Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A First-Timer's Perspective On The Sla 2010 Annual Conference, Sara Samuel

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Division Officers And Boards

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Anonytl Specification, Dan Peebles, Cory Cornelius, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Minho Shin, Nikos Triandopoulos

Computer Science Technical Reports

We provide a specification of AnonyTL, a domain-specific language that describes sensing tasks for mobile devices in a manner that facilitates automated reasoning about privacy.

The Fibonacci Sequence, Arik Avagyan

A with Honors Projects

A review was made of the Fibonacci sequence, its characteristics and applications.

An Integrated Collection Of Tools For Continuously Improving The Processes By Which Health Care Is Delivered: A Tool Report, Lj Osterweil, La Clarke, Gs Avrunin

Leon Osterweil

With the availability of powerful computational and commu- nication systems, scientists now readily access large, complicated derived datasets and build on those results to produce, through further processing, yet other derived datasets of interest. The scientific processes used to create such datasets must be clearly documented so that scientists can evaluate their soundness, reproduce the results, and build upon them in responsible and appropriate ways. Here, we present the concept of an analytic web, which defines the scientific processes employed and details the exact appli- cation of those processes in creating derived datasets. The work described here is similar to …

High-Performance Semi-Supervised Learning Using Discriminatively Constrained Generative Models, Gregory Druck, Andrew Mccallum

Andrew McCallum

We develop a semi-supervised learning algorithm that encourages generative models to discover latent structure that is relevant to a prediction task. The method constrains the posterior distribution of latent variables under a generative model to satisfy a rich set of feature expectation constraints from labeled data. We focus on the application of this method to sequence labeling and estimate parameters with a modified EM algorithm. The E-step involves estimating the parameters of a log-linear model with an HMM as the base distribution. This HMM-CRF can be used for test time prediction. The approach is related to other semi-supervised methods, but …

Collective Cross-Document Relation Extraction Without Labelled Data, Limin Yao, Sebastian Riedel, Andrew Mccallum

Andrew McCallum

We present a novel approach to relation extraction that integrates information across documents, performs global inference and requires no labelled text. In particular, we tackle relation extraction and entity identification jointly. We use distant supervision to train a factor graph model for relation extraction based on an existing knowledge base (Freebase, derived in parts from Wikipedia). For inference we run an efficient Gibbs sampler that leads to linear time joint inference. We evaluate our approach both for an in-domain (Wikipedia) and a more realistic out-of-domain (New York Times Corpus) setting. For the in-domain setting, our joint model leads to 4% …

Thermohaline Circulation, Rob Snyder

IPY STEM Polar Connections

Surface currents, such as the Gulf Stream, are pushed by the wind. Deep ocean currents, called the “Thermohaline Circulation”, are the result of changes in the density of water. In this activity you can investigate how differences in the temperature and salinity of water can produce deep ocean currents

Globe Walk, Rob Snyder

IPY STEM Polar Connections

A “Globe Walk” can be used as a demonstration or classroom activity to guide students toward a better understanding of the affects that Earth’s axial tilt, rotation on Earth’s axis, and orbital motion have on the angles of incidence of sunlight, the lengths of daytimes, and solar insolation.

Polar Literature, Holly Hargraves

IPY STEM Polar Connections

No abstract provided.

Play Doh Coring Sampler Teacher Guide, Beth Caissie

IPY STEM Polar Connections

Sediment cores are one of the most valuable types of samples for researchers who would like to learn about past climate or ecological changes. Cores can be retrieved from lakes, marshes, swamps, fields, and the ocean. The layers often reveal striking changes in color (see photos) reflecting changing sediment composition (i.e. more clay deposition or more microfossil s). This easy activity illustrates the basic geologic principle that horizontal layers of sediment become older the deeper you go below the Earth’s surface (Law of Superposition). Each layer contains sediment, fossils and organic matter etc. that can inform us about past changes …

Seasonal Changes In Sea Ice, Rob Snyder

IPY STEM Polar Connections

No abstract provided.

Brine Rejection Activity, Beth Caissie, Rob Snyder

IPY STEM Polar Connections

As salt water freezes, the salt is pushed out of solution through channels in the ice. This process is called brine rejection or brine exclusion. These channels are often used as microhabitats by ice algae, zooplankton, and even tiny fish. You can easily demonstrate what these channels look like.

Build A Remote Sensing Satellite, Rob Snyder

IPY STEM Polar Connections

•Build a model of a remote sensing satellite. •Use your model of a satellite to transform reflected visible of different frequencies into electrical signals with different voltages. •Use different colors of paper to calibrate the model. •Create a model of a landscape using three different colors of paper. •Create a “false color” image of the model of a landscape (if time permits).

Albedo Effects In Polar Regions, Morton Sternheim

IPY STEM Polar Connections

•Why are Polar Regions more affected by global warming than other parts of the globe? •One reason (there are others) is that as sea ice melts and more open water appears, more energy is absorbed, and warming accelerates. •This is a form of positive feedback and it makes the polar climate change faster than the climate in temperate areas. •Increasing vegetation on land also has a similar positive feedback effect.

Global Warming And Arctic Climate, Ray Bradley

IPY STEM Polar Connections

No abstract provided.

Polar Remote Sensing, Beth Caissie

IPY STEM Polar Connections

•Satellite sensors specialize in collecting data about specific wavelengths The Geostationary Operational Environment Satellites (GOES) operated by NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Commerce provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions. Orbiting the Earth’s equatorial plane at a speed exactly matching the planet’s rotation, satellites in the GOES network seem to hover over fixed spots. They monitor atmospheric conditions that lead to hurricanes, flash floods, tornadoes, and hail storms.

Caribou, Whales, Andenvironmental Variability, Craig Nicolson

IPY STEM Polar Connections

How many caribou are there? Increasing or decreasing? Carrying capacity? How do we measure habitat quality?? Satellite imagery. Whale migration patterns. Activities on caribou and whales. Also, see http://www.nfb.ca/film/being_caribou/ a video entitled Being Caribou..

Modeling Relations And Their Mentions Without Labeled Text, Sebastian Riedel, Limin Yao, Andrew Mccallum

Andrew McCallum

Several recent works on relation extraction have been applying the distant supervision paradigm: instead of relying on annotated text to learn how to predict relations, they employ existing knowledge bases (KBs) as source of supervision. Crucially, these approaches are trained based on the assumption that each sentence which mentions the two related entities is an expression of the given relation. Here we argue that this leads to noisy patterns that hurt precision, in particular if the knowledge base is not directly related to the text we are working with. We present a novel approach to distant supervision that can alleviate …

Carbon Travels Game, Marie Silver

IPY STEM Polar Connections

Carbon cycle game.

Proportions for this activity are based LOOSELY on data from the Exploring the Environment website http://davem2.cotf.edu/ete/modules/carbon/effig11_full.html

They have a brief overview of the carbon cycle at http://davem2.cotf.edu/ete/modules/carbon/efcarbon.html