No Arabic abstract
In the field of astronomy, Maunakea is known as a prestigious site for observing and science. In Native Hawaiian culture, Maunakea is revered as the connection between past, present, and future generations and their ancestral lands of Hawaii. We have reached a juncture at which it is necessary to allow and enable Native Hawaiians to pursue careers in astronomy, especially on Maunakea. This paper serves to tell the accounts of four Kanaka astronomers and raise awareness of the barriers they have faced while pursuing astronomy careers. The authors identify issues that the community faces due to the disconnect between astronomy and Hawaii communities and propose resolutions to lead the way forward.
We present the second edition of a Best Practices Guide for academic departments and other institutions striving to create more inclusive environments for physicists and astronomers in the LGBT+ community. Our recommendations incorporate new research since the original, 2014 edition, and are designed for anyone who wishes to become aware of -- and help mitigate -- the extra burdens that face members of the LGBT+ community in the physical sciences.
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here we develop an original framework for measuring how a publications citation rate $Delta c$ depends on the reputation of its central author $i$, in addition to its net citation count $c$. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly-cited scientists, using the total citations $C_{i}$ of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover $c_{times}$ which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with $c < c_{times}$, the authors reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in $C_{i}$. However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that for $cgeq c_{times}$ the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science.
The Physics GRE is currently a required element of the graduate admissions process in nearly all U.S. astronomy programs; however, its predictive power and utility as a means of selecting successful applicants has never been examined. We circulated a short questionnaire to 271 people who have held U.S. prize postdoctoral fellowships in astrophysics between 2010-2015, asking them to report their Physics GRE scores (this should not in any way be interpreted as a belief that a prize fellowship is the best or only metric of success in astronomy). The response rate was 64%, and the responding sample is unbiased with respect to the overall gender distribution of prize fellows. The responses reveal that the Physics GRE scores of prize fellows do not adhere to any minimum percentile score and show no statistically significant correlation with the number of first author papers published. As an example, a Physics GRE percentile cutoff of 60% would have eliminated 44% of 2010-2015 U.S. prize postdoctoral fellows, including 60% of the female fellows. From these data, we find no evidence that the Physics GRE can be used as an effective predictor of success either in or beyond graduate school.
From 2001 to 2007, COSMOS provided a teaching and outreach venue for the Center for Adaptive Optics Professional Development Program (CfAO PDP). COSMOS is a four-week residential mathematics and science summer program for high-school students organized by the University of California on four of its campuses. Two topical science courses comprised each COSMOS cluster. An astronomy course has always formed a basis for the CfAO PDP-affiliated cluster. The course included a variety of pedagogical techniques to address a diversity of learners and goals. We outline the astronomy course---lectures, activities, etc.---and provide the rationale for what was taught, how it was aught, and when it was taught.
Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision-making among those who interact. The sanitary situation and the transition to remote teaching has added new challenges for collaboration given that students interactions are mediated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this study we explore the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships on physics and mathematics, from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile. We used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map students friendships relations, academic prestige, and collaboration on both courses. Later we combined the collaboration network with friendship and academic prestige on the course, to separate strong from weak friendship working ties, and those among students who enjoy or not academic prestige. Multiple linear regression models showed, on average, positive effects of collaboration on grades. Yet, when isolating the effects of the types of collaboration, the positive effects are observed only between those who display more strong friendship ties. Also, we found differences on the social networks and their effects over grades between both courses, presumably due to their pedagogical nature. With these results we contribute to the literature of collaboration and its effectiveness based on the nature of students relationships, and advocate for the importance of instructional design in fostering appropriate motivations and guidelines for constructive collaboration in the classroom.