisciplinary strategies and do usually not regard the process of integration as such as a research topic of its own. There seems to be a general reluctance to apply (truly) interdisciplinary methodology because this is tedious and few, immediate incentives are experienced.

The study of middle school mathematics and science teachers' practices, perceptions, and attitudes related to mathematics and science integration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Leszczynski, Eliza

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the nature of mathematics and science connections made by sixth and seventh grade mathematics and science teachers in their classrooms. This study also examined the extent to which these connections represented mathematics and science integration and described the teachers' perceptions of and attitudes about mathematics and science integration. The primary data sources included classroom observations and teacher interviews. Findings suggested that teacher practices in making mathematics and science connections in the classroom incorporated many of the characteristics of integrated instruction presented in the literature. Teacher attitudes toward integration were found to be generally positive and supportive of integrated instruction. Mathematics teachers shared a common perception of integration being two separate lessons taught together in one lesson. In contrast, science teachers perceived integration to be a seamless blend of the two disciplines. The researcher related these perceptions and attitudes to the teachers' past experiences with mathematics and science connections and integration, and also to their practices of mathematics and science connections in the study.

Integration and Typologies of Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Case Study from Australian Wheat Sheep Zones.

PubMed

Huai, Jianjun

2016-09-27

Although the integrated indicator methods have become popular for assessing vulnerability to climate change, their proliferation has introduced a confusing array of scales and indicators that cause a science-policy gap. I argue for a clear adaptation pathway in an "integrative typology" of regional vulnerability that matches appropriate scales, optimal measurements and adaptive strategies in a six-dimensional and multi-level analysis framework of integration and typology inspired by the "5W1H" questions: "Who is concerned about how to adapt to the vulnerability of what to what in some place (where) at some time (when)?" Using the case of the vulnerability of wheat, barley and oats to drought in Australian wheat sheep zones during 1978-1999, I answer the "5W1H" questions through establishing the "six typologies" framework. I then optimize the measurement of vulnerability through contrasting twelve kinds of vulnerability scores with the divergence of crops yields from their regional mean. Through identifying the socioeconomic constraints, I propose seven generic types of crop-drought vulnerability and local adaptive strategy. Our results illustrate that the process of assessing vulnerability and selecting adaptations can be enhanced using a combination of integration, optimization and typology, which emphasize dynamic transitions and transformations between integration and typology.

Why the Petascale era will drive improvements in the management of the full lifecycle of earth science data.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyborn, L.

2012-04-01

The advent of the petascale era, in both storage and compute facilities, will offer new opportunities for earth scientists to transform the way they do their science and to undertake cross-disciplinary science at a global scale. No longer will data have to be averaged and subsampled: it can be analysed to its fullest resolution at national or even global scales. Much larger data volumes can be analysed in single passes and at higher resolution: large scale cross domain science is now feasible. However, in general, earth sciences have been slow to capitalise on the potential of these new petascale compute facilities: many struggle to even use terascale facilities. Our chances of using these new facilities will require a vast improvement in the management of the full life cycle of data: in reality it will need to be transformed. Many of our current issues with earth science data are historic and stem from the limitations of early data storage systems. As storage was so expensive, metadata was usually stored separate from the data and attached as a readme file. Likewise, attributes that defined uncertainty, reliability and traceability were recoded in lab note books and rarely stored with the data. Data were routinely transferred as files. The new opportunities require that the traditional discover, display and locally download and process paradigm is too limited. For data access and assimilation to be improved, data will need to be self describing. For heterogeneous data to be rapidly integrated attributes such as reliability, uncertainty and traceability will need to be systematically recorded with each observation. The petascale era also requires that individual data files be transformed and aggregated into calibrated data arrays or data cubes. Standards become critical and are the enablers of integration. These changes are common to almost every science discipline. What makes earth sciences unique is that many domains record time series data, particularly in the environmental geosciences areas (weathering, soil changes, climate change). The data life cycle will be measured in decades and centuries, not years. Preservation over such time spans is quite a challenge to the earth sciences as data will have to be managed over many evolutions of software and hardware. The focus has to be on managing the data and not the media. Currently storage is not an issue, but it is predicted that data volumes will soon exceed the effective storage media than can be physically manufactured. This means that organisations will have to think about disposal and destruction of data. For earth sciences, this will be a particularly sensitive issue. Petascale computing offers many new opportunities to the earth sciences and by 2020 exascale computers will be a reality. To fully realise these opportunities the earth sciences needs to actively and systematically rethink what the ramifications of these new systems will have on current practices for data storage, discovery, access and assimilation.

The BIG Data Center: from deposition to integration to translation

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Biological data are generated at unprecedentedly exponential rates, posing considerable challenges in big data deposition, integration and translation. The BIG Data Center, established at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences, provides a suite of database resources, including (i) Genome Sequence Archive, a data repository specialized for archiving raw sequence reads, (ii) Gene Expression Nebulas, a data portal of gene expression profiles based entirely on RNA-Seq data, (iii) Genome Variation Map, a comprehensive collection of genome variations for featured species, (iv) Genome Warehouse, a centralized resource housing genome-scale data with particular focus on economically important animals and plants, (v) Methylation Bank, an integrated database of whole-genome single-base resolution methylomes and (vi) Science Wikis, a central access point for biological wikis developed for community annotations. The BIG Data Center is dedicated to constructing and maintaining biological databases through big data integration and value-added curation, conducting basic research to translate big data into big knowledge and providing freely open access to a variety of data resources in support of worldwide research activities in both academia and industry. All of these resources are publicly available and can be found at http://bigd.big.ac.cn. PMID:27899658

Challenges in integrating multidisciplinary data into a single e-infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Atakan, Kuvvet; Jeffery, Keith G.; Bailo, Daniele; Harrison, Matthew

2015-04-01

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) aims to create a pan-European infrastructure for solid Earth science to support a safe and sustainable society. The mission of EPOS is to monitor and understand the dynamic and complex Earth system by relying on new e-science opportunities and integrating diverse and advanced Research Infrastructures in Europe for solid Earth Science. EPOS will enable innovative multidisciplinary research for a better understanding of the Earth's physical and chemical processes that control earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, ground instability and tsunami as well as the processes driving tectonics and Earth's surface dynamics. EPOS will improve our ability to better manage the use of the subsurface of the Earth. Through integration of data, models and facilities EPOS will allow the Earth Science community to make a step change in developing new concepts and tools for key answers to scientific and socio-economic questions concerning geo-hazards and geo-resources as well as Earth sciences applications to the environment and to human welfare. EPOS is now getting into its Implementation Phase (EPOS-IP). One of the main challenges during the implementation phase is the integration of multidisciplinary data into a single e-infrastructure. Multidisciplinary data are organized and governed by the Thematic Core Services (TCS) and are driven by various scientific communities encompassing a wide spectrum of Earth science disciplines. TCS data, data products and services will be integrated into a platform "the ICS system" that will ensure their interoperability and access to these services by the scientific community as well as other users within the society. This requires dedicated tasks for interactions with the various TCS-WPs, as well as the various distributed ICS (ICS-Ds), such as High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, large scale data storage facilities, complex processing and visualization tools etc. Computational Earth Science (CES) services are identified as a transversal activity and as such need to be harmonized and provided within the ICS. In order to develop a metadata catalogue and the ICS system, the content from the entire spectrum of services included in TCS, ICS-Ds as well as CES activities, need to be organized in a systematic manner taking into account global and European IT-standards, while complying with the user needs and data provider requirements.

Integrating Climate and Ecosystem-Response Sciences in Temperate Western North American Mountains: The CIRMOUNT Initiative

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Millar, C. I.; Fagre, D. B.

2004-12-01

Mountain regions are uniquely sensitive to changes in climate, vulnerable to climate effects on biotic and physical factors of intense social concern, and serve as critical early-warning systems of climate impacts. Escalating demands on western North American (WNA) mountain ecosystems increasingly stress both natural resources and rural community capacities; changes in mountain systems cascade to issues of national concern. Although WNA has long been a focus for climate- and climate-related environmental research, these efforts remain disciplinary and poorly integrated, hindering interpretation into policy and management. Knowledge is further hampered by lack of standardized climate monitoring stations at high-elevations in WNA. An initiative is emerging as the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (CIRMOUNT) whose primary goal is to improve knowledge of high-elevation climate systems and to better integrate physical, ecological, and social sciences relevant to climate change, ecosystem response, and natural-resource policy in WNA. CIRMOUNT seeks to focus research on climate variability and ecosystem response (progress in understanding synoptic scale processes) that improves interpretation of linkages between ecosystem functions and human processing (progress in understanding human-environment integration), which in turn would yield applicable information and understanding on key societal issues such as mountains as water towers, biodiversity, carbon forest sinks, and wildland hazards such as fire and forest dieback (progress in understanding ecosystem services and key thresholds). Achieving such integration depends first on implementing a network of high-elevation climate-monitoring stations, and linking these with integrated ecosystem-response studies. Achievements since 2003 include convening the 2004 Mountain Climate Sciences Symposium (1, 2) and several special sessions at technical conferences; initiating a biennial mountain climate research symposium (MTNCLIM), the first to be held in spring 2005; developing a strategy for climate-monitoring in WNA; installing and networking high-elevation (>3000m) climate-monitoring stations; and completing three target regions (Glacier National Park, MT; Sierra Nevada and White Mountains, CA) of the international GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) plant-monitoring project, the first in WNA. CIRMOUNT emphasizes integration at the regional scale in WNA, collaborating with and complementing projects such as the Western Mountain Initiative, whose mandate is more targeted than CIRMOUNT's, and global programs such as GLORIA and the international Mountain Research Initiative. Achievement of continuing success in WNA hinges on the capacity to secure long-term funding and institutional investment. (1) See associated URL for paper and poster pdfs (2) Discussing the future of western U.S. mountains, climate change, and ecosystems. EOS 31 August 2004, 85(35), p. 329

Nanobonding: A key technology for emerging applications in health and environmental sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Howlader, Matiar M. R.; Deen, M. Jamal; Suga, Tadatomo

2015-03-01

In this paper, surface-activation-based nanobonding technology and its applications are described. This bonding technology allows for the integration of electronic, photonic, fluidic and mechanical components into small form-factor systems for emerging sensing and imaging applications in health and environmental sciences. Here, we describe four different nanobonding techniques that have been used for the integration of various substrates — silicon, gallium arsenide, glass, and gold. We use these substrates to create electronic (silicon), photonic (silicon and gallium arsenide), microelectromechanical (glass and silicon), and fluidic (silicon and glass) components for biosensing and bioimaging systems being developed. Our nanobonding technologies provide void-free, strong, and nanometer scale bonding at room temperature or at low temperatures (<200 °C), and do not require chemicals, adhesives, or high external pressure. The interfaces of the nanobonded materials in ultra-high vacuum and in air correspond to covalent bonds, and hydrogen or hydroxyl bonds, respectively.

A concept for performance management for Federal science programs

USGS Publications Warehouse

Whalen, Kevin G.

2017-11-06

The demonstration of clear linkages between planning, funding, outcomes, and performance management has created unique challenges for U.S. Federal science programs. An approach is presented here that characterizes science program strategic objectives by one of five “activity types”: (1) knowledge discovery, (2) knowledge development and delivery, (3) science support, (4) inventory and monitoring, and (5) knowledge synthesis and assessment. The activity types relate to performance measurement tools for tracking outcomes of research funded under the objective. The result is a multi-time scale, integrated performance measure that tracks individual performance metrics synthetically while also measuring progress toward long-term outcomes. Tracking performance on individual metrics provides explicit linkages to root causes of potentially suboptimal performance and captures both internal and external program drivers, such as customer relations and science support for managers. Functionally connecting strategic planning objectives with performance measurement tools is a practical approach for publicly funded science agencies that links planning, outcomes, and performance management—an enterprise that has created unique challenges for public-sector research and development programs.

Strategy for earth explorers in global earth sciences

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1988-01-01

The goal of the current NASA Earth System Science initiative is to obtain a comprehensive scientific understanding of the Earth as an integrated, dynamic system. The centerpiece of the Earth System Science initiative will be a set of instruments carried on polar orbiting platforms under the Earth Observing System program. An Earth Explorer program can open new vistas in the earth sciences, encourage innovation, and solve critical scientific problems. Specific missions must be rigorously shaped by the demands and opportunities of high quality science and must complement the Earth Observing System and the Mission to Planet Earth. The committee believes that the proposed Earth Explorer program provides a substantial opportunity for progress in the earth sciences, both through independent missions and through missions designed to complement the large scale platforms and international research programs that represent important national commitments. The strategy presented is intended to help ensure the success of the Earth Explorer program as a vital stimulant to the study of the planet.

How "Discover the COSMOS", "PATHWAY", "Go-Lab" and "Inspiring Science Education" are changing the science education in European high schools

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kourkoumelis, Christine

2014-04-01

It has been noted by various reports that during recent years, there has been an alarming decline in young people's interest for science studies and mathematics. Since it is believed that the traditional teaching methods often fail to foster positive attitudes towards learning science, the European Commission has made intensive efforts to promote science education in schools though new methods based on the inquiry methodology of learning: questions, search and answers. This should be coupled to laboratories and hands-on experience which should be structured and scaffolded in a pedagogically meaningful way. "PATHWAY", "Discover the COSMOS" and "ISE" have been providing the lesson plans and the best practices for teachers and students and "Go-lab" is working towards an integrated set up of on-line labs for large scale use in science education. In the next sections some concrete examples which aim to bring the High Energy Physics (HEP) frontier research to schools will be given.

The Need for Integrated Approaches in Metabolic Engineering

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lechner, Anna; Brunk, Elizabeth; Keasling, Jay D.

This review highlights state-of-the-art procedures for heterologous small-molecule biosynthesis, the associated bottlenecks, and new strategies that have the potential to accelerate future accomplishments in metabolic engineering. We emphasize that a combination of different approaches over multiple time and size scales must b e considered for successful pathway engineering in a heterologous host. We have classified these optimization procedures based on the "system" that is being manipulated: transcriptome, translatome, proteome, or reactome. By bridging multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and computational sciences, we can create an integral framework for the discovery and implementation of novel biosynthetic production routes.

The Need for Integrated Approaches in Metabolic Engineering

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lechner, Anna; Brunk, Elizabeth; Keasling, Jay D.

Highlights include state-of-the-art procedures for heterologous small-molecule biosynthesis, the associated bottlenecks, and new strategies that have the potential to accelerate future accomplishments in metabolic engineering. A combination of different approaches over multiple time and size scales must be considered for successful pathway engineering in a heterologous host. We have classified these optimization procedures based on the “system” that is being manipulated: transcriptome, translatome, proteome, or reactome. Here, by bridging multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and computational sciences, we can create an integral framework for the discovery and implementation of novel biosynthetic production routes.

The Need for Integrated Approaches in Metabolic Engineering

DOE PAGES

Lechner, Anna; Brunk, Elizabeth; Keasling, Jay D.

2016-08-15

Highlights include state-of-the-art procedures for heterologous small-molecule biosynthesis, the associated bottlenecks, and new strategies that have the potential to accelerate future accomplishments in metabolic engineering. A combination of different approaches over multiple time and size scales must be considered for successful pathway engineering in a heterologous host. We have classified these optimization procedures based on the “system” that is being manipulated: transcriptome, translatome, proteome, or reactome. Here, by bridging multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and computational sciences, we can create an integral framework for the discovery and implementation of novel biosynthetic production routes.

Integrating continental-scale ecological data into university courses: Developing NEON's Online Learning Portal

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wasser, L. A.; Gram, W.; Lunch, C. K.; Petroy, S. B.; Elmendorf, S.

2013-12-01

'Big Data' are becoming increasingly common in many fields. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be collecting data over the 30 years, using consistent, standardized methods across the United States. Similar efforts are underway in other parts of the globe (e.g. Australia's Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, TERN). These freely available new data provide an opportunity for increased understanding of continental- and global scale processes such as changes in vegetation structure and condition, biodiversity and landuse. However, while 'big data' are becoming more accessible and available, integrating big data into the university courses is challenging. New and potentially unfamiliar data types and associated processing methods, required to work with a growing diversity of available data, may warrant time and resources that present a barrier to classroom integration. Analysis of these big datasets may further present a challenge given large file sizes, and uncertainty regarding best methods to properly statistically summarize and analyze results. Finally, teaching resources, in the form of demonstrative illustrations, and other supporting media that might help teach key data concepts, take time to find and more time to develop. Available resources are often spread widely across multi-online spaces. This presentation will overview the development of NEON's collaborative University-focused online education portal. Portal content will include 1) interactive, online multi-media content that explains key concepts related to NEON's data products including collection methods, key metadata to consider and consideration of potential error and uncertainty surrounding data analysis; and 2) packaged 'lab' activities that include supporting data to be used in an ecology, biology or earth science classroom. To facilitate broad use in classrooms, lab activities will take advantage of freely and commonly available processing tools, techniques and scripts. All NEON materials are being developed in collaboration with labs and organizations across the globe. Integrating data analysis and processing techniques, early in student's careers will support and facilitate student advancement in the sciences - contributing to a larger body of knowledge and understanding of continental and global scale issues. Facilitating understanding of data use and empowering young ecologists with the tools required to process the data, is thus as integral to the observatory as the data itself. In this presentation, we discuss the integral role of freely available education materials that demonstrate the use of big data to address ecological questions and concepts. We also review gaps in existing educational resources related to big data and associated tools. Further, we address the great potential for big data inclusion into both an existing ecological, physical and environmental science courses and self-paced learning model through engaging and interactive multi-media presentation. Finally, we present beta-versions of the interactive, multi-media modules and results from feedback following early piloting and review.

Science-Grade Observing Systems as Process Observatories: Mapping and Understanding Nonlinearity and Multiscale Memory with Models and Observations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barros, A. P.; Wilson, A. M.; Miller, D. K.; Tao, J.; Genereux, D. P.; Prat, O.; Petersen, W. A.; Brunsell, N. A.; Petters, M. D.; Duan, Y.

2015-12-01

Using the planet as a study domain and collecting observations over unprecedented ranges of spatial and temporal scales, NASA's EOS (Earth Observing System) program was an agent of transformational change in Earth Sciences over the last thirty years. The remarkable space-time organization and variability of atmospheric and terrestrial moist processes that emerged from the analysis of comprehensive satellite observations provided much impetus to expand the scope of land-atmosphere interaction studies in Hydrology and Hydrometeorology. Consequently, input and output terms in the mass and energy balance equations evolved from being treated as fluxes that can be used as boundary conditions, or forcing, to being viewed as dynamic processes of a coupled system interacting at multiple scales. Measurements of states or fluxes are most useful if together they map, reveal and/or constrain the underlying physical processes and their interactions. This can only be accomplished through an integrated observing system designed to capture the coupled physics, including nonlinear feedbacks and tipping points. Here, we first review and synthesize lessons learned from hydrometeorology studies in the Southern Appalachians and in the Southern Great Plains using both ground-based and satellite observations, physical models and data-assimilation systems. We will specifically focus on mapping and understanding nonlinearity and multiscale memory of rainfall-runoff processes in mountainous regions. It will be shown that beyond technical rigor, variety, quantity and duration of measurements, the utility of observing systems is determined by their interpretive value in the context of physical models to describe the linkages among different observations. Second, we propose a framework for designing science-grade and science-minded process-oriented integrated observing and modeling platforms for hydrometeorological studies.

Interfacing with in-Situ Data Networks during the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McInerney, M.; Griffith, P. C.; Duffy, D.; Hoy, E.; Schnase, J. L.; Sinno, S.; Thompson, J. H.

2014-12-01

The Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is designed to improve understanding of the causes and impacts of ecological changes in Arctic/boreal regions, and will integrate field-based studies, modeling, and data from airborne and satellite remote sensing. ABoVE will result in a fuller understanding of ecosystem vulnerability and resilience to environmental change in the Arctic and boreal regions of western North America, and provide scientific information required to develop options for societal responses to the impacts of these changes. The studies sponsored by NASA during ABoVE will be coordinated with research and in-situ monitoring activities being sponsored by a number of national and international partners. The NASA Center for Climate Simulation at the Goddard Space Flight Center has partnered with the NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Office to create a science cloud designed for this field campaign - the ABoVE Science Cloud (ASC). The ASC combines high performance computing with emerging technologies to create an environment specifically designed for large-scale modeling, analysis of remote sensing data, copious disk storage with integrated data management, and integration of core variables from in-situ networks identified by the ABoVE Science Definition Team. In this talk, we will present the scientific requirements driving the development of the ABoVE Science Cloud, discuss the necessary interfaces, both computational and human, with in-situ monitoring networks, and show examples of how the ASC is being used to meet the needs of the ABoVE campaign.

A Case Based-Shared Teaching Approach in Undergraduate Medical Curriculum: A Way for Integration in Basic and Clinical Sciences.

PubMed

Peiman, Soheil; Mirzazadeh, Azim; Alizadeh, Maryam; Mortaz Hejri, Sara; Najafi, Mohammad-Taghi; Tafakhori, Abbas; Larti, Farnoosh; Rahimi, Besharat; Geraiely, Babak; Pasbakhsh, Parichehr; Hassanzadeh, Gholamreza; Nabavizadeh Rafsanjani, Fatemeh; Ansari, Mohammad; Allameh, Seyed Farshad

2017-04-01

To present a multiple-instructor, active-learning strategy in the undergraduate medical curriculum. This educational research is a descriptive one. Shared teaching sessions, were designed for undergraduate medical students in six organ-system based courses. Sessions that involved in-class discussions of integrated clinical cases were designed implemented and moderated by at least 3 faculties (clinicians and basic scientists). The participants in this study include the basic sciences medical students of The Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Students' reactions were assessed using an immediate post-session evaluation form on a 5-point Likert scale. Six two-hour sessions for 2 cohorts of students, 2013 and 2014 medical students during their two first years of study were implemented from April 2014 to March 2015. 17 faculty members participated in the program, 21 cases were designed, and participation average was 60 % at 6 sessions. Students were highly appreciative of this strategy. The majority of students in each course strongly agreed that this learning practice positively contributed to their learning (78%) and provided better understanding and application of the material learned in an integrated classroom course (74%). They believed that the sessions affected their view about medicine (73%), and should be continued in future courses (80%). The percentage demonstrates the average of all courses. The program helped the students learn how to apply basic sciences concepts to clinical medicine. Evaluation of the program indicated that students found the sessions beneficial to their learning.

Situational Awareness Applied to Geology Field Mapping using Integration of Semantic Data and Visualization Techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Houser, P. I. Q.

2017-12-01

21st century earth science is data-intensive, characterized by heterogeneous, sometimes voluminous collections representing phenomena at different scales collected for different purposes and managed in disparate ways. However, much of the earth's surface still requires boots-on-the-ground, in-person fieldwork in order to detect the subtle variations from which humans can infer complex structures and patterns. Nevertheless, field experiences can and should be enabled and enhanced by a variety of emerging technologies. The goal of the proposed research project is to pilot test emerging data integration, semantic and visualization technologies for evaluation of their potential usefulness in the field sciences, particularly in the context of field geology. The proposed project will investigate new techniques for data management and integration enabled by semantic web technologies, along with new techniques for augmented reality that can operate on such integrated data to enable in situ visualization in the field. The research objectives include: Develop new technical infrastructure that applies target technologies to field geology; Test, evaluate, and assess the technical infrastructure in a pilot field site; Evaluate the capabilities of the systems for supporting and augmenting field science; and Assess the generality of the system for implementation in new and different types of field sites. Our hypothesis is that these technologies will enable what we call "field science situational awareness" - a cognitive state formerly attained only through long experience in the field - that is highly desirable but difficult to achieve in time- and resource-limited settings. Expected outcomes include elucidation of how, and in what ways, these technologies are beneficial in the field; enumeration of the steps and requirements to implement these systems; and cost/benefit analyses that evaluate under what conditions the investments of time and resources are advisable to construct such system.

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility Expansion

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Thigpen, William W.

2017-01-01

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division enables advances in high-end computing technologies and in modeling and simulation methods to tackle some of the toughest science and engineering challenges facing NASA today. The name "NAS" has long been associated with leadership and innovation throughout the high-end computing (HEC) community. We play a significant role in shaping HEC standards and paradigms, and provide leadership in the areas of large-scale InfiniBand fabrics, Lustre open-source filesystems, and hyperwall technologies. We provide an integrated high-end computing environment to accelerate NASA missions and make revolutionary advances in science. Pleiades, a petaflop-scale supercomputer, is used by scientists throughout the U.S. to support NASA missions, and is ranked among the most powerful systems in the world. One of our key focus areas is in modeling and simulation to support NASA's real-world engineering applications and make fundamental advances in modeling and simulation methods.

Analysis of Photogrammetry Data from ISIM Mockup, June 1, 2007

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nowak, Maria; Hill, Mike

2007-01-01

During ground testing of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the ISIM Optics group plans to use a Photogrammetry Measurement System for cryogenic calibration of specific target points on the ISIM composite structure and Science Instrument optical benches and other GSE equipment. This testing will occur in the Space Environmental Systems (SES) chamber at Goddard Space Flight Center. Close range photogrammetry is a 3 dimensional metrology system using triangulation to locate custom targets in 3 coordinates via a collection of digital photographs taken from various locations and orientations. These photos are connected using coded targets, special targets that are recognized by the software and can thus correlate the images to provide a 3 dimensional map of the targets, and scaled via well calibrated scale bars. Photogrammetry solves for the camera location and coordinates of the targets simultaneously through the bundling procedure contained in the V-STARS software.

Earthwalk

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Muller, E.

2006-12-01

When the weather is nice, I like to take my students on a walk to the center of the earth. Earthwalk is a hands-on and feet-on activity that gets students outdoors, having fun, moving and learning about the structures of the earth. Earthwalk is a lesson to help students visualize our planets size and scale. This activity has students calculate the ratio of a scaled 100m cross-sectional earth, mark the boundaries between major planetary layers, walk from the center of the earth to the surface and draw proportional manmade and natural surface features (mountains, building, mine shafts, etc). This lesson effectively integrates content and pedagogy while touching on skills and topics such as math, measurement, science, writing skills (they have to take notes), reading, listening and group dynamics. This activity fits well into the earth science curriculum by introducing basic seismology; tectonic, geochemistry and heat transfer concepts. Besides showcasing this lesson, a limited number of Earth Anatomy posters will be distributed.

Integrating art into science education: a survey of science teachers' practices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Turkka, Jaakko; Haatainen, Outi; Aksela, Maija

2017-07-01

Numerous case studies suggest that integrating art and science education could engage students with creative projects and encourage students to express science in multitude of ways. However, little is known about art integration practices in everyday science teaching. With a qualitative e-survey, this study explores the art integration of science teachers (n = 66). A pedagogical model for science teachers' art integration emerged from a qualitative content analysis conducted on examples of art integration. In the model, art integration is characterised as integration through content and activities. Whilst the links in the content were facilitated either directly between concepts and ideas or indirectly through themes or artefacts, the integration through activity often connected an activity in one domain and a concept, idea or artefact in the other domain with the exception of some activities that could belong to both domains. Moreover, the examples of art integration in everyday classroom did not include expression of emotions often associated with art. In addition, quantitative part of the survey confirmed that integration is infrequent in all mapped areas. The findings of this study have implications for science teacher education that should offer opportunities for more consistent art integration.

Integrating Art into Science Education: A Survey of Science Teachers' Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Turkka, Jaakko; Haatainen, Outi; Aksela, Maija

2017-01-01

Numerous case studies suggest that integrating art and science education could engage students with creative projects and encourage students to express science in multitude of ways. However, little is known about art integration practices in everyday science teaching. With a qualitative e-survey, this study explores the art integration of science…

Report from the NSF/SSMA Wingspread Conference: A Network for Integrated Science and Mathematics Teaching and Learning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berlin, Donna F.; White, Arthur L.

1992-01-01

Reports the proceedings of the Wingspread conference on integrating science and mathematics teaching and learning. Discusses (1) a literature review on integration of science and mathematics education; (2) development of definitions of integration; (3) specification of guidelines for infusing integrated teaching and learning into science and…

Intending to stay: Positive images, attitudes, and classroom experiences as influences on students' intentions to persist in science and engineering majors

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyer, Mary Beth

2000-10-01

Contemporary research on persistence in undergraduate education in science and engineering has focused primarily on identifying the structural, social, and psychological barriers to participation by students in underrepresented groups. As a result, there is a wealth of data to document why students leave their majors, but there is little direct empirical data to support prevailing presumptions about why students stay. Moreover, researchers have used widely differing definitions and measures of persistence, and they have seldom explored field differences. This study compared three ways of measuring persistence. These constituted three criterion variables: commitment to major, degree aspirations, and commitment to a science/engineering career. The study emphasized social factors that encourage students to persist, including four predictor variables---(1) positive images of scientists/engineers, (2) positive attitudes toward gender and racial equality, (3) positive classroom experiences, and (4) high levels of social integration. In addition, because researchers have repeatedly documented the degree to which women are more likely than men to drop out of science and engineering majors, the study examined the potential impact of gender in relation to these predictor variables. A survey was administered in the classroom to a total of 285 students enrolled in a required course for either a biological sciences and or an engineering major. Predictor variables were developed from standard scales, including the Images of Science/Scientists Scale, the Attitudes toward Women Scale, the Women in Science Scale, and the Perceptions of Prejudice Scale. Based on logistic regression models, results indicate that positive images of scientists and engineers was significantly related to improving the odds of students having a high commitment to major, high degree aspirations, and high commitment to career. There was also evidence that positive attitudes toward gender and racial equality as well as positive classroom experiences improved the odds of students' having high degree aspirations. There was limited evidence to suggest the significance of gender in interaction with the predictor variables. There was tentative evidence that field differences may play a critical role in persistence. The study concludes on two points. The first is that gender may be a more important factor in explaining why some students leave their science and engineering majors than in explaining why others stay. The second is that research directed at improving diversity in science would benefit from discussion about the measures of persistence.

Science for Managing Riverine Ecosystems: Actions for the USGS Identified in the Workshop "Analysis of Flow and Habitat for Instream Aquatic Communities"

USGS Publications Warehouse

Bencala, Kenneth E.; Hamilton, David B.; Petersen, James H.

2006-01-01

Federal and state agencies need improved scientific analysis to support riverine ecosystem management. The ability of the USGS to integrate geologic, hydrologic, chemical, geographic, and biological data into new tools and models provides unparalleled opportunities to translate the best riverine science into useful approaches and usable information to address issues faced by river managers. In addition to this capability to provide integrated science, the USGS has a long history of providing long-term and nationwide information about natural resources. The USGS is now in a position to advance its ability to provide the scientific support for the management of riverine ecosystems. To address this need, the USGS held a listening session in Fort Collins, Colorado in April 2006. Goals of the workshop were to: 1) learn about the key resource issues facing DOI, other Federal, and state resource management agencies; 2) discuss new approaches and information needs for addressing these issues; and 3) outline a strategy for the USGS role in supporting riverine ecosystem management. Workshop discussions focused on key components of a USGS strategy: Communications, Synthesis, and Research. The workshop identified 3 priority actions the USGS can initiate now to advance its capabilities to support integrated science for resource managers in partner government agencies and non-governmental organizations: 1) Synthesize the existing science of riverine ecosystem processes to produce broadly applicable conceptual models, 2) Enhance selected ongoing instream flow projects with complementary interdisciplinary studies, and 3) Design a long-term, watershed-scale research program that will substantively reinvent riverine ecosystem science. In addition, topical discussion groups on hydrology, geomorphology, aquatic habitat and populations, and socio-economic analysis and negotiation identified eleven important complementary actions required to advance the state of the science and to develop the tools for supporting decisions on riverine ecosystem management. These eleven actions lie within the continuum of Communications, Synthesis, and Research.

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission Science Data Center: Technologies, Methods, and Experiences in Making Available Large Quantities of Science Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pankratz, C. K.; Kokkonen, K.; Larsen, K. W.; Panneton, R. S.; Putnam, B.; Schafer, C.; Baker, D. N.; Burch, J. L.

2016-12-01

On September 1, 2015 the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) constellation of four satellites completed their six-month commissioning period and began routine science data collection. Science operations for the mission is conducted at the Science Operations Center (SOC) at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The MMS Science Data Center (SDC) is a component of the SOC responsible for the data production, management, dissemination, archiving, and visualization of the data from the extensive suite of 100 instruments onboard the four spacecraft. As of March 2016, MMS science data are openly available to the entire science community via the SDC. This includes hundreds of science parameters, and 50 gigabytes of data per day distributed across thousands of data files. Products are produced using integrated software systems developed and maintained by teams at other institutions using their own institutional software management procedures and made available via a centralized public web site and web services. To accomplish the data management, data processing, and system integration challenges present on this space mission, the MMS SDC incorporates a number of evolutionary techniques and technologies. This presentation will provide an informatics-oriented view of the MMS SDC, summarizing its technical aspects, novel technologies and data management practices that are employed, experiences with its design and development, and lessons learned. Also presented is the MMS "Scientist-in-the-Loop" (SITL) system, which is used to leverage human insight and expertise to optimize the data selected for transmission to the ground. This smoothly operating system entails the seamless interoperability of multiple mission facilities and data systems that ultimately translate scientist insight into uplink commands that triggers optimal data downlink to the ground.

How In-Service Science Teachers Integrate History and Nature of Science in Elementary Science Courses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hacieminoglu, Esme

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the in-service science teachers' (IST) perceptions and practices about curriculum and integration of the history of science (HOS) and the nature of science (NOS) affect their science courses. For this aim, how ISTs integrated the NOS and HOS in their elementary science courses for understanding of…

Generation of multiphoton entangled quantum states by means of integrated frequency combs.

PubMed

Reimer, Christian; Kues, Michael; Roztocki, Piotr; Wetzel, Benjamin; Grazioso, Fabio; Little, Brent E; Chu, Sai T; Johnston, Tudor; Bromberg, Yaron; Caspani, Lucia; Moss, David J; Morandotti, Roberto

2016-03-11

Complex optical photon states with entanglement shared among several modes are critical to improving our fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics and have applications for quantum information processing, imaging, and microscopy. We demonstrate that optical integrated Kerr frequency combs can be used to generate several bi- and multiphoton entangled qubits, with direct applications for quantum communication and computation. Our method is compatible with contemporary fiber and quantum memory infrastructures and with chip-scale semiconductor technology, enabling compact, low-cost, and scalable implementations. The exploitation of integrated Kerr frequency combs, with their ability to generate multiple, customizable, and complex quantum states, can provide a scalable, practical, and compact platform for quantum technologies. Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Horizontal integration of the basic sciences in the chiropractic curriculum.

PubMed

Ward, Kevin P

2010-01-01

Basic science curricula at most chiropractic colleges consist of courses (eg, general anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc) that are taught as stand-alone content domains. The lack of integration between basic science disciplines causes difficulties for students who need to understand how the parts function together as an integrated whole and apply this understanding to solving clinical problems. More horizontally integrated basic science curricula could be achieved by several means: integrated Part I National Board of Chiropractic Examiners questions, a broader education for future professors, an increased emphasis on integration within the current model, linked courses, and an integrated, thematic basic science curriculum. Horizontally integrating basic science curricula would require significant efforts from administrators, curriculum committees, and instructional faculty. Once in place this curriculum would promote more clinically relevant learning, improved learning outcomes, and superior vertical integration.

Horizontal Integration of the Basic Sciences in the Chiropractic Curriculum

PubMed Central

Ward, Kevin P.

2010-01-01

Basic science curricula at most chiropractic colleges consist of courses (eg, general anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc) that are taught as stand-alone content domains. The lack of integration between basic science disciplines causes difficulties for students who need to understand how the parts function together as an integrated whole and apply this understanding to solving clinical problems. More horizontally integrated basic science curricula could be achieved by several means: integrated Part I National Board of Chiropractic Examiners questions, a broader education for future professors, an increased emphasis on integration within the current model, linked courses, and an integrated, thematic basic science curriculum. Horizontally integrating basic science curricula would require significant efforts from administrators, curriculum committees, and instructional faculty. Once in place this curriculum would promote more clinically relevant learning, improved learning outcomes, and superior vertical integration. PMID:21048882

What does physics have to do with cancer?

PubMed Central

Michor, Franziska; Liphardt, Jan; Ferrari, Mauro; Widom, Jonathan

2013-01-01

Large-scale cancer genomics, proteomics and RNA-sequencing efforts are currently mapping in fine detail the genetic and biochemical alterations that occur in cancer. However, it is becoming clear that it is difficult to integrate and interpret these data and to translate them into treatments. This difficulty is compounded by the recognition that cancer cells evolve, and that initiation, progression and metastasis are influenced by a wide variety of factors. To help tackle this challenge, the US National Cancer Institute Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers initiative is bringing together physicists, cancer biologists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers. How are we beginning to address cancer from the perspective of the physical sciences? PMID:21850037

The Mexican National Programs on Teaching Mathematics and Science with Technology: The Legacy of a Decade of Experiences of Transformation of School Practices and Interactions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sacristán, Ana Isabel; Rojano, Teresa

Here we give an overview of the Mexican experience of a national program, begun in 1997, of gradual implementation of computational tools in the lower secondary-school classrooms (children 12-15 years-old) for mathematics and science. This project illustrates, through the benefit of long-term hindsight, the successes and difficulties of large-scale massive implementation of technologies in schools. The key factors for success and for transforming school practices seem to be: adequate planning, gradual implementation, continuous training and support, and enough time (years) for assimilation and integration.

Integrated low emissions cleanup system for direct coal-fueled turbines

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lippert, T.E.; Newby, R.A.; Alvin, M.A.

1992-01-01

The Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Science Technology Center (W-STC) is developing an Integrated Low Emissions Cleanup (ILEC) concept for high-temperature gas cleaning to meet environmental standards, as well as to economical gas turbine life. The ILEC concept simultaneously controls sulfur, particulate, and alkali contaminants in high-pressure fuel gases or combustion gases at temperatures up to 1850[degrees]F for advanced power generation systems (PFBC, APFBC, IGCC, DCF7). The objective of this program is to demonstrate, at a bench scale, the conceptual, technical feasibility of the REC concept. The ELEC development program has a 3 phase structure: Phase 1 - laboratory-scale testing; phase 2more » - bench-scale equipment; design and fabrication; and phase 3 - bench-scale testing. Phase 1 laboratory testing has been completed. In Phase 1, entrained sulfur and alkali sorbent kinetics were measured and evaluated, and commercial-scale performance was projected. Related cold flow model testing has shown that gas-particle contacting within the ceramic barrier filter vessel will provide a good reactor environment. The Phase 1 test results and the commercial evaluation conducted in the Phase 1 program support the bench-scale facility testing to be performed in Phase 3. Phase 2 is nearing completion with the design and assembly of a modified, bench-scale test facility to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the ILEC features. This feasibility testing will be conducted in Phase 3.« less

Integrated low emissions cleanup system for direct coal-fueled turbines

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lippert, T.E.; Newby, R.A.; Alvin, M.A.

1992-12-31

The Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Science & Technology Center (W-STC) is developing an Integrated Low Emissions Cleanup (ILEC) concept for high-temperature gas cleaning to meet environmental standards, as well as to economical gas turbine life. The ILEC concept simultaneously controls sulfur, particulate, and alkali contaminants in high-pressure fuel gases or combustion gases at temperatures up to 1850{degrees}F for advanced power generation systems (PFBC, APFBC, IGCC, DCF7). The objective of this program is to demonstrate, at a bench scale, the conceptual, technical feasibility of the REC concept. The ELEC development program has a 3 phase structure: Phase 1 - laboratory-scale testing; phasemore » 2 - bench-scale equipment; design and fabrication; and phase 3 - bench-scale testing. Phase 1 laboratory testing has been completed. In Phase 1, entrained sulfur and alkali sorbent kinetics were measured and evaluated, and commercial-scale performance was projected. Related cold flow model testing has shown that gas-particle contacting within the ceramic barrier filter vessel will provide a good reactor environment. The Phase 1 test results and the commercial evaluation conducted in the Phase 1 program support the bench-scale facility testing to be performed in Phase 3. Phase 2 is nearing completion with the design and assembly of a modified, bench-scale test facility to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the ILEC features. This feasibility testing will be conducted in Phase 3.« less

Science Objectives and Design of the European Seas Observatory NETwork (ESONET)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ruhl, H.; Géli, L.; Karstensen, J.; Colaço, A.; Lampitt, R.; Greinert, J.; Phannkuche, O.; Auffret, Y.

