bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Being a beneficent observer
Authors: Bennett Peggy D.
Published: November 2020

Beneficent observers reframe others’ behaviors to become more open to a range of possible meanings. Instead of assuming rudeness, we consider that the other person has a har­ried schedule. Instead of assuming coldness, we consider that the other person is painfully shy. Instead of assuming insult, we consider that the other person has no idea this is a sensitive topic for us. Instead of assuming disrespect, we consider that the other person knows little about our classroom expertise and achieve­ments. We choose to think “What else could it be?” rather than assuming a deliberate affront. When we are beneficent in the ways we see others, we change how we feel about and speak to them and the ways we speak to others about them: 1. We contribute to our own sense of calm and stability, our own good health. 2. We feel less like an adversary and more like a strong, compas­sionate, generous- of- spirit member of the school community. 3. We let them be them without taking on the negative views we have of them or that they have of us. 4. We essentially demagnetize ourselves. We are no longer pulled into others’ drama. We leave their anger, jealousy, and rude behaviors with them. 5. We realize that our own thresholds for tolerance and pre­ferred behaviors may be causing our suffering more than any intentional action by the “offending” person. 6. We are willing to give the other a moment of grace and the benefit of the doubt to see behavior as simply that: behavior 7. We devote ourselves to helping rather than hindering goodwill. 8. We ask ourselves: “What could I say, do, and think that mod­els compassion?” 9. We sometimes offer a silent benediction to those who rankle us: “May you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering.” These habits of mind happen neither quickly nor easily, but they are worth the effort, inch by inch, step by step, healthy habit by healthy habit.
Interpreting behavior
Authors: Bennett Peggy D.
Published: November 2020

How we interpret behaviors determines the ways we respond to them. For the benefit of ourselves, our students, and our co- workers, it can be helpful to rethink the ways we see common behaviors. A three- phase process can structure our interpretations. 1. Observe. Pause to broaden your view. Is the student inten­tionally breaking the rules, misbehaving, harming? Or is the student oblivious, distracted? What do you see? 2. Interpret. Ask, “What else could it be?” Pause to consider innocent motives. The shift from home to school behaviors can be drastic and difficult for some. What do you think? 3. Respond. Feel inner calm as you firmly address the student and the behavior. Response can be a simply stated command without criticism, judgment, or punishment. Escalating conse­quences occur as necessary. How do you act? Sometimes, especially in tough situations, we can become pouncers who “run a tight ship” and pride ourselves on how fast we exert control. So what differences might behavior reinterpretation make? Loud talking may be forgetting to speak quietly. Bumping into another may be the usual way friends play. Profanity or lewd gestures may be normal behaviors at home. Outbursts of shov­ing, laughing, joking, and insulting may reflect how students live during the many hours they are not in school. Neutral directives, with varying degrees of firmness, can deliver the desired expectation without accusation or excessive scolding. • “The noise level is way too high right now. Fix it.” • “Toby, you are interrupting Jamey. Listen.” • “If your voice is too loud, I’m going to assume you are not listening.” • “Physical roughness doesn’t belong in this school.” • “Language like that is not acceptable here.” When we momentarily reserve judgment about students’ behav­iors, we may be more likely to acknowledge that, outside our classrooms and schools, the behaviors we find offensive may be acceptable and preferable. Once we interpret the possible motives of students’ behaviors, we are direct about what needs to change without demeaning the student or the behavior.
On second thought
Authors: Bennett Peggy D.
Published: November 2020

In 1960s America, a popular motto was “If it feels good, do it.” The message was intended to lift societal constraints on beliefs and behaviors. But for some, the motto’s sentiment spiked widespread encouragement to reject inhibitions, to be free of restraint. “Do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want” was the message. “Inhibition” became a dirty word. Yet inhibitions are critically important to maturity and societal conventions. The ability to inhibit appropriately and delay grati­fication (even if momentarily) signals development. The phrase “on second thought” offers a strategy for taking a moment to think about our thinking, to metacognate about our decisions: “What else could it be?” “What else could I choose?” “What are my options?” We take a moment to allow our better selves to make better decisions: • Stifling laughter, delaying an opinion, suspending the impulse to offer assistance • Modifying a reply, choosing a kinder adjective, opting for silence • Resisting a second helping, choosing a healthy alternative, deciding to pass on a risky behavior Not the same as second- guessing, second thoughts prepare us to be deliberate rather than impulsive, reflective rather than pejorative, strategic rather than reactionary. Some teachers may innately use second thoughts in school relationships and teaching. But, others of us may not have con­sidered this notion as a strategy. With the possibility of allowing us to reframe, revise, and revive our interactions with others, why not experiment with second thoughts? On second thought, why not declare a “Second Thoughts Day?”
Moments of grace
Authors: Bennett Peggy D.
Published: November 2020