2009-04-01

The needs for a network of ocean observing systems cross many applied and research areas of earth and marine science. Many of the science areas that can be examined using such systems have direct impacts on societal health and well being and our understanding of ocean function in a shifting climate. The European Seas Observatory NETwork (ESONET) Network of Excellence has been evaluating ocean observatory design requirements, data management needs, standardization and interoperability concerns, social implications, outreach and education, as well as financial and legal aspects of developing such a system. ESONET has great potential to address a growing set of Earth science questions that require a broad and integrated network of ocean and seafloor observations. ESONET activities are also importantly integrating researchers in the European Community, as well as internationally. There is now wide recognition that research addressing science questions of international priority, such as understanding the potential impacts of climate change or geohazards like earthquakes and tsunamis should be conducted in a framework that can address questions across adequate temporal and spatial scales. We will present the relevant science priorities in the four interconnected fields of geoscience, physical oceanography, biogeochemistry, and marine ecology, and some of the practical ways in which these questions can be addressed using ESONET. Several key questions persist that will require comprehensive interdisciplinary approaches including: How can monitoring of factors such as seismic activity, fluid pore chemistry and pressure, improve seismic, slope failure, and tsunami warning? To what extent do seabed processes influence ocean physics, biogeochemistry, and marine ecosystems? How are physical and biogeochemical processes that occur at differing scales related? What aspects of physical oceanography and biogeochemical cycling will be most sensitive to climate change? What will the important feedbacks of potential ecological change be on biogeochemical cycles? What are the factors that control the distribution and abundance of marine life and what will the influence of anthropogenic change be? We will outline a set of science objectives and observation parameters to be collected at all ESONET sites, as well as a set of rather specific objectives and thus parameters that might only be measured at some sites. We will also present the preliminary module specifications now being considered by ESONET. In a practical sense the observatory design has been divided into those that will be included in a so called ‘generic' module and those that will be part of science-specific modules. Outlining preliminary module specifications is required to move forward with studies of observatory design and operation. These specifications are importantly provisional and can be updated as science needs and feasibility change. A functional cleavage not only comes between aspects that are considered generic or specific, but also the settings in which those systems will be used. For example, some modules will be on the seabed and some will be moored in the water column. In order to address many of the questions posed above ESONET users will require other supporting data from other programs from local to international levels. Examples of these other data sources include satellite oceanographic data, climatic data, air-sea interface data, and the known distribution and abundances of marine fauna. Thus the connection of ESONET to other programs is integral to its success. The development of ESONET provides a substantial opportunity for ocean science to evolve in Europe. Furthermore, ESONET and several other developing ocean observatory programs are integrating into larger science frameworks including the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and Global Monitoring of Environment and Security (GMES) programs. It is only in a greater integrated framework that the full potential of the component systems will be realized.

Exploring cognitive integration of basic science and its effect on diagnostic reasoning in novices.

PubMed

Lisk, Kristina; Agur, Anne M R; Woods, Nicole N

2016-06-01

Integration of basic and clinical science knowledge is increasingly being recognized as important for practice in the health professions. The concept of 'cognitive integration' places emphasis on the value of basic science in providing critical connections to clinical signs and symptoms while accounting for the fact that clinicians may not spontaneously articulate their use of basic science knowledge in clinical reasoning. In this study we used a diagnostic justification test to explore the impact of integrated basic science instruction on novices' diagnostic reasoning process. Participants were allocated to an integrated basic science or clinical science training group. The integrated basic science group was taught the clinical features along with the underlying causal mechanisms of four musculoskeletal pathologies while the clinical science group was taught only the clinical features. Participants completed a diagnostic accuracy test immediately after initial learning, and one week later a diagnostic accuracy and justification test. The results showed that novices who learned the integrated causal mechanisms had superior diagnostic accuracy and better understanding of the relative importance of key clinical features. These findings further our understanding of cognitive integration by providing evidence of the specific changes in clinical reasoning when basic and clinical sciences are integrated during learning.

78 FR 38318 - Integrated Science Assessment for Lead

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-06-26

... ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY [FRL-9827-4] Integrated Science Assessment for Lead AGENCY... availability of a final document titled, ``Integrated Science Assessment for Lead'' (EPA/600/R-10/075F). The... ``Integrated Science Assessment for Lead'' will be made available primarily through the Internet on the NCEA...

Smart Data Infrastructure: The Sixth Generation of Mediation for Data Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, P. A.

2014-12-01

In the emergent "fourth paradigm" (data-driven) science, the scientific method is enhanced by the integration of significant data sources into the practice of scientific research. To address Big Science, there are challenges in understanding the role of data in enabling researchers to attack not just disciplinary issues, but also the system-level, large-scale, and transdisciplinary global scientific challenges facing society.Recognizing that the volume of data is only one of many dimensions to be considered, there is a clear need for improved data infrastructures to mediate data and information exchange, which we contend will need to be powered by semantic technologies. One clear need is to provide computational approaches for researchers to discover appropriate data resources, rapidly integrate data collections from heterogeneously resources or multiple data sets, and inter-compare results to allow generation and validation of hypotheses. Another trend is toward automated tools that allow researchers to better find and reuse data that they currently don't know they need, let alone know how to find. Again semantic technologies will be required. Finally, to turn data analytics from "art to science", technical solutions are needed for cross-dataset validation, reproducibility studies on data-driven results, and the concomitant citation of data products allowing recognition for those who curate and share important data resources.

2014 Future Earth Young Scientists Conference on Integrated Science and Knowledge Co-Production for Ecosystems and Human Well-Being †

PubMed Central

Shiue, Ivy; Samberg, Leah; Kulohoma, Benard; Dogaru, Diana; Wyborn, Carina; Hamel, Perrine; Jørgensen, Peter Søgaard; Lussier, Paul; Sundaram, Bharath; Lim, Michelle; Tironi, Antonio

2014-01-01

Effective integration in science and knowledge co-production is a challenge that crosses research boundaries, climate regions, languages and cultures. Early career scientists are crucial in the identification of, and engagement with, obstacles and opportunities in the development of innovative solutions to complex and interconnected problems. On 25–31 May 2014, International Council for Science and International Social Science Council, in collaboration with the International Network of Next-Generation Ecologists and Institute for New Economic Thinking: Young Scholars Initiative, assembled a group of early career researchers with diverse backgrounds and research perspectives to reflect on and debate relevant issues around ecosystems and human wellbeing in the transition towards green economy, funded by the German Research Foundation, at Villa Vigoni, Italy. As a group of young scientists, we have come to a consensus that collaboration and communication among a diverse group of peers from different geographic regions could break down the barriers to multi-disciplinary research designed to solve complex global-scale problems. We also propose to establish a global systematic thinking to monitor global socio-ecological systems and to develop criteria for a “good” anthropocene. Finally, we aim to bridge gaps among research, the media, and education from a governance perspective linking with “sustainable development goals”. PMID:25390795

Reflective Writing about the Utility Value of Science as a Tool for Increasing STEM Motivation and Retention -- Can AI Help Scale Up?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beigman Klebanov, Beata; Burstein, Jill; Harackiewicz, Judith M.; Priniski, Stacy J.; Mulholland, Matthew

2017-01-01

The integration of subject matter learning with reading and writing skills takes place in multiple ways. Students learn to read, interpret, and write texts in the discipline-relevant genres. However, writing can be used not only for the purposes of practice in professional communication, but also as an opportunity to reflect on the learned…

Integrating Mobile Phones into Science Teaching to Help Students Develop a Procedure to Evaluate the Corrosion Rate of Iron in Simulated Seawater

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moraes, Edgar P.; Confessor, Mario R.; Gasparotto, Luiz H. S.

2015-01-01

This article proposes an indirect method to evaluate the corrosion rate of iron nail in simulated seawater. The official procedure is based on the direct measurement of the specimen's weight loss over time; however, a highly precise scale is required and such equipment may not be easily available. On the other hand, mobile phones equipped with…

Dental Implant Systems

PubMed Central

Oshida, Yoshiki; Tuna, Elif B.; Aktören, Oya; Gençay, Koray

2010-01-01

Among various dental materials and their successful applications, a dental implant is a good example of the integrated system of science and technology involved in multiple disciplines including surface chemistry and physics, biomechanics, from macro-scale to nano-scale manufacturing technologies and surface engineering. As many other dental materials and devices, there are crucial requirements taken upon on dental implants systems, since surface of dental implants is directly in contact with vital hard/soft tissue and is subjected to chemical as well as mechanical bio-environments. Such requirements should, at least, include biological compatibility, mechanical compatibility, and morphological compatibility to surrounding vital tissues. In this review, based on carefully selected about 500 published articles, these requirements plus MRI compatibility are firstly reviewed, followed by surface texturing methods in details. Normally dental implants are placed to lost tooth/teeth location(s) in adult patients whose skeleton and bony growth have already completed. However, there are some controversial issues for placing dental implants in growing patients. This point has been, in most of dental articles, overlooked. This review, therefore, throws a deliberate sight on this point. Concluding this review, we are proposing a novel implant system that integrates materials science and up-dated surface technology to improve dental implant systems exhibiting bio- and mechano-functionalities. PMID:20480036

Ultrafast optical ranging using microresonator soliton frequency combs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Trocha, P.; Karpov, M.; Ganin, D.; Pfeiffer, M. H. P.; Kordts, A.; Wolf, S.; Krockenberger, J.; Marin-Palomo, P.; Weimann, C.; Randel, S.; Freude, W.; Kippenberg, T. J.; Koos, C.

2018-02-01

Light detection and ranging is widely used in science and industry. Over the past decade, optical frequency combs were shown to offer advantages in optical ranging, enabling fast distance acquisition with high accuracy. Driven by emerging high-volume applications such as industrial sensing, drone navigation, or autonomous driving, there is now a growing demand for compact ranging systems. Here, we show that soliton Kerr comb generation in integrated silicon nitride microresonators provides a route to high-performance chip-scale ranging systems. We demonstrate dual-comb distance measurements with Allan deviations down to 12 nanometers at averaging times of 13 microseconds along with ultrafast ranging at acquisition rates of 100 megahertz, allowing for in-flight sampling of gun projectiles moving at 150 meters per second. Combining integrated soliton-comb ranging systems with chip-scale nanophotonic phased arrays could enable compact ultrafast ranging systems for emerging mass applications.

III-V quantum light source and cavity-QED on silicon.

PubMed

Luxmoore, I J; Toro, R; Del Pozo-Zamudio, O; Wasley, N A; Chekhovich, E A; Sanchez, A M; Beanland, R; Fox, A M; Skolnick, M S; Liu, H Y; Tartakovskii, A I

2013-01-01

Non-classical light sources offer a myriad of possibilities in both fundamental science and commercial applications. Single photons are the most robust carriers of quantum information and can be exploited for linear optics quantum information processing. Scale-up requires miniaturisation of the waveguide circuit and multiple single photon sources. Silicon photonics, driven by the incentive of optical interconnects is a highly promising platform for the passive optical components, but integrated light sources are limited by silicon's indirect band-gap. III-V semiconductor quantum-dots, on the other hand, are proven quantum emitters. Here we demonstrate single-photon emission from quantum-dots coupled to photonic crystal nanocavities fabricated from III-V material grown directly on silicon substrates. The high quality of the III-V material and photonic structures is emphasized by observation of the strong-coupling regime. This work opens-up the advantages of silicon photonics to the integration and scale-up of solid-state quantum optical systems.

Teacher Perceptions of Inquiry and STEM Education in Bangladesh

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shahidullah, Kazi K.

This dissertation reports lower secondary science teachers perceptions of current practice in Dhaka, Bangladesh concerning inquiry and STEM Education in order to establish a baseline of data for reform of science education in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has been trying to incorporate inquiry-based science curricula since the 1970s. Over time, the science curricula also aligned with different international science education movements such as Science for All, Scientific Literacy, Science, Technology, and Society. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is the most recent science education movement in international science education. This study explored current practices and perceptions of lower secondary science teachers in order to establish a baseline of current practice so that future reform recommendations may be pursued and recommendations made for Bangladesh to overcome the inquiry-based challenges and to incorporate new STEM-based science education trends happening in the US and throughout the world. The study explored science teachers perceptions and readiness to transform their science classrooms based on self-reported survey. The survey utilized Likert-type scale with range 1 (very strongly disagree) to 6 (very strongly agree) among four hundred lower secondary science teachers, teacher training college faculty, and university faculty. The data is presented in four different categories: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development. Results indicated that the participants understand and practice a certain level of inquiry in their science classrooms, though they do not have adequate professional development. Participants also stated that they do not have sufficient instructional materials and the curriculum is not articulated enough to support inquiry. On the other hand, the participants reported that they understand and practice a certain degree of inquiry and STEM-based science education, but they also state that the current curriculum and instructional materials are not sufficient to practice inquiry nor to integrate more than one or two disciplines with science as is required in STEM integrated teaching. Finally, this study recommends a framework for science education reform for Bangladesh based upon a combination of successful international science education reformation practices.

The Holocene Geoarchaeology of the Desert Nile in Northern Sudan

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Woodward, Jamie; Macklin, Mark; Spencer, Neal; Welsby, Derek; Dalton, Matthew; Hay, Sophie; Hardy, Andrew

2016-04-01

Invited Paper Forty years ago Colin Renfrew declared that "every archaeological problem starts as a problem in geoarchaeology" (Renfrew, 1976 p. 2). With this assertion in mind, this paper draws upon the findings from field research in two sectors of the Nile Valley of Northern Sudan dedicated to the exploration of human-environment interactions during the middle and late Holocene. This part of the Nile corridor contains a rich cultural record and an exceptionally well preserved Holocene fluvial archive. A distinctive feature of these records is the variety of evidence for interaction between desert and river over a range of spatial and temporal scales. This interaction presented both challenges and opportunities for its ancient inhabitants. This paper will present evidence for large-scale landscape changes driven by shifts in global climate. It will also show how we have integrated the archaeological and geological records in the Northern Dongola Reach and at Amara West - where long-term field projects led by archaeologists from the British Museum have recognised the importance of a sustained commitment to interdisciplinary research to achieve a fully integrated geoarchaeological approach across a range of scales. The former project is a large-scale landscape survey with multiple sites across an 80 km reach of the Nile whilst the latter has a strong focus on a single New Kingdom town site and changes in its environmental setting. By combining multiple archaeological and geological datasets - and pioneering the use of OSL dating and strontium isotope analysis in the Desert Nile - we have developed a new understanding of human responses to Holocene climate and landscape change in this region. Renfrew, C. (1976) Archaeology and the earth sciences. In: D.A. Davidson and M.I. Shackley (eds) Geoarchaeology: Earth Science and the Past, Duckworth, London, 1-5.

A New Era of Science Education: Science Teachers' Perceptions and Classroom Practices of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Integration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Hui-Hui

Quality STEM education is the key in helping the United States maintain its lead in global competitiveness and in preparing for new economic and security challenges in the future. Policymakers and professional societies emphasize STEM education by legislating the addition of engineering standards to the existing science standards. On the other hand, the nature of the work of most STEM professionals requires people to actively apply STEM knowledge to make critical decisions. Therefore, using an integrated approach to teaching STEM in K-12 is expected. However, science teachers encounter numerous difficulties in adapting the new STEM integration reforms into their classrooms because of a lack of knowledge and experience. Therefore, high quality STEM integration professional development programs are an urgent necessity. In order to provide these high quality programs, it is important to understand teachers' perceptions and classroom practices regarding STEM integration. A multiple-case study was conducted with five secondary school science teachers in order to gain a better understanding of teachers' perceptions and classroom practices in using STEM integration. This study addresses the following research questions: 1) What are secondary school science teachers' practices of STEM integration? 2) What are secondary science teachers' overall perceptions of STEM integration? and 3) What is the connection between secondary science teachers' perceptions and understanding of STEM integration with their classroom practices? This research aims to explore teachers' perceptions and classroom practices in order to set up the baseline for STEM integration and also to determine STEM integration professional development best practices in science education. Findings from the study provide critical data for making informed decision about the direction for STEM integration in science education in K-12.

Report of the USGS Coastal and Marine Geology Modeling Workshop, Pacific Marine Science Center, Santa Cruz, CA, March 22-23, 2005

USGS Publications Warehouse

Sherwood, Christopher R.

2006-01-01

A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coastal and Marine Geology (CMG) Modeling Workshop was held to discuss the general topic of coastal modeling, defined broadly to include circulation, waves, sediment transport, water quality, ecology, sediment diagenesis, morphology change, and coastal evolution, on scales ranging from seconds and a few centimeters (individual ripples) to centuries (coastal evolution) and thousands of kilometers (tsunami propagation). The workshop was convened at the suggestion of CMG Program Management to improve communication among modelers and model users, assess modeling-related activities being conducted at the three centers (Florida Integrated Science Center, FISC; Pacific Marine Science Center; PMSC; and Woods Hole Science Center; WHSC), and develop goals, strategies, and plans for future modeling activities. The workshop represents a step toward developing a five-year strategic plan, and was timed to provide input for the FY06 prospectus. The workshop was held at the USGS Pacific Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz on March 22-23, 2005.

Facilitating the transition from physiology to hospital wards through an interdisciplinary case study of septic shock.

PubMed

Li, Albert S; Berger, Kenneth I; Schwartz, David R; Slater, William R; Goldfarb, David S

2014-04-12

In order to develop clinical reasoning, medical students must be able to integrate knowledge across traditional subject boundaries and multiple disciplines. At least two dimensions of integration have been identified: horizontal integration, bringing together different disciplines in considering a topic; and vertical integration, bridging basic science and clinical practice. Much attention has been focused on curriculum overhauls, but our approach is to facilitate horizontal and vertical integration on a smaller scale through an interdisciplinary case study discussion and then to assess its utility. An interdisciplinary case study discussion about a critically ill patient was implemented at the end of an organ system-based, basic sciences module at New York University School of Medicine. Three clinical specialists-a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, and a nephrologist-jointly led a discussion about a complex patient in the intensive care unit with multiple medical problems secondary to septic shock. The discussion emphasized the physiologic underpinnings behind the patient's presentation and the physiologic considerations across the various systems in determining proper treatment. The discussion also highlighted the interdependence between the cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal systems, which were initially presented in separate units. After the session students were given a brief, anonymous three-question free-response questionnaire in which they were asked to evaluate and freely comment on the exercise. Students not only took away physiological principles but also gained an appreciation for various thematic lessons for bringing basic science to the bedside, especially horizontal and vertical integration. The response of the participants was overwhelmingly positive with many indicating that the exercise integrated the material across organ systems, and strengthened their appreciation of the role of physiology in understanding disease presentations and guiding appropriate therapy. Horizontal and vertical integration can be presented effectively through a single-session case study, with complex patient cases involving multiple organ systems providing students opportunities to integrate their knowledge across organ systems while emphasizing the importance of physiology in clinical reasoning. Furthermore, having several clinicians from different specialties discuss the case together can reinforce the matter of integration across multiple organ systems and disciplines in students' minds.

Facilitating the transition from physiology to hospital wards through an interdisciplinary case study of septic shock

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background In order to develop clinical reasoning, medical students must be able to integrate knowledge across traditional subject boundaries and multiple disciplines. At least two dimensions of integration have been identified: horizontal integration, bringing together different disciplines in considering a topic; and vertical integration, bridging basic science and clinical practice. Much attention has been focused on curriculum overhauls, but our approach is to facilitate horizontal and vertical integration on a smaller scale through an interdisciplinary case study discussion and then to assess its utility. Methods An interdisciplinary case study discussion about a critically ill patient was implemented at the end of an organ system-based, basic sciences module at New York University School of Medicine. Three clinical specialists—a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, and a nephrologist—jointly led a discussion about a complex patient in the intensive care unit with multiple medical problems secondary to septic shock. The discussion emphasized the physiologic underpinnings behind the patient’s presentation and the physiologic considerations across the various systems in determining proper treatment. The discussion also highlighted the interdependence between the cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal systems, which were initially presented in separate units. After the session students were given a brief, anonymous three-question free-response questionnaire in which they were asked to evaluate and freely comment on the exercise. Results Students not only took away physiological principles but also gained an appreciation for various thematic lessons for bringing basic science to the bedside, especially horizontal and vertical integration. The response of the participants was overwhelmingly positive with many indicating that the exercise integrated the material across organ systems, and strengthened their appreciation of the role of physiology in understanding disease presentations and guiding appropriate therapy. Conclusions Horizontal and vertical integration can be presented effectively through a single-session case study, with complex patient cases involving multiple organ systems providing students opportunities to integrate their knowledge across organ systems while emphasizing the importance of physiology in clinical reasoning. Furthermore, having several clinicians from different specialties discuss the case together can reinforce the matter of integration across multiple organ systems and disciplines in students’ minds. PMID:24725336

Metabolic Network Modeling of Microbial Communities

PubMed Central

Biggs, Matthew B.; Medlock, Gregory L.; Kolling, Glynis L.

2015-01-01

Genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions and constraint-based analysis are powerful methods that have the potential to make functional predictions about microbial communities. Current use of genome-scale metabolic networks to characterize the metabolic functions of microbial communities includes species compartmentalization, separating species-level and community-level objectives, dynamic analysis, the “enzyme-soup” approach, multi-scale modeling, and others. There are many challenges inherent to the field, including a need for tools that accurately assign high-level omics signals to individual community members, new automated reconstruction methods that rival manual curation, and novel algorithms for integrating omics data and engineering communities. As technologies and modeling frameworks improve, we expect that there will be proportional advances in the fields of ecology, health science, and microbial community engineering. PMID:26109480

Measurement of the small-scale structure of the intergalactic medium using close quasar pairs.

PubMed

Rorai, Alberto; Hennawi, Joseph F; Oñorbe, Jose; White, Martin; Prochaska, J Xavier; Kulkarni, Girish; Walther, Michael; Lukić, Zarija; Lee, Khee-Gan

2017-04-28

The distribution of diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM) imprints a series of hydrogen absorption lines on the spectra of distant background quasars known as the Lyman-α forest. Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations predict that IGM density fluctuations are suppressed below a characteristic scale where thermal pressure balances gravity. We measured this pressure-smoothing scale by quantifying absorption correlations in a sample of close quasar pairs. We compared our measurements to hydrodynamical simulations, where pressure smoothing is determined by the integrated thermal history of the IGM. Our findings are consistent with standard models for photoionization heating by the ultraviolet radiation backgrounds that reionized the universe. Copyright © 2017, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Use of MicroMaps for Satellite Validation and Potential UAV Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Connors, V. S.; Sachse, G. W.; Hopkins, P. E.; Morrow, W.; McMillan, W. W.

2005-12-01

The MicroMAPS instrument is a nadir-viewing, gas filter-correlated radiometer which operates in the 4.67 micrometer fundamental band of carbon monoxide. Originally designed and built for a space mission, this CO remote sensor is being flown in support of satellite validation and science instrument demonstrations for potential UAV applications. The MicroMAPS CO instrument was flown for the first time during the Summer-Fall 2004 on-board the Proteus aircraft, which is owned and operated by Scaled Composites, in Mojave, CA. The insturment system, flown on Proteus, was designed by a student team as a senior design project in the Aerospace Engineering Department, Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, VA. This proposed design was reviewed and revised by Systems Engineers at NASA Langley; the final instrument system was integrated and tested at NASA LaRC in partnership with Scaled Composites and Virginia Space Grant Consortium, which supervised the fabrication of the nacelle which housed the instrument system on the right rear tail boom of Proteus. Full system integration and flight testing was performed at Scaled Composites, in Mojave, in June 2004. Its successful performance enabled participation in three international science missions: INTEX -NA over eastern North America in July 2004, ADRIEX over the Mediterranean region and EAQUATE over the United Kingdom region in September 2004, piggy-backing with the IPO-sponsored payload flown on Proteus. These flights resulted in nearly 100 hours of science measurements and in-flight calibrations. In parallel with the engineering devlopments, theoretical radiative transfer models were developed specifically for the MicroMAPS instrument system at the University of Virginia, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department by a combined undergraduate and graduate student team. With techical support from Resonance Ltd. In June 2005, in Barrie, Canada, the MicroMAPS instrument was calibrated for the conditions underwhich the Summer-Fall 2004 flights occurred. The analyses of the calibration data, combined with the theoretical radiative transfer models, will provide the first data reduction for the science flights. These early results and comparisons with profile data from the NASA DC-8 and the coincident AIRS CO retrievals will be presented.

Nutritional Systems Biology Modeling: From Molecular Mechanisms to Physiology

PubMed Central

de Graaf, Albert A.; Freidig, Andreas P.; De Roos, Baukje; Jamshidi, Neema; Heinemann, Matthias; Rullmann, Johan A.C.; Hall, Kevin D.; Adiels, Martin; van Ommen, Ben

2009-01-01

The use of computational modeling and simulation has increased in many biological fields, but despite their potential these techniques are only marginally applied in nutritional sciences. Nevertheless, recent applications of modeling have been instrumental in answering important nutritional questions from the cellular up to the physiological levels. Capturing the complexity of today's important nutritional research questions poses a challenge for modeling to become truly integrative in the consideration and interpretation of experimental data at widely differing scales of space and time. In this review, we discuss a selection of available modeling approaches and applications relevant for nutrition. We then put these models into perspective by categorizing them according to their space and time domain. Through this categorization process, we identified a dearth of models that consider processes occurring between the microscopic and macroscopic scale. We propose a “middle-out” strategy to develop the required full-scale, multilevel computational models. Exhaustive and accurate phenotyping, the use of the virtual patient concept, and the development of biomarkers from “-omics” signatures are identified as key elements of a successful systems biology modeling approach in nutrition research—one that integrates physiological mechanisms and data at multiple space and time scales. PMID:19956660

Ultrafast dynamics and stabilization in chip-scale optical frequency combs (Conference Presentation)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huang, Shu Wei

2017-02-01

Optical frequency comb technology has been the cornerstone for scientific breakthroughs such as precision frequency metrology, re-definition of time, extreme light-matter interaction, and attosecond sciences. Recently emerged Kerr-active microresonators are promising alternatives to the current benchmark femtosecond laser platform. These chip-scale frequency combs, or Kerr combs, are unique in their compact footprints and offer the potential for monolithic electronic and feedback integration, thereby expanding the already remarkable applications of optical frequency combs. In this talk, I will first report the generation and characterization of low-phase-noise Kerr frequency combs. Measurements of the Kerr comb ultrafast dynamics and phase noise will be presented and discussed. Then I will describe novel strategies to fully stabilize Kerr comb line frequencies towards chip-scale optical frequency synthesizers with a relative uncertainty better than 2.7×10-16. I will show that the unique generation physics of Kerr frequency comb can provide an intrinsic self-referenced access to the Kerr comb line frequencies. The strategy improves the optical frequency stability by more than two orders of magnitude, while preserving the Kerr comb's key advantage of low SWaP and potential for chip-scale electronic and photonic integration.

Science based integrated approach to advanced nuclear fuel development - integrated multi-scale multi-physics hierarchical modeling and simulation framework Part III: cladding

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Tome, Carlos N; Caro, J A; Lebensohn, R A

2010-01-01

Advancing the performance of Light Water Reactors, Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles, and Advanced Reactors, such as the Next Generation Nuclear Power Plants, requires enhancing our fundamental understanding of fuel and materials behavior under irradiation. The capability to accurately model the nuclear fuel systems to develop predictive tools is critical. Not only are fabrication and performance models needed to understand specific aspects of the nuclear fuel, fully coupled fuel simulation codes are required to achieve licensing of specific nuclear fuel designs for operation. The backbone of these codes, models, and simulations is a fundamental understanding and predictive capability for simulating themore » phase and microstructural behavior of the nuclear fuel system materials and matrices. In this paper we review the current status of the advanced modeling and simulation of nuclear reactor cladding, with emphasis on what is available and what is to be developed in each scale of the project, how we propose to pass information from one scale to the next, and what experimental information is required for benchmarking and advancing the modeling at each scale level.« less

Integration and Typologies of Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Case Study from Australian Wheat Sheep Zones

PubMed Central

Huai, Jianjun

2016-01-01

Although the integrated indicator methods have become popular for assessing vulnerability to climate change, their proliferation has introduced a confusing array of scales and indicators that cause a science-policy gap. I argue for a clear adaptation pathway in an “integrative typology” of regional vulnerability that matches appropriate scales, optimal measurements and adaptive strategies in a six-dimensional and multi-level analysis framework of integration and typology inspired by the “5W1H” questions: “Who is concerned about how to adapt to the vulnerability of what to what in some place (where) at some time (when)?” Using the case of the vulnerability of wheat, barley and oats to drought in Australian wheat sheep zones during 1978–1999, I answer the “5W1H” questions through establishing the “six typologies” framework. I then optimize the measurement of vulnerability through contrasting twelve kinds of vulnerability scores with the divergence of crops yields from their regional mean. Through identifying the socioeconomic constraints, I propose seven generic types of crop-drought vulnerability and local adaptive strategy. Our results illustrate that the process of assessing vulnerability and selecting adaptations can be enhanced using a combination of integration, optimization and typology, which emphasize dynamic transitions and transformations between integration and typology. PMID:27670975

Integrating Science in Agricultural Education: Attitudes of Indiana Agricultural Science and Business Teachers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Balschweid, Mark A.; Thompson, Gregory W.

2002-01-01

In a survey of Indiana agriscience and business teachers (n=170), one-half reported their students receive science credit for agriscience and business courses; they felt prepared to teach integrated biological sciences; and integration required more preparation time. They needed appropriate equipment and adequate funding to support integration.…

An Instrumental Case Study of Effective Science Integration in a Traditional Agricultural Education Program

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baker, Marshall A.; Bunch, J. C.; Kelsey, Kathleen D.

2015-01-01

The integration of science and agriculture has been discussed since the inception of agricultural education. However, the standards-based focus in public secondary education and changing climate of agriculture has brought science integration back to the forefront. Though research has indicated that the integration of science into agricultural…

Examining Thai high school students' developing STEM projects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Teenoi, Kultida; Siripun, Kulpatsorn; Yuenyong, Chokchai

2018-01-01

Like others, Thailand education strongly focused on STEM education. This paper aimed to examine existing Thai high school students' integrated knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in their developing science project. The participants included 49 high school students were studying the subject of individual study (IS) in Khon Kaen wittayayon school, Khon Kaen, Thailand. The IS was provided to gradually enhance students to know how to do science project starting from getting start to do science projects, They enrolled to study the individual study of science project for three year in roll. Methodology was qualitative research. Views of students' integrated knowledge about STEM were interpreted through participant observation, interview, and students' science projects. The first author as participant observation has taught this group of students for 3 years. It found that 16 science projects were developed. Views of students' integrated knowledge about STEM could be categorized into three categories. These included (1) completely indicated integration of knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, (2) partial indicated integration of knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and (3) no integration. The findings revealed that majority of science projects could be categorized as completely indicated integration of knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The paper suggested some ideas of enhancing students to applying STEM for developing science projects.

Multiscale information modelling for heart morphogenesis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Abdulla, T.; Imms, R.; Schleich, J. M.; Summers, R.

2010-07-01

Science is made feasible by the adoption of common systems of units. As research has become more data intensive, especially in the biomedical domain, it requires the adoption of a common system of information models, to make explicit the relationship between one set of data and another, regardless of format. This is being realised through the OBO Foundry to develop a suite of reference ontologies, and NCBO Bioportal to provide services to integrate biomedical resources and functionality to visualise and create mappings between ontology terms. Biomedical experts tend to be focused at one level of spatial scale, be it biochemistry, cell biology, or anatomy. Likewise, the ontologies they use tend to be focused at a particular level of scale. There is increasing interest in a multiscale systems approach, which attempts to integrate between different levels of scale to gain understanding of emergent effects. This is a return to physiological medicine with a computational emphasis, exemplified by the worldwide Physiome initiative, and the European Union funded Network of Excellence in the Virtual Physiological Human. However, little work has been done on how information modelling itself may be tailored to a multiscale systems approach. We demonstrate how this can be done for the complex process of heart morphogenesis, which requires multiscale understanding in both time and spatial domains. Such an effort enables the integration of multiscale metrology.

Barriers, Support, and Collaboration: A Comparison of Science and Agriculture Teachers' Perceptions regarding Integration of Science into the Agricultural Education Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Warnick, Brian K.; Thompson, Gregory W.

2007-01-01

This study is part of a larger investigation which focused on determining and comparing the perceptions of agriculture teachers and science teachers on integrating science into agricultural education programs. Science and agriculture teachers' perceptions of barriers to integrating science, the support of stakeholders, and collaboration between…

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission Science Data Center: Technologies, Methods, and Experiences in Making Available Large Volumes of In-Situ Particle and Field Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pankratz, Christopher; Kokkonen, Kim; Larsen, Kristopher; Panneton, Russell; Putnam, Brian; Schafer, Corey; Baker, Daniel; Burch, James

2016-04-01

On September 1, 2015 the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) constellation of four satellites completed their six-month commissioning period and began routine science data collection. Science operations for the mission is conducted at the Science Operations Center (SOC) at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The MMS Science Data Center (SDC) is a component of the SOC responsible for the data production, management, dissemination, archiving, and visualization of the data from the extensive suite of 100 instruments onboard the four spacecraft. As of March 2016, MMS science data are openly available to the entire science community via the SDC. This includes hundreds of science parameters, and 50 gigabytes of data per day distributed across thousands of data files. Products are produced using integrated software systems developed and maintained by teams at other institutions using their own institutional software management procedures and made available via a centralized public web site and web services. To accomplish the data management, data processing, and system integration challenges present on this space mission, the MMS SDC incorporates a number of evolutionary techniques and technologies. This presentation will provide an informatics-oriented view of the MMS SDC, summarizing its technical aspects, novel technologies and data management practices that are employed, experiences with its design and development, and lessons learned. Also presented is the MMS "Scientist-in-the-Loop" (SITL) system, which is used to leverage human insight and expertise to optimize the data selected for transmission to the ground. This smoothly operating system entails the seamless interoperability of multiple mission facilities and data systems that ultimately translate scientist insight into uplink commands that triggers optimal data downlink to the ground.

NEON Citizen Science: Planning and Prototyping

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Newman, S. J.; Henderson, S.; Gardiner, L. S.; Ward, D.; Gram, W.

2011-12-01

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be a national resource for ecological research and education. NEON citizen science projects are being designed to increase awareness and educate citizen scientists about the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on continental-scale ecological processes as well as expand NEON data collection capacity by enabling laypersons to collect geographically distributed data. The citizen science area of the NEON web portal will enable citizen scientists to collect, contribute, interpret, and visualize scientific data, as well as access training modules, collection protocols and targeted learning experiences related to citizen science project topics. For NEON, citizen science projects are a means for interested people to interact with and contribute to NEON science. Investigations at vast spatial and temporal scales often require rapid acquisition of large amounts of data from a geographically distributed population of "human sensors." As a continental-scale ecological observatory, NEON is uniquely positioned to develop strategies to effectively integrate data collected by non-scientists into scientific databases. Ultimately, we plan to work collaboratively to transform the practice of science to include "citizens" or non-scientists in the process. Doing science is not limited to scientists, and breaking down the barriers between scientists and citizens will help people better understand the power of using science in their own decision making. In preparation for fully developing the NEON citizen science program, we are partnering with Project BudBurst (PBB), a citizen science project focused on monitoring plant phenology. The educational goals of PBB are to: (1) increase awareness of climate change, (2) educate citizen scientists about the impacts of climate change on plants and the environment, and (3) increase science literacy by engaging participants in the scientific process. Phenology was chosen as the focus of this citizen science campaign because it is a visible and comprehensible way of demonstrating the effects of climate change. In addition, plants are readily accessible in nearly every neighborhood and park, and wild area across the continent, so people can make observations whether they live near an inner city park or in the rural countryside. Recently, NEON developed data visualization tools for Project BudBurst to engage citizen science participants in "doing science" beyond data collection. By prototyping NEON citizen science through Project BudBurst, NEON is developing a better understanding of how to build a citizen science program that addresses areas of awareness, mastery, and leadership of scientific information like that which NEON will produce over the next 30 years.

A Guided Tour of Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Snieder, Roel; van Wijk, Kasper

2015-05-01

1. Introduction; 2. Dimensional analysis; 3. Power series; 4. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates; 5. Gradient; 6. Divergence of a vector field; 7. Curl of a vector field; 8. Theorem of Gauss; 9. Theorem of Stokes; 10. The Laplacian; 11. Scale analysis; 12. Linear algebra; 13. Dirac delta function; 14. Fourier analysis; 15. Analytic functions; 16. Complex integration; 17. Green's functions: principles; 18. Green's functions: examples; 19. Normal modes; 20. Potential-field theory; 21. Probability and statistics; 22. Inverse problems; 23. Perturbation theory; 24. Asymptotic evaluation of integrals; 25. Conservation laws; 26. Cartesian tensors; 27. Variational calculus; 28. Epilogue on power and knowledge.

Consortium biology in immunology: the perspective from the Immunological Genome Project.

PubMed

Benoist, Christophe; Lanier, Lewis; Merad, Miriam; Mathis, Diane

2012-10-01

Although the field has a long collaborative tradition, immunology has made less use than genetics of 'consortium biology', wherein groups of investigators together tackle large integrated questions or problems. However, immunology is naturally suited to large-scale integrative and systems-level approaches, owing to the multicellular and adaptive nature of the cells it encompasses. Here, we discuss the value and drawbacks of this organization of research, in the context of the long-running 'big science' debate, and consider the opportunities that may exist for the immunology community. We position this analysis in light of our own experience, both positive and negative, as participants of the Immunological Genome Project.

Introduction: Special issue on advances in topobathymetric mapping, models, and applications

USGS Publications Warehouse

Gesch, Dean B.; Brock, John C.; Parrish, Christopher E.; Rogers, Jeffrey N.; Wright, C. Wayne

2016-01-01

Detailed knowledge of near-shore topography and bathymetry is required for many geospatial data applications in the coastal environment. New data sources and processing methods are facilitating development of seamless, regional-scale topobathymetric digital elevation models. These elevation models integrate disparate multi-sensor, multi-temporal topographic and bathymetric datasets to provide a coherent base layer for coastal science applications such as wetlands mapping and monitoring, sea-level rise assessment, benthic habitat mapping, erosion monitoring, and storm impact assessment. The focus of this special issue is on recent advances in the source data, data processing and integration methods, and applications of topobathymetric datasets.

Bedrock and structural geologic maps of eastern Candor Sulci, western Ceti Mensa, and southeastern Ceti Mensa, Candor Chasma, Valles Marineris region of Mars

USGS Publications Warehouse

Okubo, Chris H.; Gaither, Tenielle A.

2017-05-12

This map product contains a set of three 1:18,000-scale maps showing the geology and structure of study areas in the western Candor Chasma region of Valles Marineris, Mars. These maps are part of an informal series of large-scale maps and map-based topical studies aimed at refining current understanding of the geologic history of western Candor Chasma. The map bases consist of digital elevation models and orthorectified images derived from High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) data. These maps are accompanied by geologic cross sections, colorized elevation maps, and cutouts of HiRISE images showing key superposition relations. Also included in this product is a Correlation of Map Units that integrates units across all three map areas, as well as an integrated Description of Map Units and an integrated Explanation of Map Symbols. The maps were assembled using ArcGIS software produced by Environmental Systems Research Institute (http://www.esri.com). The ArcGIS projects and databases associated with each map are included online as supplemental data.

An integrated semiconductor device enabling non-optical genome sequencing.

PubMed

Rothberg, Jonathan M; Hinz, Wolfgang; Rearick, Todd M; Schultz, Jonathan; Mileski, William; Davey, Mel; Leamon, John H; Johnson, Kim; Milgrew, Mark J; Edwards, Matthew; Hoon, Jeremy; Simons, Jan F; Marran, David; Myers, Jason W; Davidson, John F; Branting, Annika; Nobile, John R; Puc, Bernard P; Light, David; Clark, Travis A; Huber, Martin; Branciforte, Jeffrey T; Stoner, Isaac B; Cawley, Simon E; Lyons, Michael; Fu, Yutao; Homer, Nils; Sedova, Marina; Miao, Xin; Reed, Brian; Sabina, Jeffrey; Feierstein, Erika; Schorn, Michelle; Alanjary, Mohammad; Dimalanta, Eileen; Dressman, Devin; Kasinskas, Rachel; Sokolsky, Tanya; Fidanza, Jacqueline A; Namsaraev, Eugeni; McKernan, Kevin J; Williams, Alan; Roth, G Thomas; Bustillo, James

2011-07-20

The seminal importance of DNA sequencing to the life sciences, biotechnology and medicine has driven the search for more scalable and lower-cost solutions. Here we describe a DNA sequencing technology in which scalable, low-cost semiconductor manufacturing techniques are used to make an integrated circuit able to directly perform non-optical DNA sequencing of genomes. Sequence data are obtained by directly sensing the ions produced by template-directed DNA polymerase synthesis using all-natural nucleotides on this massively parallel semiconductor-sensing device or ion chip. The ion chip contains ion-sensitive, field-effect transistor-based sensors in perfect register with 1.2 million wells, which provide confinement and allow parallel, simultaneous detection of independent sequencing reactions. Use of the most widely used technology for constructing integrated circuits, the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process, allows for low-cost, large-scale production and scaling of the device to higher densities and larger array sizes. We show the performance of the system by sequencing three bacterial genomes, its robustness and scalability by producing ion chips with up to 10 times as many sensors and sequencing a human genome.

Examining the Effects of Integrated Science, Engineering, and Nonfiction Literature on Student Learning in Elementary Classrooms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tank, Kristina Maruyama

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on the integration of multiple disciplines in order to help prepare more students to better address the complex challenges they will face in the 21st century. Exposing students to an integrated and multidisciplinary approach will help them to better understand the connections between subjects instead of as individual and separate subjects. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Integration has been suggested as an approach that would model a multidisciplinary approach while also offering authentic and meaningful learning experiences to students. However, there is limited research on STEM integration in the elementary classroom and additional research is needed to better define and explore the effects of this integration for both students and science educators. With the recent recommendations for teaching both science and engineering in elementary classrooms (NRC, 2012), two common models include teaching science through inquiry and teaching science through engineering-design pedagogies. This study will explore both of these models as it seeks to better understand one piece of the larger issue of STEM and STEM integration by examining how the integration of science, engineering, and nonfiction literature affects students learning in elementary classrooms. This study employed an embedded mixed methods design to measure the effects of this integration on student learning in four fifth grade classrooms from the same elementary school. The findings revealed that the students who participated in the nonfiction reading instruction that was integrated with their science instruction showed a greater increase in all measures of student learning in both science and reading when compared to the control students. The findings from the integrated science, engineering and nonfiction literature revealed similar findings with the treatment students showing a greater increase in the measures of student learning in all three of the content areas. These results suggest that integrating nonfiction literature with science or science and engineering instruction can be an effective strategy in improving student learning in elementary classrooms.

Practical Insights into Curricula Integration for Primary Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hudson, Peter

2012-01-01

As indicated in a previous Teaching Science article, effective planning for curricula integration requires using standards from two (or more) subject areas (e.g., Science and English, Science and Art or Science and Mathematics), which also becomes the assessment foci for teaching and learning. Curricula integration of standards into an activity…

Hyporheic zone hydrologic science: A historical account of its emergence and a prospectus

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cardenas, M. Bayani

2015-05-01

The hyporheic zone, defined by shallow subsurface pathways through river beds and banks beginning and ending at the river, is an integral and unique component of fluvial systems. It hosts myriad hydrologically controlled processes that are potentially coupled in complex ways. Understanding these processes and the connections between them is critical since these processes are not only important locally but integrate to impact increasingly larger scale biogeochemical functioning of the river corridor up to the river network scale. Thus, the hyporheic zone continues to be a growing research focus for many hydrologists for more than half the history of Water Resources Research. This manuscript partly summarizes the historical development of hyporheic zone hydrologic science as gleaned from papers published in Water Resources Research, from the birth of the concept of the hyporheic zone as a hydrologic black box (sometimes referred to as transient storage zone), to its adolescent years of being torn between occasionally competing research perspectives of interrogating the hyporheic zone from a surface or subsurface view, to its mature emergence as an interdisciplinary research field that employs the wide array of state-of-the-art tools available to the modern hydrologist. The field is vibrant and moving in the right direction of addressing critical fundamental and applied questions with no clear end in sight in its growth. There are exciting opportunities for scientists that are able to tightly link the allied fields of geology, geomorphology, hydrology, geochemistry, and ecology to tackle the many open problems in hyporheic zone science.

Precision measurement of the integrated luminosity of the data taken by BESIII at center-of-mass energies between 3.810 GeV and 4.600 GeV

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ablikim, M.; N. Achasov, M.; Ai, X. C.; Albayrak, O.; Albrecht, M.; J. Ambrose, D.; Amoroso, A.; An, F. F.; An, Q.; Bai, J. Z.; R. Baldini, Ferroli; Ban, Y.; W. Bennett, D.; V. Bennett, J.; Bertani, M.; Bettoni, D.; Bian, J. M.; Bianchi, F.; Boger, E.; Bondarenko, O.; Boyko, I.; A. Briere, R.; Cai, H.; Cai, X.; Cakir, O.; Calcaterra, A.; Cao, G. F.; A. Cetin, S.; Chang, J. F.; Chelkov, G.; Chen, G.; Chen, H. S.; Chen, H. Y.; Chen, J. C.; Chen, M. L.; Chen, S. J.; Chen, X.; Chen, X. R.; Chen, Y. B.; Cheng, H. P.; Chu, X. K.; Cibinetto, G.; Cronin-Hennessy, D.; Dai, H. L.; Dai, J. P.; Dbeyssi, A.; Dedovich, D.; Deng, Z. Y.; Denig, A.; Denysenko, I.; Destefanis, M.; F. De, Mori; Ding, Y.; Dong, C.; Dong, J.; Dong, L. Y.; Dong, M. Y.; Du, S. X.; Duan, P. F.; Fan, J. Z.; Fang, J.; Fang, S. S.; Fang, X.; Fang, Y.; Fava, L.; Feldbauer, F.; Felici, G.; Feng, C. Q.; Fioravanti, E.; Fritsch, M.; Fu, C. D.; Gao, Q.; Gao, Y.; Gao, Z.; Garzia, I.; Geng, C.; Goetzen, K.; Gong, W. X.; Gradl, W.; Greco, M.; Gu, M. H.; Gu, Y. T.; Guan, Y. H.; Guo, A. Q.; Guo, L. B.; Guo, Y.; P. Guo, Y.; Haddadi, Z.; Hafner, A.; Han, S.; Han, Y. L.; Hao, X. Q.; A. Harris, F.; He, K. L.; He, Z. Y.; Held, T.; Heng, Y. K.; Hou, Z. L.; Hu, C.; Hu, H. M.; Hu, J. F.; Hu, T.; Hu, Y.; Huang, G. M.; Huang, G. S.; Huang, H. P.; Huang, J. S.; Huang, X. T.; Huang, Y.; Hussain, T.; Ji, Q.; Ji, Q. P.; Ji, X. B.; Ji, X. L.; Jiang, L. L.; Jiang, L. W.; Jiang, X. S.; Jiao, J. B.; Jiao, Z.; Jin, D. P.; Jin, S.; Johansson, T.; Julin, A.; Kalantar-Nayestanaki, N.; Kang, X. L.; Kang, X. S.; Kavatsyuk, M.; C. Ke, B.; Kliemt, R.; Kloss, B.; B. Kolcu, O.; Kopf, B.; Kornicer, M.; Kuehn, W.; Kupsc, A.; Lai, W.; S. Lange, J.; M., Lara; Larin, P.; Leng, C.; Li, C. H.; Li, Cheng; Li, D. M.; Li, F.; Li, G.; Li, H. B.; Li, J. C.; Li, Jin; Li, K.; Li, K.; Li, Lei; Li, P. R.; Li, T.; Li, W. D.; Li, W. G.; Li, X. L.; Li, X. M.; Li, X. N.; Li, X. Q.; Li, Z. B.; Liang, H.; Liang, Y. F.; Liang, Y. T.; Liao, G. R.; X. Lin(Lin, D.; Liu, B. J.; Liu, C. X.; Liu, F. H.; Liu, Fang; Liu, Feng; Liu, H. B.; Liu, H. H.; Liu, H. H.; Liu, H. M.; Liu, J.; Liu, J. P.; Liu, J. Y.; Liu, K.; Liu, K. Y.; Liu, L. D.; Liu, P. L.; Liu, Q.; Liu, S. B.; Liu, X.; Liu, X. X.; Liu, Y. B.; Liu, Z. A.; Liu, Zhiqiang; Zhiqing, Liu; Loehner, H.; Lou, X. C.; Lu, H. J.; Lu, J. G.; Lu, R. Q.; Lu, Y.; Lu, Y. P.; Luo, C. L.; Luo, M. X.; Luo, T.; Luo, X. L.; Lv, M.; Lyu, X. R.; Ma, F. C.; Ma, H. L.; Ma, L. L.; Ma, Q. M.; Ma, S.; Ma, T.; Ma, X. N.; Ma, X. Y.; E. Maas, F.; Maggiora, M.; A. Malik, Q.; Mao, Y. J.; Mao, Z. P.; Marcello, S.; G. Messchendorp, J.; Min, J.; Min, T. J.; E. Mitchell, R.; Mo, X. H.; Mo, Y. J.; C. Morales, Morales; Moriya, K.; Yu. Muchnoi, N.; Muramatsu, H.; Nefedov, Y.; Nerling, F.; B. Nikolaev, I.; Ning, Z.; Nisar, S.; Niu, S. L.; Niu, X. Y.; Olsen, S. L.; Ouyang, Q.; Pacetti, S.; Patteri, P.; Pelizaeus, M.; Peng, H. P.; Peters, K.; Ping, J. L.; Ping, R. G.; Poling, R.; Pu, Y. N.; Qi, M.; Qian, S.; Qiao, C. F.; Qin, L. Q.; Qin, N.; Qin, X. S.; Qin, Y.; Qin, Z. H.; Qiu, J. F.; H. Rashid, K.; F. Redmer, C.; Ren, H. L.; Ripka, M.; Rong, G.; Ruan, X. D.; Santoro, V.; Sarantsev, A.; Savrié, M.; Schoenning, K.; Schumann, S.; Shan, W.; Shao, M.; Shen, C. P.; Shen, P. X.; Shen, X. Y.; Sheng, H. Y.; Song, W. M.; Song, X. Y.; Sosio, S.; Spataro, S.; Sun, G. X.; Sun, J. F.; Sun, S. S.; Sun, Y. J.; Sun, Y. Z.; Sun, Z. J.; Sun, Z. T.; Tang, C. J.; Tang, X.; Tapan, I.; H. Thorndike, E.; Tiemens, M.; Toth, D.; Ullrich, M.; Uman, I.; S. Varner, G.; Wang, B.; Wang, B. L.; Wang, D.; Wang, D. Y.; Wang, K.; Wang, L. L.; Wang, L. S.; Wang, M.; Wang, P.; Wang, P. L.; Wang, Q. J.; Wang, S. G.; Wang, W.; Wang, X. F.; Yadi, Wang; Wang, Y. F.; Wang, Y. Q.; Wang, Z.; Wang, Z. G.; Wang, Z. H.; Wang, Z. Y.; Weber, T.; Wei, D. H.; Wei, J. B.; Weidenkaff, P.; Wen, S. P.; Wiedner, U.; Wolke, M.; Wu, L. H.; Wu, Z.; Xia, L. G.; Xia, Y.; Xiao, D.; Xiao, Z. J.; Xie, Y. G.; Xiu, Q. L.; Xu, G. F.; Xu, L.; Xu, Q. J.; Xu, Q. N.; Xu, X. P.; Yan, L.; Yan, W. B.; Yan, W. C.; Yan, Y. H.; Yang, H. X.; Yang, L.; Yang, Y.; Yang, Y. X.; Ye, H.; Ye, M.; Ye, M. H.; Yin, J. H.; Yu, B. X.; Yu, C. X.; Yu, H. W.; Yu, J. S.; Yuan, C. Z.; Yuan, W. L.; Yuan, Y.; Yuncu, A.; A. Zafar, A.; Zallo, A.; Zeng, Y.; Zhang, B. X.; Zhang, B. Y.; Zhang, C.; Zhang, C. C.; Zhang, D. H.; Zhang, H. H.; Zhang, H. Y.; Zhang, J. J.; Zhang, J. L.; Zhang, J. Q.; Zhang, J. W.; Zhang, J. Y.; Zhang, J. Z.; Zhang, K.; Zhang, L.; Zhang, S. H.; Zhang, X. Y.; Zhang, Y.; Zhang, Y. H.; Zhang, Y. T.; Zhang, Z. H.; Zhang, Z. P.; Zhang, Z. Y.; Zhao, G.; Zhao, J. W.; Zhao, J. Y.; Zhao, J. Z.; Zhao, Lei; Zhao, Ling; Zhao, M. G.; Zhao, Q.; Zhao, Q. W.; Zhao, S. J.; Zhao, T. C.; Zhao, Y. B.; Zhao, Z. G.; Zhemchugov, A.; Zheng, B.; Zheng, J. P.; Zheng, W. J.; Zheng, Y. H.; Zhong, B.; Zhou, L.; Zhou, Li; Zhou, X.; Zhou, X. K.; Zhou, X. R.; Zhou, X. Y.; Zhu, K.; Zhu, K. J.; Zhu, S.; Zhu, X. L.; Zhu, Y. C.; Zhu, Y. S.; Zhu, Z. A.; Zhuang, J.; Zotti, L.; Zou, B. S.; Zou, J. H.; BESIII Collaboration

2015-09-01

From December 2011 to May 2014, about 5 fb-1 of data were taken with the BESIII detector at center-of-mass energies between 3.810 GeV and 4.600 GeV to study the charmonium-like states and higher excited charmonium states. The time-integrated luminosity of the collected data sample is measured to a precision of 1% by analyzing events produced by the large-angle Bhabha scattering process. Supported by National Key Basic Research Program of China (2015CB856700), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (11125525, 11235011, 11322544, 11335008, 11425524), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Large-Scale Scientific Facility Program, Joint Large-Scale Scientific Facility Funds of the NSFC and CAS (11179007, U1232201, U1332201) CAS (KJCX2-YW-N29, KJCX2-YW-N45), 100 Talents Program of CAS, INPAC and Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, German Research Foundation DFG (Collaborative Research Center CRC-1044), Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy; Ministry of Development of Turkey (DPT2006K-120470), Russian Foundation for Basic Research (14-07-91152), U.S. Department of Energy (DE-FG02-04ER41291, DE-FG02-05ER41374, DE-FG02-94ER40823, DESC0010118), U.S. National Science Foundation, University of Groningen (RuG) and the Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung GmbH (GSI), Darmstadt and WCU Program of National Research Foundation of Korea (R32-2008-000-10155-0)

Designing a solution to enable agency-academic scientific collaboration for disasters

USGS Publications Warehouse

Mease, Lindley A.; Gibbs-Plessl, Theodora; Erickson, Ashley; Ludwig, Kristin A.; Reddy, Christopher M.; Lubchenco, Jane

2017-01-01

As large-scale environmental disasters become increasingly frequent and more severe globally, people and organizations that prepare for and respond to these crises need efficient and effective ways to integrate sound science into their decision making. Experience has shown that integrating nongovernmental scientific expertise into disaster decision making can improve the quality of the response, and is most effective if the integration occurs before, during, and after a crisis, not just during a crisis. However, collaboration between academic, government, and industry scientists, decision makers, and responders is frequently difficult because of cultural differences, misaligned incentives, time pressures, and legal constraints. Our study addressed this challenge by using the Deep Change Method, a design methodology developed by Stanford ChangeLabs, which combines human-centered design, systems analysis, and behavioral psychology. We investigated underlying needs and motivations of government agency staff and academic scientists, mapped the root causes underlying the relationship failures between these two communities based on their experiences, and identified leverage points for shifting deeply rooted perceptions that impede collaboration. We found that building trust and creating mutual value between multiple stakeholders before crises occur is likely to increase the effectiveness of problem solving. We propose a solution, the Science Action Network, which is designed to address barriers to scientific collaboration by providing new mechanisms to build and improve trust and communication between government administrators and scientists, industry representatives, and academic scientists. The Science Action Network has the potential to ensure cross-disaster preparedness and science-based decision making through novel partnerships and scientific coordination.

Large-scale adverse effects related to treatment evidence standardization (LAERTES): an open scalable system for linking pharmacovigilance evidence sources with clinical data.

PubMed

2017-03-07

Integrating multiple sources of pharmacovigilance evidence has the potential to advance the science of safety signal detection and evaluation. In this regard, there is a need for more research on how to integrate multiple disparate evidence sources while making the evidence computable from a knowledge representation perspective (i.e., semantic enrichment). Existing frameworks suggest well-promising outcomes for such integration but employ a rather limited number of sources. In particular, none have been specifically designed to support both regulatory and clinical use cases, nor have any been designed to add new resources and use cases through an open architecture. This paper discusses the architecture and functionality of a system called Large-scale Adverse Effects Related to Treatment Evidence Standardization (LAERTES) that aims to address these shortcomings. LAERTES provides a standardized, open, and scalable architecture for linking evidence sources relevant to the association of drugs with health outcomes of interest (HOIs). Standard terminologies are used to represent different entities. For example, drugs and HOIs are represented in RxNorm and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms respectively. At the time of this writing, six evidence sources have been loaded into the LAERTES evidence base and are accessible through prototype evidence exploration user interface and a set of Web application programming interface services. This system operates within a larger software stack provided by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics clinical research framework, including the relational Common Data Model for observational patient data created by the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership. Elements of the Linked Data paradigm facilitate the systematic and scalable integration of relevant evidence sources. The prototype LAERTES system provides useful functionality while creating opportunities for further research. Future work will involve improving the method for normalizing drug and HOI concepts across the integrated sources, aggregated evidence at different levels of a hierarchy of HOI concepts, and developing more advanced user interface for drug-HOI investigations.

Computational Environments and Analysis methods available on the NCI High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data (HPD) Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evans, B. J. K.; Foster, C.; Minchin, S. A.; Pugh, T.; Lewis, A.; Wyborn, L. A.; Evans, B. J.; Uhlherr, A.

2014-12-01

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has established a powerful in-situ computational environment to enable both high performance computing and data-intensive science across a wide spectrum of national environmental data collections - in particular climate, observational data and geoscientific assets. This paper examines 1) the computational environments that supports the modelling and data processing pipelines, 2) the analysis environments and methods to support data analysis, and 3) the progress in addressing harmonisation of the underlying data collections for future transdisciplinary research that enable accurate climate projections. NCI makes available 10+ PB major data collections from both the government and research sectors based on six themes: 1) weather, climate, and earth system science model simulations, 2) marine and earth observations, 3) geosciences, 4) terrestrial ecosystems, 5) water and hydrology, and 6) astronomy, social and biosciences. Collectively they span the lithosphere, crust, biosphere, hydrosphere, troposphere, and stratosphere. The data is largely sourced from NCI's partners (which include the custodians of many of the national scientific records), major research communities, and collaborating overseas organisations. The data is accessible within an integrated HPC-HPD environment - a 1.2 PFlop supercomputer (Raijin), a HPC class 3000 core OpenStack cloud system and several highly connected large scale and high-bandwidth Lustre filesystems. This computational environment supports a catalogue of integrated reusable software and workflows from earth system and ecosystem modelling, weather research, satellite and other observed data processing and analysis. To enable transdisciplinary research on this scale, data needs to be harmonised so that researchers can readily apply techniques and software across the corpus of data available and not be constrained to work within artificial disciplinary boundaries. Future challenges will involve the further integration and analysis of this data across the social sciences to facilitate the impacts across the societal domain, including timely analysis to more accurately predict and forecast future climate and environmental state.

The BIG Data Center: from deposition to integration to translation.

PubMed

2017-01-04

Biological data are generated at unprecedentedly exponential rates, posing considerable challenges in big data deposition, integration and translation. The BIG Data Center, established at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences, provides a suite of database resources, including (i) Genome Sequence Archive, a data repository specialized for archiving raw sequence reads, (ii) Gene Expression Nebulas, a data portal of gene expression profiles based entirely on RNA-Seq data, (iii) Genome Variation Map, a comprehensive collection of genome variations for featured species, (iv) Genome Warehouse, a centralized resource housing genome-scale data with particular focus on economically important animals and plants, (v) Methylation Bank, an integrated database of whole-genome single-base resolution methylomes and (vi) Science Wikis, a central access point for biological wikis developed for community annotations. The BIG Data Center is dedicated to constructing and maintaining biological databases through big data integration and value-added curation, conducting basic research to translate big data into big knowledge and providing freely open access to a variety of data resources in support of worldwide research activities in both academia and industry. All of these resources are publicly available and can be found at http://bigd.big.ac.cn. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Integrating Data Distribution and Data Assimilation Between the OOI CI and the NOAA DIF

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Meisinger, M.; Arrott, M.; Clemesha, A.; Farcas, C.; Farcas, E.; Im, T.; Schofield, O.; Krueger, I.; Klacansky, I.; Orcutt, J.; Peach, C.; Chave, A.; Raymer, D.; Vernon, F.

2008-12-01

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is an NSF funded program to establish the ocean observing infrastructure of the 21st century benefiting research and education. It is currently approaching final design and promises to deliver cyber and physical observatory infrastructure components as well as substantial core instrumentation to study environmental processes of the ocean at various scales, from coastal shelf-slope exchange processes to the deep ocean. The OOI's data distribution network lies at the heart of its cyber- infrastructure, which enables a multitude of science and education applications, ranging from data analysis, to processing, visualization and ontology supported query and mediation. In addition, it fundamentally supports a class of applications exploiting the knowledge gained from analyzing observational data for objective-driven ocean observing applications, such as automatically triggered response to episodic environmental events and interactive instrument tasking and control. The U.S. Department of Commerce through NOAA operates the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) providing continuous data in various formats, rates and scales on open oceans and coastal waters to scientists, managers, businesses, governments, and the public to support research and inform decision-making. The NOAA IOOS program initiated development of the Data Integration Framework (DIF) to improve management and delivery of an initial subset of ocean observations with the expectation of achieving improvements in a select set of NOAA's decision-support tools. Both OOI and NOAA through DIF collaborate on an effort to integrate the data distribution, access and analysis needs of both programs. We present details and early findings from this collaboration; one part of it is the development of a demonstrator combining web-based user access to oceanographic data through ERDDAP, efficient science data distribution, and scalable, self-healing deployment in a cloud computing environment. ERDDAP is a web-based front-end application integrating oceanographic data sources of various formats, for instance CDF data files as aggregated through NcML or presented using a THREDDS server. The OOI-designed data distribution network provides global traffic management and computational load balancing for observatory resources; it makes use of the OpenDAP Data Access Protocol (DAP) for efficient canonical science data distribution over the network. A cloud computing strategy is the basis for scalable, self-healing organization of an observatory's computing and storage resources, independent of the physical location and technical implementation of these resources.

Future trends in transport and fate of diffuse contaminants in catchments, with special emphasis on stable isotope applications

USGS Publications Warehouse

Turner, J.; Albrechtsen, H.-J.; Bonell, M.; Duguet, J.-P.; Harris, B.; Meckenstock, R.; McGuire, K.; Moussa, R.; Peters, N.; Richnow, H.H.; Sherwood-Lollar, B.; Uhlenbrook, S.; van, Lanen H.

2006-01-01

A summary is provided of the first of a series of proposed Integrated Science Initiative workshops supported by the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme. The workshop brought together hydrologists, environmental chemists, microbiologists, stable isotope specialists and natural resource managers with the purpose of communicating new ideas on ways to assess microbial degradation processes and reactive transport at catchment scales. The focus was on diffuse contamination at catchment scales and the application of compound-specific isotope analysis (CSIA) in the assessment of biological degradation processes of agrochemicals. Major outcomes were identifying the linkage between water residence time distribution and rates of contaminant degradation, identifying the need for better information on compound specific microbial degradation isotope fractionation factors and the potential of CSIA in identifying key degradative processes. In the natural resource management context, a framework was developed where CSIA techniques were identified as practically unique in their capacity to serve as distributed integrating indicators of process across a range of scales (micro to diffuse) of relevance to the problem of diffuse pollution assessment. Copyright ?? 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Are X-rays the key to integrated computational materials engineering?

DOE PAGES

Ice, Gene E.

2015-11-01

The ultimate dream of materials science is to predict materials behavior from composition and processing history. Owing to the growing power of computers, this long-time dream has recently found expression through worldwide excitement in a number of computation-based thrusts: integrated computational materials engineering, materials by design, computational materials design, three-dimensional materials physics and mesoscale physics. However, real materials have important crystallographic structures at multiple length scales, which evolve during processing and in service. Moreover, real materials properties can depend on the extreme tails in their structural and chemical distributions. This makes it critical to map structural distributions with sufficient resolutionmore » to resolve small structures and with sufficient statistics to capture the tails of distributions. For two-dimensional materials, there are high-resolution nondestructive probes of surface and near-surface structures with atomic or near-atomic resolution that can provide detailed structural, chemical and functional distributions over important length scales. Furthermore, there are no nondestructive three-dimensional probes with atomic resolution over the multiple length scales needed to understand most materials.« less

Physical Science Teachers' Attitudes to and Factors Affecting Their Integration of Technology Education in Science Teaching in Benin

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kelani, Raphael R.; Gado, Issaou

2018-01-01

Following the calls of international conferences related to the teaching of science and technology, technology education (TE) was integrated as a component of physical sciences programmes in Benin, West Africa. This study investigates physical science teachers' attitudes towards the integration of TE topics in secondary school science curricula in…

The EuroDIVERSITY Programme: Challenges of Biodiversity Science in Europe

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jonckheere, I.

2009-04-01

In close cooperation with its Member Organisations, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has launched since late 2003 a series of European Collaborative Research (EUROCORES) Programmes. Their aim is to enable researchers in different European countries to develop cooperation and scientific synergy in areas where European scale and scope are required in a global context. The EUROCORES instrument represents the first large scale attempt of national research (funding) agencies to act together against fragmentation, asynchronicity and duplication of research (funding) within Europe. Although covering all scientific fields, there are presently 13 EUROCORES Programmes dealing with cutting edge science in the fields of Earth, Climate and Environmental Sciences. The aim of the EuroDIVERSITY Programme is to support the emergence of an integrated biodiversity science based on an understanding of fundamental ecological and social processes that drive biodiversity changes and their impacts on ecosystem functioning and society. Ecological systems across the globe are being threatened or transformed at unprecedented rates from local to global scales due to the ever-increasing human domination of natural ecosystems. In particular, massive biodiversity changes are currently taking place, and this trend is expected to continue over the coming decades, driven by the increasing extension and globalisation of human affairs. The EuroDIVERSITY Programme meets the research need triggered by the increasing human footprint worldwide with a focus on generalisations across particular systems and on the generation and validation of theory relevant to experimental and empirical data. The EURODIVERSITY Programme tries to bridge the gaps between the natural and social sciences, between research work on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, and between research work on plants, animals and micro-organisms. The Programme was launched in April 2006 and includes 10 international, multidisciplinary collaborative research projects, which are expected to contribute to this goal by initiating or strengthening major collaborative research efforts. Some projects are dealing primarily with microbial diversity (COMIX, METHECO, MiCROSYSTEMS), others try to investigate the biogeochemistry in grassland and forest ecosystems (BEGIN, BioCycle), the landscape and community ecology of biodiversity changes (ASSEMBLE, AGRIPOPES, EcoTRADE), and others focus on the diversity in freshwater (BIOPOOL, MOLARCH). In 2009, the EuroDIVERSITY Programme will integrate the different European research teams involved with collaborative field work campaigns over Europe, international workshops and conferences, as well as joint peer-review publications. For more information about the Programme and its activities, please check the Programme website: www.esf.org/eurodiversity

Integrated Medical Curriculum: Advantages and Disadvantages

PubMed Central

Quintero, Gustavo A.; Vergel, John; Arredondo, Martha; Ariza, María-Cristina; Gómez, Paula; Pinzon-Barrios, Ana-Maria

2016-01-01

Most curricula for medical education have been integrated horizontally and vertically–-vertically between basic and clinical sciences. The Flexnerian curriculum has disappeared to permit integration between basic sciences and clinical sciences, which are taught throughout the curriculum. We have proposed a different form of integration where the horizontal axis represents the defined learning outcomes and the vertical axis represents the teaching of the sciences throughout the courses. We believe that a mere integration of basic and clinical sciences is not enough because it is necessary to emphasize the importance of humanism as well as health population sciences in medicine. It is necessary to integrate basic and clinical sciences, humanism, and health population in the vertical axis, not only in the early years but also throughout the curriculum, presupposing the use of active teaching methods based on problems or cases in small groups. PMID:29349303

Multilayer network modeling of integrated biological systems. Comment on "Network science of biological systems at different scales: A review" by Gosak et al.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

De Domenico, Manlio

2018-03-01

Biological systems, from a cell to the human brain, are inherently complex. A powerful representation of such systems, described by an intricate web of relationships across multiple scales, is provided by complex networks. Recently, several studies are highlighting how simple networks - obtained by aggregating or neglecting temporal or categorical description of biological data - are not able to account for the richness of information characterizing biological systems. More complex models, namely multilayer networks, are needed to account for interdependencies, often varying across time, of biological interacting units within a cell, a tissue or parts of an organism.

Multiscale assembly for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine

PubMed Central

Inci, Fatih; Tasoglu, Savas; Erkmen, Burcu; Demirci, Utkan

2015-01-01

Our understanding of cell biology and its integration with materials science has led to technological innovations in the bioengineering of tissue-mimicking grafts that can be utilized in clinical and pharmaceutical applications. Bio-engineering of native-like multiscale building blocks provides refined control over the cellular microenvironment, thus enabling functional tissues. In this review, we focus on assembling building blocks from the biomolecular level to the millimeter scale. We also provide an overview of techniques for assembling molecules, cells, spheroids, and microgels and achieving bottom-up tissue engineering. Additionally, we discuss driving mechanisms for self- and guided assembly to create micro-to-macro scale tissue structures. PMID:25796488

Characterizing Middle Grade Students' Integrated Alternative Science Knowledge about the Effects of Climate Change

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fick, Sarah J.; Songer, Nancy Butler

2017-01-01

Recent reforms emphasize a shift in how students should learn and demonstrate knowledge of science. These reforms call for students to learn content knowledge using science and engineering practices, creating integrated science knowledge. While there is existing literature about the development of integrated science knowledge assessments, few…

Integrating Mathematics and Science: Ecology and Venn Diagrams

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leszczynski, Eliza; Munakata, Mika; Evans, Jessica M.; Pizzigoni, Francesca

2014-01-01

Efforts to integrate mathematics and science have been widely recognized by mathematics and science educators. However, successful integration of these two important school disciplines remains a challenge. In this article, a mathematics and science activity extends the use of Venn diagrams to a life science context and then circles back to a…

JPRS Report, Science & Technology, Europe

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-06-05

Francoise Grosvalet; Paris ELECTRONIQUE HEBDO, 16 Feb 89] 7 French Firm Develops Real-Time Vocal Interface [Christine Serou; Paris ELECTRONIQUE HEBDO...SPIEGEL, 24 Apr 89] 10 FRG’s Aixtron Develops Upgraded VPE Machine for III-V Compounds [Elisabeth Feder; Paris ELECTRONIQUE HEBDO, 16 Feb 89] 13...AN890110 Paris ELECTRONIQUE HEBDO in French 16 Feb89p 15 [Article by Francoise Grosvalet: "Wafer-Scale and 3-D Integration: Europe Makes Up for Lost

A Three-Legged Stool or Race? Governance Models for NOAA RISAs, DOI CSCs, and USDA Climate Hubs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foster, J. G.

2014-12-01

NOAAs Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Teams, DOIs Climate Science Centers (CSCs), and USDAs Regional Climate Hubs (RCHs) have common missions of integrating climate and related knowledge across scientific disciplines and regions to create "actionable" information that decision-makes can use to manage climate risks and impacts at state and local scales. However, the sponsoring agency programs, university investigators, and local federal officials govern each differently. The three models of program and center governance are 1) exclusively university (RISAs), 2) a hybrid of Federal government and (host) university (CSCs,), and 3) exclusively Federal (Hubs). Each model has it's advantages and disadvantages in terms of legal definition and authority, scientific mission requirements and strategies, flexibility and legitimacy to conduct research and to collaborate regionally with constituencies, leadership and governance approach and "friction points,", staff capacity and ability to engage stakeholders, necessity to deliver products and services, bureaucratic oversight, performance evaluation, and political support at Congressional, state, and local levels. Using available sources of information and data, this paper will compare and contrast the strengths and weakness of these three regional applied climate science center governance models.

Comparisons of Physicians' and Nurses' Attitudes towards Computers.

PubMed

Brumini, Gordana; Ković, Ivor; Zombori, Dejvid; Lulić, Ileana; Bilic-Zulle, Lidija; Petrovecki, Mladen

2005-01-01

Before starting the implementation of integrated hospital information systems, the physicians' and nurses' attitudes towards computers were measured by means of a questionnaire. The study was conducted in Dubrava University Hospital, Zagreb in Croatia. Out of 194 respondents, 141 were nurses and 53 physicians, randomly selected. They surveyed by an anonymous questionnaire consisting of 8 closed questions about demographic data, computer science education and computer usage, and 30 statements on attitudes towards computers. The statements were adapted to a Likert type scale. Differences in attitudes towards computers between groups were compared using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann Whitney test for post-hoc analysis. The total score presented attitudes toward computers. Physicians' total score was 130 (97-144), while nurses' total score was 123 (88-141). It points that the average answer to all statements was between "agree" and "strongly agree", and these high total scores indicated their positive attitudes. Age, computer science education and computer usage were important factors witch enhances the total score. Younger physicians and nurses with computer science education and with previous computer experience had more positive attitudes towards computers than others. Our results are important for planning and implementation of integrated hospital information systems in Croatia.

The Human Genome Project: big science transforms biology and medicine

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

The Human Genome Project has transformed biology through its integrated big science approach to deciphering a reference human genome sequence along with the complete sequences of key model organisms. The project exemplifies the power, necessity and success of large, integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts - so-called ‘big science’ - directed towards complex major objectives. In this article, we discuss the ways in which this ambitious endeavor led to the development of novel technologies and analytical tools, and how it brought the expertise of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians together with biologists. It established an open approach to data sharing and open-source software, thereby making the data resulting from the project accessible to all. The genome sequences of microbes, plants and animals have revolutionized many fields of science, including microbiology, virology, infectious disease and plant biology. Moreover, deeper knowledge of human sequence variation has begun to alter the practice of medicine. The Human Genome Project has inspired subsequent large-scale data acquisition initiatives such as the International HapMap Project, 1000 Genomes, and The Cancer Genome Atlas, as well as the recently announced Human Brain Project and the emerging Human Proteome Project. PMID:24040834

A Three-Legged Stool or Race? Governance Models for NOAA RISAs, DOI CSCs, and USDA Climate Hub

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foster, J. G.

2014-12-01

NOAAs Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Teams, DOIs Climate Science Centers (CSCs), and USDAs Regional Climate Hubs (RCHs) have common missions of integrating climate and related knowledge across scientific disciplines and regions to create "actionable" information that decision-makes can use to manage climate risks and impacts at state and local scales. However, the sponsoring agency programs, university investigators, and local federal officials govern each differently. The three models of program and center governance are 1) exclusively university (RISAs), 2) a hybrid of Federal government and (host) university (CSCs,), and 3) exclusively Federal (Hubs). Each model has it's advantages and disadvantages in terms of legal definition and authority, scientific mission requirements and strategies, flexibility and legitimacy to conduct research and to collaborate regionally with constituencies, leadership and governance approach and "friction points,", staff capacity and ability to engage stakeholders, necessity to deliver products and services, bureaucratic oversight, performance evaluation, and political support at Congressional, state, and local levels. Using available sources of information and data, this paper will compare and contrast the strengths and weakness of these three regional applied climate science center governance models.

Fostering Collaboration Across the U.S. Critical Zone Observatories Network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sharkey, S.; White, T. S.

2017-12-01

The Critical Zone (CZ) is defined as the permeable layer from the top of the vegetation canopy to the bottom of freely circulating groundwater where rock, soil, water, air and life meet. The study of the CZ is motivated by an overall lack of understanding of the coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes in this zone at differing spatial and temporal scales. Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs), supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation's Geosciences Directorate, are natural laboratories that aim to provide infrastructure, data and models to gain understanding of the evolution and function of the CZ from grain-to-watershed scales. The nine U.S. observatories span a range of climatic, ecologic, geologic, and physiographic environments from California to Puerto Rico, working on site-specific hypotheses and network-scale goals. CZO research infrastructure allows for teams of cross-disciplinary scientists at each site to further CZ science using field and theoretical approaches, education and outreach, and cross-CZO science. Cross-CZO science emerges from a set of common CZ science questions and hypotheses focused on CZ structure and evolution, event-based and continuous fluxes across CZ interfaces, and changes in storage of major CZ reservoirs at the catchment scale. CZO research seeks to understand coupled processes across all timescales using quantitative models parameterized from observations of meteorological variables, streams, and groundwater, and sampling and analyzing landforms, bedrock, soils, and ecosystems. Each observatory strives to apply common infrastructure, protocols and measurements that help quantify the composition and fluxes of energy, water, solutes, sediments, energy, and mass across boundaries of the CZ system through both space and time. This type of approach enables researchers to access and integrate data in a way that allows for the isolation of environmental variables and comparison of processes and responses across environmental gradients. There is opportunity to foster cross-collaborations with existing research infrastructure (i.e. LTER, NEON, international CZOs) to promote cross-site science and expand upon geologic, climatic, ecological, land use and hydrologic gradients required to understand the CZ.

Lake Nutrient Responses to Integrated Conservation Practices in an Agricultural Watershed.

PubMed

Lizotte, Richard E; Yasarer, Lindsey M W; Locke, Martin A; Bingner, Ronald L; Knight, Scott S

2017-03-01

Watershed-scale management efforts to reduce nutrient loads and improve the conservation of lakes in agricultural watersheds require effective integration of a variety of agricultural conservation best management practices (BMPs). This paper documents watershed-scale assessments of the influence of multiple integrated BMPs on oxbow lake nutrient concentrations in a 625-ha watershed of intensive row-crop agricultural activity during a 14-yr monitoring period (1996-2009). A suite of BMPs within fields and at field edges throughout the watershed and enrollment of 87 ha into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) were implemented from 1995 to 2006. Total phosphorus (TP), soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), ammonium, and nitrate were measured approximately biweekly from 1996 to 2009, and total nitrogen (TN) was measured from 2001 to 2009. Decreases in several lake nutrient concentrations occurred after BMP implementation. Reductions in TP lake concentrations were associated with vegetative buffers and rainfall. No consistent patterns of changes in TN or SRP lake concentrations were observed. Reductions in ammonium lake concentrations were associated with conservation tillage and CRP. Reductions in nitrate lake concentrations were associated with vegetative buffers. Watershed simulations conducted with the AnnAGNPS (Annualized Agricultural Non-Point Source) model with and without BMPs also show a clear reduction in TN and TP loads to the lake after the implementation of BMPs. These results provide direct evidence of how watershed-wide BMPs assist in reducing nutrient loading in aquatic ecosystems and promote a more viable and sustainable lake ecosystem. Copyright © by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Inc.

Integrating Sustainability Science with the Sciences of Human Well-being to Inform Design and Planning in an Urbanizing World

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alberti, M.; Graumlich, L. J.; Frumkin, H.; Friedman, D.

2012-12-01

A sustainable human future requires both healthy ecosystems and communities in which people thrive, with opportunities for health, well-being, happiness, economic prosperity, and equity. To make progress towards this goal, two largely disparate communities of scholars and practitioners must come together: sustainability science needs to be integrated with the sciences of human health and well-being. The opportunity for such integration is particularly ripe for urbanizing regions which not only dominate energy and resource use but also increasingly represent the human habitat. We present a conceptual framework that integrates sustainability science with the sciences of human health and well-being to explicitly articulate testable hypotheses on the relationships between humans and their habitat. We are interested in human behaviors and metrics of health and well-being in relationship to the characteristics of the built environment at various scales from buildings to metro regions. Focusing on the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW) as a testbed, we are building on our current empirical studies on urban sprawl and ecosystem function including biodiversity, air quality, hydrological, biogeochemical, and human health to develop formal hypotheses on how alternative urban design and development patterns may influence health outcomes and well-being. The PNW is an ideal setting for this work because of the connected metropolitan areas within a region characterized by a spectacular diversity of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and deeply held cultural and political aspirations towards sustainability. The framework also highlights opportunities for translation of knowledge to practice in the design and planning of built environments. For example, understanding these associations is critical to assessing tradeoffs in design and planning strategies and exploring potential synergies that optimize both sustainability and human well-being. In complex systems such as cities, managers need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and limited resources and provide essential human services (e.g., clean water, clean air, protection from diseases etc.) to diverse population groups (e.g., vulnerable populations). We believe that research that advances empirical knowledge at the human well-being -- ecosystem interface will be critical to expanding sustainability science and its effective application to practice in designing buildings, neighborhoods and metropolitan regions that are simultaneously healthy and sustainable.

Building the Capacity for Climate Services: Thoughts on Training Next Generation Climate Science Integrators

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garfin, G. M.; Brugger, J.; Gordon, E. S.; Barsugli, J. J.; Rangwala, I.; Travis, W.

2015-12-01

For more than a decade, stakeholder needs assessments and reports, including the recent National Climate Assessment, have pointed out the need for climate "science translators" or "science integrators" who can help bridge the gap between the cultures and contexts of researchers and decision-makers. Integration is important for exchanging and enhancing knowledge, building capacity to use climate information in decision making, and fostering more robust planning for decision-making in the context of climate change. This talk will report on the characteristics of successful climate science integrators, and a variety of models for training the upcoming generation of climate science integrators. Science integration characteristics identified by an experienced vanguard in the U.S. include maintaining credibility in both the scientific and stakeholder communities, a basic respect for stakeholders demonstrated through active listening, and a deep understanding of the decision-making context. Drawing upon the lessons of training programs for Cooperative Extension, public health professionals, and natural resource managers, we offer ideas about training next generation climate science integrators. Our model combines training and development of skills in interpersonal relations, communication of science, project implementation, education techniques and practices - integrated with a strong foundation in disciplinary knowledge.