“What a nasty thing to say!” But was it? “Her tantrums are so immature!” But are they? “He is just lazy and doesn’t care.” But is he? A momentary pause between our observation and our con­clusion about someone can make a world of difference. That moment of grace, in some ways, bestows a peace offering on someone who may or may not deserve it. It offers vitality and goodwill to the encounter. During that momentary internal pause, we have the opportu­nity to broaden our interpretation, to look beyond our immedi­ate response, to offer the benefit of the doubt. The “nasty thing to say” may be a misunderstood remark. Those “immature tan­trums” may be the result of severe emotional pain. That “lazi­ness” may be depression or disillusionment. Few of us would argue with someone giving us the benefit of the doubt. Most often we would welcome that generosity. Yet how do we offer a moment of grace without being gullible? When our intent is to suspend judgment momentarily, we are neither believing nor disbelieving. We simply postpone our con­clusions about another’s meaning and intention because we do not know the full story, and we know that we don’t know. We are comfortable sitting with our gesture of grace. Even though we may be taking this high road for the other, the benefits of grace ripple to us as well. Silent moments of grace serve both the giver and the receiver. Opportunities for grace are everywhere. A moment of grace is the interval of time we take to reframe somebody’s behavior so that we can react with curiosity, compassion, or openness rather than judgment, annoyance, or defensiveness. Giving someone the benefit of doubt allows us to delay our reaction to the comment or action with the intent of looking beyond our immediate response.
Always do your best
Authors: Bennett Peggy D.
Published: November 2020

“Always do your best” is the agreement that Ruiz believes will most help the other three agreements. Being our best is about intention. When we intend to do our best, we are relieved from always thinking we should be more and do more. Are there times when we do less than our best? More than our best? Do we know what our best is? Do we even pay attention to such things? Doing less than our best keeps us from feeling satisfied, secure, and fulfilled. We are less vigorous, less vivacious. There can be a domino effect leading from feeling disappointed to feeling hopeless to “I give up. I’m just not good at this.” Some of us may specialize in less than our best. We wing it or make do instead of planning substantial lessons and creating thorough reports. We avoid helping even when we are available. We gossip about students or co- workers. We silently compete with others on the staff. All of us can likely recognize ourselves in each of these moments. It is normal to be “less than our best” at times. Some of us may specialize in doing more than our best. We make commitments that we cannot keep, because we are determined to keep ourselves active. We refuse to take a break, even though we would benefit from fresh air and a change of pace. We know our reputation relies on student achievements, so we invest too heavily in making students appear successful. By now, it may be obvious that our “best” changes. Various factors influence what our best can be on any given day, in any given setting. Sometimes doing “ better” is a reasonable and worthy tar­get: it’s good enough. Adopting the intent to do our best means we can know and accept that whatever our best is in this moment, it’s good enough for now. We can say: “That’s as good as I can do right now.” “This will do for today.”
Innovation and the Development of Recipes and Formulations
Authors: Kelly Alan
Published: November 2020

Many studies have reported astonishing statistics about the rate of introduction of new food products globally, with new products appearing probably at least every hour somewhere around the world, if not more frequently. If you could go into a food store anywhere in the world and somehow take a snapshot of the range of products on the shelf, then revisit it five years later and do a comparison of what you find, there would be a huge surprise in terms of the turnover. Many products will have disappeared, and many new ones will have appeared. For those that remain across this time span, there is a very high likelihood that they have changed in less visible ways, in terms of modifications to their formulation, package, or the process by which they are made. Even fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish are likely to have benefited from scientific advances in their production, quality, or transportation in an optimal state of quality and safety. Why is there such a high rate of change? There are two main drivers, one external to those who produce the food and that relates to the highly fluid and some­times unpredictable expectations and demand of consumers, and one more specific to the food producer that relates to new opportunities in technology, formulation, or scientific understanding. For any new product to be successful on the market requires two successful changes in behavior of consumers. The first is that, instead or as well as what they normally purchase, they need to buy to try a new product, and drop it into their basket or cart as a result of a planned or spontaneous decision to do so. To achieve this is primarily the responsibility of experts in marketing, who can divine what consumers want, develop a strategy accordingly, and then deploy the appropriate tools to bring the product to the attention of those who are most likely to buy the product, such as through promotions, advertisements, and probably, in today’s world, social media campaigns.
Abstractions All The Way
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

Creative people are driven by certain inner forces, inner needs that are part cognitive, part affective. One such force is intellectual curiosity: the need to know or understand. Another compelling drive is dissatisfaction with the status quo. We saw this as the force that impelled Nicklaus Wirth into creating Pascal (Chapter 1, Section 1.7). But few in the emerging computer science community of the first age of computer science epitomized this characteristic more fiercely than Edsger W. Dijkstra. In his case his discontent was with the direction programming had taken in the 1960s. And the strength of his dissat­isfaction was never more evident than in a letter to the editor of the Communications of the ACM in 1968. The practice of communicating new scientific results by their discoverers in the form of compact letters to the editors of scientific journals was, of course, well established in the natural sciences. The British journal Nature (London) had established this tradition right from its inaugural issue in 1869. But in an upstart discipline, as computer science still was, this practice as a means of scientific communication was quite un­usual. (In one of his celebrated handwritten “EWD notes,” Dijkstra, reflecting retrospectively, explained that his short paper was published as a letter to bypass the usual publication pipeline and that the editor who made this decision was Nicklaus Wirth.) Dijkstra had long been concerned with the question of program quality and how one may acquire confidence in the reliability or correctness of a program. But, as the title of the letter— “Goto Statement Considered Harmful”— tells us, the object of his discontent lay in the use of the goto statement— the unconditional branch available in one notation or another in most programming languages, including Algol-like ones. Dijkstra claimed that the quality of the programmers decreased as a function of the frequency of the goto statements in their programs. And so he proposed that the goto should be banished from all high- level programming languages.
Very Formal Affairs
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

If social and behavioral scientists have harbored “physics envy” as some have wryly claimed—envy of its explanatory and predictive success— then computer scientists may be said to have suffered from “mathematics envy.” Interestingly, this envy was less a characteristic of the pioneers of digital computing of the 1940s and 1950s, the people who shed first light on the design of digital electronic computers, the first programming languages, the first operating systems, the first language translators, and so on—though most of them were trained as mathematicians. They were too busy learning the heuristic principles of computational artifacts. Rather, it was in the 1960s when we first find signs of a kind of mathematics envy, at least in some segments of the embryonic computer science community. It was as if, having discovered (or invented) the heuristic principles of practical computational artifacts, some felt the need to understand the underlying “science” of these artifacts—by which they meant its underlying mathematics and logic. Mathematics envy could be assuaged only by thinking mathematically about computational artifacts. Computer science would then be raised to the intellectual stature of, say, physics or indeed of mathematics itself if computer scientists could transform their discipline into a mathematical science. One cannot blame computer scientists who thought this way. The fact is, there is something about mathematics that situates it in a world of its own. “Mathematics is a unique aspect of human thought,” wrote hyperprolific science (fact and fiction) writer Isaac Asimov. And Asimov was by no means the first or only person to think so. But wherein lies the uniqueness of mathematical thinking? Perhaps the answer is that for many people, mathematics offers the following promises:The unearthliness of mathematical objects. The perfectness and exactness of mathematical concepts. An inexorable rigor of mathematical reasoning. The certainty of mathematical knowledge. The self-sufficiency of the mathematical universe. These promises are clearly enviable if they can be kept; usually, they are kept.
Welcoming Practices
Authors: Astor Ron Avi , Jacobson Linda , Wrabel Stephanie L. , Benbenishty Rami , Pineda Diana
Published: November 2020

Students change schools for a variety of reasons, and some students change more often than others -- a reality that can leave them feeling emotionally disconnected and often academically at risk. Welcoming Practices summarizes the research on school transition and makes a case for why schools need to do a better job of welcoming new children and families and following up with them over time. Arriving at a moment in history in which schools are increasing attention on students' social and emotional development, this book captures the innovative practices that some institutions are using to connect with new students and provides practical strategies that all schools can use to make both students and parents feel a part of the school and community. The book discusses how to use technology to improve families' experiences in their new schools, provides strategies appropriate at the school and district levels, and gives schools suggestions for practices that are best suited for younger students as well as for those at middle and high school levels.
Connecting in Person
Authors: Astor Ron Avi , Jacobson Linda , Wrabel Stephanie L. , Benbenishty Rami , Pineda Diana
Published: November 2020