Unmet needs for analyzing biological big data: A survey of 704 NSF principal investigators

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

In a 2016 survey of 704 National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences Directorate principal investigators (BIO PIs), nearly 90% indicated they are currently or will soon be analyzing large data sets. BIO PIs considered a range of computational needs important to their work, including high performance computing (HPC), bioinformatics support, multistep workflows, updated analysis software, and the ability to store, share, and publish data. Previous studies in the United States and Canada emphasized infrastructure needs. However, BIO PIs said the most pressing unmet needs are training in data integration, data management, and scaling analyses for HPC—acknowledging that data science skills will be required to build a deeper understanding of life. This portends a growing data knowledge gap in biology and challenges institutions and funding agencies to redouble their support for computational training in biology. PMID:29049281

Unmet needs for analyzing biological big data: A survey of 704 NSF principal investigators.

PubMed

Barone, Lindsay; Williams, Jason; Micklos, David

2017-10-01

In a 2016 survey of 704 National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences Directorate principal investigators (BIO PIs), nearly 90% indicated they are currently or will soon be analyzing large data sets. BIO PIs considered a range of computational needs important to their work, including high performance computing (HPC), bioinformatics support, multistep workflows, updated analysis software, and the ability to store, share, and publish data. Previous studies in the United States and Canada emphasized infrastructure needs. However, BIO PIs said the most pressing unmet needs are training in data integration, data management, and scaling analyses for HPC-acknowledging that data science skills will be required to build a deeper understanding of life. This portends a growing data knowledge gap in biology and challenges institutions and funding agencies to redouble their support for computational training in biology.

Observatories, think tanks, and community models in the hydrologic and environmental sciences: How does it affect me?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Torgersen, Thomas

2006-06-01

Multiple issues in hydrologic and environmental sciences are now squarely in the public focus and require both government and scientific study. Two facts also emerge: (1) The new approach being touted publicly for advancing the hydrologic and environmental sciences is the establishment of community-operated "big science" (observatories, think tanks, community models, and data repositories). (2) There have been important changes in the business of science over the last 20 years that make it important for the hydrologic and environmental sciences to demonstrate the "value" of public investment in hydrological and environmental science. Given that community-operated big science (observatories, think tanks, community models, and data repositories) could become operational, I argue that such big science should not mean a reduction in the importance of single-investigator science. Rather, specific linkages between the large-scale, team-built, community-operated big science and the single investigator should provide context data, observatory data, and systems models for a continuing stream of hypotheses by discipline-based, specialized research and a strong rationale for continued, single-PI ("discovery-based") research. I also argue that big science can be managed to provide a better means of demonstrating the value of public investment in the hydrologic and environmental sciences. Decisions regarding policy will still be political, but big science could provide an integration of the best scientific understanding as a guide for the best policy.

Long-term agroecosystem research in the central Mississippi river basin: introduction, establishment, and overview.

PubMed

Sadler, E John; Lerch, Robert N; Kitchen, Newell R; Anderson, Stephen H; Baffaut, Claire; Sudduth, Kenneth A; Prato, Anthony A; Kremer, Robert J; Vories, Earl D; Myers, D Brent; Broz, Robert; Miles, Randall J; Young, Fred J

2015-01-01

Many challenges currently facing agriculture require long-term data on landscape-scale hydrologic responses to weather, such as from the Goodwater Creek Experimental Watershed (GCEW), located in northeastern Missouri, USA. This watershed is prone to surface runoff despite shallow slopes, as a result of a significant smectitic clay layer 30 to 50 cm deep that restricts downward flow of water and gives rise to a periodic perched water table. This paper is the first in a series that documents the database developed from GCEW. The objectives of this paper are to (i) establish the context of long-term data and the federal infrastructure that provides it, (ii) describe the GCEW/ Central Mississippi River Basin (CMRB) establishment and the geophysical and anthropogenic context, (iii) summarize in brief the collected research results published using data from within GCEW, (iv) describe the series of papers this work introduces, and (v) identify knowledge gaps and research needs. The rationale for the collection derives from converging trends in data from long-term research, integration of multiple disciplines, and increasing public awareness of increasingly larger problems. The outcome of those trends includes being selected as the CMRB site in the USDA-ARS Long-Term Agro-Ecosystem Research (LTAR) network. Research needs include quantifying watershed scale fluxes of N, P, K, sediment, and energy, accounting for fluxes involving forest, livestock, and anthropogenic sources, scaling from near-term point-scale results to increasingly long and broad scales, and considering whole-system interactions. This special section informs the scientific community about this database and provides support for its future use in research to solve natural resource problems important to US agricultural, environmental, and science policy. Copyright © by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Inc.

Integrating geographically isolated wetlands into land management decisions

USGS Publications Warehouse

Golden, Heather E.; Creed, Irena F.; Ali, Genevieve; Basu, Nandita; Neff, Brian; Rains, Mark C.; McLaughlin, Daniel L.; Alexander, Laurie C.; Ameli, Ali A.; Christensen, Jay R.; Evenson, Grey R.; Jones, Charles N.; Lane, Charles R.; Lang, Megan

2017-01-01

Wetlands across the globe provide extensive ecosystem services. However, many wetlands – especially those surrounded by uplands, often referred to as geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs) – remain poorly protected. Protection and restoration of wetlands frequently requires information on their hydrologic connectivity to other surface waters, and their cumulative watershed‐scale effects. The integration of measurements and models can supply this information. However, the types of measurements and models that should be integrated are dependent on management questions and information compatibility. We summarize the importance of GIWs in watersheds and discuss what wetland connectivity means in both science and management contexts. We then describe the latest tools available to quantify GIW connectivity and explore crucial next steps to enhancing and integrating such tools. These advancements will ensure that appropriate tools are used in GIW decision making and maintaining the important ecosystem services that these wetlands support.

Biomaterial science meets computational biology.

PubMed

Hutmacher, Dietmar W; Little, J Paige; Pettet, Graeme J; Loessner, Daniela

2015-05-01

There is a pressing need for a predictive tool capable of revealing a holistic understanding of fundamental elements in the normal and pathological cell physiology of organoids in order to decipher the mechanoresponse of cells. Therefore, the integration of a systems bioengineering approach into a validated mathematical model is necessary to develop a new simulation tool. This tool can only be innovative by combining biomaterials science with computational biology. Systems-level and multi-scale experimental data are incorporated into a single framework, thus representing both single cells and collective cell behaviour. Such a computational platform needs to be validated in order to discover key mechano-biological factors associated with cell-cell and cell-niche interactions.

Integrated Assessment of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana - Part 3: Social Sciences and Economics.

PubMed

Wilson, Mark L; Renne, Elisha; Roncoli, Carla; Agyei-Baffour, Peter; Tenkorang, Emmanuel Yamoah

2015-07-15

This article is one of three synthesis reports resulting from an integrated assessment (IA) of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in Ghana. Given the complexities that involve multiple drivers and diverse disciplines influencing ASGM, an IA framework was used to analyze economic, social, health, and environmental data and to co-develop evidence-based responses in collaboration with pertinent stakeholders. We look at both micro- and macro-economic processes surrounding ASGM, including causes, challenges, and consequences. At the micro-level, social and economic evidence suggests that the principal reasons whereby most people engage in ASGM involve "push" factors aimed at meeting livelihood goals. ASGM provides an important source of income for both proximate and distant communities, representing a means of survival for impoverished farmers as well as an engine for small business growth. However, miners and their families often end up in a "poverty trap" of low productivity and indebtedness, which reduce even further their economic options. At a macro level, Ghana's ASGM activities contribute significantly to the national economy even though they are sometimes operating illegally and at a disadvantage compared to large-scale industrial mining companies. Nevertheless, complex issues of land tenure, social stability, mining regulation and taxation, and environmental degradation undermine the viability and sustainability of ASGM as a livelihood strategy. Although more research is needed to understand these complex relationships, we point to key findings and insights from social science and economics research that can guide policies and actions aimed to address the unique challenges of ASGM in Ghana and elsewhere.

Integrated Assessment of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana — Part 3: Social Sciences and Economics

PubMed Central

Wilson, Mark L.; Renne, Elisha; Roncoli, Carla; Agyei-Baffour, Peter; Yamoah Tenkorang, Emmanuel

2015-01-01

This article is one of three synthesis reports resulting from an integrated assessment (IA) of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in Ghana. Given the complexities that involve multiple drivers and diverse disciplines influencing ASGM, an IA framework was used to analyze economic, social, health, and environmental data and to co-develop evidence-based responses in collaboration with pertinent stakeholders. We look at both micro- and macro-economic processes surrounding ASGM, including causes, challenges, and consequences. At the micro-level, social and economic evidence suggests that the principal reasons whereby most people engage in ASGM involve “push” factors aimed at meeting livelihood goals. ASGM provides an important source of income for both proximate and distant communities, representing a means of survival for impoverished farmers as well as an engine for small business growth. However, miners and their families often end up in a “poverty trap” of low productivity and indebtedness, which reduce even further their economic options. At a macro level, Ghana’s ASGM activities contribute significantly to the national economy even though they are sometimes operating illegally and at a disadvantage compared to large-scale industrial mining companies. Nevertheless, complex issues of land tenure, social stability, mining regulation and taxation, and environmental degradation undermine the viability and sustainability of ASGM as a livelihood strategy. Although more research is needed to understand these complex relationships, we point to key findings and insights from social science and economics research that can guide policies and actions aimed to address the unique challenges of ASGM in Ghana and elsewhere. PMID:26184277

Position Paper: Designing Complex Systems to Support Interdisciplinary Cognitive Work

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Greene, Melissa T.; Papalambros, Panos Y.; Mcgowan, Anna-Maria R.

2016-01-01

The paper argues that the field we can call cognitive science of interdisciplinary collaboration is an important area of study for improving design of Large-Scale Complex Systems (LaCES) and supporting cognitive work. The paper mostly raised questions that have been documented in earlier qualitative analysis studies, and provided possible avenues of exploration for addressing them. There are likely further contributions from additional disciplines beyond those mentioned in this paper that should be considered and integrated into such a cognitive science framework. Knowledge and awareness of various perspectives will help to inform the types of interventions available for improving LaCES design and functionality. For example, a cognitive interpretation of interdisciplinary collaborations in LaCES elucidated the need for a "translator" or "mediator" in helping subject matter experts to transcend language boundaries, mitigate single discipline bias, support integrative activities, and correct misaligned objectives. Additional research in this direction is likely to uncover similar gaps and opportunities for improvements in practice.

Exploring Remote Sensing Products Online with Giovanni for Studying Urbanization

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Shen, Suhung; Leptoukh, Gregory G.; Gerasimov, Irina; Kempler, Steve

2012-01-01

Recently, a Large amount of MODIS land products at multi-spatial resolutions have been integrated into the online system, Giovanni, to support studies on land cover and land use changes focused on Northern Eurasia and Monsoon Asia regions. Giovanni (Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure) is a Web-based application developed by the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) providing a simple and intuitive way to visualize, analyze, and access Earth science remotely-sensed and modeled data. The customized Giovanni Web portals (Giovanni-NEESPI and Giovanni-MAIRS) are created to integrate land, atmospheric, cryospheric, and social products, that enable researchers to do quick exploration and basic analyses of land surface changes and their relationships to climate at global and regional scales. This presentation documents MODIS land surface products in Giovanni system. As examples, images and statistical analysis results on land surface and local climate changes associated with urbanization over Yangtze River Delta region, China, using data in Giovanni are shown.

Toward Open Science at the European Scale: Geospatial Semantic Array Programming for Integrated Environmental Modelling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de Rigo, Daniele; Corti, Paolo; Caudullo, Giovanni; McInerney, Daniel; Di Leo, Margherita; San-Miguel-Ayanz, Jesús

2013-04-01

Interfacing science and policy raises challenging issues when large spatial-scale (regional, continental, global) environmental problems need transdisciplinary integration within a context of modelling complexity and multiple sources of uncertainty [1]. This is characteristic of science-based support for environmental policy at European scale [1], and key aspects have also long been investigated by European Commission transnational research [2-5]. Parameters ofthe neededdata- transformations ? = {?1????m} (a.5) Wide-scale transdisciplinary modelling for environment. Approaches (either of computational science or of policy-making) suitable at a given domain-specific scale may not be appropriate for wide-scale transdisciplinary modelling for environment (WSTMe) and corresponding policy-making [6-10]. In WSTMe, the characteristic heterogeneity of available spatial information (a) and complexity of the required data-transformation modelling (D- TM) appeal for a paradigm shift in how computational science supports such peculiarly extensive integration processes. In particular, emerging wide-scale integration requirements of typical currently available domain-specific modelling strategies may include increased robustness and scalability along with enhanced transparency and reproducibility [11-15]. This challenging shift toward open data [16] and reproducible research [11] (open science) is also strongly suggested by the potential - sometimes neglected - huge impact of cascading effects of errors [1,14,17-19] within the impressively growing interconnection among domain-specific computational models and frameworks. From a computational science perspective, transdisciplinary approaches to integrated natural resources modelling and management (INRMM) [20] can exploit advanced geospatial modelling techniques with an awesome battery of free scientific software [21,22] for generating new information and knowledge from the plethora of composite data [23-26]. From the perspective of the science-policy interface, INRMM should be able to provide citizens and policy-makers with a clear, accurate understanding of the implications of the technical apparatus on collective environmental decision-making [1]. Complexity of course should not be intended as an excuse for obscurity [27-29]. Geospatial Semantic Array Programming. Concise array-based mathematical formulation and implementation (with array programming tools, see (b) ) have proved helpful in supporting and mitigating the complexity of WSTMe [40-47] when complemented with generalized modularization and terse array-oriented semantic constraints. This defines the paradigm of Semantic Array Programming (SemAP) [35,36] where semantic transparency also implies free software use (although black-boxes [12] - e.g. legacy code - might easily be semantically interfaced). A new approach for WSTMe has emerged by formalizing unorganized best practices and experience-driven informal patterns. The approach introduces a lightweight (non-intrusive) integration of SemAP and geospatial tools (c) - called Geospatial Semantic Array Programming (GeoSemAP). GeoSemAP (d) exploits the joint semantics provided by SemAP and geospatial tools to split a complex D- TM into logical blocks which are easier to check by means of mathematical array-based and geospatial constraints. Those constraints take the form of precondition, invariant and postcondition semantic checks. This way, even complex WSTMe may be described as the composition of simpler GeoSemAP blocks, each of them structured as (d). GeoSemAP allows intermediate data and information layers to be more easily an formally semantically described so as to increase fault-tolerance [17], transparency and reproducibility of WSTMe. This might also help to better communicate part of the policy-relevant knowledge, often difficult to transfer from technical WSTMe to the science-policy interface [1,15]. References de Rigo, D., 2013. Behind the horizon of reproducible integrated environmental modelling at European scale: ethics and practice of scientific knowledge freedom. F1000 Research. To appear as discussion paper. Funtowicz, S. O., Ravetz, J. R., 1994. Uncertainty, complexity and post-normal science. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 13 (12), 1881-1885. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/etc.5620131203 Funtowicz, S. O., Ravetz, J. R., 1994. The worth of a songbird: ecological economics as a post-normal science. Ecological Economics 10 (3), 197-207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0921-8009(94)90108-2 Funtowicz, S. O., Ravetz, J. R., 2003. Funtowicz, S., Ravetz, J. (2003). Post-normal science. International Society for Ecological Economics, Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics Ravetz, J., 2004. The post-normal science of precaution. Futures 36 (3), 347-357. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(03)00160-5 van der Sluijs, J. P., 2012. Uncertainty and dissent in climate risk assessment: A Post-Normal perspective. Nature and Culture 7 (2), 174-195. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/nc.2012.070204 Ulieru, M., Doursat, R., 2011. Emergent engineering: a radical paradigm shift. International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems 4 (1), 39-60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJAACS.2011.037748 Turner, M. G., Dale, V. H., Gardner, R. H., Dec. 1989. Predicting across scales: Theory development and testing. Landscape Ecology 3 (3), 245-252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00131542 Zhang, X., Drake, N. A., Wainwright, J., 2004. Scaling issues in environmental modelling. In: Wainwright, J., Mulligan, M. (Eds.), Environmental modelling : finding simplicity in complexity. Wiley. ISBN: 9780471496182 Bankes, S. C., 2002. Tools and techniques for developing policies for complex and uncertain systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99 (Suppl 3), 7263-7266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.092081399 Peng, R. D., 2011. Reproducible research in computational science. Science 334 (6060), 1226-1227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1213847 Morin, A., Urban, J., Adams, P. D., Foster, I., Sali, A., Baker, D., Sliz, P., 2012. Shining light into black boxes. Science 336 (6078), 159-160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1218263 Nature, 2011. Devil in the details. Nature 470 (7334), 305-306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/470305b Stodden, V., 2012. Reproducible research: Tools and strategies for scientific computing. Computing in Science and Engineering 14, 11-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2012.82 de Rigo, D., Corti, P., Caudullo, G., McInerney, D., Di Leo, M., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., (exp. 2013). Supporting Environmental Modelling and Science-Policy Interface at European Scale with Geospatial Semantic Array Programming. In prep. Molloy, J. C., 2011. The open knowledge foundation: Open data means better science. PLoS Biology 9 (12), e1001195+. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001195 de Rigo, D., 2013. Software Uncertainty in Integrated Environmental Modelling: the role of Semantics and Open Science. Geophysical Research Abstracts 15, EGU General Assembly 2013. Cerf, V. G., 2012. Where is the science in computer science? Commun. ACM 55 (10), 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2347736.2347737 Wilson, G., 2006. Where's the real bottleneck in scientific computing? American Scientist 94 (1), 5+. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/2006.1.5 de Rigo, D. 2012. Integrated Natural Resources Modelling and Management: minimal redefinition of a known challenge for environmental modelling. Excerpt from the Call for a shared research agenda toward scientific knowledge freedom, Maieutike Research Initiative. http://www.citeulike.org/groupfunc/15400/home Stallman, R. M., 2005. Free community science and the free development of science. PLoS Med 2 (2), e47+. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020047 Stallman, R. M., 2009. Viewpoint: Why "open source" misses the point of free software. Communications of the ACM 52 (6), 31-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1516046.1516058 (free access version: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html ) Rodriguez Aseretto, D., Di Leo, M., de Rigo, D., Corti, P., McInerney, D., Camia, A., San Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2013. Free and Open Source Software underpinning the European Forest Data Centre. Geophysical Research Abstracts 15, EGU General Assembly 2013. Giovando, C., Whitmore, C., Camia, A., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2010. Enhancing the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) with open source software. In: FOSS4G 2010. http://2010.foss4g.org/presentations_show.php?id=3693 Corti, P., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., Camia, A., McInerney, D., Boca, R., Di Leo, M., 2012. Fire news management in the context of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). In: proceedings of "Quinta conferenza italiana sul software geografico e sui dati geografici liberi" (GFOSS DAY 2012). http://files.figshare.com/229492/Fire_news_management_in_the_context_of_EFFIS.pdf McInerney, D., Bastin, L., Diaz, L., Figueiredo, C., Barredo, J. I., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2012. Developing a forest data portal to support Multi-Scale decision making. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 5 (6), 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2012.2194136 Morin, A., Urban, J., Adams, P. D., Foster, I., Sali, A., Baker, D., Sliz, P., (2012). Shining light into black boxes. Science 336 (6078), 159-160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1218263 Stodden, V., 2011. Trust your science? Open your data and code. Amstat News July 2011, 21-22. http://www.stanford.edu/ vcs/papers/TrustYourScience-STODDEN.pdf van der Sluijs, J., 2005. Uncertainty as a monster in the science-policy interface: four coping strategies. Water Science & Technology 52 (6), 87-92. http://www.iwaponline.com/wst/05206/wst052060087.htm Iverson, K. E., 1980. Notation as a tool of thought. Communications of the ACM 23 (8), 444-465. http://awards.acm.org/images/awards/140/articles/9147499.pdf Eaton, J. W., Bateman, D., Hauberg, S., 2008. GNU Octave: a high-level interactive language for numerical computations. Network Theory. ISBN: 9780954612061 Eaton, J. W., 2012. GNU octave and reproducible research. Journal of Process Control 22 (8), 1433-1438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jprocont.2012.04.006 R Development Core Team, 2011. The R reference manual. Network Theory Ltd. Vol. 1, ISBN: 978-1-906966-09-6. Vol. 2, ISBN: 978-1-906966-10-2. Vol. 3, ISBN: 978-1-906966-11-9. Vol. 4, ISBN: 978-1-906966-12-6. Ramey, C., Fox, B., 2006. Bash reference manual : reference documentation for Bash edition 2.5b, for Bash version 2.05b. Network Theory Limited. ISBN: 978-0-9541617-7-4. de Rigo, D., 2012. Semantic array programming for environmental modelling: Application of the mastrave library. In: Seppelt, R., Voinov, A. A., Lange, S., Bankamp, D. (Eds.), International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs) 2012 International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software. Managing Resources of a Limited Planet: Pathways and Visions under Uncertainty, Sixth Biennial Meeting. pp. 1167-1176. http://www.iemss.org/iemss2012/proceedings/D3_1_0715_deRigo.pdf de Rigo, D., 2012. Semantic Array Programming with Mastrave - Introduction to Semantic Computational Modelling. http://mastrave.org/doc/MTV-1.012-1.htm Van Rossum, G., Drake, F.J., 2011. Python Language Ref. Manual, Network Theory Ltd. ISBN: 0954161785. http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pylang/ The Scipy community, 2012. NumPy Reference Guide. SciPy.org. http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/ The Scipy community, 2012. SciPy Reference Guide. SciPy.org. http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/ de Rigo, D., Castelletti, A., Rizzoli, A. E., Soncini-Sessa, R., Weber, E., Jul. 2005. A selective improvement technique for fastening neuro-dynamic programming in water resources network management. In: Zítek, P. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 16th IFAC World Congress. Vol. 16. International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), pp. 7-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3182/20050703-6-CZ-1902.02172 de Rigo, D., Bosco, C., 2011. Architecture of a Pan-European Framework for Integrated Soil Water Erosion Assessment. Vol. 359 of IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer Boston, Berlin, Heidelberg, Ch. 34, pp. 310-318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22285-6_34 San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., Schulte, E., Schmuck, G., Camia, A., Strobl, P., Liberta, G., Giovando, C., Boca, R., Sedano, F., Kempeneers, P., McInerney, D., Withmore, C., de Oliveira, S. S., Rodrigues, M., Durrant, T., Corti, P., Oehler, F., Vilar, L., Amatulli, G., Mar. 2012. Comprehensive monitoring of wildfires in Europe: The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). In: Tiefenbacher, J. (Ed.), Approaches to Managing Disaster - Assessing Hazards, Emergencies and Disaster Impacts. InTech, Ch. 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/28441 de Rigo, D., Caudullo, G., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., Stancanelli, G., 2012. Mapping European forest tree species distribution to support pest risk assessment. In: Baker, R., Koch, F., Kriticos, D., Rafoss, T., Venette, R., van der Werf, W. (Eds.), Advancing risk assessment models for invasive alien species in the food chain: contending with climate change, economics and uncertainty. Bioforsk FOKUS 7. OECD Co-operative Research Programme on Biological Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Systems; Bioforsk - Norwegian Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research. http://www.pestrisk.org/2012/BioforskFOKUS7-10_IPRMW-VI.pdf Estreguil, C., Caudullo, G., de Rigo, D., Whitmore, C., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2012. Reporting on European forest fragmentation: Standardized indices and web map services. IEEE Earthzine. http://www.earthzine.org/2012/07/05/reporting-on-european-forest-fragmentation-standardized-indices-and-web-map-services/ Estreguil, C., de Rigo, D. and Caudullo, G. (exp. 2013). Towards an integrated and reproducible characterisation of habitat pattern. Submitted to Environmental Modelling & Software Amatulli, G., Camia, A., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., 2009. Projecting future burnt area in the EU-mediterranean countries under IPCC SRES A2/B2 climate change scenarios (JRC55149), 33-38 de Rigo, D., Caudullo, G., Amatulli, G., Strobl, P., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J. (exp. 2013). Modelling tree species distribution in Europe with constrained spatial multi-frequency analysis. In prep. GRASS Development Team, 2012. Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) Software. Open Source Geospatial Foundation. http://grass.osgeo.org http://www.spatial-ecology.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:firemod Neteler, M., Bowman, M. H., Landa, M., Metz, M., 2012. GRASS GIS: A multi-purpose open source GIS. Environmental Modelling & Software 31, 124-130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2011.11.014 Neteler, M., Mitasova, H., 2008. Open source GIS a GRASS GIS approach. ISBN: 978-0-387-35767-6 Warmerdam, F., 2008. The geospatial data abstraction library. In: Hall, G. B., Leahy, M. G. (Eds.), Open Source Approaches in Spatial Data Handling. Vol. 2 of Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 87-104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74831-15 Open Geospatial Consortium, 2007. OpenGIS Web Processing Service version 1.0.0. No. OGC 05-007r7 in OpenGIS Standard. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=24151 Hazzard, E., 2011. Openlayers 2.10 beginner's guide. Packt Publishing. ISBN: 1849514127 Obe, R., Hsu, L., 2011. PostGIS in Action. Manning Publications. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2018871 Sutton, T., 2009. Clipping data from postgis. linfiniti.com Open Source Geospatial Solutions. http://linfiniti.com/2009/09/clipping-data-from-postgis/

The NCI High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data (HPD) Platform to Support the Analysis of Petascale Environmental Data Collections

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evans, B. J. K.; Pugh, T.; Wyborn, L. A.; Porter, D.; Allen, C.; Smillie, J.; Antony, J.; Trenham, C.; Evans, B. J.; Beckett, D.; Erwin, T.; King, E.; Hodge, J.; Woodcock, R.; Fraser, R.; Lescinsky, D. T.

2014-12-01

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has co-located a priority set of national data assets within a HPC research platform. This powerful in-situ computational platform has been created to help serve and analyse the massive amounts of data across the spectrum of environmental collections - in particular the climate, observational data and geoscientific domains. This paper examines the infrastructure, innovation and opportunity for this significant research platform. NCI currently manages nationally significant data collections (10+ PB) categorised as 1) earth system sciences, climate and weather model data assets and products, 2) earth and marine observations and products, 3) geosciences, 4) terrestrial ecosystem, 5) water management and hydrology, and 6) astronomy, social science and biosciences. The data is largely sourced from the NCI partners (who include the custodians of many of the national scientific records), major research communities, and collaborating overseas organisations. By co-locating these large valuable data assets, new opportunities have arisen by harmonising the data collections, making a powerful transdisciplinary research platformThe data is accessible within an integrated HPC-HPD environment - a 1.2 PFlop supercomputer (Raijin), a HPC class 3000 core OpenStack cloud system and several highly connected large scale and high-bandwidth Lustre filesystems. New scientific software, cloud-scale techniques, server-side visualisation and data services have been harnessed and integrated into the platform, so that analysis is performed seamlessly across the traditional boundaries of the underlying data domains. Characterisation of the techniques along with performance profiling ensures scalability of each software component, all of which can either be enhanced or replaced through future improvements. A Development-to-Operations (DevOps) framework has also been implemented to manage the scale of the software complexity alone. This ensures that software is both upgradable and maintainable, and can be readily reused with complexly integrated systems and become part of the growing global trusted community tools for cross-disciplinary research.

CTE Teachers' Perspectives on the Process of CTE and Science Content Integration: A Grounded Theory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Spindler, Matthew Kenneth

The integration of career and technical education (CTE) and academic curricular content that capitalizes on natural and inherent connections represents a challenge for CTE professionals. The research question that was used to guide the current study was: What are CTE teachers' perspectives of and experiences with the process of CTE and science content integration? And more specifically, to generate a grounded theory which explicates the process of CTE and science content integration from the perspective of CTE teachers. The CTE teachers expressed that the process of CTE and science content integration was a process of evolutionizing. From the perspective of the CTE teachers involved integrating CTE and science content resulted in their programs of study being adapted into something different than they were before the process of integration was begun. The CTE teachers revealed that the evolutions in their programs of study and themselves were associated with three other categories within the grounded theory: (a) connecting; (b) enacting; and (c) futuring. The process of CTE and science content integration represents a deep and complex episode for CTE teachers. The process of CTE and science content integration requires connecting to others, putting ideas into action, and an orienting towards the future.

Ecohydrology and Its Relation to Integrated Groundwater Management

USGS Publications Warehouse

Hunt, Randall J.; Hayashi, Masaki; Batelaan, Okke

2016-01-01

In the twentieth century, groundwater characterization focused primarily on easily measured hydraulic metrics of water storage and flows. Twenty-first century concepts of groundwater availability, however, encompass other factors having societal value, such as ecological well-being. Effective ecohydrological science is a nexus of fundamental understanding derived from two scientific disciplines: (1) ecology, where scale, thresholds, feedbacks and tipping points for societal questions form the basis for the ecologic characterization, and (2) hydrology, where the characteristics, magnitude, and timing of water flows are characterized for a defined system of interest. In addition to ecohydrology itself, integrated groundwater management requires input from resource managers to understand which areas of the vast world of ecohydrology are important for decision making. Expectations of acceptable uncertainty, or even what ecohydrological outputs have utility, are often not well articulated within societal decision making frameworks, or within the science community itself. Similarly, “acceptable levels of impact” are difficult to define. Three examples are given to demonstrate the use of ecohydrological considerations for long-term sustainability of groundwater resources and their related ecosystem function. Such examples illustrate the importance of accommodating ecohydrogeological aspects into integrated groundwater management of the twenty-first century, regardless of society, climate, or setting.

Knowledge-based assistance for science visualization and analysis using large distributed databases

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Handley, Thomas H., Jr.; Jacobson, Allan S.; Doyle, Richard J.; Collins, Donald J.

1993-01-01

Within this decade, the growth in complexity of exploratory data analysis and the sheer volume of space data require new and innovative approaches to support science investigators in achieving their research objectives. To date, there have been numerous efforts addressing the individual issues involved in inter-disciplinary, multi-instrument investigations. However, while successful in small scale, these efforts have not proven to be open and scalable. This proposal addresses four areas of significant need: scientific visualization and analysis; science data management; interactions in a distributed, heterogeneous environment; and knowledge-based assistance for these functions. The fundamental innovation embedded with this proposal is the integration of three automation technologies, namely, knowledge-based expert systems, science visualization and science data management. This integration is based on concept called the DataHub. With the DataHub concept, NASA will be able to apply a more complete solution to all nodes of a distributed system. Both computation nodes and interactive nodes will be able to effectively and efficiently use the data services (address, retrieval, update, etc.) with a distributed, interdisciplinary information system in a uniform and standard way. This will allow the science investigators to concentrate on their scientific endeavors, rather than to involve themselves in the intricate technical details of the systems and tools required to accomplish their work. Thus, science investigators need not be programmers. The emphasis will be on the definition and prototyping of system elements with sufficient detail to enable data analysis and interpretation leading to publishable scientific results. In addition, the proposed work includes all the required end-to-end components and interfaces to demonstrate the completed concept.

Knowledge-based assistance for science visualization and analysis using large distributed databases

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Handley, Thomas H., Jr.; Jacobson, Allan S.; Doyle, Richard J.; Collins, Donald J.

1992-01-01

Within this decade, the growth in complexity of exploratory data analysis and the sheer volume of space data require new and innovative approaches to support science investigators in achieving their research objectives. To date, there have been numerous efforts addressing the individual issues involved in inter-disciplinary, multi-instrument investigations. However, while successful in small scale, these efforts have not proven to be open and scaleable. This proposal addresses four areas of significant need: scientific visualization and analysis; science data management; interactions in a distributed, heterogeneous environment; and knowledge-based assistance for these functions. The fundamental innovation embedded within this proposal is the integration of three automation technologies, namely, knowledge-based expert systems, science visualization and science data management. This integration is based on the concept called the Data Hub. With the Data Hub concept, NASA will be able to apply a more complete solution to all nodes of a distributed system. Both computation nodes and interactive nodes will be able to effectively and efficiently use the data services (access, retrieval, update, etc.) with a distributed, interdisciplinary information system in a uniform and standard way. This will allow the science investigators to concentrate on their scientific endeavors, rather than to involve themselves in the intricate technical details of the systems and tools required to accomplish their work. Thus, science investigators need not be programmers. The emphasis will be on the definition and prototyping of system elements with sufficient detail to enable data analysis and interpretation leading to publishable scientific results. In addition, the proposed work includes all the required end-to-end components and interfaces to demonstrate the completed concept.

Early childhood teachers' self-efficacy toward teaching science: Outcomes of professional development

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Clark, Sarah

The teaching of science in the early childhood classrooms has slowly been decreasing. As the years have passed, the subject of science has been put on the backburner while mathematics and language arts have taken center stage in the educational system. Early childhood teachers need to find ways to integrate science with other subjects in order to ensure children are receiving a well-rounded and full education. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of professional development on teachers' efficacy in teaching science. Volunteer teachers completed the Weisgram and Bigler scale (TWBS) pre and post training, in order to determine their self-efficacy toward teaching science, they also completed pre- and post- concept maps about their knowledge of teaching science, and a demographic questionnaire. Findings indicate the training provided was effective in increasing teachers' knowledge of teaching science. Teachers who had an increase in science teaching knowledge were also found to feel more efficacious about teaching science after completing the training and an academic year of implementing science lessons in their classrooms. There was not a relationship between teacher demographics and their science-teaching efficacy. This means that the demographics of participants in this study were not influential on teachers' efficacy, but professional development workshops enabled teachers to gain more knowledge about teaching as well as increase their efficacy about teaching science.

Sequencing Data Discovery and Integration for Earth System Science with MetaSeek

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hoarfrost, A.; Brown, N.; Arnosti, C.

2017-12-01

Microbial communities play a central role in biogeochemical cycles. Sequencing data resources from environmental sources have grown exponentially in recent years, and represent a singular opportunity to investigate microbial interactions with Earth system processes. Carrying out such meta-analyses depends on our ability to discover and curate sequencing data into large-scale integrated datasets. However, such integration efforts are currently challenging and time-consuming, with sequencing data scattered across multiple repositories and metadata that is not easily or comprehensively searchable. MetaSeek is a sequencing data discovery tool that integrates sequencing metadata from all the major data repositories, allowing the user to search and filter on datasets in a lightweight application with an intuitive, easy-to-use web-based interface. Users can save and share curated datasets, while other users can browse these data integrations or use them as a jumping off point for their own curation. Missing and/or erroneous metadata are inferred automatically where possible, and where not possible, users are prompted to contribute to the improvement of the sequencing metadata pool by correcting and amending metadata errors. Once an integrated dataset has been curated, users can follow simple instructions to download their raw data and quickly begin their investigations. In addition to the online interface, the MetaSeek database is easily queryable via an open API, further enabling users and facilitating integrations of MetaSeek with other data curation tools. This tool lowers the barriers to curation and integration of environmental sequencing data, clearing the path forward to illuminating the ecosystem-scale interactions between biological and abiotic processes.

Large-scale water projects in the developing world: Revisiting the past and looking to the future

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sivakumar, Bellie; Chen, Ji

2014-05-01

During the past half a century or so, the developing world has been witnessing a significant increase in freshwater demands due to a combination of factors, including population growth, increased food demand, improved living standards, and water quality degradation. Since there exists significant variability in rainfall and river flow in both space and time, large-scale storage and distribution of water has become a key means to meet these increasing demands. In this regard, large dams and water transfer schemes (including river-linking schemes and virtual water trades) have been playing a key role. While the benefits of such large-scale projects in supplying water for domestic, irrigation, industrial, hydropower, recreational, and other uses both in the countries of their development and in other countries are undeniable, concerns on their negative impacts, such as high initial costs and damages to our ecosystems (e.g. river environment and species) and socio-economic fabric (e.g. relocation and socio-economic changes of affected people) have also been increasing in recent years. These have led to serious debates on the role of large-scale water projects in the developing world and on their future, but the often one-sided nature of such debates have inevitably failed to yield fruitful outcomes thus far. The present study aims to offer a far more balanced perspective on this issue. First, it recognizes and emphasizes the need for still additional large-scale water structures in the developing world in the future, due to the continuing increase in water demands, inefficiency in water use (especially in the agricultural sector), and absence of equivalent and reliable alternatives. Next, it reviews a few important success and failure stories of large-scale water projects in the developing world (and in the developed world), in an effort to arrive at a balanced view on the future role of such projects. Then, it discusses some major challenges in future water planning and management, with proper consideration to potential technological developments and new options. Finally, it highlights the urgent need for a broader framework that integrates the physical science-related aspects ("hard sciences") and the human science-related aspects ("soft sciences").

NEON Citizen Science: Planning and Prototyping (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gram, W.

2010-12-01

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be a national resource for ecological research and education. NEON citizen science projects are being designed to increase awareness and educate citizen scientists about the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on continental-scale ecological processes as well as expand NEON data collection capacity by enabling laypersons to collect geographically distributed data. The citizen science area of the NEON web portal will enable citizen scientists to collect, contribute, interpret, and visualize scientific data, as well as access training modules, collection protocols and targeted learning experiences related to citizen science project topics. For NEON, citizen science projects are a means for interested people to interact with and contribute to NEON science. Investigations at vast spatial and temporal scales often require rapid acquisition of large amounts of data from a geographically distributed population of “human sensors.” As a continental-scale ecological observatory, NEON is uniquely positioned to develop strategies to effectively integrate data collected by non-scientists into scientific databases. Ultimately, we plan to work collaboratively to transform the practice of science to include “citizens” or non-scientists in the process. Doing science is not limited to scientists, and breaking down the barriers between scientists and citizens will help people better understand the power of using science in their own decision making. In preparation for fully developing the NEON citizen science program, we are partnering with Project BudBurst (PBB), a citizen science project focused on monitoring plant phenology. The educational goals of PBB are to: (1) increase awareness of climate change, (2) educate citizen scientists about the impacts of climate change on plants and the environment, and (3) increase science literacy by engaging participants in the scientific process. Phenology was chosen as the focus of this citizen science campaign because it is a visible and comprehensible way of demonstrating the effects of climate change. In addition, plants are readily accessible in nearly every neighborhood and park, and wild areas across the continent, so people can make observations whether they live near an inner city park or in the rural countryside. Recently, NEON built 3 web tools that enable users to visualize PBB data. The tools include a mapping function that displays selected PBB distributional data on a map, an animated map that shows “green up” through time and space, and a graphing tool that compares number of species flowering or leafing out with day length. This prototyping will help NEON better understand how to engage citizen science participants in “doing science” beyond data collection.

Sensors in the Stream: The High-Frequency Wave of the Present.

PubMed

Rode, Michael; Wade, Andrew J; Cohen, Matthew J; Hensley, Robert T; Bowes, Michael J; Kirchner, James W; Arhonditsis, George B; Jordan, Phil; Kronvang, Brian; Halliday, Sarah J; Skeffington, Richard A; Rozemeijer, Joachim C; Aubert, Alice H; Rinke, Karsten; Jomaa, Seifeddine

2016-10-04

New scientific understanding is catalyzed by novel technologies that enhance measurement precision, resolution or type, and that provide new tools to test and develop theory. Over the last 50 years, technology has transformed the hydrologic sciences by enabling direct measurements of watershed fluxes (evapotranspiration, streamflow) at time scales and spatial extents aligned with variation in physical drivers. High frequency water quality measurements, increasingly obtained by in situ water quality sensors, are extending that transformation. Widely available sensors for some physical (temperature) and chemical (conductivity, dissolved oxygen) attributes have become integral to aquatic science, and emerging sensors for nutrients, dissolved CO 2 , turbidity, algal pigments, and dissolved organic matter are now enabling observations of watersheds and streams at time scales commensurate with their fundamental hydrological, energetic, elemental, and biological drivers. Here we synthesize insights from emerging technologies across a suite of applications, and envision future advances, enabled by sensors, in our ability to understand, predict, and restore watershed and stream systems.

A low-threshold nanolaser based on hybrid plasmonic waveguides at the deep subwavelength scale

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Zhi-Quan; Piao, Rui-Qi; Zhao, Jing-Jing; Meng, Xiao-Yun; Tong, Kai

2015-07-01

A novel nanolaser structure based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide is proposed and investigated. The coupling between the metal nanowire and the high-index semiconductor nanowire with optical gain leads to a strong field enhancement in the air gap region and low propagation loss, which enables the realization of lasing at the deep subwavelength scale. By optimizing the geometric parameters of the structure, a minimal lasing threshold is achieved while maintaining the capacity of ultra-deep subwavelength mode confinement. Compared with the previous coupled nanowire pair based hybrid plasmonic structure, a lower threshold can be obtained with the same geometric parameters. The proposed nanolaser can be integrated into a miniature chip as a nanoscale light source and has the potential to be widely used in optical communication and optical sensing technology. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61172044) and the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province, China (Grant No. F2014501150).

Integrating Science and Technology: Using Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a Framework to Study the Practices of Science Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pringle, Rose M.; Dawson, Kara; Ritzhaupt, Albert D.