Even if a school or district has done a good job providing thorough information on its website or has made efforts to connect online with incoming families, that work might be in vain if the school doesn’t feel inviting once the students and parents arrive. As parents have shared, that first reception that families receive when they walk into a school or district office can determine whether they view the new school community as welcoming or unwelcoming. Schools—as well as individual teachers—should have procedures in place for when someone new walks in the door. For example, previous work on schools serving military children showed that many Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools ask parents to wait a day after enrollment before their child starts class. This gives the teacher and the students in a class a chance to prepare for the new student. They get a desk, books, and other materials ready—thus allowing the new student to feel less as if he or she is a disruption. Clearly, DoDEA schools are accustomed to welcoming new students all the time, but it’s a practice that could be implemented in any school. This chapter focuses on how to make early face-to-face interactions with new students and parents a positive experience. Every new family in a school needs that person who can say, “If I don’t know the answer, I will find out who does.” The approaches described here not only create an initial welcoming atmosphere, but also provide families with links should they need more information. Many school districts have a central location where families can receive information on the district and learn about the enrollment process, school choice options, community resources, and additional services. Welcome centers tend to be more common in a school district that handles registration at the central office level, instead of in each local school, and especially if the district serves an immigrant population. In addition to providing information on registration, these centers often provide information on other community agencies and services that families might need, such as housing, food assistance, child care, and after-school programs.
Photos, Videos, and Other Technology
Authors: Astor Ron , Benbenishty Rami
Published: November 2020

On their own, photos and videos are not a reliable source of information about what is taking place in a school. It’s easy to react emotionally or with outrage to a video of a fight, a child being picked on, or some other display of abuse or wrongdoing. But everyone knows from highly publicized incidents posted on YouTube, Twitter, or other social media sites that photos and videos can be taken out of context. They tell a story, but they don’t tell the whole story. Even so, they can be used by administrators to discern whether the action shown in the photo or video is an isolated incident or could be a symptom of a larger problem. If an alarming photo or video taken at a school is receiving attention from the media, it’s better to talk about it with the school community as soon as possible than to pretend it didn’t happen. Situations like these create an opportunity to examine and share other sources of data about school safety, violence, and victimization. Too often, one incident can cause the public to draw conclusions about a school that are not accurate. That’s why a monitoring system is necessary— to put such an incident in context. Administrators who can refer to other sources of data regarding violence, drug use, or weapons can respond with more confidence when faced with criticism over one incident. As part of a monitoring system, photos, videos and other technology can be used for positive purposes. They allow students who might skip questions on a survey or don’t want to speak up during a focus group to express themselves in a different way. There are many examples of projects in which students are given cameras and microphones and encouraged to express themselves and present their experiences in school through this media. In addition to the individual students benefitting from such experiences, school leaders, staff members, and parents get the opportunity to see the school from the students’ perspectives.
Conclusion: Implications for the Future
Authors: Astor Ron , Benbenishty Rami
Published: November 2020

Currently, as this book is being written, there is a national trend toward integrating social- emotional learning (SEL) and positive school climates into the academic mission of the school. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA); the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development; the National Center on School Climate; the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning; and other organizations have put forth strong policy, research, and practice agendas to include these important variables as a focus of K- 12 schooling in the United States and worldwide. The authors of this guide aim to extend this effort to more school systems around the world, and the examples included here support this national and international effort. The ideas and practices presented in this guide, however, go beyond a specific point in history. The assumptions and values underlying supportive school monitoring are central to the educational mission of schools. Supportive monitoring is democratic and empowering for all school constituencies. Listening to the voices of students, parents, and staff, sharing what has been heard, and acting upon it reflect a democratic process. Supportive school monitoring can make this democratic process an ordinary magic, performed every day in schools as part of ongoing practice. The focus on each individual school and providing opportunities to tailor- fit the supportive monitoring system— or at least significant parts of this system— to each school’s needs is a remedy against “one- size- fits- all” solutions. It helps the school discover and maintain its uniqueness without rejecting accountability altogether. By making supportive monitoring an integral part of school life, accountability systems are not an oppressive outside intervention in the school. Instead, they are a path toward responsible and responsive education that is based on values and data- driven at the same time. Educators teach students about the importance of data in making key decisions. They encourage students to look for the most accurate data and take advantage of it. Sadly, however, many school administrators and teachers dread data, mainly because it’s been used to punish schools and teachers.
Conclusion: The Everything Device
Authors: Agrawal Ravi
Published: November 2020

The world changed on January 9, 2007. It was the Macworld trade show in San Francisco, an annual showcase for Apple products, and founder Steve Jobs was about to introduce a new gadget. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” announced Jobs. The Macworld audience had a Pavlovian expectation for something game-changing that day. In 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh, which went on to transform computing and make the mouse a mainstream accessory. Then in 2001, the iPod arrived. “It didn’t just change the way we all listened to music. It changed the entire music industry,” Jobs reminded his audience. (This was no exaggeration. When Apple began offering individual songs for ninety-nine cents on its iTunes store, the era of record companies selling entire albums was shattered.) “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls.” Jobs paused for dramatic effect. On cue, the audience broke into hearty applause. “The second,” continued Jobs, “is a revolutionary mobile phone.” This time, before he could pause, cheers rang out—with a louder, prolonged burst of clapping. Apple had never manufactured a phone before. “And the third,” he went on, as a big screen behind him mirrored his words, “is a breakthrough internet communications device.” A whoop, followed by a polite round of clapping; by now the audience was a bit confused at the deluge of new products. Jobs let his words hang in the air, teasing the crowd as it waited in anticipation. “So, three things,” he recapped, as the screen behind him showed three Apple icons representing an iPod, a phone, and the internet. “A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.” Silence. “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,” Jobs repeated, as the screen displayed each of those icons in the center, flipping to reveal the next one. The animations behind Jobs had been carefully choreographed to match his words.
Steps to Developing Critical Service Learning Projects
Authors: Johnson Annette , McKay-Jackson Cassandra , Grumbach Giesela
Published: November 2020

After the practitioner gains administrative buy- in, as discussed in Chapter 5, the focus should turn to conducting the critical service learning (CSL) project. In this chapter, the five phases of conducting a CSL project are described. The first step in preplanning is for practitioners to determine the type of group to be developed, the facilitation approach (individual or cofacilitated), and the target audience. It is important to determine whether the group will be integrated into an existing counseling or therapeutic group or a stand- alone group focused specifically on CSL. If practitioners integrate the CSL project into an existing group, they may use the existing facilitators for the group. However, if it is a stand- alone group, practitioners may create an opportunity for cofacilitation of the group using other school- based personnel. Practitioners must also identify the student population they will recruit for the intervention. Work conducted through the Carnegie Mellon University Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Education Innovation (n.d.) suggests several considerations for screening group members: considering youth’s prior knowledge, youth’s motivation, the diversity of perspectives, familiarity with one another, and personality types. When considering youth’s prior knowledge, previous experiences, and skills, practitioners must assess the youth’s strengths, skills, and abilities. All youth have strengths that may be utilized in the CSL process. Another consideration is the need to assess youth’s motivation as they may have varying degrees of self- awareness or desire to address community issues. If the goal of the group is to expand students’ abilities to relate to multiple perspectives, practitioners may seek diverse group membership. It is likely that CSL projects will focus on perspective taking and will need to consider diversification as a main priority of the group. Practitioners may also think about students’ familiarity with one another and per¬sonality types (introverted or extraverted) within the group. The initial screening of students requires that practitioners assess students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) needs and skill levels for fit and selection into the group. Students with common SEL needs may be one consideration as practitioners consider the group’s composition. Practitioners must also assess students’ willingness to contrib¬ute to the CSL project and become a part of the group process. Otherwise, some youth may not commit to the overall project.
What Are Vineyards Made Of ?
Authors: Maltman Alex
Published: November 2020

What strikes you first when looking at a vineyard? Perhaps the vines themselves? Your eye may be caught by random scatterings of gnarly old bushes or by the military neatness of rows of trained vines, luxuriant in foliage in summer and little more than gaunt woody skeletons in winter. But possibly more striking might be the land itself—the geology, or at least manifestations of it. The vines may extend across a vast, flat plain, or they may be perched on a vertiginous slope, or anywhere in between—it depends on the bedrock geology. How well the vines grow will be influenced by how that bedrock weathers into soil and how the vine roots respond. The soil may have an eye-catching color or may be astonishingly stony, consisting of little more than rock debris. This quality, too, depends on the geology. But what exactly is this vineyard ground? What are such things as bedrock, soil, and stone made of? Where do they come from? How did they get this way? The answers form the basis of understanding vineyard geology, so let’s begin here, with a few fundamentals. We can think about what the ground in a vineyard is made of in three ways. The first way is that, like all matter, it consists of atoms of chemical elements. And remarkably, although there are nearly a hundred different chemical elements in nature, the ground is dominated by just eight of them (Figure 1.1a). You could even say that it’s pretty much made up of only four of these elements, as the first four on the list account for nearly 88% of the composition. Preponderant among them are oxygen, at no less than 46%, and silicon, at 28%. So there’s a lot of these two elements in most vineyards! As an aside, it’s the same kind of story with living organisms: about 95% of their composition consists of just three elements—carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen—and that includes grapevines and grapes (Figure 1.1b).
The Lay of the Land
Authors: Maltman Alex
Published: November 2020