2015-01-01

In this study, we examined how teachers involved in a yearlong technology integration initiative planned to enact technological, pedagogical, and content practices in science lessons. These science teachers, engaged in an initiative to integrate educational technology in inquiry-based science lessons, provided a total of 525 lesson plans for this…

Crossing borders between social and physical sciences in post-event investigations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ruin, I.; Gruntfest, E.; Lutoff, C.; Anquetin, S.; Scolobig, A.; Creutin, J.-D.; Borga, M.

2009-04-01

In natural hazard research social and physical scientists tend to approach post-event investigations within their narrow disciplinary lenses. Efforts that are called trans-disciplinary often add social science but do not integrate it effectively. For example, an economist might be brought in to address a question of "value" without any understanding or interest in the context in which the value will be applied (e.g., Merrell et al. 2002, Simmons and Sutter 2005). At the same time, social scientists would benefit from some knowledge of geology, meteorology, hydrology, forecasting operations, and hazard detection systems in order, for instance, to understand the nature and types of uncertainty in the physical systems. Proactive partnership between social and physical scientists in post-event investigations needs a background knowledge and a preparation about several issues from both sides. Moreover neither physical nor social scientists necessarily understand and appreciate the contributions that they can reciprocally bring to their works. Post-event collaborations between social and physical science are rare. The few examples of multi-disciplinary work, when examined closely, are not integrated collaborative projects but patchwork quilts of a variety of specialists taking separate aspects of an issue. There are examples where social scientists and engineers are engaged in one project, but the efforts tend to include social scientists as an "add on" to an existing physical science investigation. In this way, true integration of information, data and knowledge from different fields is lacking and the result is that neither the physical nor the social science perspectives gain a comprehensive picture of the issue under scrutiny. Looking at the flash flood problem, the atmospheric and hydrological generating mechanisms of the phenomenon are poorly understood, leading to highly uncertain forecasts of and warnings for these events. On the other hand warning and crisis response to such violent and fast events is not a straightforward process. In both the social and physical aspect of the problem, space and time scales involved either in hydro-meteorology, human behavior and social organizations sciences are of crucial importance. Interdisciplinary collaboration is particularly important here because those involved with such events, including scholars, hydrologists, meteorologists, road users, emergency managers and civil security services, all have different time and space frameworks that they use for decision-making, forecasting, warnings and research. This presentation will show examples of original findings that emerged from a successful collaboration among different scientific disciplines. Working with geophysical scientists drives us to analyze social data from a different angle, integrating time and space scales as they are used to do in hydrometeorological research. This comprehensive, coupled natural—human system approach over time and space is rarely used but it has been shown to be especially pertinent to integrate social and physical components of the flash flood risk. (Ruin et al., 2008, Ruin et al., 2009, Creutin et al., 2009). Based on these examples we propose to develop a new network, DELUGE (Disasters Evolving Lessons Using Global Experience), to address trans-disciplinary efforts and capacity building related to post-disaster field techniques to change the post-event field experience enterprise and assure that practitioners, forecasters, researchers, students, and others learn from experience to reduce losses. DELUGE is an interdisciplinary, international network aimed at developing a sustainable community of meteorologists, hydrologists, geographers, anthropologists, engineers, planners, economists, and sociologists working together to create a set of guidelines for post-disaster investigations to reduce losses from short-fuse flood events, particularly flash floods, debris flows and landslides (hereafter termed flash floods). Flash-floods, debris flows, and landslides often develop at space and time scales that conventional observation systems are not able to monitor for rainfall and river discharge.

Hands-on, online, and workshop-based K-12 weather and climate education resources from the Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foster, S. Q.; Johnson, R. M.; Randall, D. A.; Denning, A.; Burt, M. A.; Gardiner, L.; Genyuk, J.; Hatheway, B.; Jones, B.; La Grave, M. L.; Russell, R. M.

2009-12-01

The need for improving the representation of cloud processes in climate models has been one of the most important limitations of the reliability of climate-change simulations. Now in its fourth year, the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMMAP) at Colorado State University (CSU) is addressing this problem through a revolutionary new approach to representing cloud processes on their native scales, including the cloud-scale interaction processes that are active in cloud systems. CMMAP has set ambitious education and human-resource goals to share basic information about the atmosphere, clouds, weather, climate, and modeling with diverse K-12 and public audiences. This is accomplished through collaborations in resource development and dissemination between CMMAP scientists, CSU’s Little Shop of Physics (LSOP) program, and the Windows to the Universe (W2U) program at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Little Shop of Physics develops new hands on science activities demonstrating basic science concepts fundamental to understanding atmospheric characteristics, weather, and climate. Videos capture demonstrations of children completing these activities which are broadcast to school districts and public television programs. CMMAP and LSOP educators and scientists partner in teaching a summer professional development workshops for teachers at CSU with a semester's worth of college-level content on the basic physics of the atmosphere, weather, climate, climate modeling, and climate change, as well as dozens of LSOP inquiry-based activities suitable for use in classrooms. The W2U project complements these efforts by developing and broadly disseminating new CMMAP-related online content pages, animations, interactives, image galleries, scientists’ biographies, and LSOP videos to K-12 and public audiences. Reaching nearly 20 million users annually, W2U is highly valued as a curriculum enhancement resource, because its content is written at three levels in English and Spanish. Links between science topics and literature, art, and mythology enable teachers of English Language Learners, literacy, and the arts to integrate science into their classrooms. In summary, the CMMAP NSF-funded Science and Technology Center has established a highly effective and productive partnership of scientists and educators focused on enhancing public science literacy about weather, climate, and global change. All CMMAP, LSOP, and W2U resources can be accessed online at no cost by the entire atmospheric science K-12 and informal science education community.

Clouds, weather, climate, and modeling for K-12 and public audiences from the Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foster, S. Q.; Johnson, R. M.; Randall, D. A.; Denning, A.; Russell, R. M.; Gardiner, L. S.; Hatheway, B.; Jones, B.; Burt, M. A.; Genyuk, J.

2010-12-01

The need for improving the representation of cloud processes in climate models has been one of the most important limitations of the reliability of climate-change simulations. Now in its fifth year, the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMMAP) at Colorado State University (CSU) is addressing this problem through a revolutionary new approach to representing cloud processes on their native scales, including the cloud-scale interaction processes that are active in cloud systems. CMMAP has set ambitious education and human-resource goals to share basic information about the atmosphere, clouds, weather, climate, and modeling with diverse K-12 and public audiences. This is accomplished through collaborations in resource development and dissemination between CMMAP scientists, CSU’s Little Shop of Physics (LSOP) program, and the Windows to the Universe (W2U) program at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Little Shop of Physics develops new hands on science activities demonstrating basic science concepts fundamental to understanding atmospheric characteristics, weather, and climate. Videos capture demonstrations of children completing these activities which are broadcast to school districts and public television programs. CMMAP and LSOP educators and scientists partner in teaching a summer professional development workshops for teachers at CSU with a semester's worth of college-level content on the basic physics of the atmosphere, weather, climate, climate modeling, and climate change, as well as dozens of LSOP inquiry-based activities suitable for use in classrooms. The W2U project complements these efforts by developing and broadly disseminating new CMMAP-related online content pages, animations, interactives, image galleries, scientists’ biographies, and LSOP videos to K-12 and public audiences. Reaching nearly 20 million users annually, W2U is highly valued as a curriculum enhancement resource, because its content is written at three levels in English and Spanish. Links between science topics and literature, art, and mythology enable teachers of English Language Learners, literacy, and the arts to integrate science into their classrooms. In summary, the CMMAP NSF-funded Science and Technology Center has established a highly effective and productive partnership of scientists and educators focused on enhancing public science literacy about weather, climate, and global change. All CMMAP, LSOP, and W2U resources can be accessed online at no cost by the entire atmospheric science K-12 and informal science education community.

Radiometric Measurement Comparisons Using Transfer Radiometers in Support of the Calibration of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Sensors

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Butler, James J.; Johnson, B. Carol; Brown, Steven W.; Yoon, Howard W.; Barnes, Robert A.; Markham, Brian L.; Biggar, Stuart F.; Zalewski, Edward F.; Spyak, Paul R.; Cooper, John W.;

HESS Opinions "Integration of groundwater and surface water research: an interdisciplinary problem?"

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barthel, R.

2014-07-01

Today there is a great consensus that water resource research needs to become more holistic, integrating perspectives of a large variety of disciplines. Groundwater and surface water (hereafter: GW and SW) are typically identified as different compartments of the hydrological cycle and were traditionally often studied and managed separately. However, despite this separation, these respective fields of study are usually not considered to be different disciplines. They are often seen as different specializations of hydrology with a different focus yet similar theory, concepts, and methodology. The present article discusses how this notion may form a substantial obstacle in the further integration of GW and SW research and management. The article focuses on the regional scale (areas of approximately 103 to 106 km2), which is identified as the scale where integration is most greatly needed, but ironically where the least amount of fully integrated research seems to be undertaken. The state of research on integrating GW and SW research is briefly reviewed and the most essential differences between GW hydrology (or hydrogeology, geohydrology) and SW hydrology are presented. Groundwater recharge and baseflow are used as examples to illustrate different perspectives on similar phenomena that can cause severe misunderstandings and errors in the conceptualization of integration schemes. The fact that integration of GW and SW research on the regional scale necessarily must move beyond the hydrological aspects, by collaborating with the social sciences and increasing the interaction between science and society in general, is also discussed. The typical elements of an ideal interdisciplinary workflow are presented and their relevance with respect to the integration of GW and SW is discussed. The overall conclusions are that GW hydrology and SW hydrogeology study rather different objects of interest, using different types of observation, working on different problem settings. They have thus developed a different theory, methodology and terminology. However, there seems to be a widespread lack of awareness of these differences, which hinders the detection of the existing interdisciplinary aspects of GW and SW integration and consequently the development of a truly unifying interdisciplinary theory and methodology. Thus, despite having the ultimate goal of creating a more holistic approach, we may have to start integration by analyzing potential disciplinary differences. Improved understanding among hydrologists of what interdisciplinary means and how it works is needed. Hydrologists, despite frequently being involved in multidisciplinary projects, are not sufficiently involved in developing interdisciplinary strategies and do usually not regard the process of integration as such as a research topic of its own. There seems to be a general reluctance to apply a (truly) interdisciplinary methodology because this is tedious and few immediate incentives are experienced. The objective of the present opinion paper is to stimulate a discussion rather than to provide recipes on how to integrate GW and SW research or to explain how specific problems of GW-SW interaction should be solved on a technical level. For that purpose it presents complicated topics in a rather simplified, bold way, ignoring to some degree subtleties and potentially controversial issues.

Sex, grade, and course differences in attitudes that are related to cognitive performance in secondary science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Levin, James; Seymour Fowler, H.

The purpose of this study was to collect and analyze data on sexual differences in secondary school students' attitudes towards science. Attitudinal differences were also analyzed for the independent variables of science programs and grade levels. Data were collected from 988 students using a modified version of the Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Attitude Scales to represent attitudes toward science. Reliabilities of the modified science subscales were all high ( > 0.83). Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to analyze the data for the main and interaction effects of the independent variables of sex (male, female), grade level (10th, 11th, 12th), and science program (advanced placement, academic, general, terminal). Significant differences (p < 0.05) were indicated for all main effects (sex, grade, science program). Interaction effects were not found. Mean separations for the various levels of sex, grade, and science program were performed for all attitudinal subscales. Females evidenced a significantly more positive attitude (p 0.01) than males on three subscales: Attitude Toward Success in Science Scale, Science as a Male Domain Scale, and Teacher Scale. Although not significant, males evidenced more positive attitudes on all the remaining five subscales. Eleventh graders evidenced significantly more positive attitudes than tenth graders on all but the Effectance Motivation Scale. Students in 11th grade had more positive attitudes than 12th-grade students on all scales but Science as a Male Domain Scale; however, these differences were not significant. Tenth graders differed significantly from 12th graders on three subscales; Science Usefulness Scale, Confidence in Learning Science Scale, and Teacher Scale. Positive attitudes decreased from advanced placement to terminal programs. Academic students did not differ significantly from general students except on the Father Scale; however, they were significantly different (more positive) from the terminal students for all subscales. General students were also significantly different from terminal students except on the three subscales of Attitudes Toward Success in Science, Science as a Male Domain, and Effectance Motivation.

Snow snakes and science agency: Empowering American Indian students through a culturally-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Miller, Brant Gregory

Mainstream curricula have struggled to provide American Indian students with meaningful learning experiences. This research project studied a novel approach to engaging students with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content through a culturally-based context. The traditional American Indian game of Snow Snakes (shushumeg in Ojibwe) presented a highly engaging context for delivering STEM content. Through the engaging context of snow snakes, the designed STEM curriculum explicitly applied mathematics (scaling and data), and science (force and motion) to an engineering prototype iteration that used available materials and tools (technology) for success. It was hypothesized that by engaging students through the carefully integrated STEM curriculum, driven by the culturally based context of snow snakes, students would exhibit an increase in science agency and achievement. The overarching research question explored for this study was: How does a culturally-based and integrated STEM curriculum impact student's science agency? Associated sub-questions were: (1) What does science agency look like for 6th grade students? (2) What key experiences are involved in the development of science agency through a culturally-based STEM curriculum context? And (3) What are the impacts on the community associated with the implementation of a culturally-based STEM curriculum? A case study research design was implemented for this research. Yin (2003) defines a case study as investigating a phenomenon (e.g. science agency) which occurs within authentic contexts (e.g. snow snakes, Adventure Learning, and Eagle Soaring School) especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are unclear. For this case study Eagle Soaring School acted as the bounded case with students from the 6th grade class representing the embedded units. Science agency was the theoretical framework for data analysis. Major findings were categorized as science and STEM learning, agency, and community impact. Concerning agency, students displayed science agency through: connecting snow snake experiences to outside contexts; students emerging as leaders; and students commanding a facility with science. This research lays the foundation for future inquiry into the development of science agency in students using culturally-based contexts.

DOE Network 2025: Network Research Problems and Challenges for DOE Scientists. Workshop Report

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

None, None

2016-02-01

The growing investments in large science instruments and supercomputers by the US Department of Energy (DOE) hold enormous promise for accelerating the scientific discovery process. They facilitate unprecedented collaborations of geographically dispersed teams of scientists that use these resources. These collaborations critically depend on the production, sharing, moving, and management of, as well as interactive access to, large, complex data sets at sites dispersed across the country and around the globe. In particular, they call for significant enhancements in network capacities to sustain large data volumes and, equally important, the capabilities to collaboratively access the data across computing, storage, andmore » instrument facilities by science users and automated scripts and systems. Improvements in network backbone capacities of several orders of magnitude are essential to meet these challenges, in particular, to support exascale initiatives. Yet, raw network speed represents only a part of the solution. Indeed, the speed must be matched by network and transport layer protocols and higher layer tools that scale in ways that aggregate, compose, and integrate the disparate subsystems into a complete science ecosystem. Just as important, agile monitoring and management services need to be developed to operate the network at peak performance levels. Finally, these solutions must be made an integral part of the production facilities by using sound approaches to develop, deploy, diagnose, operate, and maintain them over the science infrastructure.« less

The Integration of Mathematics in Middle School Science: Student and Teacher Impacts Related to Science Achievement and Attitudes Towards Integration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McHugh, Luisa

Contemporary research has suggested that in order for students to compete globally in the 21st century workplace, pedagogy must shift to include the integration of science and mathematics, where teachers effectively incorporate the two disciplines seamlessly. Mathematics facilitates a deeper understanding of science concepts and has been linked to improved student perception of the integration of science and mathematics. Although there is adequate literature to substantiate students' positive responses to integration in terms of attitudes, there has been little empirical data to support significant academic improvement when both disciplines are taught in an integrated method. This research study, conducted at several school districts on Long Island and New York City, New York, examined teachers' attitudes toward integration and students' attitudes about, and achievement on assessments in, an integrated 8th grade science classroom compared to students in a non-integrated classroom. An examination of these parameters was conducted to analyze the impact of the sizeable investment of time and resources needed to teach an integrated curriculum effectively. These resources included substantial teacher training, planning time, collaboration with colleagues, and administration of student assessments. The findings suggest that students had positive outcomes associated with experiencing an integrated science and mathematics curriculum, though these were only weakly correlated with teacher confidence in implementing the integrated model successfully. The positive outcomes included the ability of students to understand scientific concepts within a concrete mathematical framework, improved confidence in applying mathematics to scientific ideas, and increased agreement with the usefulness of mathematics in interpreting science concepts. Implications of these research findings may be of benefit to educators and policymakers looking to adapt integrated curricula in order to improve the preparation of students to learn and achieve in a global society.

Integrating Science and Literacy Instruction: A Framework for Bridging the Gap

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Freeman, Gene; Taylor, Vickie

2006-01-01

There is vast research that substantiates the integration of science and literacy; however, there are very few books that correlate findings and address specific practices. "Integrating Science and Literary Instruction" connects scientifically based research and best instructional practices in literacy and integrates this with the inquiry-based…

Preparing prospective physics teachers to teach integrated science in junior high school

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wiyanto; Hartono; Nugroho, S. E.

2018-03-01

The physics education study program especially prepares its students to teach physics in senior high school, however in reality many its graduates have become science teachers in junior high school. Therefore introducing integrated science to prospective physics teachers is important, because based on the curriculum, science in the junior high school should be taught integratedly. This study analyzed integrated science teaching materials that developed by prospective physics teachers. Results from this study showed that majority of the integration materials that developed by the prospective physics teachers focused on topic with an overlapping concept or theme as connecting between two or three subjects.

To simulate or not to simulate: what are the questions?

PubMed

Dudai, Yadin; Evers, Kathinka

2014-10-22

Simulation is a powerful method in science and engineering. However, simulation is an umbrella term, and its meaning and goals differ among disciplines. Rapid advances in neuroscience and computing draw increasing attention to large-scale brain simulations. What is the meaning of simulation, and what should the method expect to achieve? We discuss the concept of simulation from an integrated scientific and philosophical vantage point and pinpoint selected issues that are specific to brain simulation.

Creating a FIESTA (Framework for Integrated Earth Science and Technology Applications) with MagIC

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Minnett, R.; Koppers, A. A. P.; Jarboe, N.; Tauxe, L.; Constable, C.

2017-12-01

The Magnetics Information Consortium (https://earthref.org/MagIC) has recently developed a containerized web application to considerably reduce the friction in contributing, exploring and combining valuable and complex datasets for the paleo-, geo- and rock magnetic scientific community. The data produced in this scientific domain are inherently hierarchical and the communities evolving approaches to this scientific workflow, from sampling to taking measurements to multiple levels of interpretations, require a large and flexible data model to adequately annotate the results and ensure reproducibility. Historically, contributing such detail in a consistent format has been prohibitively time consuming and often resulted in only publishing the highly derived interpretations. The new open-source (https://github.com/earthref/MagIC) application provides a flexible upload tool integrated with the data model to easily create a validated contribution and a powerful search interface for discovering datasets and combining them to enable transformative science. MagIC is hosted at EarthRef.org along with several interdisciplinary geoscience databases. A FIESTA (Framework for Integrated Earth Science and Technology Applications) is being created by generalizing MagIC's web application for reuse in other domains. The application relies on a single configuration document that describes the routing, data model, component settings and external services integrations. The container hosts an isomorphic Meteor JavaScript application, MongoDB database and ElasticSearch search engine. Multiple containers can be configured as microservices to serve portions of the application or rely on externally hosted MongoDB, ElasticSearch, or third-party services to efficiently scale computational demands. FIESTA is particularly well suited for many Earth Science disciplines with its flexible data model, mapping, account management, upload tool to private workspaces, reference metadata, image galleries, full text searches and detailed filters. EarthRef's Seamount Catalog of bathymetry and morphology data, EarthRef's Geochemical Earth Reference Model (GERM) databases, and Oregon State University's Marine and Geology Repository (http://osu-mgr.org) will benefit from custom adaptations of FIESTA.

An instructional package integrating science and social studies instruction at the fifth-grade level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hulley, Kathy Louise Sullivan

Integrative education is being implemented by classroom teachers who want to immerse students in an environment rich in problem-solving skills, critical analysis skills, ethics, valuing of knowledge, and communication of learning. Several subject areas in the curriculum have been integrated, such as literature with social studies and mathematics with science. The focus of this dissertation is on the integration of science and social studies at the fifth grade level using the Mississippi State Department of Education Curriculum Guidelines and Objectives (MSDE, 1995) and the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council (NRC), 1996). An instructional package of lesson plans that teachers can use as ideas to create their own plans for an integrated curriculum of science and social studies was devised. The Mississippi State Department of Education Curriculum Guidelines and Objectives for Social Studies (MSDE, 1995) at the fifth grade level contain fifteen competencies. Three standards from the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) were chosen. They include (a) science and technology, (b) science in personal and social perspectives, and (c) the history and nature of science. Each competency for social studies has three lesson plans written that integrate the three chosen standards from the National Science Education Standards. A total of forty-five lesson plans were written integrating science and social studies. Each lesson plan includes an objective, materials, procedures, and evaluation for teachers. Teachers are encouraged to use the lesson plans as a guide in creating their own lesson plans that would correspond to their school's particular curriculum guidelines. Consideration should be given to the learning levels and styles of their classroom. This qualitative study was done to create lesson plans that integrate science and social studies with the hope that teachers will expand upon them and implement them into their curricula.

Adapting agriculture to climate change.

PubMed

Howden, S Mark; Soussana, Jean-François; Tubiello, Francesco N; Chhetri, Netra; Dunlop, Michael; Meinke, Holger

2007-12-11

The strong trends in climate change already evident, the likelihood of further changes occurring, and the increasing scale of potential climate impacts give urgency to addressing agricultural adaptation more coherently. There are many potential adaptation options available for marginal change of existing agricultural systems, often variations of existing climate risk management. We show that implementation of these options is likely to have substantial benefits under moderate climate change for some cropping systems. However, there are limits to their effectiveness under more severe climate changes. Hence, more systemic changes in resource allocation need to be considered, such as targeted diversification of production systems and livelihoods. We argue that achieving increased adaptation action will necessitate integration of climate change-related issues with other risk factors, such as climate variability and market risk, and with other policy domains, such as sustainable development. Dealing with the many barriers to effective adaptation will require a comprehensive and dynamic policy approach covering a range of scales and issues, for example, from the understanding by farmers of change in risk profiles to the establishment of efficient markets that facilitate response strategies. Science, too, has to adapt. Multidisciplinary problems require multidisciplinary solutions, i.e., a focus on integrated rather than disciplinary science and a strengthening of the interface with decision makers. A crucial component of this approach is the implementation of adaptation assessment frameworks that are relevant, robust, and easily operated by all stakeholders, practitioners, policymakers, and scientists.

Rivers are social–ecological systems: Time to integrate human dimensions into riverscape ecology and management

USGS Publications Warehouse

Dunham, Jason B.; Angermeier, Paul L.; Crausbay, Shelley D.; Cravens, Amanda; Gosnell, Hannah; McEvoy, Jamie; Moritz, Max A.; Raheem, Nejem; Sanford, Todd

2018-01-01

Incorporation of concepts from landscape ecology into understanding and managing riverine ecosystems has become widely known as riverscape ecology. Riverscape ecology emphasizes interactions among processes at different scales and their consequences for valued ecosystem components, such as riverine fishes. Past studies have focused strongly on understanding the ecological processes in riverscapes and how human actions modify those processes. It is increasingly clear, however, that an understanding of the drivers behind actions that lead to human modification also merit consideration, especially regarding how those drivers influence management efficacy. These indirect drivers of riverscape outcomes can be understood in the context of a diverse array of social processes, which we collectively refer to as human dimensions. Like ecological phenomena, social processes also exhibit complex interactions across spatiotemporal scales. Greater emphasis on feedbacks between social and ecological processes will lead scientists and managers to more completely understand riverscapes as complex, dynamic, interacting social–ecological systems. Emerging applications in riverscapes, as well as studies of other ecosystems, provide examples that can lead to stronger integration of social and ecological science. We argue that conservation successes within riverscapes may not come from better ecological science, improved ecosystem service analyses, or even economic incentives if the fundamental drivers of human behaviors are not understood and addressed in conservation planning and implementation.

Linking Big and Small Data Across the Social, Engineering, and Earth Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, R. S.; de Sherbinin, A. M.; Levy, M. A.; Downs, R. R.

2014-12-01

The challenges of sustainable development cut across the social, health, ecological, engineering, and Earth sciences, across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and across the spectrum from basic to applied research and decision making. The rapidly increasing availability of data and information in digital form from a variety of data repositories, networks, and other sources provides new opportunities to link and integrate both traditional data holdings as well as emerging "big data" resources in ways that enable interdisciplinary research and facilitate the use of objective scientific data and information in society. Taking advantage of these opportunities not only requires improved technical and scientific data interoperability across disciplines, scales, and data types, but also concerted efforts to bridge gaps and barriers between key communities, institutions, and networks. Given the long time perspectives required in planning sustainable approaches to development, it is also imperative to address user requirements for long-term data continuity and stewardship by trustworthy repositories. We report here on lessons learned by CIESIN working on a range of sustainable development issues to integrate data across multiple repositories and networks. This includes CIESIN's roles in developing policy-relevant climate and environmental indicators, soil data for African agriculture, and exposure and risk measures for hazards, disease, and conflict, as well as CIESIN's participation in a range of national and international initiatives related both to sustainable development and to open data access, interoperability, and stewardship.

Enabling Long-Term Oceanographic Research: Changing Data Practices, Information Management Strategies and Informatics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baker, K. S.; Chandler, C. L.

2008-12-01

Data management and informatics research are in a state of change in terms of data practices, information strategies, and roles. New ways of thinking about data and data management can facilitate interdisciplinary global ocean science. To meet contemporary expectations for local data use and reuse by a variety of audiences, collaborative strategies involving diverse teams of information professionals are developing. Such changes are fostering the growth of information infrastructures that support multi-scale sampling, data integration, and nascent networks of data repositories. In this retrospective, two examples of oceanographic projects incorporating data management in partnership with long-term science programs are reviewed: the Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research program (Palmer LTER) and the United States Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (US JGOFS). Lessons learned - short-term and long-term - from a decade of data management within these two communities will be presented. A conceptual framework called Ocean Informatics provides one example for managing the complexities inherent to sharing oceanographic data. Elements are discussed that address the economies-of-scale as well as the complexities-of-scale pertinent to a broad vision of information management and scientific research.

The Need for Integrated Approaches in Metabolic Engineering.

PubMed

Lechner, Anna; Brunk, Elizabeth; Keasling, Jay D

2016-11-01

This review highlights state-of-the-art procedures for heterologous small-molecule biosynthesis, the associated bottlenecks, and new strategies that have the potential to accelerate future accomplishments in metabolic engineering. We emphasize that a combination of different approaches over multiple time and size scales must be considered for successful pathway engineering in a heterologous host. We have classified these optimization procedures based on the "system" that is being manipulated: transcriptome, translatome, proteome, or reactome. By bridging multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and computational sciences, we can create an integral framework for the discovery and implementation of novel biosynthetic production routes. Copyright © 2016 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; all rights reserved.

Building brains for bodies

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Brooks, Rodney Allen; Stein, Lynn Andrea

1994-01-01

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We will build an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to 'think' by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience.

U.S. Geological Survey Ecosystems science strategy: advancing discovery and application through collaboration

USGS Publications Warehouse

Williams, Byron K.; Wingard, G. Lynn; Brewer, Gary; Cloern, James E.; Gelfenbaum, Guy; Jacobson, Robert B.; Kershner, Jeffrey L.; McGuire, Anthony David; Nichols, James D.; Shapiro, Carl D.; van Riper, Charles; White, Robin P.

2013-01-01

Ecosystem science is critical to making informed decisions about natural resources that can sustain our Nation’s economic and environmental well-being. Resource managers and policymakers are faced with countless decisions each year at local, regional, and national levels on issues as diverse as renewable and nonrenewable energy development, agriculture, forestry, water supply, and resource allocations at the urbanrural interface. The urgency for sound decisionmaking is increasing dramatically as the world is being transformed at an unprecedented pace and in uncertain directions. Environmental changes are associated with natural hazards, greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing demands for water, land, food, energy, mineral, and living resources. At risk is the Nation’s environmental capital, the goods and services provided by resilient ecosystems that are vital to the health and wellbeing of human societies. Ecosystem science—the study of systems of organisms interacting with their environment and the consequences of natural and human-induced change on these systems—is necessary to inform decisionmakers as they develop policies to adapt to these changes. This Ecosystems Science Strategy is built on a framework that includes basic and applied science. It highlights the critical roles that U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists and partners can play in building scientific understanding and providing timely information to decisionmakers. The strategy underscores the connection between scientific discoveries and the application of new knowledge, and it integrates ecosystem science and decisionmaking, producing new scientific outcomes to assist resource managers and providing public benefits. We envision the USGS as a leader in integrating scientific information into decisionmaking processes that affect the Nation’s natural resources and human well-being. The USGS is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in ecosystem science. With its wide range of expertise, the Bureau can bring holistic, cross-scale, interdisciplinary capabilities to the design and conduct of monitoring, research, and modeling and to new technologies for data collection, management, and visualization. Collectively, these capabilities can be used to reveal ecological patterns and processes, explain how and why ecosystems change, and forecast change over different spatial and temporal scales. USGS science can provide managers with options and decision-support tools to use resources sustainably. The USGS has long-standing, collaborative relationships with the Department of the Interior (DOI) and other partners in the natural sciences, in both conducting science and applying the results. The USGS engages these partners in cooperative investigations that otherwise would lack the necessary support or be too expensive for a single bureau to conduct. The heart of this strategy is a framework for USGS ecosystems science that focuses on five long-term goals, which are seen as interconnected components that reinforce our vision of the USGS providing science that is at the forefront of decisionmaking.

A Comparative Study of the Empirical Relationship in Student Performance between Physics and Other STEM Subjects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guerra, Maricela

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) advocated by the National Research Council emphasize the connections among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. By design, NGSS is expected to replace the previous science education standards to enhance the quality of STEM education across the nation. To support this initiative, this investigation was conducted to fill a void in the research literature by developing an empirical indicator for the relationship of student performance across STEM subjects using a large-scale database from the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In particular, an innovative approach has been taken in this study to support the canonical correlation analysis of student plausible scores between physics and other STEM subjects at different grade levels and in a cross-country context. Results from this doctoral research revealed the need to strengthen the alignment between the intended, implemented, and attained curricula to support the integration of STEM disciplines in the United States.

Super Science Connections.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Janice, Ed.

This manual was developed to help K-3 teachers incorporate science and science activities as an integral part of their curricula. It integrates hands-on science activities with other curricular areas, particularly the language arts. The activities include science background information, science process skills, classroom management suggestions,…

Integrating Instruction: Literacy and Science. Tools for Teaching Literacy Series

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McKee, Judy; Ogle, Donna

2005-01-01

This book provides a full framework for integrating science and literacy. It shows how tapping into children's interest in science can help them develop key literacy skills and strategies as they explore the world around them. Examples of integrated science units include hands-on instructions and reproducible materials for learning activities that…

Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK): An Educational Landscape for Tertiary Science Faculty

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lavadia, Linda

Earlier studies concluded that technology's strength is in supporting student learning rather than as an instrument for content delivery (Angeli & Valanides, 2014). Current research espouses the merits of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a guide for educators' reflections about technology integration within the context of content and instructional practice. Grounded by two theoretical frameworks, TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; 2008) and Rogers' (1983, 1995) theory of diffusion of innovation, the purpose of this mixed-methods research was two-fold: to explore the perceived competencies of tertiary science faculty at higher education institutions with respect to their integration of technology within the constructs of pedagogical practice and content learning and to analyze whether these perceived competencies may serve as predictive factors for technology adoption level. The literature review included past research that served as models for the Sci-TPACK instrument. Twenty-nine professors of tertiary science courses participated in an online Likert survey, and four professors provided in-depth interviews on their TPACK practices. Quantitative analysis of data consisted of descriptive and reliability statistics, calculations of means for each of the seven scales or domains of TPACK, and regression analysis. Open-ended questions on the Likert survey and individual interviews provided recurrent themes of the qualitative data. Final results revealed that the participants integrate technology into pedagogy and content through a myriad of TPACK practices. Regression analysis supported perceived TPACK competencies as predictive factors for technology adoption level.

Exploring scientific creativity of eleventh-grade students in Taiwan

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liang, Jia-Chi

2002-04-01

Although most researchers focus on scientists' creativity, students' scientific creativity should be considered, especially for high school and college students. It is generally assumed that most professional creators in science emerge from amateur creators. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between students' scientific creativity and selected variables including creativity, problem finding, formulating hypotheses, science achievement, the nature of science, and attitudes toward science for finding significant predictors of eleventh grade students' scientific creativity. A total of 130 male eleventh-grade students in three biology classes participated in this study. The main instruments included the Test of Divergent Thinking (TDT) for creativity measurement, the Creativity Rating Scale (CRS) and the Creative Activities and Accomplishments Check Lists (CAACL ) for measurement of scientific creativity, the Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS) for measurement of the nature of science, and the Science Attitude Inventory II (SAI II) for measurement of attitudes toward science. In addition, two instruments on measuring students' abilities of problem finding and abilities of formulating hypotheses were developed by the researcher in this study. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlations, and stepwise multiple regressions. The major findings suggested the following: (1) students' scientific creativity significantly correlated with some of selected variables such as attitudes toward science, problem finding, formulating hypotheses, the nature of science, resistance to closure, originality, and elaboration; (2) four significant predictors including attitudes toward science, problem finding, resistance to closure, and originality accounted for 48% of the variance of students' scientific creativity; (3) there were big differences between students with a higher and a lower degree of scientific creativity on the variables of family support, career images, and readings about science; and (4) many students were confused about the creative and moral levels on NSKS and the concept of "almighty of science" and purposes of science on SAI II. The results of this study may provide a more holistic and integrative interpretation of students' scientific creativity and propose better ways of evaluating students' scientific creativity. In addition, the research results may encourage teachers to view scientific creativity as an ability that can be enhanced through various means in classroom science teaching.

Toward a science of learning systems: a research agenda for the high-functioning Learning Health System.

PubMed

Friedman, Charles; Rubin, Joshua; Brown, Jeffrey; Buntin, Melinda; Corn, Milton; Etheredge, Lynn; Gunter, Carl; Musen, Mark; Platt, Richard; Stead, William; Sullivan, Kevin; Van Houweling, Douglas

2015-01-01

The capability to share data, and harness its potential to generate knowledge rapidly and inform decisions, can have transformative effects that improve health. The infrastructure to achieve this goal at scale--marrying technology, process, and policy--is commonly referred to as the Learning Health System (LHS). Achieving an LHS raises numerous scientific challenges. The National Science Foundation convened an invitational workshop to identify the fundamental scientific and engineering research challenges to achieving a national-scale LHS. The workshop was planned by a 12-member committee and ultimately engaged 45 prominent researchers spanning multiple disciplines over 2 days in Washington, DC on 11-12 April 2013. The workshop participants collectively identified 106 research questions organized around four system-level requirements that a high-functioning LHS must satisfy. The workshop participants also identified a new cross-disciplinary integrative science of cyber-social ecosystems that will be required to address these challenges. The intellectual merit and potential broad impacts of the innovations that will be driven by investments in an LHS are of great potential significance. The specific research questions that emerged from the workshop, alongside the potential for diverse communities to assemble to address them through a 'new science of learning systems', create an important agenda for informatics and related disciplines. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Examining Curricular Integration Strategies To Optimize Learning Of The Anatomical Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lisk, Kristina Adriana Ayako

Background: Integration of basic and clinical science knowledge is essential to clinical practice. Although the importance of these two knowledge domains is well-recognized, successfully supporting the development of learners' integrated basic and clinical science knowledge, remains an educational challenge. In this dissertation, I examine curricular integration strategies to optimize learning of the anatomical sciences. Objectives: The studies were designed to achieve the following research aims: 1) to objectively identify clinically relevant content for an integrated musculoskeletal anatomy curriculum; 2) to examine the value of integrated anatomy and clinical science instruction compared to clinical science instruction alone on novices' diagnostic accuracy and diagnostic reasoning process; 3) to compare the effect of integrating and segregating anatomy and clinical science instruction along with a learning strategy (self-explanation) on novices' diagnostic accuracy. Methods: A modified Delphi was used to objectively select clinically relevant content for an integrated musculoskeletal anatomy curriculum. Two experimental studies were created to compare different instructional strategies to optimize learning of the curricular content. In both of these studies, novice learners were taught the clinical features of musculoskeletal pathologies using different learning approaches. Diagnostic performance was measured immediately after instruction and one-week later. Results: The results show that the Delphi method is an effective strategy to select clinically relevant content for integrated anatomy curricula. The findings also demonstrate that novices who were explicitly taught the clinical features of musculoskeletal diseases using causal basic science descriptions had superior diagnostic accuracy and a better understanding of the relative importance of key clinical features for disease categories. Conclusions: This research demonstrates how integration strategies can be applied at multiple levels of the curriculum. Further, this work shows the value of cognitive integration of anatomy and clinical science and it emphasizes the importance of purposefully linking the anatomical and clinical sciences in day-to-day teaching.

CLEANER-Hydrologic Observatory Joint Science Plan

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Welty, C.; Dressler, K.; Hooper, R.

2005-12-01

The CLEANER-Hydrologic Observatory* initiative is a distributed network for research on complex environmental systems that focuses on the intersecting water-related issues of both the CUAHSI and CLEANER communities. It emphasizes research on the nation's water resources related to human-dominated natural and built environments. The network will be comprised of: interacting field sites with an integrated cyberinfrastructure; a centralized technical resource staff and management infrastructure to support interdisciplinary research through data collection from advanced sensor systems, data mining and aggregation from multiple sources and databases; cyber-tools for analysis, visualization, and predictive multi-scale modeling that is dynamically driven. As such, the network will transform 21st century workforce development in the water-related intersection of environmental science and engineering, as well as enable substantial educational and engagement opportunities for all age levels. The scientific goal and strategic intent of the CLEANER-Hydrologic Observatory Network is to transform our understanding of the earth's water cycle and associated biogeochemical cycles across spatial and temporal scales-enabling quantitative forecasts of critical water-related processes, especially those that affect and are affected by human activities. This strategy will develop scientific and engineering tools that will enable more effective adaptive approaches for resource management. The need for the network is based on three critical deficiencies in current abilities to understand large-scale environmental processes and thereby develop more effective management strategies. First we lack basic data and the infrastructure to collect them at the needed resolution. Second, we lack the means to integrate data across scales from different media (paper records, electronic worksheets, web-based) and sources (observations, experiments, simulations). Third, we lack sufficiently accurate modeling and decision-support tools to predict the underlying processes or subsequently forecast the effects of different management strategies. Water is a critical driver for the functioning of all ecosystems and development of human society, and it is a key ingredient for the success of industry, agriculture and, national economy. CLEANER-Hydrologic Observatories will foster cutting-edge science and engineering research that addresses major national needs (public and governmental) related to water and include, for example: (i) water resource problems, such as impaired surface waters, contaminated ground water, water availability for human use and ecosystem needs, floods and floodplain management, urban storm water, agricultural runoff, and coastal hypoxia; (ii) understanding environmental impacts on public health; (iii) achieving a balance of economic and environmental sustainability; (iv) reversing environmental degradation; and (v) protecting against chemical and biological threats. CLEANER (Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research) is an ENG initiative; the Hydrologic Observatory Network is GEO initiative through CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.). The two initiatives were merged into a joint, bi-directorate program in December 2004.

Coupling the Biophysical and Social Dimensions of Wildfire Risk to Improve Wildfire Mitigation Planning.

PubMed

Ager, Alan A; Kline, Jeffrey D; Fischer, A Paige

2015-08-01

We describe recent advances in biophysical and social aspects of risk and their potential combined contribution to improve mitigation planning on fire-prone landscapes. The methods and tools provide an improved method for defining the spatial extent of wildfire risk to communities compared to current planning processes. They also propose an expanded role for social science to improve understanding of community-wide risk perceptions and to predict property owners' capacities and willingness to mitigate risk by treating hazardous fuels and reducing the susceptibility of dwellings. In particular, we identify spatial scale mismatches in wildfire mitigation planning and their potential adverse impact on risk mitigation goals. Studies in other fire-prone regions suggest that these scale mismatches are widespread and contribute to continued wildfire dwelling losses. We discuss how risk perceptions and behavior contribute to scale mismatches and how they can be minimized through integrated analyses of landscape wildfire transmission and social factors that describe the potential for collaboration among landowners and land management agencies. These concepts are then used to outline an integrated socioecological planning framework to identify optimal strategies for local community risk mitigation and improve landscape-scale prioritization of fuel management investments by government entities. © 2015 Society for Risk Analysis.

Integration Science and Technology of Advanced Ceramics for Energy and Environmental Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Singh, M.