Every farmer knows that certain crops do better in particular fields, and every gardener knows that some plants grow better in certain spots in the garden. Grapevines are no different. The idea forms the basis of the concept of terroir, and in this and the following two chapters we will meet a number of factors, besides the minerals and rocks we have been talking about, that contribute to it. First, we consider the shape of the land surface. The weathering of rocks produces loose debris—sediment—which sooner or later will move, and this gives rise to erosion. The two processes usually work hand in hand though, strictly speaking, weathering happens in place, whereas erosion results from movement of the debris. We will look more closely at weathering in the next chapter, in the context of generating soil. Here we are concerned with erosion. It may involve sand particles being hurled at outcrops by high winds, or rivers loaded with particles grinding at the land to form a river channel. In some places, rock-charged ice may be gnawing away at the bedrock. Ultimately, the shape of the land surface is the result of how such processes interact with the solid bedrock. In other words, the interplay between erosion and bedrock determines the physical lay of vineyards. Plateaus are level upland areas. They can be formed in any kind of material: it’s the flat, table-like form that defines them. For instance, a vast area of the Deccan Plateau of central India, focus of a burgeoning wine industry, is made up of horizontal flows of basalt lava. The Colorado Plateau in the United States is formed largely of horizontal sedimentary strata. It has been deeply incised by rivers, in places leaving isolated blocks such as mesas and buttes (Figure 8.1; see Plate 18). Mesas have a larger summit area than buttes, compared to their heights. These bodies of rock have not been individually uplifted, as is sometimes claimed. They are remnant blocks, erosion having taken away the strata that were once around them.
New worlds versus scaling: From van Leeuwenhoek to Mandelbrot
Authors: Lovejoy Shaun
Published: November 2020

We just took a voyage through scales, noticing structures in cloud photographs and wiggles on graphs. Collectively, they spanned ranges of scale over factors of billions in space and billions of billions in time. We are immediately confronted with the question: How can we conceptualize and model such fantastic variation? Two extreme approaches have developed. For the moment, I call the domi­nant one the new worlds view, after Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632– 1723), who developed a powerful early microscope. The other is the self- similar (scaling) view by Benoit Mandelbrot which I discuss in the next section. My own view— scaling but with the notion of scale itself an emergent property— is discussed in Chapter 3. When van Leeuwenhoek peered through his microscope, in his amazement he is said to have discovered a “new world in a drop of water”: “animalcules,” the first microorganisms (Fig. 2.1). Since then, the idea that zooming reveals something completely new has become second nature. In the twenty- first cen­tury, atom- imaging microscopes are developed precisely because of the promise of such new worlds. The scale- by- scale “newness” idea was graphically illustrated by K. Boeke’s highly influential book Cosmic View, which starts with a photograph of a girl holding a cat, first zooming away to show the surrounding vast reaches of outer space, and then zooming in until reaching the nucleus of an atom. The book was incredibly successful. It was included in Hutchins and Adler’s Gateway to the Great Books, a ten- volume series featuring works by Aristotle, Shakespeare, Einstein, and others. In 1968, two films were based on Boeke’s book— Cosmic Zoom and Powers of Ten (1968, re- released in 1977), encouraging the idea that nearly every power of ten in scale hosts different phenomena. More recently (2012), there’s even the interactive Cosmic Eye app for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod, not to mention a lavish update: the “Zoomable Universe.”
Macroweather, the climate, and beyond
Authors: Lovejoy Shaun
Published: November 2020

“Expect the cold weather to continue for the next ten days, followed by a warm spell.” This might have been the fourteen- day weather forecast for Montreal on December, 31, 2006 (Fig. 5.1, top). But imagine what it might have been if Earth rotated about its axis ten times more slowly, so that the length of the day coincided with the ten- day weather– macroweather transition scale— an alignment of scales almost achieved on Mars. In that case (Fig. 5.1, bottom) we would have heard, “Expect mild weather on Monday, followed by freezing temperatures, until a warm spell on Thursday, followed by a brisk Friday and Saturday, a warming on Sunday and Monday, followed by freezing on Tuesday, then a four- day warm period followed by freezing and then warming.” Although long- term trends in weather can persist for up to ten days or so, in macroweather, the upshifts tend to be followed immediately by downshifts (and vice versa) and, although longer term trends exist, they are much more subtle, resulting from imperfect cancelations of successive fluctuations. The tendency of macroweather fluctuations to cancel rather than to accu­mulate is its defining feature, and cancelation is synonymous with stability. Quantitatively, it implies that the temporal fluctuation exponent H is negative. In the weather regime with positive H, the temperature, wind, and other variables wander up and down with prolonged swings. The weather is a meta­phor for instability. If we average macroweather over longer and longer times, its variability is reduced systematically so that it appears to converge to a well-defined value. In that sense, macroweather is what you expect, the weather is what you get. But what about macroweather’s spatial properties? As usual, forecasts can be explained with recourse to maps. For example, Plate 5.1 (left) shows the day- to-day evolution of the daily temperatures corresponding to the forecast in Figure 5.1 (top).
What have we done?
Authors: Lovejoy Shaun
Published: November 2020