2012-01-01

The discovery of new and innovative materials has been known to culminate in major turning points in human history. The transformative impact and functional manifestation of new materials have been demonstrated in every historical era by their integration into new products, systems, assemblies, and devices. In modern times, the integration of new materials into usable products has a special relevance for the technological development and economic competitiveness of industrial societies. Advanced ceramic technologies dramatically impact the energy and environmental landscape due to potential wide scale applications in all aspects of energy production, storage, distribution, conservation, and efficiency. Examples include gas turbine propulsion systems, fuel cells, thermoelectrics, photovoltaics, distribution and transmission systems based on superconductors, nuclear power generation, and waste disposal. Robust ceramic integration technologies enable hierarchical design and manufacturing of intricate ceramic components starting with geometrically simpler units that are subsequently joined to themselves and/or to metals to create components with progressively higher levels of complexity and functionality. However, for the development of robust and reliable integrated systems with optimum performance under different operating conditions, the detailed understanding of various thermochemical and thermomechanical factors is critical. Different approaches are required for the integration of ceramic-metal and ceramic-ceramic systems across length scales (macro to nano). In this presentation, a few examples of integration of ceramic to metals and ceramic to ceramic systems will be presented. Various challenges and opportunities in design, fabrication, and testing of integrated similar (ceramic-ceramic) and dissimilar (ceramic-metal) material systems will be discussed. Potential opportunities and need for the development of innovative design philosophies, approaches, and integrated system testing under simulated application conditions will also be presented.

Integration of basic sciences and clinical sciences in oral radiology education for dental students.

PubMed

Baghdady, Mariam T; Carnahan, Heather; Lam, Ernest W N; Woods, Nicole N

2013-06-01

Educational research suggests that cognitive processing in diagnostic radiology requires a solid foundation in the basic sciences and knowledge of the radiological changes associated with disease. Although it is generally assumed that dental students must acquire both sets of knowledge, little is known about the most effective way to teach them. Currently, the basic and clinical sciences are taught separately. This study was conducted to compare the diagnostic accuracy of students when taught basic sciences segregated or integrated with clinical features. Predoctoral dental students (n=51) were taught four confusable intrabony abnormalities using basic science descriptions integrated with the radiographic features or taught segregated from the radiographic features. The students were tested with diagnostic images, and memory tests were performed immediately after learning and one week later. On immediate and delayed testing, participants in the integrated basic science group outperformed those from the segregated group. A main effect of learning condition was found to be significant (p<0.05). The results of this study support the critical role of integrating biomedical knowledge in diagnostic radiology and shows that teaching basic sciences integrated with clinical features produces higher diagnostic accuracy in novices than teaching basic sciences segregated from clinical features.

Technology Integration in a Science Classroom: Preservice Teachers' Perceptions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rehmat, Abeera P.; Bailey, Janelle M.

2014-12-01

The challenge of preparing students for the information age has prompted administrators to increase technology in the public schools. Yet despite the increased availability of technology in schools, few teachers are integrating technology for instructional purposes. Preservice teachers must be equipped with adequate content knowledge of technology to create an advantageous learning experience in science classrooms. To understand preservice teachers' conceptions of technology integration, this research study explored 15 elementary science methods students' definitions of technology and their attitudes toward incorporating technology into their teaching. The phenomenological study took place in a science methods course that was based on a constructivist approach to teaching and learning science through science activities and class discussions, with an emphasis on a teacher beliefs framework. Data were collected throughout the semester, including an open-ended pre/post-technology integration survey, lesson plans, and reflections on activities conducted throughout the course. Through a qualitative analysis, we identified improvements in students' technology definitions, increased technology incorporation into science lesson plans, and favorable attitudes toward technology integration in science teaching after instruction. This research project demonstrates that positive changes in beliefs and behaviors relating to technology integration in science instruction among preservice teachers are possible through explicit instruction.

Stormwater management and ecosystem services: a review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Prudencio, Liana; Null, Sarah E.

2018-03-01

Researchers and water managers have turned to green stormwater infrastructure, such as bioswales, retention basins, wetlands, rain gardens, and urban green spaces to reduce flooding, augment surface water supplies, recharge groundwater, and improve water quality. It is increasingly clear that green stormwater infrastructure not only controls stormwater volume and timing, but also promotes ecosystem services, which are the benefits that ecosystems provide to humans. Yet there has been little synthesis focused on understanding how green stormwater management affects ecosystem services. The objectives of this paper are to review and synthesize published literature on ecosystem services and green stormwater infrastructure and identify gaps in research and understanding, establishing a foundation for research at the intersection of ecosystems services and green stormwater management. We reviewed 170 publications on stormwater management and ecosystem services, and summarized the state-of-the-science categorized by the four types of ecosystem services. Major findings show that: (1) most research was conducted at the parcel-scale and should expand to larger scales to more closely understand green stormwater infrastructure impacts, (2) nearly a third of papers developed frameworks for implementing green stormwater infrastructure and highlighted barriers, (3) papers discussed ecosystem services, but less than 40% quantified ecosystem services, (4) no geographic trends emerged, indicating interest in applying green stormwater infrastructure across different contexts, (5) studies increasingly integrate engineering, physical science, and social science approaches for holistic understanding, and (6) standardizing green stormwater infrastructure terminology would provide a more cohesive field of study than the diverse and often redundant terminology currently in use. We recommend that future research provide metrics and quantify ecosystem services, integrate disciplines to measure ecosystem services from green stormwater infrastructure, and better incorporate stormwater management into environmental policy. Our conclusions outline promising future research directions at the intersection of stormwater management and ecosystem services.

Integrated Modeling of Aerosol, Cloud, Precipitation and Land Processes at Satellite-Resolved Scales

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Peters-Lidard, Christa; Tao, Wei-Kuo; Chin, Mian; Braun, Scott; Case, Jonathan; Hou, Arthur; Kumar, Anil; Kumar, Sujay; Lau, William; Matsui, Toshihisa;

Convergence Science in a Nano World

PubMed Central

Cady, Nathaniel

2013-01-01

Convergence is a new paradigm that brings together critical advances in the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering. Going beyond traditional “interdisciplinary” studies, “convergence” describes the culmination of truly integrated research and development, yielding revolutionary advances in both scientific research and new technologies. At its core, nanotechnology embodies these elements of convergence science by bringing together multiple disciplines with the goal of creating innovative and groundbreaking technologies. In the biological and biomedical sciences, nanotechnology research has resulted in dramatic improvements in sensors, diagnostics, imaging, and even therapeutics. In particular, there is a current push to examine the interface between the biological world and micro/nano-scale systems. For example, my laboratory is developing novel strategies for spatial patterning of biomolecules, electrical and optical biosensing, nanomaterial delivery systems, cellular patterning techniques, and the study of cellular interactions with nano-structured surfaces. In this seminar, I will give examples of how convergent research is being applied to three major areas of biological research &endash; cancer diagnostics, microbiology, and DNA-based biosensing. These topics will be presented as case studies, showing the benefits (and challenges) of multi-disciplinary, convergent research and development.

Nanobiotechnology: synthetic biology meets materials science.

PubMed

Jewett, Michael C; Patolsky, Fernando

2013-08-01

Nanotechnology, the area of science focused on the control of matter in the nanometer scale, allows ground-breaking changes of the fundamental properties of matter that are often radically different compared to those exhibited by the bulk counterparts. In view of the fact that dimensionality plays a key role in determining the qualities of matter, the realization of the great potential of nanotechnology has opened the door to other disciplines such as life sciences and medicine, where the merging between them offers exciting new applications, along with basic science research. The application of nanotechnology in life sciences, nanobiotechnology, is now having a profound impact on biological circuit design, bioproduction systems, synthetic biology, medical diagnostics, disease therapy and drug delivery. This special issue is dedicated to the overview of how we are learning to control biopolymers and biological machines at the molecular- and nanoscale. In addition, it covers far-reaching progress in the design and synthesis of nanoscale materials, thus enabling the construction of integrated systems in which the component blocks are comparable in size to the chemical and biological entities under investigation. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Authentic Integration: A Model for Integrating Mathematics and Science in the Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Treacy, Páraic; O'Donoghue, John

2014-01-01

Attempts at integrating mathematics and science have been made previously but no definitive, widely adopted teaching model has been developed to date. Research suggests that hands-on, practical, student-centred tasks should form a central element when designing an effective model for the integration of mathematics and science. Aided by this…

Integration of Basic and Clinical Sciences: Faculty Perspectives at a U.S. Dental School.

PubMed

van der Hoeven, Dharini; van der Hoeven, Ransome; Zhu, Liang; Busaidy, Kamal; Quock, Ryan L

2018-04-01

Although dental education has traditionally been organized into basic sciences education (first and second years) and clinical education (third and fourth years), there has been growing interest in ways to better integrate the two to more effectively educate students and prepare them for practice. Since 2012, The University of Texas School of Dentistry at Houston (UTSD) has made it a priority to improve integration of basic and clinical sciences, with a focus to this point on integrating the basic sciences. The aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of basic and clinical science faculty members regarding basic and clinical sciences integration and the degree of integration currently occurring. In October 2016, all 227 faculty members (15 basic scientists and 212 clinicians) were invited to participate in an online survey. Of the 212 clinicians, 84 completed the clinician educator survey (response rate 40%). All 15 basic scientists completed the basic science educator survey (response rate 100%). The majority of basic and clinical respondents affirmed the value of integration (93.3%, 97.6%, respectively) and reported regular integration in their teaching (80%, 86.9%). There were no significant differences between basic scientists and clinicians on perceived importance (p=0.457) and comfort with integration (p=0.240), but the basic scientists were more likely to integrate (p=0.039) and collaborate (p=0.021) than the clinicians. There were no significant differences between generalist and specialist clinicians on importance (p=0.474) and degree (p=0.972) of integration in teaching and intent to collaborate (p=0.864), but the specialists reported feeling more comfortable presenting basic science information (p=0.033). Protected faculty time for collaborative efforts and a repository of integrated basic science and clinical examples for use in teaching and faculty development were recommended to improve integration. Although questions might be raised about the respondents' definition of "integration," this study provides a baseline assessment of perceptions at a dental school that is placing a priority on integration.

CI-Miner: A Semantic Methodology to Integrate Scientists, Data and Documents through the Use of Cyber-Infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pinheiro da Silva, P.; CyberShARE Center of Excellence

2011-12-01

Scientists today face the challenge of rethinking the manner in which they document and make available their processes and data in an international cyber-infrastructure of shared resources. Some relevant examples of new scientific practices in the realm of computational and data extraction sciences include: large scale data discovery; data integration; data sharing across distinct scientific domains, systematic management of trust and uncertainty; and comprehensive support for explaining processes and results. This talk introduces CI-Miner - an innovative hands-on, open-source, community-driven methodology to integrate these new scientific practices. It has been developed in collaboration with scientists, with the purpose of capturing, storing and retrieving knowledge about scientific processes and their products, thereby further supporting a new generation of science techniques based on data exploration. CI-Miner uses semantic annotations in the form of W3C Ontology Web Language-based ontologies and Proof Markup Language (PML)-based provenance to represent knowledge. This methodology specializes in general-purpose ontologies, projected into workflow-driven ontologies(WDOs) and into semantic abstract workflows (SAWs). Provenance in PML is CI-Miner's integrative component, which allows scientists to retrieve and reason with the knowledge represented in these new semantic documents. It serves additionally as a platform to share such collected knowledge with the scientific community participating in the international cyber-infrastructure. The integrated semantic documents that are tailored for the use of human epistemic agents may also be utilized by machine epistemic agents, since the documents are based on W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) notation. This talk is grounded upon interdisciplinary lessons learned through the use of CI-Miner in support of government-funded national and international cyber-infrastructure initiatives in the areas of geo-sciences (NSF-GEON and NSF-EarthScope), environmental sciences (CEON, NSF NEON, NSF-LTER and DOE-Ameri-Flux), and solar physics (VSTO and NSF-SPCDIS). The discussion on provenance is based on the use of PML in support of projects in collaboration with government organizations (DARPA, ARDA, NSF, DHS and DOE), research organizations (NCAR and PNNL), and industries (IBM and SRI International).

Taking Open Innovation to the Molecular Level - Strengths and Limitations.

PubMed

Zdrazil, Barbara; Blomberg, Niklas; Ecker, Gerhard F

2012-08-01

The ever-growing availability of large-scale open data and its maturation is having a significant impact on industrial drug-discovery, as well as on academic and non-profit research. As industry is changing to an 'open innovation' business concept, precompetitive initiatives and strong public-private partnerships including academic research cooperation partners are gaining more and more importance. Now, the bioinformatics and cheminformatics communities are seeking for web tools which allow the integration of this large volume of life science datasets available in the public domain. Such a data exploitation tool would ideally be able to answer complex biological questions by formulating only one search query. In this short review/perspective, we outline the use of semantic web approaches for data and knowledge integration. Further, we discuss strengths and current limitations of public available data retrieval tools and integrated platforms.

Large-scale brain networks in affective and social neuroscience: Towards an integrative functional architecture of the brain

PubMed Central

Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Satpute, Ajay

2013-01-01

Understanding how a human brain creates a human mind ultimately depends on mapping psychological categories and concepts to physical measurements of neural response. Although it has long been assumed that emotional, social, and cognitive phenomena are realized in the operations of separate brain regions or brain networks, we demonstrate that it is possible to understand the body of neuroimaging evidence using a framework that relies on domain general, distributed structure-function mappings. We review current research in affective and social neuroscience and argue that the emerging science of large-scale intrinsic brain networks provides a coherent framework for a domain-general functional architecture of the human brain. PMID:23352202

Requirements and principles for the implementation and construction of large-scale geographic information systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Smith, Terence R.; Menon, Sudhakar; Star, Jeffrey L.; Estes, John E.

1987-01-01

This paper provides a brief survey of the history, structure and functions of 'traditional' geographic information systems (GIS), and then suggests a set of requirements that large-scale GIS should satisfy, together with a set of principles for their satisfaction. These principles, which include the systematic application of techniques from several subfields of computer science to the design and implementation of GIS and the integration of techniques from computer vision and image processing into standard GIS technology, are discussed in some detail. In particular, the paper provides a detailed discussion of questions relating to appropriate data models, data structures and computational procedures for the efficient storage, retrieval and analysis of spatially-indexed data.

The macroecology of sustainability

USGS Publications Warehouse

Burger, Joseph R.; Allen, Craig D.; Brown, James H.; Burnside, William R.; Davidson, Ana D.; Fristoe, Trevor S.; Hamilton, Marcus J.; Mercado-Silva, Norman; Nekola, Jeffrey C.; Okie, Jordan G.; Zuo, Wenyun

2012-01-01

The discipline of sustainability science has emerged in response to concerns of natural and social scientists, policymakers, and lay people about whether the Earth can continue to support human population growth and economic prosperity. Yet, sustainability science has developed largely independently from and with little reference to key ecological principles that govern life on Earth. A macroecological perspective highlights three principles that should be integral to sustainability science: 1) physical conservation laws govern the flows of energy and materials between human systems and the environment, 2) smaller systems are connected by these flows to larger systems in which they are embedded, and 3) global constraints ultimately limit flows at smaller scales. Over the past few decades, decreasing per capita rates of consumption of petroleum, phosphate, agricultural land, fresh water, fish, and wood indicate that the growing human population has surpassed the capacity of the Earth to supply enough of these essential resources to sustain even the current population and level of socioeconomic development.

Leo Szilard Lectureship Award Talk: From Reductionism to Complexity; A Theoretical Physicist's Journey into Biology and the Social Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

West, Geoffrey

2013-04-01

In this talk I review how a high energy physicist serendipitously migrated from quarks and gluons, dark matter and string theory to thinking about equally big topics like why we live for 100 years (and not a thousand or 2-3 like a mouse), how is this generated from molecular time scales, why do we sleep and where does 8 hours come from, and how is this related to the rate at which we evolve, can there be a quantitative, mathematisable science of cities and companies, and can our exponentially expanding socio-economic universe be sustained, etc, etc? I consider these as integral parts of physics, related to the interface between Reductionism and Complexity, Thermodynamics and Information Theory. The saga will be a personal one ranging from issues connected with the demise of the SSC and attacks on science to the future role of physics and transdisciplinary thinking.

Suborbital Science Program: Dryden Flight Research Center

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

DelFrate, John

2008-01-01

This viewgraph presentation reviews the suborbital science program at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The Program Objectives are given in various areas: (1) Satellite Calibration and Validation (Cal/val)--Provide methods to perform the cal/val requirements for Earth Observing System satellites; (2) New Sensor Development -- Provide methods to reduce risk for new sensor concepts and algorithm development prior to committing sensors to operations; (3) Process Studies -- Facilitate the acquisition of high spatial/temporal resolution focused measurements that are required to understand small atmospheric and surface structures which generate powerful Earth system effects; and (4) Airborne Networking -- Develop disruption-tolerant networking to enable integrated multiple scale measurements of critical environmental features. Dryden supports the NASA Airborne Science Program and the nation in several elements: ER-2, G-3, DC-8, Ikhana (Predator B) & Global Hawk and Reveal. These are reviewed in detail in the presentation.

Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH): Scientific Understanding of Arctic Environmental Change to Help Society Understand and Respond to a Rapidly Changing Arctic.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wiggins, H. V.; Myers, B.

2015-12-01

The Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) is a U.S. program with a mission to provide a foundation of Arctic change science through collaboration with the research community, funding agencies, and other stakeholders. To achieve this mission, SEARCH: Generates and synthesizes research findings and promotes Arctic science and scientific discovery across disciplines and among agencies. Identifies emerging issues in Arctic environmental change. Provides scientific information to Arctic stakeholders, policy-makers, and the public to help them understand and respond to arctic environmental change. Facilitates research activities across local-to-global scales, with an emphasis on addressing needs of decision-makers. Collaborates with national and international science programs integral to SEARCH goals. This poster presentation will present SEARCH activities and plans, highlighting those focused on providing information for decision-makers. http://www.arcus.org/search

Applying colour science in colour design

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Luo, Ming Ronnier

2006-06-01

Although colour science has been widely used in a variety of industries over the years, it has not been fully explored in the field of product design. This paper will initially introduce the three main application fields of colour science: colour specification, colour-difference evaluation and colour appearance modelling. By integrating these advanced colour technologies together with modern colour imaging devices such as display, camera, scanner and printer, some computer systems have been recently developed to assist designers for designing colour palettes through colour selection by means of a number of widely used colour order systems, for creating harmonised colour schemes via a categorical colour system, for generating emotion colours using various colour emotional scales and for facilitating colour naming via a colour-name library. All systems are also capable of providing accurate colour representation on displays and output to different imaging devices such as printers.

Creating Healthy and Just Bioregions

PubMed Central

Pezzoli, Keith; Leiter, Robert A.

2017-01-01

Dramatic changes taking place locally, regionally, globally, demand that we rethink strategies to improve public health, especially in disadvantaged communities where the cumulative impacts of toxicant exposure and other environmental and social stressors are most damaging. The emergent field of sustainability science, including a new bioregionalism for the 21st Century, is giving rise to promising place-based (territorially rooted) approaches. Embedded in this bioregional approach is an Integrated Planning Framework that enables people to map and develop plans and strategies that cut across various scales (e.g., from regional to citywide to neighborhood scale) and various topical areas (e.g., urban land use planning, water resource planning, food systems planning and “green infrastructure” planning) with the specific intent of reducing the impacts of toxicants to public health and the natural environment. This paper describes a case of bioregionally inspired Integrated Planning in San Diego, California (USA). The paper highlights food-water-energy linkages and the importance of “rooted” community-university partnerships and knowledge-action collaboratives in creating healthy and just bioregions. PMID:26812849

NASA'S SERVIR Gulf of Mexico Project: The Gulf of Mexico Regional Collaborative (GoMRC)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Quattrochi, Dale A.; Irwin, Daniel; Presson, Joan; Estes, Maury; Estes, Sue; Judd, Kathleen

2006-01-01

The Gulf of Mexico Regional Collaborative (GoMRC) is a NASA-funded project that has as its goal to develop an integrated, working, prototype IT infrastructure for Earth science data, knowledge and models for the five Gulf U.S. states and Mexico, and to demonstrate its ability to help decision-makers better understand critical Gulf-scale issues. Within this preview, the mission of this project is to provide cross cutting solution network and rapid prototyping capability for the Gulf of Mexico region, in order to demonstrate substantial, collaborative, multi-agency research and transitional capabilities using unique NASA data sets and models to address regional problems. SERVIR Mesoamerica is seen as an excellent existing framework that can be used to integrate observational and GIs data bases, provide a sensor web interface, visualization and interactive analysis tools, archival functions, data dissemination and product generation within a Rapid Prototyping concept to assist decision-makers in better understanding Gulf-scale environmental issues.

III–V quantum light source and cavity-QED on Silicon

PubMed Central

Luxmoore, I. J.; Toro, R.; Pozo-Zamudio, O. Del; Wasley, N. A.; Chekhovich, E. A.; Sanchez, A. M.; Beanland, R.; Fox, A. M.; Skolnick, M. S.; Liu, H. Y.; Tartakovskii, A. I.

2013-01-01

Non-classical light sources offer a myriad of possibilities in both fundamental science and commercial applications. Single photons are the most robust carriers of quantum information and can be exploited for linear optics quantum information processing. Scale-up requires miniaturisation of the waveguide circuit and multiple single photon sources. Silicon photonics, driven by the incentive of optical interconnects is a highly promising platform for the passive optical components, but integrated light sources are limited by silicon's indirect band-gap. III–V semiconductor quantum-dots, on the other hand, are proven quantum emitters. Here we demonstrate single-photon emission from quantum-dots coupled to photonic crystal nanocavities fabricated from III–V material grown directly on silicon substrates. The high quality of the III–V material and photonic structures is emphasized by observation of the strong-coupling regime. This work opens-up the advantages of silicon photonics to the integration and scale-up of solid-state quantum optical systems. PMID:23393621

Development and Preliminary Validation of a New Measure of Values in Scientific Work.

PubMed

English, Tammy; Antes, Alison L; Baldwin, Kari A; DuBois, James M

2018-04-01

In this paper we describe the development and initial psychometric evaluation of a new measure, the values in scientific work (VSW). This scale assesses the level of importance that investigators attach to different VSW. It taps a broad range of intrinsic, extrinsic, and social values that motivate the work of scientists, including values specific to scientific work (e.g., truth and integrity) and more classic work values (e.g., security and prestige) in the context of science. Notably, the values represented in this scale are relevant to scientists regardless of their career stage and research focus. We administered the VSW and a measure of global values to 203 NIH-funded investigators. Exploratory factor analyses suggest the delineation of eight VSW, including autonomy, research ethics, social impact, income, collaboration, innovation and growth, conserving relationships, and job security. These VSW showed predictable and distinct associations with global values. Implications of these findings for work on research integrity and scientific misconduct are discussed.

Climate forcing and infectious disease transmission in urban landscapes: integrating demographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity.

PubMed

Santos-Vega, Mauricio; Martinez, Pamela P; Pascual, Mercedes

2016-10-01

Urbanization and climate change are the two major environmental challenges of the 21st century. The dramatic expansion of cities around the world creates new conditions for the spread, surveillance, and control of infectious diseases. In particular, urban growth generates pronounced spatial heterogeneity within cities, which can modulate the effect of climate factors at local spatial scales in large urban environments. Importantly, the interaction between environmental forcing and socioeconomic heterogeneity at local scales remains an open area in infectious disease dynamics, especially for urban landscapes of the developing world. A quantitative and conceptual framework on urban health with a focus on infectious diseases would benefit from integrating aspects of climate forcing, population density, and level of wealth. In this paper, we review what is known about these drivers acting independently and jointly on urban infectious diseases; we then outline elements that are missing and would contribute to building such a framework. © 2016 New York Academy of Sciences.

Psychology as an Evolving, Interdisciplinary Science: Integrating Science in Sensation and Perception from Fourier to Fluid Dynamics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ebersole, Tela M.; Kelty-Stephen, Damian G.

2017-01-01

This article outlines the theoretical rationale and process for an integrated-science approach to teaching sensation and perception (S&P) to undergraduate psychology students that may also serve as an integrated-science curriculum. The course aimed to introduce the interdisciplinary evolution of this psychological field irrespective of any…

Rocking Your Writing Program: Integration of Visual Art, Language Arts, & Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poldberg, Monique M.,; Trainin, Guy; Andrzejczak, Nancy

2013-01-01

This paper explores the integration of art, literacy and science in a second grade classroom, showing how an integrative approach has a positive and lasting influence on student achievement in art, literacy, and science. Ways in which art, science, language arts, and cognition intersect are reviewed. Sample artifacts are presented along with their…

An integrated science plan for the Lake Tahoe basin: conceptual framework and research strategies

Treesearch

Zachary P. Hymanson; Michael W. Collopy

2010-01-01

An integrated science plan was developed to identify and refine contemporary science information needs for the Lake Tahoe basin ecosystem. The main objectives were to describe a conceptual framework for an integrated science program, and to develop research strategies addressing key uncertainties and information gaps that challenge government agencies in the theme...

Making Sense of Integrated Science: A Guide for High Schools.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, Colorado Springs.

This guide outlines the initial work and includes recommendations for schools and districts on how to implement an integrated science program. Chapters include: (1) "What Is Integrated Science and What Does It Look Like at the High School Level?"; (2) "Coherence in High School Science" (F. James Rutherford); (3) "Thinking about Change: What Will…

In Their Own Words: The Significance of Participant Perceptions in Assessing Entomology Citizen Science Learning Outcomes Using a Mixed Methods Approach

PubMed Central

Lynch, Louise I.; Dauer, Jenny M.; Babchuk, Wayne A.; Heng-Moss, Tiffany

2018-01-01

A mixed methods study was used to transcend the traditional pre-, post-test approach of citizen science evaluative research by integrating adults’ test scores with their perceptions. We assessed how contributory entomology citizen science affects participants’ science self-efficacy, self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Pre- and post-test score analyses from citizen scientists (n = 28) and a control group (n = 72) were coupled with interviews (n = 11) about science experiences and entomological interactions during participation. Considering quantitative data alone, no statistically significant changes were evident in adults following participation in citizen science when compared to the control group. Citizen scientists’ pre-test scores were significantly higher than the control group for self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Interview data reveal a notable discrepancy between measured and perceived changes. In general, citizen scientists had an existing, long-term affinity for the natural world and perceived increases in their science self-efficacy, self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Perceived influences may act independently of test scores. Scale instruments may not show impacts with variances in individual’s prior knowledge and experiences. The value of mixed methods on citizen science program evaluation is discussed. PMID:29415522

In Their Own Words: The Significance of Participant Perceptions in Assessing Entomology Citizen Science Learning Outcomes Using a Mixed Methods Approach.

PubMed

Lynch, Louise I; Dauer, Jenny M; Babchuk, Wayne A; Heng-Moss, Tiffany; Golick, Doug

2018-02-06

A mixed methods study was used to transcend the traditional pre-, post-test approach of citizen science evaluative research by integrating adults' test scores with their perceptions. We assessed how contributory entomology citizen science affects participants' science self-efficacy, self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Pre- and post-test score analyses from citizen scientists ( n = 28) and a control group ( n = 72) were coupled with interviews ( n = 11) about science experiences and entomological interactions during participation. Considering quantitative data alone, no statistically significant changes were evident in adults following participation in citizen science when compared to the control group. Citizen scientists' pre-test scores were significantly higher than the control group for self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Interview data reveal a notable discrepancy between measured and perceived changes. In general, citizen scientists had an existing, long-term affinity for the natural world and perceived increases in their science self-efficacy, self-efficacy for environmental action, nature relatedness and attitude towards insects. Perceived influences may act independently of test scores. Scale instruments may not show impacts with variances in individual's prior knowledge and experiences. The value of mixed methods on citizen science program evaluation is discussed.

Have I Been a Data Scientist from the Start? Parallels from the Geographic Information Science Community in the Early 1990s

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wright, D. J.

2013-12-01

In the early 1990s the author came of age as the technology driving the geographic information system or GIS was beginning to successfully 'handle' geospatial data at a range of scales and formats, and a wide array of information technology products emerged from an expanding GIS industry. However, that small community struggled to reflect the diverse research efforts at play in understanding the deeper issues surrounding geospatial data, and the impediments to that effective use of that data. It was from this need that geographic information science or GIScience arose, to ensure in part that GIS did not fall into the trap of being a technology in search of applications, a one-time, one-off, non-intellectual 'bag of tricks' with no substantive theory underpinning it, and suitable only for a static period of time (e.g., Goodchild, 1992). The community has since debated the issue of "tool versus science' which has also played a role in defining GIS as an actual profession. In turn, GIS has contributed to "methodological versus substantive" questions in science, leading to understandings of how the Earth works versus how the Earth should look. In the author's experience, the multidimensional structuring and scaling data, with integrative and innovative approaches to analyzing, modeling, and developing extensive and spatial data from selected places on land and at sea, have revealed how theory and application are in no way mutually exclusive, and it may often be application that advances theory, rather than vice versa. Increasingly, both the system and science of geographic information have welcomed strong collaborations among computer scientists, information scientists, and domain scientists to solve complex scientific questions. As such, they have paralleled the emergence and acceptance of "data science." And now that we are squarely in an era of regional- to global-scale observation and simulation of the Earth, produce data that are too big, move too fast, and do not fit the structures and processing capacity of conventional database systems, and the author reflects on how the potential of the GIS/GIScience world to contribute to the training and professional advancement of data science.

Science for the Public Good: Tackling scientific integrity in the federal government

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Goldman, G. T.; Halpern, M.; Johnson, C.

2016-12-01

From hydraulic fracturing to climate change to seismic risk, government science and scientists are integral to public decision making in the geosciences. Following calls for increased scientific integrity across the government, policies have been put in place in recent years to be promote transparency and appropriate use of science in government decision making. But how effective have these initiatives been? With the development of scientific integrity policies, new transparency measures, and other efforts in recent years, are we seeing improvements in how federal agencies use science? And importantly, can these safeguards prevent potential future breaches of scientific integrity and misuse science for political gain? Review of recent progress and problems around government scientific integrity, including case studies, policy assessments, and surveys of federal scientists, can shed light on how far the we have come and what areas still need improvement to ensure that government scientific integrity is preserved in the future.

A new era of semiconductor genetics using ion-sensitive field-effect transistors: the gene-sensitive integrated cell.

PubMed

Toumazou, Christofer; Thay, Tan Sri Lim Kok; Georgiou, Pantelis

2014-03-28

Semiconductor genetics is now disrupting the field of healthcare owing to the rapid parallelization and scaling of DNA sensing using ion-sensitive field-effect transistors (ISFETs) fabricated using commercial complementary metal -oxide semiconductor technology. The enabling concept of DNA reaction monitoring introduced by Toumazou has made this a reality and we are now seeing relentless scaling with Moore's law ultimately achieving the $100 genome. In this paper, we present the next evolution of this technology through the creation of the gene-sensitive integrated cell (GSIC) for label-free real-time analysis based on ISFETs. This device is derived from the traditional metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) and has electrical performance identical to that of a MOSFET in a standard semiconductor process, yet is capable of incorporating DNA reaction chemistries for applications in single nucleotide polymorphism microarrays and DNA sequencing. Just as application-specific integrated circuits, which are developed in much the same way, have shaped our consumer electronics industry and modern communications and memory technology, so, too, do GSICs based on a single underlying technology principle have the capacity to transform the life science and healthcare industries.

IEDA: Making Small Data BIG Through Interdisciplinary Partnerships Among Long-tail Domains

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lehnert, K. A.; Carbotte, S. M.; Arko, R. A.; Ferrini, V. L.; Hsu, L.; Song, L.; Ghiorso, M. S.; Walker, D. J.

2014-12-01

The Big Data world in the Earth Sciences so far exists primarily for disciplines that generate massive volumes of observational or computed data using large-scale, shared instrumentation such as global sensor networks, satellites, or high-performance computing facilities. These data are typically managed and curated by well-supported community data facilities that also provide the tools for exploring the data through visualization or statistical analysis. In many other domains, especially those where data are primarily acquired by individual investigators or small teams (known as 'Long-tail data'), data are poorly shared and integrated, lacking a community-based data infrastructure that ensures persistent access, quality control, standardization, and integration of data, as well as appropriate tools to fully explore and mine the data within the context of broader Earth Science datasets. IEDA (Integrated Earth Data Applications, www.iedadata.org) is a data facility funded by the US NSF to develop and operate data services that support data stewardship throughout the full life cycle of observational data in the solid earth sciences, with a focus on the data management needs of individual researchers. IEDA builds on a strong foundation of mature disciplinary data systems for marine geology and geophysics, geochemistry, and geochronology. These systems have dramatically advanced data resources in those long-tail Earth science domains. IEDA has strengthened these resources by establishing a consolidated, enterprise-grade infrastructure that is shared by the domain-specific data systems, and implementing joint data curation and data publication services that follow community standards. In recent years, other domain-specific data efforts have partnered with IEDA to take advantage of this infrastructure and improve data services to their respective communities with formal data publication, long-term preservation of data holdings, and better sustainability. IEDA hopes to foster such partnerships with streamlined data services, including user-friendly, single-point interfaces for data submission, discovery, and access across the partner systems to support interdisciplinary science.

78 FR 3905 - Center for Scientific Review; Notice of Closed Meetings

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-01-17

... . Name of Committee: Cardiovascular and Respiratory Sciences Integrated Review Group; Cardiac... 3188, MSC 7808, Bethesda, MD 20892, 301-435- 1146, [email protected] . Name of Committee: Cardiovascular and Respiratory Sciences Integrated Review Group; Clinical and Integrative Cardiovascular Sciences...

Integrating to Learn and Learning to Integrate: A Case Study of an Online Master's Program on Science-Mathematics Integration for Middle School Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Mimi Miyoung; Chauvot, Jennifer; Plankis, Brian; Vowell, Julie; Culpepper, Shea

2011-01-01

iSMART (Integration of Science, Mathematics, and Reflective Teaching) Program is an online science and mathematics integrated graduate program for middle school teachers across the state of Texas. As part of a large design-based research project, this paper describes the initial stages of the design process of the iSMART program for its first…

77 FR 1932 - Notification of a Public Teleconference of the Science Advisory Board Committee on Science...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-01-12

... a draft report based on fact-finding activities conducted as part of a study of science integration... Science Advisory Board Committee on Science Integration for Decision Making AGENCY: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ACTION: Notice. SUMMARY: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or Agency) Science...

Feasibility of Integration of Selected Aspects of (CBA) Chemistry, (CHEMS) Chemistry and (PSSC) Physics into a Two Year Physical Science Sequence.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fiasca, Michael Aldo

Compared, for selected outcomes, were integrated chemistry-physics courses with chemistry and physics courses taught separately. Three classes studying integrated Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC)-Chemical Bond Approach (CBA), and three classes studying integrated Physical Science Study Committee-Chemical Education Materials Study (CHEMS)…

Machine learning for Big Data analytics in plants.

PubMed

Ma, Chuang; Zhang, Hao Helen; Wang, Xiangfeng

2014-12-01

Rapid advances in high-throughput genomic technology have enabled biology to enter the era of 'Big Data' (large datasets). The plant science community not only needs to build its own Big-Data-compatible parallel computing and data management infrastructures, but also to seek novel analytical paradigms to extract information from the overwhelming amounts of data. Machine learning offers promising computational and analytical solutions for the integrative analysis of large, heterogeneous and unstructured datasets on the Big-Data scale, and is gradually gaining popularity in biology. This review introduces the basic concepts and procedures of machine-learning applications and envisages how machine learning could interface with Big Data technology to facilitate basic research and biotechnology in the plant sciences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Integrated Science: Providing a More Complete Understanding of Complex Problems

USGS Publications Warehouse

,

2006-01-01

Integration among sciences is critical in order to address some of our most pressing problems. Because of the inherent complexity of natural systems, and the increasing complexity of human demands on them, narrowly-focused approaches are no longer sufficient. USGS Workshop on Enhancing Integrated Science, November 1998. The Mid-Continent Geographic Science Center is actively participating in several integrated science studies that include research partners from the other disciplines of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), other Federal and State agencies, universities, and private non-government organizations. The following three examples illustrate the diversity of these studies.

Education, Outreach, and Diversity Partnerships and Science Education Resources From the Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foster, S. Q.; Randall, D.; Denning, S.; Jones, B.; Russell, R.; Gardiner, L.; Hatheway, B.; Johnson, R. M.; Drossman, H.; Pandya, R.; Swartz, D.; Lanting, J.; Pitot, L.

2007-12-01

The need for improving the representation of cloud processes in climate models has been one of the most important limitations of the reliability of climate-change simulations. The new National Science Foundation- funded Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMMAP) at Colorado State University (CSU) is a major research program addressing this problem over the next five years through a revolutionary new approach to representing cloud processes on their native scales, including the cloud-scale interactions among the many physical and chemical processes that are active in cloud systems. At the end of its first year, CMMAP has established effective partnerships between scientists, students, and teachers to meet its goals to: (1) provide first-rate graduate education in atmospheric science; (2) recruit diverse undergraduates into graduate education and careers in climate science; and (3) develop, evaluate, and disseminate educational resources designed to inform K-12 students, teachers, and the general public about the nature of the climate system, global climate change, and career opportunities in climate science. This presentation will describe the partners, our challenges and successes, and measures of achievement involved in the integrated suite of programs launched in the first year. They include: (1) a new high school Colorado Climate Conference drawing prestigious climate scientists to speak to students, (2) a summer Weather and Climate Workshop at CSU and the National Center for Atmospheric Research introducing K-12 teachers to Earth system science and a rich toolkit of teaching materials, (3) a program from CSU's Little Shop of Physics reaching 50 schools and 20,000 K-12 students through the new "It's Up In the Air" program, (4) expanded content, imagery, and interactives on clouds, weather, climate, and modeling for students, teachers, and the public on The Windows to the Universe web site at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), (5) mentoring programs engaging diverse undergraduate and graduate level students in CMMAP research through UCAR's Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) Program, and (6) after school activities about clouds, climate and weather for underrepresented middle school students at the Catamount Institute. CMMAP is also enabling Windows to the Universe to continue its commitment to translate all new web pages into Spanish. This presentation will explain how resources emerging from CMMAP can be accessed and used by the entire Earth and Ocean Science educational outreach community.

Crowd-Sourcing with K-12 citizen scientists: The Continuing Evolution of the GLOBE Program

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Murphy, T.; Wegner, K.; Andersen, T. J.

2016-12-01

Twenty years ago, the Internet was still in its infancy, citizen science was a relatively unknown term, and the idea of a global citizen science database was unheard of. Then the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program was proposed and this all changed. GLOBE was one of the first K-12 citizen science programs on a global scale. An initial large scale ramp-up of the program was followed by the establishment of a network of partners in countries and within the U.S. Now in the 21st century, the program has over 50 protocols in atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and pedosphere, almost 140 million measurements in the database, a visualization system, collaborations with NASA satellite mission scientists (GPM, SMAP) and other scientists, as well as research projects by GLOBE students. As technology changed over the past two decades, it was integrated into the program's outreach efforts to existing and new members with the result that the program now has a strong social media presence. In 2016, a new app was launched which opened up GLOBE and data entry to citizen scientists of all ages. The app is aimed at fresh audiences, beyond the traditional GLOBE K-12 community. Groups targeted included: scouting organizations, museums, 4H, science learning centers, retirement communities, etc. to broaden participation in the program and increase the number of data available to students and scientists. Through the 20 years of GLOBE, lessons have been learned about changing the management of this type of large-scale program, the use of technology to enhance and improve the experience for members, and increasing community involvement in the program.

FIDO prototype Mars rover field trials, Black Rock Summit, Nevada, as test of the ability of robotic mobility systems to conduct field science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Arvidson, R. E.; Squyres, S. W.; Baumgartner, E. T.; Schenker, P. S.; Niebur, C. S.; Larsen, K. W.; SeelosIV, F. P.; Snider, N. O.; Jolliff, B. L.

2002-08-01

The Field Integration Design and Operations (FIDO) prototype Mars rover was deployed and operated remotely for 2 weeks in May 2000 in the Black Rock Summit area of Nevada. The blind science operation trials were designed to evaluate the extent to which FIDO-class rovers can be used to conduct traverse science and collect samples. FIDO-based instruments included stereo cameras for navigation and imaging, an infrared point spectrometer, a color microscopic imager for characterization of rocks and soils, and a rock drill for core acquisition. Body-mounted ``belly'' cameras aided drill deployment, and front and rear hazard cameras enabled terrain hazard avoidance. Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data, a high spatial resolution IKONOS orbital image, and a suite of descent images were used to provide regional- and local-scale terrain and rock type information, from which hypotheses were developed for testing during operations. The rover visited three sites, traversed 30 m, and acquired 1.3 gigabytes of data. The relatively small traverse distance resulted from a geologically rich site in which materials identified on a regional scale from remote-sensing data could be identified on a local scale using rover-based data. Results demonstrate the synergy of mapping terrain from orbit and during descent using imaging and spectroscopy, followed by a rover mission to test inferences and to make discoveries that can be accomplished only with surface mobility systems.

Judicious use of custom development in an open source component architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bristol, S.; Latysh, N.; Long, D.; Tekell, S.; Allen, J.