It was April 11, 2014, and the McGill University press release went online at 1:30 in the afternoon. Although I’d published many articles, they were on fundamental geoscience; the release summarized the first one that had significant social and political consequences. Its title, “Scaling Fluctuation Analysis and Statistical Hypothesis Testing of Anthropogenic Warming,” was arcane, but the release was clear enough: “Statistical analysis rules out natural- warming hypothesis with more than 99% certainty” (the article, published in Climate Dynamics, is hereafter referred to as CD). It had been fifteen months since the original submission went to peer review, but now the pace picked up dramatically. Within hours, the tone was set by the skeptic majordomo Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchely, who displayed his Oxbridge classics erudition by deliciously qualifying the paper as a “mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness.” Three days later, with the release getting 12,000 hits per day, the “Friends of Science” sent an aggressive missive to the McGill chancellor asking that it be removed from McGill’s site. The Calgary- based group with its Orwellian name was set up in 2002 to promote the theory that “The sun is the driver of climate change. Not you. Not CO2.” (Fig. 6.1). One could understand their thunder. Rather than trying to prove that the warming was anthropogenic— something that is impossible to do “beyond reasonable doubt”— the new paper closed the debate2 by doing something far simpler: by disproving the “Friends” Giant Natural Fluctuation (GNF) hypothesis. If we exclude either divine or extraterrestrial intervention, then the warming is natural or it is human; there is no third alternative. The skeptics were stuck. To add insult to injury, their prepackaged sermons on the inadequacies of computer models or their speculations about solar variability were irrelevant. Provoked by the media attention and several Op- Eds in the hours, days, and weeks that followed, in email, blogs, and Twitter, I was treated to a deluge of abuse: “atheist,” “Marxist,” “hippy name,” and so on— everything, it seemed, short of death threats.
Conclusions: Richardson’s dreams
Authors: Lovejoy Shaun
Published: November 2020

From big to small, from fast to slow, we traveled through scales— through magnifications of billions in space and billions of billions in time. We looked at how the traditional scalebound approach singles out specific phenomena: structures at specific spatial scales with specific lifetimes. The approach attempts to understand each in a (scale) reductionist and (usually) deterministic manner. Yet it fails miserably to describe more than tiny portions of the actual variability, giving— at best— some qualitative insights. Viewing the big picture with the help of modern data, we saw that, quantitatively, the scalebound approach underestimates the variability by a factor of a million billion (Fig. 2.3A). The alternative is the scaling approach, which attempts to understand and model the atmosphere over wide ranges of scale. This approach is based on space– time scale symmetry principles. It describes statistically the synergy of nonlinear processes that act collectively over wide ranges of scale. To apply the idea in space, we needed to generalize the notion of scale itself (Chapter 3)— notably, to be able to account for the stratification caused by gravity. The appropriate notion of scale is one that emerges as a consequence of strong nonlinear dynamics, rather than being imposed a priori from without. Applying scaling in time, we found that the familiar weather– climate dichotomy was missing a key middle regime: from ten days to twenty years. It is a weather, macroweather, climate trichotomy. When it comes to real atmospheric modeling, scientists have long realized the limits of the scalebound approach. When they “really need to know,” they defer to NWP or GCMs, the embodiment of Richardson’s dream of “weather prediction by numerical process.” This is fortunate, because the NWPs and GCMs respect space– time scaling symmetries; without them, they would be hopelessly unrealistic. At least when used for their original purpose— weather prediction up to the ten- day deterministic predictability limit— respecting scaling allows them to be reasonably accurate.
Schools as Centers for Behavioral Learning
Authors: Detterman Robin , Ventura Jenny , Rosenthal Lihi , Berrick Ken
Published: November 2020