2014-12-01

Modern software engineering is not as much programming from scratch as innovative assembly of existing components. Seamlessly integrating disparate components into scalable, performant architecture requires sound engineering craftsmanship and can often result in increased cost efficiency and accelerated capabilities if software teams focus their creativity on the edges of the problem space. ScienceBase is part of the U.S. Geological Survey scientific cyberinfrastructure, providing data and information management, distribution services, and analysis capabilities in a way that strives to follow this pattern. ScienceBase leverages open source NoSQL and relational databases, search indexing technology, spatial service engines, numerous libraries, and one proprietary but necessary software component in its architecture. The primary engineering focus is cohesive component interaction, including construction of a seamless Application Programming Interface (API) across all elements. The API allows researchers and software developers alike to leverage the infrastructure in unique, creative ways. Scaling the ScienceBase architecture and core API with increasing data volume (more databases) and complexity (integrated science problems) is a primary challenge addressed by judicious use of custom development in the component architecture. Other data management and informatics activities in the earth sciences have independently resolved to a similar design of reusing and building upon established technology and are working through similar issues for managing and developing information (e.g., U.S. Geoscience Information Network; NASA's Earth Observing System Clearing House; GSToRE at the University of New Mexico). Recent discussions facilitated through the Earth Science Information Partners are exploring potential avenues to exploit the implicit relationships between similar projects for explicit gains in our ability to more rapidly advance global scientific cyberinfrastructure.

Authentic scientific data collection in support of an integrative model-based class: A framework for student engagement in the classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sorensen, A. E.; Dauer, J. M.; Corral, L.; Fontaine, J. J.

2017-12-01

A core component of public scientific literacy, and thereby informed decision-making, is the ability of individuals to reason about complex systems. In response to students having difficulty learning about complex systems, educational research suggests that conceptual representations, or mental models, may help orient student thinking. Mental models provide a framework to support students in organizing and developing ideas. The PMC-2E model is a productive tool in teaching ideas of modeling complex systems in the classroom because the conceptual representation framework allows for self-directed learning where students can externalize systems thinking. Beyond mental models, recent work emphasizes the importance of facilitating integration of authentic science into the formal classroom. To align these ideas, a university class was developed around the theme of carnivore ecology, founded on PMC-2E framework and authentic scientific data collection. Students were asked to develop a protocol, collect, and analyze data around a scientific question in partnership with a scientist, and then use data to inform their own learning about the system through the mental model process. We identified two beneficial outcomes (1) scientific data is collected to address real scientific questions at a larger scale and (2) positive outcomes for student learning and views of science. After participating in the class, students report enjoying class structure, increased support for public understanding of science, and shifts in nature of science and interest in pursuing science metrics on post-assessments. Further work is ongoing investigating the linkages between engaging in authentic scientific practices that inform student mental models, and how it might promote students' systems-thinking skills, implications for student views of nature of science, and development of student epistemic practices.

A science of integration: frameworks, processes, and products in a place-based, integrative study

USGS Publications Warehouse

Kliskey, Andrew; Alessa, Lilian; Wandersee, Sarah; Williams, Paula; Trammell, Jamie; Powell, Jim; Grunblatt, Jess; Wipfli, Mark S.

2017-01-01

Integrative research is increasingly a priority within the scientific community and is a central goal for the evolving field of sustainability science. While it is conceptually attractive, its successful implementation has been challenging and recent work suggests that the move towards interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in sustainability science is being only partially realized. To address this from the perspective of social-ecological systems (SES) research, we examine the process of conducting a science of integration within the Southcentral Alaska Test Case (SCTC) of Alaska-EPSCoR as a test-bed for this approach. The SCTC is part of a large, 5 year, interdisciplinary study investigating changing environments and adaptations to those changes in Alaska. In this paper, we review progress toward a science of integration and present our efforts to confront the practical issues of applying proposed integration frameworks. We: (1) define our integration framework; (2) describe the collaborative processes, including the co-development of science through stakeholder engagement and partnerships; and (3) illustrate potential products of integrative, social-ecological systems research. The approaches we use can also be applied outside of this particular framework. We highlight challenges and propose improvements for integration in sustainability science by addressing the need for common frameworks and improved contextual understanding. These insights may be useful for capacity-building for interdisciplinary projects that address complex real-world social and environmental problems.

Nanoethics and the breaching of boundaries: a heuristic for going from encouragement to a fuller integration of ethical, legal and social issues and science : commentary on: "Adding to the mix: integrating ELSI into a National Nanoscale Science and Technology Center".

PubMed

Tuma, Julio R

2011-12-01

The intersection of ELSI and science forms a complicated nexus yet their integration is an important goal both for society and for the successful advancement of science. In what follows, I present a heuristic that makes boundary identification and crossing an important tool in the discovery of potential areas of ethical, legal, and social concern in science. A dynamic and iterative application of the heuristic can lead towards a fuller integration and appreciation of the concerns of ELSI and of science from both sides of the divide.

An analysis of integrated science and language arts themes in software at the elementary school level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Libidinsky, Lisa Jill

2002-09-01

There are many demands on the elementary classroom teacher today, such that teachers often do not have the time and resources to instruct in a meaningful manner that would produce effective, real instruction. Subjects are often disjointed and not significant. When teachers instruct using an integrated approach, students learn more efficiently as they see connections in the subjects. Science and language arts, when combined to produce an integrated approach, show positive associations that can enable students to learn real-life connections. In addition, with the onset of technology and the increased usage of technological programs in the schools, teachers can use technology to support an integrated curriculum. When teachers use a combined instructional focus of science, language arts, and technology to produce lessons, students are able to gain knowledge of concepts and skills necessary for appropriate academic growth and development. Given that there are many software programs available to teachers for classroom use, it is imperative that quality software is used for instruction. Using criteria based upon an intensive literature review of integrated instruction in the areas of science and language arts, this study examines science and language arts software programs to determine whether there are science and language arts integrated themes in the software analyzed. Also, this study examines whether more science and language arts integrated themes are present in science or language arts software programs. Overall, this study finds a significant difference between language arts software and science software when looking at integrated themes. This study shows that science software shows integrated themes with language arts more often than does language arts software with science. The findings in this study can serve as a reference point for educators when selecting software that is meaningful and effective in the elementary classroom. Based on this study, it is apparent that there is a need to evaluate software for appropriate use in the classroom in order to promote effective education.

Future opportunities and trends for e-infrastructures and life sciences: going beyond the grid to enable life science data analysis

PubMed Central

Duarte, Afonso M. S.; Psomopoulos, Fotis E.; Blanchet, Christophe; Bonvin, Alexandre M. J. J.; Corpas, Manuel; Franc, Alain; Jimenez, Rafael C.; de Lucas, Jesus M.; Nyrönen, Tommi; Sipos, Gergely; Suhr, Stephanie B.

2015-01-01

With the increasingly rapid growth of data in life sciences we are witnessing a major transition in the way research is conducted, from hypothesis-driven studies to data-driven simulations of whole systems. Such approaches necessitate the use of large-scale computational resources and e-infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI, one of key the enablers of the digital European Research Area, is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. Here we aim to provide the state of the art of Grid/Cloud computing in EU research as viewed from within the field of life sciences, focusing on key infrastructures and projects within the life sciences community. Rather than focusing purely on the technical aspects underlying the currently provided solutions, we outline the design aspects and key characteristics that can be identified across major research approaches. Overall, we aim to provide significant insights into the road ahead by establishing ever-strengthening connections between EGI as a whole and the life sciences community. PMID:26157454

Future opportunities and trends for e-infrastructures and life sciences: going beyond the grid to enable life science data analysis.

PubMed

Duarte, Afonso M S; Psomopoulos, Fotis E; Blanchet, Christophe; Bonvin, Alexandre M J J; Corpas, Manuel; Franc, Alain; Jimenez, Rafael C; de Lucas, Jesus M; Nyrönen, Tommi; Sipos, Gergely; Suhr, Stephanie B

2015-01-01

With the increasingly rapid growth of data in life sciences we are witnessing a major transition in the way research is conducted, from hypothesis-driven studies to data-driven simulations of whole systems. Such approaches necessitate the use of large-scale computational resources and e-infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI, one of key the enablers of the digital European Research Area, is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. Here we aim to provide the state of the art of Grid/Cloud computing in EU research as viewed from within the field of life sciences, focusing on key infrastructures and projects within the life sciences community. Rather than focusing purely on the technical aspects underlying the currently provided solutions, we outline the design aspects and key characteristics that can be identified across major research approaches. Overall, we aim to provide significant insights into the road ahead by establishing ever-strengthening connections between EGI as a whole and the life sciences community.

Intelligent Design of Nano-Scale Molecular Imaging Agents

PubMed Central

Kim, Sung Bae; Hattori, Mitsuru; Ozawa, Takeaki

2012-01-01

Visual representation and quantification of biological processes at the cellular and subcellular levels within living subjects are gaining great interest in life science to address frontier issues in pathology and physiology. As intact living subjects do not emit any optical signature, visual representation usually exploits nano-scale imaging agents as the source of image contrast. Many imaging agents have been developed for this purpose, some of which exert nonspecific, passive, and physical interaction with a target. Current research interest in molecular imaging has mainly shifted to fabrication of smartly integrated, specific, and versatile agents that emit fluorescence or luminescence as an optical readout. These agents include luminescent quantum dots (QDs), biofunctional antibodies, and multifunctional nanoparticles. Furthermore, genetically encoded nano-imaging agents embedding fluorescent proteins or luciferases are now gaining popularity. These agents are generated by integrative design of the components, such as luciferase, flexible linker, and receptor to exert a specific on–off switching in the complex context of living subjects. In the present review, we provide an overview of the basic concepts, smart design, and practical contribution of recent nano-scale imaging agents, especially with respect to genetically encoded imaging agents. PMID:23235326

Intelligent design of nano-scale molecular imaging agents.

PubMed

Kim, Sung Bae; Hattori, Mitsuru; Ozawa, Takeaki

2012-12-12

Visual representation and quantification of biological processes at the cellular and subcellular levels within living subjects are gaining great interest in life science to address frontier issues in pathology and physiology. As intact living subjects do not emit any optical signature, visual representation usually exploits nano-scale imaging agents as the source of image contrast. Many imaging agents have been developed for this purpose, some of which exert nonspecific, passive, and physical interaction with a target. Current research interest in molecular imaging has mainly shifted to fabrication of smartly integrated, specific, and versatile agents that emit fluorescence or luminescence as an optical readout. These agents include luminescent quantum dots (QDs), biofunctional antibodies, and multifunctional nanoparticles. Furthermore, genetically encoded nano-imaging agents embedding fluorescent proteins or luciferases are now gaining popularity. These agents are generated by integrative design of the components, such as luciferase, flexible linker, and receptor to exert a specific on-off switching in the complex context of living subjects. In the present review, we provide an overview of the basic concepts, smart design, and practical contribution of recent nano-scale imaging agents, especially with respect to genetically encoded imaging agents.

[The growing importance of ethics in medical care and research].

PubMed

Sass, Hans-Martin

2009-01-01

The integration of medical humanities into future patient care and medical research will become as importance for trust, care and health as the natural sciences were during the last 100 years. In particular, improvements of lay health literacy and responsibility, new forms of physician-nurse partnership and expert-lay interaction, also revisions of clinical research towards models of informed contract will improve trust and health on a global scale, allow for healthier and happier citizens and populations and eventually might reduce health care costs.

Multiscale agent-based cancer modeling.

PubMed

Zhang, Le; Wang, Zhihui; Sagotsky, Jonathan A; Deisboeck, Thomas S

2009-04-01

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is an in silico technique that is being used in a variety of research areas such as in social sciences, economics and increasingly in biomedicine as an interdisciplinary tool to study the dynamics of complex systems. Here, we describe its applicability to integrative tumor biology research by introducing a multi-scale tumor modeling platform that understands brain cancer as a complex dynamic biosystem. We summarize significant findings of this work, and discuss both challenges and future directions for ABM in the field of cancer research.

75 FR 20843 - Notice of Workshop To Discuss Policy-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for the...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-04-21

... Policy-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for the Review of the Lead National Ambient Air...-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for Review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards... review focuses on the key policy-relevant issues and considers the most meaningful new science to inform...

The Integration of Mathematics in Middle School Science: Student and Teacher Impacts Related to Science Achievement and Attitudes towards Integration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McHugh, Luisa

2016-01-01

Contemporary research has suggested that in order for students to compete globally in the 21st century workplace, pedagogy must shift to include the integration of science and mathematics, where teachers effectively incorporate the two disciplines seamlessly. Mathematics facilitates a deeper understanding of science concepts and has been linked to…

Reusing Joint Polar Satellite System (jpss) Ground System Components to Process AURA Ozone Monitoring Instrument (omi) Science Products

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Moses, J. F.; Jain, P.; Johnson, J.; Doiron, J. A.

2017-12-01

New Earth observation instruments are planned to enable advancements in Earth science research over the next decade. Diversity of Earth observing instruments and their observing platforms will continue to increase as new instrument technologies emerge and are deployed as part of National programs such as Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system (GOES), Landsat as well as the potential for many CubeSat and aircraft missions. The practical use and value of these observational data often extends well beyond their original purpose. The practicing community needs intuitive and standardized tools to enable quick unfettered development of tailored products for specific applications and decision support systems. However, the associated data processing system can take years to develop and requires inherent knowledge and the ability to integrate increasingly diverse data types from multiple sources. This paper describes the adaptation of a large-scale data processing system built for supporting JPSS algorithm calibration and validation (Cal/Val) node to a simplified science data system for rapid application. The new configurable data system reuses scalable JAVA technologies built for the JPSS Government Resource for Algorithm Verification, Independent Test, and Evaluation (GRAVITE) system to run within a laptop environment and support product generation and data processing of AURA Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) science products. Of particular interest are the root requirements necessary for integrating experimental algorithms and Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) data access libraries into a science data production system. This study demonstrates the ability to reuse existing Ground System technologies to support future missions with minimal changes.

Topographic Science

USGS Publications Warehouse

Poppenga, Sandra K.; Evans, Gayla; Gesch, Dean; Stoker, Jason M.; Queija, Vivian R.; Worstell, Bruce; Tyler, Dean J.; Danielson, Jeff; Bliss, Norman; Greenlee, Susan

2010-01-01

The mission of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center Topographic Science is to establish partnerships and conduct research and applications that facilitate the development and use of integrated national and global topographic datasets. Topographic Science includes a wide range of research and applications that result in improved seamless topographic datasets, advanced elevation technology, data integration and terrain visualization, new and improved elevation derivatives, and development of Web-based tools. In cooperation with our partners, Topographic Science is developing integrated-science applications for mapping, national natural resource initiatives, hazards, and global change science. http://topotools.cr.usgs.gov/.

An approach to designing a national climate service

PubMed Central

Miles, E. L.; Snover, A. K.; Whitely Binder, L. C.; Sarachik, E. S.; Mote, P. W.; Mantua, N.

2006-01-01

Climate variability and change are considerably important for a wide range of human activities and natural ecosystems. Climate science has made major advances during the last two decades, yet climate information is neither routinely useful for nor used in planning. What is needed is a mechanism, a national climate service (NCS), to connect climate science to decision-relevant questions and support building capacity to anticipate, plan for, and adapt to climate fluctuations. This article contributes to the national debate for an NCS by describing the rationale for building an NCS, the functions and services it would provide, and how it should be designed and evaluated. The NCS is most effectively achieved as a federal interagency partnership with critically important participation by regional climate centers, state climatologists, the emerging National Integrated Drought Information System, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Integrated Sciences Assessment (RISA) teams in a sustained relationship with a wide variety of stakeholders. Because the NCS is a service, and because evidence indicates that the regional spatial scale is most important for delivering climate services, given subnational geographical/geophysical complexity, attention is focused on lessons learned from the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group's 10 years of experience, the first of the NOAA RISA teams. PMID:17158218

Achieving Millennium Development Goals for Health: Building Understanding, Trust and Capacity to Respond

PubMed Central

Larson, Heidi J.

2007-01-01

Biomedical interventions promise achievement of health-related Millennium Development Goals provided social-, capacity- and knowledge-based constraints to scaling up and reaching marginalized people at risk, are addressed, and balance between prevention and treatment is struck. We argue for a new approach: multi-stakeholder capacity building and learning for empowerment: MuSCLE. MuSCLE is used as a way to frame three systemic weaknesses in traditional health science and policy approaches: 1) a lack of engagement with people at risk to build a collective understanding of the contexts of health problems; 2) a lack of multi-criteria evaluation of alternative interventions; and 3) a lack of attention paid to integrated capacity building. The MuSCLE framework responds in three ways: 1) Participatory assessment of the ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts of health, identifying priorities using risk and vulnerability science, and modeling drivers; 2) Selection among intervention alternatives that makes ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political tradeoffs transparent; and 3) Integrated capacity building for sustainable and adaptive interventions. Literature and field lessons support the argument, and guidelines are set down. A MuSCLE approach argues for a transformation in health science and policy in order to achieve Millennium Development Goals for health. PMID:17399849

Achieving Millennium Development Goals for health: building understanding, trust and capacity to respond.

PubMed

Downs, Timothy John; Larson, Heidi Jane

2007-10-01

Biomedical interventions promise achievement of health-related Millennium Development Goals provided social-, capacity- and knowledge-based constraints to scaling up and reaching marginalized people at risk, are addressed, and balance between prevention and treatment is struck. We argue for a new approach: multi-stakeholder capacity building and learning for empowerment: MuSCLE. MuSCLE is used as a way to frame three systemic weaknesses in traditional health science and policy approaches: (1) a lack of engagement with people at risk to build a collective understanding of the contexts of health problems, including social drivers; (2) a lack of multi-criteria evaluation of alternative interventions; (3) a lack of attention paid to integrated capacity building. The MuSCLE framework responds in three ways: (1) participatory assessment of the ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts of health, identifying priorities using risk and vulnerability science, and modeling drivers; (2) selection among intervention alternatives that makes ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political tradeoffs transparent; (3) integrated capacity building for sustainable and adaptive interventions. Literature and field lessons support the argument, and guidelines are set down. A MuSCLE approach argues for a transformation in health science and policy in order to achieve Millennium Development Goals for health.

Support for global science: Remote sensing's challenge

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Estes, J. E.; Star, J. L.

1986-01-01

Remote sensing uses a wide variety of techniques and methods. Resulting data are analyzed by man and machine, using both analog and digital technology. The newest and most important initiatives in the U. S. civilian space program currently revolve around the space station complex, which includes the core station as well as co-orbiting and polar satellite platforms. This proposed suite of platforms and support systems offers a unique potential for facilitating long term, multidisciplinary scientific investigations on a truly global scale. Unlike previous generations of satellites, designed for relatively limited constituencies, the space station offers the potential to provide an integrated source of information which recognizes the scientific interest in investigating the dynamic coupling between the oceans, land surface, and atmosphere. Earth scientist already face problems that are truly global in extent. Problems such as the global carbon balance, regional deforestation, and desertification require new approaches, which combine multidisciplinary, multinational research teams, employing advanced technologies to produce a type, quantity, and quality of data not previously available. The challenge before the international scientific community is to continue to develop both the infrastructure and expertise to, on the one hand, develop the science and technology of remote sensing, while on the other hand, develop an integrated understanding of global life support systems, and work toward a quantiative science of the biosphere.

An approach to designing a national climate service.

PubMed

Miles, E L; Snover, A K; Whitely Binder, L C; Sarachik, E S; Mote, P W; Mantua, N

2006-12-26

Climate variability and change are considerably important for a wide range of human activities and natural ecosystems. Climate science has made major advances during the last two decades, yet climate information is neither routinely useful for nor used in planning. What is needed is a mechanism, a national climate service (NCS), to connect climate science to decision-relevant questions and support building capacity to anticipate, plan for, and adapt to climate fluctuations. This article contributes to the national debate for an NCS by describing the rationale for building an NCS, the functions and services it would provide, and how it should be designed and evaluated. The NCS is most effectively achieved as a federal interagency partnership with critically important participation by regional climate centers, state climatologists, the emerging National Integrated Drought Information System, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Integrated Sciences Assessment (RISA) teams in a sustained relationship with a wide variety of stakeholders. Because the NCS is a service, and because evidence indicates that the regional spatial scale is most important for delivering climate services, given subnational geographical/geophysical complexity, attention is focused on lessons learned from the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group's 10 years of experience, the first of the NOAA RISA teams.

A Network for Integrated Science and Mathematics Teaching and Learning Conference Plenary Papers. NSF/SSMA Wingspread Conference (Racine, Wisconsin, April 1991). School Science and Mathematics Association Topics for Teachers Series Number 7.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berlin, Donna F., Ed.

The integration of mathematics and science is not a new concept. However, during recent years it has been a major focus in education reform. A Wingspread conference promoted discussion regarding the integration of mathematics and science and explored ways to improve science and mathematics education in grades K-12. Papers from the conference…

Life science payloads planning study integration facility survey results

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wells, G. W.; Brown, N. E.; Nelson, W. G.

1976-01-01

The integration facility survey effort described is structured to examine the facility resources needed to conduct life science payload (LSP) integration checkout activities at NASA-JSC. The LSP integration facility operations and functions are defined along with the LSP requirements for facility design. A description of available JSC life science facilities is presented and a comparison of accommodations versus requirements is reported.

Materials for Integrating Science and Social Studies with the Language Arts (Instructional Resources).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spiegel, Dixie Lee

1990-01-01

Discusses evaluating resources for integrating science and social studies with the language arts by using questions that teacher-reviewers used when evaluating those resources. Reviews trade books and other resources designed for the integration of science and social studies. (MG)

Preamble to the Integrated Science Assessments (ISA)

EPA Science Inventory

The Preamble to the Integrated Science Assessments, or "Preamble", is an overview document outlining the basic steps and criteria used in developing the Integrated Science Assessments (ISA). Previously included as part of the ISA, it will now be referenced by each ISA as...

Evaluation of Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading Project: "Shoreline Science" and "Terrarium Investigations." CSE Technical Report 676

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Jia; Baker, Eva L.

2006-01-01

This project was initiated in order to evaluate two literacy and science integrated instruction units, "Shoreline Science" and "Terrarium Investigations," designed by the Lawrence Hall of Science "Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading" Project ("Seeds/Roots"). We examined how the integrated units affect student…

76 FR 13182 - Science Advisory Board Staff Office; Notification of a Public Meeting of the Science Advisory...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-03-10

... results of fact-finding activities conducted as part of a study of science integration supporting EPA... ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY [FRL-9278-1] Science Advisory Board Staff Office; Notification of a Public Meeting of the Science Advisory Board Committee on Science Integration for Decision Making...

Biomedical Diagnostics Using Manmade Nanostructures Integrated With Biomolecules

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Tsai-Chin

There has been extensive research done on the bioengineering applications of nanoparticles. This thesis extended that work and focused on the application of semiconductor nanoparticles specifically as nano-scale detectors. By integrating two novel nanomaterial components, quantum dots and aptamers, nano-scale detectors may be fabricated. These nano-scale detectors make systematic studies on the molecular level possible and have other advantages described in the thesis. The analytes for such nanobiosensors include ions, cells, oligonucleotides, peptides or proteins. In this research, foodborne pathogens and potassium ions were chosen as the primary targets in the development of the nanosensors described in this thesis; due to their importance in the food industry and the biological sciences, respectively. More specifically, quantum dots were conjugated with short single-stranded nucleic acids and their fluorescence response was studied and evaluated to determine the viability of using them in nanoscale detector applications. To optimize the nanosensors, nano-scale spacer molecules are introduced at selected locations near the active regions of the nanosensors, and nanosensors synthesized with two different aptamer sequences were performed. The nanosensors were then tested with different ions and in real biological fluids; the results indicated that these nanosensors have promising potential applications in both self-diagnostics devices and molecular biological science research. The electrophoresis behavior and Raman spectra of these conjugations were also studied to examine these conjugations, in efforts to achieve better control over the proportional compositions of the entities that form these nanostructures. Several electrokinetic behavior dependencies on the nanoconjugations were observed and examined with double layer theory. This thesis investigated this novel nanobiosensor thoroughly from probe construction, performance evaluation, optical property characterization, to possible quality control methods. This research emphasized the fabrication of nano-detectors and provided a model to fabricate nano-detectors for a wide range of analytes by selecting appropriate aptamers and linker molecules.

An integrated modeling approach for estimating the water quality benefits of conservation practices at the river basin scale.

PubMed

Santhi, C; Kannan, N; White, M; Di Luzio, M; Arnold, J G; Wang, X; Williams, J R

2014-01-01

The USDA initiated the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices at regional and national scales. For this assessment, a sampling and modeling approach is used. This paper provides a technical overview of the modeling approach used in CEAP cropland assessment to estimate the off-site water quality benefits of conservation practices using the Ohio River Basin (ORB) as an example. The modeling approach uses a farm-scale model, Agricultural Policy Environmental Extender (APEX), and a watershed scale model (the Soil and Water Assessment Tool [SWAT]) and databases in the Hydrologic Unit Modeling for the United States system. Databases of land use, soils, land use management, topography, weather, point sources, and atmospheric depositions were developed to derive model inputs. APEX simulates the cultivated cropland, Conserve Reserve Program land, and the practices implemented on them, whereas SWAT simulates the noncultivated land (e.g., pasture, range, urban, and forest) and point sources. Simulation results from APEX are input into SWAT. SWAT routes all sources, including APEX's, to the basin outlet through each eight-digit watershed. Each basin is calibrated for stream flow, sediment, and nutrient loads at multiple gaging sites and turned in for simulating the effects of conservation practice scenarios on water quality. Results indicate that sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus loads delivered to the Mississippi River from ORB could be reduced by 16, 15, and 23%, respectively, due to current conservation practices. Modeling tools are useful to provide science-based information for assessing existing conservation programs, developing future programs, and developing insights on load reductions necessary for hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Copyright © by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Inc.

Scaling to diversity: The DERECHOS distributed infrastructure for analyzing and sharing data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rilee, M. L.; Kuo, K. S.; Clune, T.; Oloso, A.; Brown, P. G.

2016-12-01

Integrating Earth Science data from diverse sources such as satellite imagery and simulation output can be expensive and time-consuming, limiting scientific inquiry and the quality of our analyses. Reducing these costs will improve innovation and quality in science. The current Earth Science data infrastructure focuses on downloading data based on requests formed from the search and analysis of associated metadata. And while the data products provided by archives may use the best available data sharing technologies, scientist end-users generally do not have such resources (including staff) available to them. Furthermore, only once an end-user has received the data from multiple diverse sources and has integrated them can the actual analysis and synthesis begin. The cost of getting from idea to where synthesis can start dramatically slows progress. In this presentation we discuss a distributed computational and data storage framework that eliminates much of the aforementioned cost. The SciDB distributed array database is central as it is optimized for scientific computing involving very large arrays, performing better than less specialized frameworks like Spark. Adding spatiotemporal functions to the SciDB creates a powerful platform for analyzing and integrating massive, distributed datasets. SciDB allows Big Earth Data analysis to be performed "in place" without the need for expensive downloads and end-user resources. Spatiotemporal indexing technologies such as the hierarchical triangular mesh enable the compute and storage affinity needed to efficiently perform co-located and conditional analyses minimizing data transfers. These technologies automate the integration of diverse data sources using the framework, a critical step beyond current metadata search and analysis. Instead of downloading data into their idiosyncratic local environments, end-users can generate and share data products integrated from diverse multiple sources using a common shared environment, turning distributed active archive centers (DAACs) from warehouses into distributed active analysis centers.

Cognition before curriculum: rethinking the integration of basic science and clinical learning.

PubMed

Kulasegaram, Kulamakan Mahan; Martimianakis, Maria Athina; Mylopoulos, Maria; Whitehead, Cynthia R; Woods, Nicole N

2013-10-01

Integrating basic science and clinical concepts in the undergraduate medical curriculum is an important challenge for medical education. The health professions education literature includes a variety of educational strategies for integrating basic science and clinical concepts at multiple levels of the curriculum. To date, assessment of this literature has been limited. In this critical narrative review, the authors analyzed literature published in the last 30 years (1982-2012) using a previously published integration framework. They included studies that documented approaches to integration at the level of programs, courses, or teaching sessions and that aimed to improve learning outcomes. The authors evaluated these studies for evidence of successful integration and to identify factors that contribute to integration. Several strategies at the program and course level are well described but poorly evaluated. Multiple factors contribute to successful learning, so identifying how interventions at these levels result in successful integration is difficult. Evidence from session-level interventions and experimental studies suggests that integration can be achieved if learning interventions attempt to link basic and clinical science in a causal relationship. These interventions attend to how learners connect different domains of knowledge and suggest that successful integration requires learners to build cognitive associations between basic and clinical science. One way of understanding the integration of basic and clinical science is as a cognitive activity occurring within learners. This perspective suggests that learner-centered, content-focused, and session-level-oriented strategies can achieve cognitive integration.

Plant hydraulics as a central hub integrating plant and ecosystem function: meeting report for 'Emerging Frontiers in Plant Hydraulics' (Washington, DC, May 2015).

PubMed

Sack, Lawren; Ball, Marilyn C; Brodersen, Craig; Davis, Stephen D; Des Marais, David L; Donovan, Lisa A; Givnish, Thomas J; Hacke, Uwe G; Huxman, Travis; Jansen, Steven; Jacobsen, Anna L; Johnson, Daniel M; Koch, George W; Maurel, Christophe; McCulloh, Katherine A; McDowell, Nate G; McElrone, Andrew; Meinzer, Frederick C; Melcher, Peter J; North, Gretchen; Pellegrini, Matteo; Pockman, William T; Pratt, R Brandon; Sala, Anna; Santiago, Louis S; Savage, Jessica A; Scoffoni, Christine; Sevanto, Sanna; Sperry, John; Tyerman, Stephen D; Way, Danielle; Holbrook, N Michele

2016-09-01

Water plays a central role in plant biology and the efficiency of water transport throughout the plant affects both photosynthetic rate and growth, an influence that scales up deterministically to the productivity of terrestrial ecosystems. Moreover, hydraulic traits mediate the ways in which plants interact with their abiotic and biotic environment. At landscape to global scale, plant hydraulic traits are important in describing the function of ecological communities and ecosystems. Plant hydraulics is increasingly recognized as a central hub within a network by which plant biology is connected to palaeobiology, agronomy, climatology, forestry, community and ecosystem ecology and earth-system science. Such grand challenges as anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change, and improving the security and sustainability of our food supply rely on our fundamental knowledge of how water behaves in the cells, tissues, organs, bodies and diverse communities of plants. A workshop, 'Emerging Frontiers in Plant Hydraulics' supported by the National Science Foundation, was held in Washington DC, 2015 to promote open discussion of new ideas, controversies regarding measurements and analyses, and especially, the potential for expansion of up-scaled and down-scaled inter-disciplinary research, and the strengthening of connections between plant hydraulic research, allied fields and global modelling efforts. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The influence of a train-the-trainer professional development on teacher perceptions of science integration and inquiry-based instruction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Blythe, Jessica Marie

The purpose of this study was to describe the influence of the train-the-trainer professional development form of professional development on participants' perceptions of agriscience integration and inquiry-based instruction (IBI). The independent variables considered were elements of high-quality professional development, such as duration, active participation, coherence, and school culture; teacher attitudes towards professional development; and teacher demographics. The dependent variables assessed were teachers' perceptions of agriscience integration and IBI. This study utilized a quasi-experimental design to assess the impacts of a teacher professional development program and experimental follow-up support on secondary teachers' perceptions of science integration and IBI. This study was a census of all teachers who attended a 2012 professional development workshop facilitated by a National Agriscience Teacher Ambassador at the FFA and/or NAAE National Convention. Participants completed four surveys over the subsequent year to assess their perceptions of agriscience integration and IBI. Descriptive methods were used to analyze teachers' perceptions of agriscience integration and IBI. Correlations and follow-up regression analysis were conducted to determine the relationships between the teachers' perceptions and the elements of high-quality teacher professional development. Results of the study revealed that respondents had favorable perceptions of science integration into agriculture programs and planned to increase the levels of science integration in their programs. Additionally, a majority of respondents reported utilizing IBI more than once a week. Because participants of the study did not utilize the experimental follow-up support system for the workshop, clear effects could not be determined. There was a positive correlation between science integration and IBI. A variation of positive and negative correlations was found between the dependent and independent variables. Five models were found to be significant predictors of respondents' perceptions of science integration three models were found to be significant predictors of IBI. These findings indicate that teachers perceive science integration and IBI as positive influences in secondary agriculture education which supports the integration of science and science teaching techniques in secondary agriculture education programs. Though relationships exist between science integration and IBI, and various elements of school culture and professional development, further investigation is needed to better understand these relationships and their predictive variability.

The Effect of an Integrated Science and Mathematics Content-Based Course on Science and Mathematics Teaching Efficacy of Preservice Elementary Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moseley, Christine; Utley, Juliana

2006-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of an earth systems science course (integrated mathematics and science content) on preservice elementary teachers' mathematics and science teaching efficacy. Paired t-tests revealed that the personal mathematics and science teaching efficacy and science teaching outcome expectancy significantly…

The implementation of integrated science teaching materials based socio-scientific issues to improve students scientific literacy for environmental pollution theme

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yenni, Rita; Hernani, Widodo, Ari

2017-05-01

The study aims to determine the increasing of students' science literacy skills on content aspects and competency of science by using Integrated Science teaching materials based Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) for environmental pollution theme. The method used in the study is quasi-experiment with nonequivalent pretest and posttest control group design. The students of experimental class used teaching materials based SSI, whereas the students of control class were still using the usual textbooks. The result of this study showed a significant difference between the value of N-gain of experimental class and control class, whichalso occurred in every indicator of content aspects and competency of science. This result indicates that using of Integrated Science teaching materials based SSI can improve content aspect and competency of science and can be used as teaching materials alternative in teaching of Integrated Science.

Effects of Teacher Science Support on Student Science Support in Selected Tenth Grade Biology Classes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simpson, Ronald Dale

The objectives of this study were (1) to assess the effects of teacher science support, as measured by the Science Support Scale (Tri-S scale), on student science support and (2) to gain normative data on the Science Support Scale as an instrument for use with high school students. Twenty-four 10th grade biology teachers were given the Tri-S scale…

Integrating the history of science into a middle school science curriculum

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huybrechts, Jeanne Marie

This study examined the effect of incorporating the history of science into a middle school physical science curriculum on student attitudes toward science and the work of scientists. While there is wide support for including some science history in middle school science lessons within both the science and science-education communities, there is little curriculum designed to meet that objective. A series of five lessons was written specifically for the study. Each lesson included a brief biography of a scientist whose work was of historical significance, and a set of directions for duplicating one or more of the experiments done by that scientist. A thirty-question, Likert scale survey of the attitudes of middle school students toward science and the work of scientists was also written for this study. The survey was administered to two groups of students in a single middle school: One group---the experimental group---subsequently used the science history curriculum; the second (control) group did not. The same attitude survey was readministered to both groups of students after study of the science-history curriculum was completed. The results of the study indicate that there was no statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of either the experimental or control group students. Further analysis was done to determine whether there were differences between the pretest and posttest scores of boys and girls, or between "regular" or "honors" students. In both cases no statistically significant difference was found.

From PCK to TPACK: Developing a Transformative Model for Pre-Service Science Teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jang, Syh-Jong; Chen, Kuan-Chung

2010-12-01

New science teachers should be equipped with the ability to integrate and design the curriculum and technology for innovative teaching. How to integrate technology into pre-service science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge is the important issue. This study examined the impact on a transformative model of integrating technology and peer coaching for developing technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) of pre-service science teachers. A transformative model and an online system were designed to restructure science teacher education courses. Participants of this study included an instructor and 12 pre-service teachers. The main sources of data included written assignments, online data, reflective journals, videotapes and interviews. This study expanded four views, namely, the comprehensive, imitative, transformative and integrative views to explore the impact of TPACK. The model could help pre-service teachers develop technological pedagogical methods and strategies of integrating subject-matter knowledge into science lessons, and further enhanced their TPACK.

Integration and timing of basic and clinical sciences education.

PubMed

Bandiera, Glen; Boucher, Andree; Neville, Alan; Kuper, Ayelet; Hodges, Brian

2013-05-01

Medical education has traditionally been compartmentalized into basic and clinical sciences, with the latter being viewed as the skillful application of the former. Over time, the relevance of basic sciences has become defined by their role in supporting clinical problem solving rather than being, of themselves, a defining knowledge base of physicians. As part of the national Future of Medical Education in Canada (FMEC MD) project, a comprehensive empirical environmental scan identified the timing and integration of basic sciences as a key pressing issue for medical education. Using the literature review, key informant interviews, stakeholder meetings, and subsequent consultation forums from the FMEC project, this paper details the empirical basis for focusing on the role of basic science, the evidentiary foundations for current practices, and the implications for medical education. Despite a dearth of definitive relevant studies, opinions about how best to integrate the sciences remain strong. Resource allocation, political power, educational philosophy, and the shift from a knowledge-based to a problem-solving profession all influence the debate. There was little disagreement that both sciences are important, that many traditional models emphasized deep understanding of limited basic science disciplines at the expense of other relevant content such as social sciences, or that teaching the sciences contemporaneously rather than sequentially has theoretical and practical merit. Innovations in integrated curriculum design have occurred internationally. Less clear are the appropriate balance of the sciences, the best integration model, and solutions to the political and practical challenges of integrated curricula. New curricula tend to emphasize integration, development of more diverse physician competencies, and preparation of physicians to adapt to evolving technology and patients' expectations. Refocusing the basic/clinical dichotomy to a foundational/applied model may yield benefits in training widely competent future physicians.

Integrating the Fenton's Process with Biofiltration by to Reduce Chemical Oxygen Demand of Winery Effluents.

PubMed

Pipolo, Marco; Martins, Rui C; Quinta-Ferreira, Rosa M; Costa, Raquel

2017-03-01

The discharge of poorly decontaminated winery wastewater remains a serious environmental problem in many regions, and the industry is welcoming improved treatment methods. Here, an innovative decontamination approach integrating Fenton's process with biofiltration by Asian clams is proposed. The potential of this approach was assessed at the pilot scale using real effluent and by taking an actual industrial treatment system as a benchmark. Fenton peroxidation was observed to remove 84% of the effluent's chemical oxygen demand (COD), reducing it to 205 mg L. Subsequent biofiltration decreased the effluent's COD to approximately zero, well below the legal discharge limit of 150 mg L, in just 3 d. The reduction of the effluent's organic load through Fenton's process did not decrease its toxicity toward , but the effluent was much less harmful after biofiltration. The performance of the treatment proposed exceeded that of the integrated Fenton's process-sequencing batch reactor design implemented in the winery practice, where a residence time of around 10 d in the biological step typically results in 80 to 90% of COD removal. The method proposed is effective and compatible with typical winery budgets and potentially contributes to the management of a nuisance species. Copyright © by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Inc.

Systems Science and Childhood Obesity: A Systematic Review and New Directions

PubMed Central

Foster, E. Michael

2013-01-01

As a public health problem, childhood obesity operates at multiple levels, ranging from individual health behaviors to school and community characteristics to public policies. Examining obesity, particularly childhood obesity, from any single perspective is likely to fail, and systems science methods offer a possible solution. We systematically reviewed studies that examined the causes and/or consequences of obesity from a systems science perspective. The 21 included studies addressed four general areas of systems science in obesity: (1) translating interventions to a large scale, (2) the effect of obesity on other health or economic outcomes, (3) the effect of geography on obesity, and (4) the effect of social networks on obesity. In general, little research addresses obesity from a true, integrated systems science perspective, and the available research infrequently focuses on children. This shortcoming limits the ability of that research to inform public policy. However, we believe that the largely incremental approaches used in current systems science lay a foundation for future work and present a model demonstrating the system of childhood obesity. Systems science perspective and related methods are particularly promising in understanding the link between childhood obesity and adult outcomes. Systems models emphasize the evolution of agents and their interactions; such evolution is particularly salient in the context of a developing child. PMID:23710344

Ozone (O3) Standards - Integrated Science Assessments from Current Review

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The integrated science assessment (ISA) is a comprehensive review, synthesis, and evaluation of the most policy-relevant science, including key science judgments that are important to inform the development of the risk and exposure assessments, and more.

Bridging the Gap Between Scientists and Practitioners: The Challenge Before Us - Republished Article.

PubMed

Sobell, Linda Carter

2016-11-01

The need to develop effective and efficient strategies for the dissemination of evidence-based health care has been recognized by governments, researchers, and clinicians alike. However, recognition and implementation are separate issues. If scientists are to have a significant impact on clinical practice, they will have to learn a new way of "doing business." Lessons from the business community and from the field of diffusion of innovations research (dissemination research) have direct applicability to disseminating science-based clinical procedures. This paper presents two examples of the successful integration of science and clinical practice. The goal in each case was to address problems fundamental to dissemination research, specifically for addictions treatment. The first example demonstrates how scientists and practitioners successfully worked hand-in-hand to integrate science and practice, by creating a clinical protocol that subsequently served almost 300 clients. The second example describes the successful dissemination of a clinical research intervention into community settings. The key to effective dissemination was to make practitioners true partners in the research, development, and dissemination process. For the effective wedding of clinical science and practice on a wide scale, dissemination must be adopted as a value and become a major objective of health care organizations. Current health care emphasis on evidence-based practice suggests that alliances between practitioners and scientists will point the way to clinical standards of practice for the next millennium. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Mix It Up

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vasquez-Mireles, Selina; West, Sandra

2007-01-01

A correlated science lesson is characterized as an integrated science lesson in that it may incorporate traditionally integrated activities and use math as a tool. However, a correlated math-science lesson also: (1) has the pertinent math and science objectives aligned with state standards; and (2) teaches parallel science and math ideas equally.…

Integrated Basin-Scale Modelling and Assessment: Lessons and Challenges in Linking Biophysical and Socioeconomic Sciences for Enhancing Sustainability Outcomes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jakeman, A. J.; Croke, B. F.; Letcher, R. A.; Newham, L. T.; Norton, J. P.

2004-12-01

Integrated Assessment (IA) and Integrated Scenario Modelling (ISM) are being increasingly used to assess sustainability options and, in particular, the effects of policy changes, land use management, climate forcing and other uncontrollable drivers on a wide range of river basin outcomes. IA and ISM are processes that invoke the necessary range of biophysical and socioeconomic disciplines and embrace stakeholder involvement as an essential ingredient. The authors report on their IA studies in Australian and Asian river basins. They illustrate a range of modelling frameworks and tools that were used to perform the assessments, engage the relevant interest groups and promote systems understanding and social learning. The studies cover a range of issues and policies including poverty alleviation, industrial investments, infrastructure provision, erosion and sedimentation, water supply allocation, and ecological protection. The positive impacts of these studies are presented, as well as the lessons learnt and the challenges for modellers and disciplinary experts in advancing the reputation and performance of integrated assessment exercises.

Moon-based Earth Observation for Large Scale Geoscience Phenomena

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guo, Huadong; Liu, Guang; Ding, Yixing

2016-07-01

The capability of Earth observation for large-global-scale natural phenomena needs to be improved and new observing platform are expected. We have studied the concept of Moon as an Earth observation in these years. Comparing with manmade satellite platform, Moon-based Earth observation can obtain multi-spherical, full-band, active and passive information,which is of following advantages: large observation range, variable view angle, long-term continuous observation, extra-long life cycle, with the characteristics of longevity ,consistency, integrity, stability and uniqueness. Moon-based Earth observation is suitable for monitoring the large scale geoscience phenomena including large scale atmosphere change, large scale ocean change,large scale land surface dynamic change,solid earth dynamic change,etc. For the purpose of establishing a Moon-based Earth observation platform, we already have a plan to study the five aspects as follows: mechanism and models of moon-based observing earth sciences macroscopic phenomena; sensors' parameters optimization and methods of moon-based Earth observation; site selection and environment of moon-based Earth observation; Moon-based Earth observation platform; and Moon-based Earth observation fundamental scientific framework.

Guidelines for NASA Missions to Engage the User Community as a Part of the Mission Life Cycle

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Escobar, V. M.; Friedl, L.; Bonniksen, C. K.

2017-12-01

NASA continues to improve the Earth Science Directorate in the areas of thematic integration, stakeholder feedback and Project Applications Program tailoring for missions to transfer knowledge between scientists and projects. The integration of application themes and the implementation of application science activities in flight projects have evolved to formally include user feedback and stakeholder integration. NASA's new Flight Applied Science Program Guidelines are designed to bridge NASA Earth Science Directorates in Flight, Applied Sciences and Research and Development by agreeing to integrate the user community into mission life cycles. Thus science development and science applications will guide all new instruments launched by NASAs ESD. The continued integration with the user community has enabled socio-economic considerations into NASA Earth Science projects to advance significantly. Making users a natural part of mission science leverages future socio-economic impact research and provides a platform for innovative and more actionable product to be used in decision support systems by society. This presentation will give an overview of the new NASA Guidelines and provide samples that demonstrate how the user community can be a part of NASA mission designs.

Critters: K-6 Life Science Activities. Project AIMS.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Allen, Maureen Murphy; And Others

Project AIMS (Activities to Integrate Mathematics and Science) has as its purpose the integration of subject matter in grades K-9. Field testing of the curriculum materials produced by AIMS indicates that this integration produces the following beneficial results: (1) mathematics becomes more meaningful, hence more useful; (2) science is…

The Integration of Science and Mathematics Education: Highlights from the NSF/SSMA Wingspread Conference Plenary Papers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berlin, Donna F.

1994-01-01

Summarizes plenary papers presented at the NSF/SSMA Wingspread Conference to explore ways to improve science and mathematics education through integration. Themes included analysis of integration; divergence of mathematics education from science education; technological perspectives; promoting mathematical and scientific inquiry; and school…

Science Integrating Learning Objectives: A Cooperative Learning Group Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spindler, Matt

2015-01-01

The integration of agricultural and science curricular content that capitalizes on natural and inherent connections represents a challenge for secondary agricultural educators. The purpose of this case study was to create information about the employment of Cooperative Learning Groups (CLG) to enhance the science integrating learning objectives…

77 FR 21158 - VA Directive 0005 on Scientific Integrity: Availability for Review and Comment

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-04-09

... the Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy's Memorandum of December 17, 2010, on scientific integrity. It addresses how VA ensures quality science in its methods, review, policy application, and...: Background The Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity and the Office of Science and Technology...

A question of style: method, integrity and the meaning of proper science.

PubMed

Penders, Bart; Vos, Rein; Horstman, Klasien

2009-09-01

Controversies in science often centre on methodology and integrity; these are the gatekeepers of proper science. But what exactly defines proper science as proper is not universal, especially in collaborative fields of enquiry where different perspectives meet. These encounters often result in friction, yet may equally give rise to new perspectives on proper science. A tour of collaborative endeavours like structural biology and nutrigenomics highlights some of those frictions and the controversies that can result from the encounter of 'wet' and 'dry' science. Attuning scientists to the plurality of proper science may safeguard many a scientist's integrity from being questioned unjustly.

Redefining neuromarketing as an integrated science of influence.

PubMed

Breiter, Hans C; Block, Martin; Blood, Anne J; Calder, Bobby; Chamberlain, Laura; Lee, Nick; Livengood, Sherri; Mulhern, Frank J; Raman, Kalyan; Schultz, Don; Stern, Daniel B; Viswanathan, Vijay; Zhang, Fengqing Zoe

2014-01-01

Multiple transformative forces target marketing, many of which derive from new technologies that allow us to sample thinking in real time (i.e., brain imaging), or to look at large aggregations of decisions (i.e., big data). There has been an inclination to refer to the intersection of these technologies with the general topic of marketing as "neuromarketing". There has not been a serious effort to frame neuromarketing, which is the goal of this paper. Neuromarketing can be compared to neuroeconomics, wherein neuroeconomics is generally focused on how individuals make "choices", and represent distributions of choices. Neuromarketing, in contrast, focuses on how a distribution of choices can be shifted or "influenced", which can occur at multiple "scales" of behavior (e.g., individual, group, or market/society). Given influence can affect choice through many cognitive modalities, and not just that of valuation of choice options, a science of influence also implies a need to develop a model of cognitive function integrating attention, memory, and reward/aversion function. The paper concludes with a brief description of three domains of neuromarketing application for studying influence, and their caveats.

Spatial Modelling Tools to Integrate Public Health and Environmental Science, Illustrated with Infectious Cryptosporidiosis

PubMed Central

Lal, Aparna

2016-01-01

Contemporary spatial modelling tools can help examine how environmental exposures such as climate and land use together with socio-economic factors sustain infectious disease transmission in humans. Spatial methods can account for interactions across global and local scales, geographic clustering and continuity of the exposure surface, key characteristics of many environmental influences. Using cryptosporidiosis as an example, this review illustrates how, in resource rich settings, spatial tools have been used to inform targeted intervention strategies and forecast future disease risk with scenarios of environmental change. When used in conjunction with molecular studies, they have helped determine location-specific infection sources and environmental transmission pathways. There is considerable scope for such methods to be used to identify data/infrastructure gaps and establish a baseline of disease burden in resource-limited settings. Spatial methods can help integrate public health and environmental science by identifying the linkages between the physical and socio-economic environment and health outcomes. Understanding the environmental and social context for disease spread is important for assessing the public health implications of projected environmental change. PMID:26848669

Spatial Modelling Tools to Integrate Public Health and Environmental Science, Illustrated with Infectious Cryptosporidiosis.

PubMed

Lal, Aparna

2016-02-02

Contemporary spatial modelling tools can help examine how environmental exposures such as climate and land use together with socio-economic factors sustain infectious disease transmission in humans. Spatial methods can account for interactions across global and local scales, geographic clustering and continuity of the exposure surface, key characteristics of many environmental influences. Using cryptosporidiosis as an example, this review illustrates how, in resource rich settings, spatial tools have been used to inform targeted intervention strategies and forecast future disease risk with scenarios of environmental change. When used in conjunction with molecular studies, they have helped determine location-specific infection sources and environmental transmission pathways. There is considerable scope for such methods to be used to identify data/infrastructure gaps and establish a baseline of disease burden in resource-limited settings. Spatial methods can help integrate public health and environmental science by identifying the linkages between the physical and socio-economic environment and health outcomes. Understanding the environmental and social context for disease spread is important for assessing the public health implications of projected environmental change.

Autonomous Acquisition of Science Quality Spectra from Unmanned Aerial Systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mandl, Daniel; Campbell, Petya; Sohlberg, Robert; Cappelaere, Pat; Ong, Lawrence

2017-01-01

This is a presentation on a technique for using Unmanned Aerial Systems with intelligent sensing to create science quality data. In this particular case, the team used two spectrometers with high spectral resolution and developed a technique to have the spectrometers self calibrate so that it is possible to take the measurements within the allocated 10 minute flight times. Because there is both upwelling and downwelling foreoptics on each of the two spectrometers, it becomes slow to set the calibration up for all four possibilities which relates to the integration time and then take the measurements. If light conditions change too rapidly then the measurements won't be scaled so that the spectra max is at least 85% of the instrument max but not saturated. This process was more difficult then it appeared due to the complexity of determining the integration time before light conditions changed and before the battery runs our of charge to fly the Unmanned Aerial System. This presentation goes over the results for the first few flight days and the planned future flight experiments.

Information Fusion Issues in the UK Environmental Science Community

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Giles, J. R.

2010-12-01

The Earth is a complex, interacting system which cannot be neatly divided by discipline boundaries. To gain an holistic understanding of even a component of an Earth System requires researchers to draw information from multiple disciplines and integrate these to develop a broader understanding. But the barriers to achieving this are formidable. Research funders attempting to encourage the integration of information across disciplines need to take into account culture issues, the impact of intrusion of projects on existing information systems, ontologies and semantics, scale issues, heterogeneity and the uncertainties associated with combining information from diverse sources. Culture - There is a cultural dualism in the environmental sciences were information sharing is both rewarded and discouraged. Researchers who share information both gain new opportunities and risk reducing their chances of being first author in an high-impact journal. The culture of the environmental science community has to be managed to ensure that information fusion activities are encouraged. Intrusion - Existing information systems have an inertia of there own because of the intellectual and financial capital invested within them. Information fusion activities must recognise and seek to minimise the potential impact of their projects on existing systems. Low intrusion information fusions systems such as OGC web-service and the OpenMI Standard are to be preferred to whole-sale replacement of existing systems. Ontology and Semantics - Linking information across disciplines requires a clear understanding of the concepts deployed in the vocabulary used to describe them. Such work is a critical first step to creating routine information fusion. It is essential that national bodies, such as geological surveys organisations, document and publish their ontologies, semantics, etc. Scale - Environmental processes operate at scales ranging from microns to the scale of the Solar System and potentially beyond. The many different scales involved provide serious challenges to information fusion which need to be researched. Heterogeneity - Natural systems are heterogeneous, that is a system consisting of multiple components each of which may have considerable internal variation. Modelling Earth Systems requires recognition of the inherent complexity. Uncertainty - Understanding the uncertainties within a single information source can be difficult. Understanding the uncertainties across a system of linked models, each drawn from multiple information resources, represents a considerable challenge that must be addressed. The challenges to overcome appear insurmountable to individual research groups; but the potential rewards, in terms of a fuller scientific understanding of Earth Systems, are significant. A major international effort must be mounted to tackle these barriers and enable routine information fusion.

Materiomics: biological protein materials, from nano to macro.

PubMed

Cranford, Steven; Buehler, Markus J

2010-11-12

Materiomics is an emerging field of science that provides a basis for multiscale material system characterization, inspired in part by natural, for example, protein-based materials. Here we outline the scope and explain the motivation of the field of materiomics, as well as demonstrate the benefits of a materiomic approach in the understanding of biological and natural materials as well as in the design of de novo materials. We discuss recent studies that exemplify the impact of materiomics - discovering Nature's complexity through a materials science approach that merges concepts of material and structure throughout all scales and incorporates feedback loops that facilitate sensing and resulting structural changes at multiple scales. The development and application of materiomics is illustrated for the specific case of protein-based materials, which constitute the building blocks of a variety of biological systems such as tendon, bone, skin, spider silk, cells, and tissue, as well as natural composite material systems (a combination of protein-based and inorganic constituents) such as nacre and mollusk shells, and other natural multiscale systems such as cellulose-based plant and wood materials. An important trait of these materials is that they display distinctive hierarchical structures across multiple scales, where molecular details are exhibited in macroscale mechanical responses. Protein materials are intriguing examples of materials that balance multiple tasks, representing some of the most sustainable material solutions that integrate structure and function despite severe limitations in the quality and quantity of material building blocks. However, up until now, our attempts to analyze and replicate Nature's materials have been hindered by our lack of fundamental understanding of these materials' intricate hierarchical structures, scale-bridging mechanisms, and complex material components that bestow protein-based materials their unique properties. Recent advances in analytical tools and experimental methods allow a holistic view of such a hierarchical biological material system. The integration of these approaches and amalgamation of material properties at all scale levels to develop a complete description of a material system falls within the emerging field of materiomics. Materiomics is the result of the convergence of engineering and materials science with experimental and computational biology in the context of natural and synthetic materials. Through materiomics, fundamental advances in our understanding of structure-property-process relations of biological systems contribute to the mechanistic understanding of certain diseases and facilitate the development of novel biological, biologically inspired, and completely synthetic materials for applications in medicine (biomaterials), nanotechnology, and engineering.

Materiomics: biological protein materials, from nano to macro

PubMed Central

Cranford, Steven; Buehler, Markus J

2010-01-01

Materiomics is an emerging field of science that provides a basis for multiscale material system characterization, inspired in part by natural, for example, protein-based materials. Here we outline the scope and explain the motivation of the field of materiomics, as well as demonstrate the benefits of a materiomic approach in the understanding of biological and natural materials as well as in the design of de novo materials. We discuss recent studies that exemplify the impact of materiomics – discovering Nature’s complexity through a materials science approach that merges concepts of material and structure throughout all scales and incorporates feedback loops that facilitate sensing and resulting structural changes at multiple scales. The development and application of materiomics is illustrated for the specific case of protein-based materials, which constitute the building blocks of a variety of biological systems such as tendon, bone, skin, spider silk, cells, and tissue, as well as natural composite material systems (a combination of protein-based and inorganic constituents) such as nacre and mollusk shells, and other natural multiscale systems such as cellulose-based plant and wood materials. An important trait of these materials is that they display distinctive hierarchical structures across multiple scales, where molecular details are exhibited in macroscale mechanical responses. Protein materials are intriguing examples of materials that balance multiple tasks, representing some of the most sustainable material solutions that integrate structure and function despite severe limitations in the quality and quantity of material building blocks. However, up until now, our attempts to analyze and replicate Nature’s materials have been hindered by our lack of fundamental understanding of these materials’ intricate hierarchical structures, scale-bridging mechanisms, and complex material components that bestow protein-based materials their unique properties. Recent advances in analytical tools and experimental methods allow a holistic view of such a hierarchical biological material system. The integration of these approaches and amalgamation of material properties at all scale levels to develop a complete description of a material system falls within the emerging field of materiomics. Materiomics is the result of the convergence of engineering and materials science with experimental and computational biology in the context of natural and synthetic materials. Through materiomics, fundamental advances in our understanding of structure–property–process relations of biological systems contribute to the mechanistic understanding of certain diseases and facilitate the development of novel biological, biologically inspired, and completely synthetic materials for applications in medicine (biomaterials), nanotechnology, and engineering. PMID:24198478

Integrated narrative assessment exemplification: a leukaemia case history.

PubMed

Artioli, Giovanna; Foà, Chiara; Cosentino, Chiara; Sollami, Alfonso; Taffurelli, Chiara

2017-07-18

In the Integrated Narrative Nursing Assessment (INNA), the Evidence-Based Nursing Model is integrated with the Narrative-Based Nursing Model. The INNA makes use of quantitative instruments, arising from the natural sciences as well as of qualitative ones, arising from the human achieving results of standardization and reproducibility, as well as of customization and uniqueness. Accordingly, the purpose of this work is to exemplify the thinking process of and the method adopted by a nurse adopting an integrated narrative assessment in the evaluation of a patient. The patient suffered from acute myeloid leukaemia, treated with chemotherapy. Her nurse worked in a haematology ward in a North Italy Hospital. The nurse had previous experience in conducting the assessment according to INNA. Based on patient's characteristics, the nurse chose to use the narration (to explore needs from their subjective perception) and the scales (to measure them objectively) among the various assessment instruments provided by the INNA. The resultant integrated outcomes helped the nurse to have a comprehensive overview of the person's health-care needs and their connections. These outcomes derive from the integration of narrative information with those obtained from the scales, which in this paper have shown consistent results. It is very difficult to reach this complexity by considering qualitative and quantitative assessment strategies as mutually foreclosing, given that both emerged as being very useful in identifying, understanding and measuring the needs of the assisted person. Then they both could be used to design a customized intervention, encouraging new connections between disease, illness, sickness and everyday life.

Principle of Parsimony, Fake Science, and Scales

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yeh, T. C. J.; Wan, L.; Wang, X. S.

2017-12-01

Considering difficulties in predicting exact motions of water molecules, and the scale of our interests (bulk behaviors of many molecules), Fick's law (diffusion concept) has been created to predict solute diffusion process in space and time. G.I. Taylor (1921) demonstrated that random motion of the molecules reach the Fickian regime in less a second if our sampling scale is large enough to reach ergodic condition. Fick's law is widely accepted for describing molecular diffusion as such. This fits the definition of the parsimony principle at the scale of our concern. Similarly, advection-dispersion or convection-dispersion equation (ADE or CDE) has been found quite satisfactory for analysis of concentration breakthroughs of solute transport in uniformly packed soil columns. This is attributed to the solute is often released over the entire cross-section of the column, which has sampled many pore-scale heterogeneities and met the ergodicity assumption. Further, the uniformly packed column contains a large number of stationary pore-size heterogeneity. The solute thus reaches the Fickian regime after traveling a short distance along the column. Moreover, breakthrough curves are concentrations integrated over the column cross-section (the scale of our interest), and they meet the ergodicity assumption embedded in the ADE and CDE. To the contrary, scales of heterogeneity in most groundwater pollution problems evolve as contaminants travel. They are much larger than the scale of our observations and our interests so that the ergodic and the Fickian conditions are difficult. Upscaling the Fick's law for solution dispersion, and deriving universal rules of the dispersion to the field- or basin-scale pollution migrations are merely misuse of the parsimony principle and lead to a fake science ( i.e., the development of theories for predicting processes that can not be observed.) The appropriate principle of parsimony for these situations dictates mapping of large-scale heterogeneities as detailed as possible and adapting the Fick's law for effects of small-scale heterogeneity resulting from our inability to characterize them in detail.

Integrated Science Assessments

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

Integrated Science Assessments are reports that represent a concise evaluation and synthesis of the most policy-relevant science for reviewing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for the six principal pollutants.

Integrated, multi-scale, spatial-temporal cell biology--A next step in the post genomic era.

PubMed

Horwitz, Rick

2016-03-01

New microscopic approaches, high-throughput imaging, and gene editing promise major new insights into cellular behaviors. When coupled with genomic and other 'omic information and "mined" for correlations and associations, a new breed of powerful and useful cellular models should emerge. These top down, coarse-grained, and statistical models, in turn, can be used to form hypotheses merging with fine-grained, bottom up mechanistic studies and models that are the back bone of cell biology. The goal of the Allen Institute for Cell Science is to develop the top down approach by developing a high throughput microscopy pipeline that is integrated with modeling, using gene edited hiPS cell lines in various physiological and pathological contexts. The output of these experiments and models will be an "animated" cell, capable of integrating and analyzing image data generated from experiments and models. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Perspectives of teachers regarding the integration of mathematics and science at the secondary school level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zolnierczyk, Joanna Asia

The integration of mathematics and science in secondary schools in the 21st century continues to be an important topic of practice and research. The purpose of my research study, which builds on studies by Frykholm and Glasson (2005) and Berlin and White (2010), is to explore the potential constraints and benefits of integrating mathematics and science in Ontario secondary schools based on the perspectives of in-service and pre-service teachers with various math and/or science backgrounds. A qualitative and quantitative research design with an exploratory approach was used. The qualitative data was collected from a sample of 12 in-service teachers with various math and/or science backgrounds recruited from two school boards in Eastern Ontario. The quantitative and some qualitative data was collected from a sample of 81 pre-service teachers from the Queen's University Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) program. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the in-service teachers while a survey and a focus group was conducted with the pre-service teachers. Once the data was collected, the qualitative data were abductively analyzed. For the quantitative data, descriptive and inferential statistics (one-way ANOVAs and Pearson Chi Square analyses) were calculated to examine perspectives of teachers regardless of teaching background and to compare groups of teachers based on teaching background. The findings of this study suggest that in-service and pre-service teachers have a positive attitude towards the integration of math and science and view it as valuable to student learning and success. The pre-service teachers viewed the integration as easy and did not express concerns to this integration. On the other hand, the in-service teachers highlighted concerns and challenges such as resources, scheduling, and time constraints. My results illustrate when teachers perceive it is valuable to integrate math and science and which aspects of the classroom benefit best from the integration. Furthermore, the results highlight barriers and possible solutions to better the integration of math and science. In addition to the benefits and constraints of integration, my results illustrate why some teachers may opt out of integrating math and science and the different strategies teachers have incorporated to integrate math and science in their classroom.

Ozone (O3) Standards - Integrated Science Assessments from Review Completed in 2015

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The integrated science assessment (ISA) is a comprehensive review, synthesis, and evaluation of the most policy-relevant science, including key science judgments that are important to inform the development of the risk and exposure assessments, and more.

Building capacity for in-situ phenological observation data to support integrated biodiversity information at local to national scales

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weltzin, J. F.

2016-12-01

Earth observations from a variety of platforms and across a range of scales are required to support research, natural resource management, and policy- and decision-making in a changing world. Integrated earth observation data provides multi-faceted information critical to decision support, vulnerability and change detection, risk assessments, early warning and modeling, simulation and forecasting in the natural resource societal benefit area. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org) is a national-scale science and monitoring initiative focused on phenology - the study of seasonal life-cycle events such as leafing, flowering, reproduction, and migration - as a tool to understand the response of biodiversity to environmental variation and change. USA-NPN provides a hierarchical, national monitoring framework that enables other organizations to leverage the capacity of the Network for their own applications - minimizing investment and duplication of effort - while promoting interoperability and sustainability. Over the last decade, the network has focused on the development of a centralized database for in-situ (ground based) observations of plants and animals, now with 8 M records for the period 1954-present. More recently, we have developed a workflow for the production and validation of spatially gridded phenology products based on models that couple the organismal data with climatological and meteorological data at daily time-steps and relatively fine spatial resolutions ( 2.5 km to 4 km). These gridded data are now ripe for integration with other modeled or earth observation gridded data, e.g., indices of drought impact or land surface reflectance. This greatly broadens capacity to scale organismal observational data to landscapes and regions, and enables novel investigations of biophysical interactions at unprecedented scales, e.g., continental-scale migrations. Sustainability emerges from identification of stakeholder needs, segmentation of target audiences (e.g., data contributors, data consumers), documentation of all aspects of the data production and delivery process, development of collaborative partnerships, enterprise approaches to information management, and excellent customer service.

Operational data products to support phenological research and applications at local to continental scales

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weltzin, J. F.

2017-12-01

Phenological data from a variety of platforms - across a range of spatial and temporal scales - are required to support research, natural resource management, and policy- and decision-making in a changing world. Observational and modeled phenological data, especially when integrated with associated biophysical data (e.g., climate, land-use/land-cover, hydrology) has great potential to provide multi-faceted information critical to decision support systems, vulnerability and risk assessments, change detection applications, and early-warning and forecasting systems for natural and modified ecosystems. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org) is a national-scale science and monitoring initiative focused on understanding the drivers and feedback effects of phenological variation in changing environments. The Network maintains a centralized database of over 10M ground-based observations of plants and animals for 1954-present, and leverages these data to produce operational data products for use by a variety of audiences, including researchers and resource managers. This presentation highlights our operational data products, including the tools, maps, and services that facilitate discovery, accessibility and usability of integrated phenological information. We describe (1) the data download tool, a customizable GUI that provides geospatially referenced raw, bounded or summarized organismal and climatological data and associated metadata (including calendars, time-series curves, and XY graphs), (2) the visualization tool, which provides opportunities to explore, visualize and export or download both organismal and modeled (gridded) products at daily time-steps and relatively fine spatial resolutions ( 2.5 km to 4 km) for the period 1980 to 6 days into the future, and (3) web services that enable custom query and download of map, feature and cover services in a variety of standard formats. These operational products facilitate scaling of integrated phenological and associated data to landscapes and regions, and enable novel investigations of biophysical interactions at unprecedented scales, e.g., continental-scale migrations.

Beyond integrating social sciences: Reflecting on the place of life sciences in empirical bioethics methodologies.

PubMed

Mertz, Marcel; Schildmann, Jan

2018-06-01

Empirical bioethics is commonly understood as integrating empirical research with normative-ethical research in order to address an ethical issue. Methodological analyses in empirical bioethics mainly focus on the integration of socio-empirical sciences (e.g. sociology or psychology) and normative ethics. But while there are numerous multidisciplinary research projects combining life sciences and normative ethics, there is few explicit methodological reflection on how to integrate both fields, or about the goals and rationales of such interdisciplinary cooperation. In this paper we will review some drivers for the tendency of empirical bioethics methodologies to focus on the collaboration of normative ethics with particularly social sciences. Subsequently, we argue that the ends of empirical bioethics, not the empirical methods, are decisive for the question of which empirical disciplines can contribute to empirical bioethics in a meaningful way. Using already existing types of research integration as a springboard, five possible types of research which encompass life sciences and normative analysis will illustrate how such cooperation can be conceptualized from a methodological perspective within empirical bioethics. We will conclude with a reflection on the limitations and challenges of empirical bioethics research that integrates life sciences.

Integrating Remote Sensing Data, Hybrid-Cloud Computing, and Event Notifications for Advanced Rapid Imaging & Analysis (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hua, H.; Owen, S. E.; Yun, S.; Lundgren, P.; Fielding, E. J.; Agram, P.; Manipon, G.; Stough, T. M.; Simons, M.; Rosen, P. A.; Wilson, B. D.; Poland, M. P.; Cervelli, P. F.; Cruz, J.

2013-12-01

Space-based geodetic measurement techniques such as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and Continuous Global Positioning System (CGPS) are now important elements in our toolset for monitoring earthquake-generating faults, volcanic eruptions, hurricane damage, landslides, reservoir subsidence, and other natural and man-made hazards. Geodetic imaging's unique ability to capture surface deformation with high spatial and temporal resolution has revolutionized both earthquake science and volcanology. Continuous monitoring of surface deformation and surface change before, during, and after natural hazards improves decision-making from better forecasts, increased situational awareness, and more informed recovery. However, analyses of InSAR and GPS data sets are currently handcrafted following events and are not generated rapidly and reliably enough for use in operational response to natural disasters. Additionally, the sheer data volumes needed to handle a continuous stream of InSAR data sets also presents a bottleneck. It has been estimated that continuous processing of InSAR coverage of California alone over 3-years would reach PB-scale data volumes. Our Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis for Monitoring Hazards (ARIA-MH) science data system enables both science and decision-making communities to monitor areas of interest with derived geodetic data products via seamless data preparation, processing, discovery, and access. We will present our findings on the use of hybrid-cloud computing to improve the timely processing and delivery of geodetic data products, integrating event notifications from USGS to improve the timely processing for response, as well as providing browse results for quick looks with other tools for integrative analysis.

A Hybrid Neuro-Fuzzy Model For Integrating Large Earth-Science Datasets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Porwal, A.; Carranza, J.; Hale, M.

2004-12-01

A GIS-based hybrid neuro-fuzzy approach to integration of large earth-science datasets for mineral prospectivity mapping is described. It implements a Takagi-Sugeno type fuzzy inference system in the framework of a four-layered feed-forward adaptive neural network. Each unique combination of the datasets is considered a feature vector whose components are derived by knowledge-based ordinal encoding of the constituent datasets. A subset of feature vectors with a known output target vector (i.e., unique conditions known to be associated with either a mineralized or a barren location) is used for the training of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system. Training involves iterative adjustment of parameters of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system using a hybrid learning procedure for mapping each training vector to its output target vector with minimum sum of squared error. The trained adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system is used to process all feature vectors. The output for each feature vector is a value that indicates the extent to which a feature vector belongs to the mineralized class or the barren class. These values are used to generate a prospectivity map. The procedure is demonstrated by an application to regional-scale base metal prospectivity mapping in a study area located in the Aravalli metallogenic province (western India). A comparison of the hybrid neuro-fuzzy approach with pure knowledge-driven fuzzy and pure data-driven neural network approaches indicates that the former offers a superior method for integrating large earth-science datasets for predictive spatial mathematical modelling.

The Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mora, P.; Muhlhaus, H.; Lister, G.; Dyskin, A.; Place, D.; Appelbe, B.; Nimmervoll, N.; Abramson, D.

2001-12-01

Numerical simulation of the physics and dynamics of the entire earth system offers an outstanding opportunity for advancing earth system science and technology but represents a major challenge due to the range of scales and physical processes involved, as well as the magnitude of the software engineering effort required. However, new simulation and computer technologies are bringing this objective within reach. Under a special competitive national funding scheme to establish new Major National Research Facilities (MNRF), the Australian government together with a consortium of Universities and research institutions have funded construction of the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator (ACcESS). The Simulator or computational virtual earth will provide the research infrastructure to the Australian earth systems science community required for simulations of dynamical earth processes at scales ranging from microscopic to global. It will consist of thematic supercomputer infrastructure and an earth systems simulation software system. The Simulator models and software will be constructed over a five year period by a multi-disciplinary team of computational scientists, mathematicians, earth scientists, civil engineers and software engineers. The construction team will integrate numerical simulation models (3D discrete elements/lattice solid model, particle-in-cell large deformation finite-element method, stress reconstruction models, multi-scale continuum models etc) with geophysical, geological and tectonic models, through advanced software engineering and visualization technologies. When fully constructed, the Simulator aims to provide the software and hardware infrastructure needed to model solid earth phenomena including global scale dynamics and mineralisation processes, crustal scale processes including plate tectonics, mountain building, interacting fault system dynamics, and micro-scale processes that control the geological, physical and dynamic behaviour of earth systems. ACcESS represents a part of Australia's contribution to the APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES) international initiative. Together with other national earth systems science initiatives including the Japanese Earth Simulator and US General Earthquake Model projects, ACcESS aims to provide a driver for scientific advancement and technological breakthroughs including: quantum leaps in understanding of earth evolution at global, crustal, regional and microscopic scales; new knowledge of the physics of crustal fault systems required to underpin the grand challenge of earthquake prediction; new understanding and predictive capabilities of geological processes such as tectonics and mineralisation.

Implementation of a Food-Based Science Curriculum Improves Fourth-Grade Educators' Self-efficacy for Teaching Nutrition

PubMed Central

Carraway-Stage, Virginia; Roseno, Ashley; Hodges, Caroline D.; Hovland, Jana; Diaz, Sebastian; Duffrin, Melani W.

2016-01-01

Background Teacher self-efficacy can positively impact student dietary behaviors; however, limited curricular resources and professional development can serve as barriers to the provision of nutrition education in the classroom. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of a food-based, integrative science curriculum on 4th grade teachers’ self-efficacy toward teaching nutrition. Methods Researchers used a quasi-experimental design to implement the FoodMASTER Intermediate (FMI) curriculum in 19 4th-grade classrooms across Ohio and North Carolina. The Nutrition Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale was used to assess baseline and post-test teacher self-efficacy using a 4-point Likert-scale (1=not confident at all; 4=very confident). ANCOVA and Wilcoxon-Signed Rank Test were used for statistical analysis. Results Teachers in the intervention group displayed significantly higher post-efficacy expectation scores (mean=3.52; sd=0.41) than comparison group teachers (mean=2.86; sd=0.55). Overall, the intervention group showed significant improvement in self-efficacy on 15 of the 18 items. Discussion The results suggest providing training and integrative resources to teachers can significantly improve self-efficacy toward teaching nutrition. Future research should focus on determining the amount of training needed to improve the quality of teacher-delivered nutrition education. Translation to Health Education Practice Health educators can use the findings to inform the development of teacher trainings in nutrition and health. PMID:28392881

Database Resources of the BIG Data Center in 2018

PubMed Central

Xu, Xingjian; Hao, Lili; Zhu, Junwei; Tang, Bixia; Zhou, Qing; Song, Fuhai; Chen, Tingting; Zhang, Sisi; Dong, Lili; Lan, Li; Wang, Yanqing; Sang, Jian; Hao, Lili; Liang, Fang; Cao, Jiabao; Liu, Fang; Liu, Lin; Wang, Fan; Ma, Yingke; Xu, Xingjian; Zhang, Lijuan; Chen, Meili; Tian, Dongmei; Li, Cuiping; Dong, Lili; Du, Zhenglin; Yuan, Na; Zeng, Jingyao; Zhang, Zhewen; Wang, Jinyue; Shi, Shuo; Zhang, Yadong; Pan, Mengyu; Tang, Bixia; Zou, Dong; Song, Shuhui; Sang, Jian; Xia, Lin; Wang, Zhennan; Li, Man; Cao, Jiabao; Niu, Guangyi; Zhang, Yang; Sheng, Xin; Lu, Mingming; Wang, Qi; Xiao, Jingfa; Zou, Dong; Wang, Fan; Hao, Lili; Liang, Fang; Li, Mengwei; Sun, Shixiang; Zou, Dong; Li, Rujiao; Yu, Chunlei; Wang, Guangyu; Sang, Jian; Liu, Lin; Li, Mengwei; Li, Man; Niu, Guangyi; Cao, Jiabao; Sun, Shixiang; Xia, Lin; Yin, Hongyan; Zou, Dong; Xu, Xingjian; Ma, Lina; Chen, Huanxin; Sun, Yubin; Yu, Lei; Zhai, Shuang; Sun, Mingyuan; Zhang, Zhang; Zhao, Wenming; Xiao, Jingfa; Bao, Yiming; Song, Shuhui; Hao, Lili; Li, Rujiao; Ma, Lina; Sang, Jian; Wang, Yanqing; Tang, Bixia; Zou, Dong; Wang, Fan

2018-01-01

Abstract The BIG Data Center at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences provides freely open access to a suite of database resources in support of worldwide research activities in both academia and industry. With the vast amounts of omics data generated at ever-greater scales and rates, the BIG Data Center is continually expanding, updating and enriching its core database resources through big-data integration and value-added curation, including BioCode (a repository archiving bioinformatics tool codes), BioProject (a biological project library), BioSample (a biological sample library), Genome Sequence Archive (GSA, a data repository for archiving raw sequence reads), Genome Warehouse (GWH, a centralized resource housing genome-scale data), Genome Variation Map (GVM, a public repository of genome variations), Gene Expression Nebulas (GEN, a database of gene expression profiles based on RNA-Seq data), Methylation Bank (MethBank, an integrated databank of DNA methylomes), and Science Wikis (a series of biological knowledge wikis for community annotations). In addition, three featured web services are provided, viz., BIG Search (search as a service; a scalable inter-domain text search engine), BIG SSO (single sign-on as a service; a user access control system to gain access to multiple independent systems with a single ID and password) and Gsub (submission as a service; a unified submission service for all relevant resources). All of these resources are publicly accessible through the home page of the BIG Data Center at http://bigd.big.ac.cn. PMID:29036542

Integrating adaptive management and ecosystem services concepts to improve natural resource management: Challenges and opportunities

USGS Publications Warehouse

Epanchin-Niell, Rebecca S.; Boyd, James W.; Macauley, Molly K.; Scarlett, Lynn; Shapiro, Carl D.; Williams, Byron K.

2018-05-07

Executive Summary—OverviewNatural resource managers must make decisions that affect broad-scale ecosystem processes involving large spatial areas, complex biophysical interactions, numerous competing stakeholder interests, and highly uncertain outcomes. Natural and social science information and analyses are widely recognized as important for informing effective management. Chief among the systematic approaches for improving the integration of science into natural resource management are two emergent science concepts, adaptive management and ecosystem services. Adaptive management (also referred to as “adaptive decision making”) is a deliberate process of learning by doing that focuses on reducing uncertainties about management outcomes and system responses to improve management over time. Ecosystem services is a conceptual framework that refers to the attributes and outputs of ecosystems (and their components and functions) that have value for humans.This report explores how ecosystem services can be moved from concept into practice through connection to a decision framework—adaptive management—that accounts for inherent uncertainties. Simultaneously, the report examines the value of incorporating ecosystem services framing and concepts into adaptive management efforts.Adaptive management and ecosystem services analyses have not typically been used jointly in decision making. However, as frameworks, they have a natural—but to date underexplored—affinity. Both are policy and decision oriented in that they attempt to represent the consequences of resource management choices on outcomes of interest to stakeholders. Both adaptive management and ecosystem services analysis take an empirical approach to the analysis of ecological systems. This systems orientation is a byproduct of the fact that natural resource actions affect ecosystems—and corresponding societal outcomes—often across large geographic scales. Moreover, because both frameworks focus on resource systems, both must confront the analytical challenges of systems modeling—in terms of complexity, dynamics, and uncertainty.Given this affinity, the integration of ecosystem services analysis and adaptive management poses few conceptual hurdles. In this report, we synthesize discussions from two workshops that considered ways in which adaptive management approaches and ecosystem service concepts may be complementary, such that integrating them into a common framework may lead to improved natural resource management outcomes. Although the literature on adaptive management and ecosystem services is vast and growing, the report focuses specifically on the integration of these two concepts rather than aiming to provide new definitions or an indepth review or primer of the concepts individually.Key issues considered include the bidirectional links between adaptive decision making and ecosystem services, as well as the potential benefits and inevitable challenges arising in the development and use of an integrated framework. Specifically, the workshops addressed the following questions:How can application of ecosystem service analysis within an adaptive decision process improve the outcomes of management and advance understanding of ecosystem service identification, production, and valuation?How can these concepts be integrated in concept and practice?What are the constraints and challenges to integrating adaptive management and ecosystem services?And, should the integration of these concepts be moved forward to wider application—and if so, how?

The Global Geometry of River Drainage Basins and the Signature of Tectonic and Autogenic Processes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Giachetta, E.; Willett, S.

2015-12-01

The plan-form structure of the world's river basins contains extensive information regarding tectonic, paleo-geographic and paleo-climate conditions, but interpretation of this structure is complicated by the need to disentangle these processes from the autogenic behavior of fluvial processes. One method of interpreting this structure is by utilizing the well-established scaling between drainage area and channel slope. Integration of this scaling relationship predicts a relationship between channel length and downstream integrated drainage area, referred to in recent studies as χ (Willett et al., 2014). In this paper, we apply this methodology at a continental scale by calculating χ for the world's river networks using hydrological information from the HydroSHED (Hydrological data and maps based on SHuttleElevation Derivatives at multiple Scales) suite of geo-referenced data sets (drainage directions and flow accumulations). River pixels were identified using a minimum drainage area of 5 km2. A constant value of m/n of 0.45 was assumed. We applied a new method to correct χ within closed basins where base level is different from sea level. Mapping of χ illustrates the geometric stability of a river network, thus highlighting where tectonic or climatic forcing has perturbed the shape and geometry. Each continent shows characteristic features. Continental rift margins on all continents show clear asymmetric escarpments indicating inland migration. Active orogenic belts break up older river basins, but are difficult to interpret because of spatially variable uplift rates. Regions of recent tilting are evident even in cratonic areas by lateral reorganizations of basins. Past and pending river captures are identified on all continents. Very few regions on Earth appear to be in near-equilibrium, though some are identified; for example the Urals appears to provide a stable continental divide for Eurasia. Our analysis of maps of χ at the global scale quantifies a dynamic view of Earth's river networks and helps to identify past and ongoing evolution of Earth's landscapes. References Willett, S.D., McCoy, S.W., Perron, J.T., Goren, L., Chen C.Y. (2014): Dynamic reorganization of river basins, Science 343, 1248765. DOI: 10.1126/science.1248765.