Organizing for effective change requires an understanding both of formal systems and of intimate human relationships. It requires that efforts be intentionally embedded within local context while remaining attuned to the human dynamics that breathe life into these very communities. Chapter 2 proposed that true educational reform requires deep and sustained systems-level change. Chapter 3 explored the impact that relationships have on the sense of connection, trust, and vulnerability necessary for the transformative process. Building on a systems-level lens and an investment in human relationships, this chapter will explore the tenets of behavioral learning theory to better understand how behavior change contributes to transformation within students and school communities. Changing behavior is difficult; it is a slow, often circuitous, journey. It requires real people, with their own personal preferences and habits, to change behaviors that they may have grown strongly accustomed to overtime. What’s more, school professionals responsible for shaping the behavior of others within the education setting often lack the foundational knowledge and skills to do so. In the process of reshaping student behavior and inspiring adult learning, educators frequently start with ambitious goals that lack a clearly articulated plan for promoting the changes necessary to achieve them. Without a roadmap, it is commonplace for educators to become convinced that efforts at change are going nowhere, to lose hope or give up along the way, and tell themselves that “we just can’t help this difficult student” or “this schoolwide initiative won’t work here.” This chapter proposes that the principles of behavioral learning theory can be applied to (1) teach students the social-emotional skills they need to become successful scholars and citizens and (2) build the capacity of adults to improve the overall culture and climate of a school campus. Guided by the tenets of behavioral learning theory we ask the following questions: How do we approach challenging behavior as an opportunity to engage with students and build new behavioral skills? How do we create proactive discipline systems with the explicit purpose of creating a sense of predictability, consistency, and equity?
Changes During The Industrial Age
Authors: Rohling Eelco J.
Published: November 2020

Most of the 1°C temperature change since the start of the industrial revolution has occurred in the last six decades (Figure 1.1). The warming is evident in all independently monitored timeseries of global temperature. The general warming trend has been overprinted by variability on a lot of different timescales, largely because of internal (re-) distributions of heat within the atmosphere- ocean system. The world ocean, with an average depth of 3700 m, has more than 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. Even just the upper 700 m that are in effective exchange with the atmosphere have 200 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. As a result, even a tiny fraction of a degree centigrade change in just the upper ocean represents an enormous amount of heat. This means two things: first, atmospheric temperature can be substantially affected by almost undetectable changes in the ocean; and second, ocean heat gain calculation requires very precise temperature measurements. Precise measurement series for the ocean only exist since about 1960. Let’s have a look at what atmospheric and oceanic heat gains tell us about the Earth’s energy balance since the industrial revolution. The roughly 1°C rise of Earth’s surface temperature during the indus-trial age, with more than two- thirds of it since about 1960, represents the “realized” response to forcing. Using standard values for global climate sensitivity to radiative forcing, we can determine that this 1° C warming corresponds to a component of climate forcing of roughly 1.1 to 1.3 W/m2. In contrast, the ocean is such a vast reservoir to heat up that it has not yet realized its full warming—ocean warming will therefore continue to develop over many decades to centuries even if we managed to “freeze” all radiative forcing agents at their current levels. Since 1960, the heat content of the upper 2000 m of the ocean has increased by roughly 27 x 1022 joules in about 55 years. This is an enormous number; namely 27 followed by 22 zeroes. For comparison, the most powerful nuclear detonation ever had a yield of about 22 x 1016 joules.
Electronic Explanations of the Periodic System Developed by Chemists
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

Given the advances in explanations of the periodic system provided by physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century, described in chapter 7, it is interesting to consider what advances, if any, chemists achieved during the same period. Unlike physicists, chemists were working largely inductively with experimental data on the elements and not via any theoretical arguments. However, in many instances, the electronic configurations proposed by chemists were superior to those postulated by such physicists as Niels Bohr and Edmund Stoner. This is not entirely surprising given the chemist’s familiarity with the properties of the elements. Inductive arguments based on the macroscopic behavior of elements were often more fruitful than the deductive arguments based on physical principles. Moreover, as described in chapter 7, even physicists’ routes to electronic configurations were not always as deductive as their authors claimed them to be. The starting point for the chemical contributions to the assignment of electronic configurations can be regarded as J.J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron in 1897, since without the existence of this particle there could be no electronic configurations. In 1902, the American chemist Gilbert Norton Lewis began speculating about the electronic structure of atoms, although he did not publish his views due to the prevailing empiricist climate in US chemistry, which was rather hostile toward theoretical approaches. Considerably later, Lewis recalled his early thoughts on the constitution of atoms: . . . In the year 1902 (while I was attempting to explain to an elementary class in chemistry some of the ideas involved in the periodic law) becoming interested in the new theory of the electron, and combining this idea with those implied in the periodic classification, I formed an idea of the inner structure of the atom which, although it contained certain crudities, I have ever since regarded as representing essentially the arrangement of electrons in the atom. . . . Some dated fragments of this work still survive, including a diagram in which Lewis depicts the electronic structures of the elements from helium up to fluorine.