Our shrinking ozone layer

Depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer is one of the major environmental concerns for the new millennium having serious implications on human health, agriculture and climate. In the past decades, research by the international scientific community has been directed towards understanding the impact of human interference on the Earth’s atmosphere. The importance of ozone radiation absorption in the atmosphere and the general kinetics of the stratospheric ozone depletion mechanisms have motivated many theoretical and experimental studies on various chemical species. The distribution of ozone and other trace gases in the atmosphere is governed by the complex interaction of dynamical, chemical and radiative processes. This article concentrates on the basic concepts underlying the problems that may be faced by humankind due to reduction in the ozone layer in coming decades, and the ways in which the scientific community can contribute to predicting and remediating these effects through design of international treaties, regulations and amendments.     

A Summer Academic Research Experience for Disadvantaged Youth

Internships are an effective way of connecting high school students in a meaningful manner to the sciences. Disadvantaged minorities have fewer opportunities to participate in internships, and are underrepresented in both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors and careers. We have developed a Summer Academic Research Experience (SARE) program that provides an enriching academic internship to underrepresented youth. Our program has shown that to have a successful internship for these disadvantaged youth, several issues need to be addressed in addition to scientific mentoring. We have found that it is necessary to remediate and/or fortify basic academic skills for students to be successful. In addition, students need to be actively coached in the development of professional skills, habits, and attitudes necessary for success in the workplace. With all these factors in place, these youths can become better students, compete on a more level playing field in their internships, and increase their potential of participating actively in the sciences in the future.     

Diffusion of Innovations: Communication Evolution and Influences

Diffusion of innovations research has altered the research trajectories of those in the field of communication. In this article, the authors briefly explore the evolution of diffusion research, in terms of theoretical influences and applied research advances, and then address how the evolution of diffusion of innovations provided the impetus for a communication discipline identity search. An explication of how diffusion of innovations can be viewed as mechanistically affecting media convergence is presented. This piece closes with a call to return to diffusion research, especially given the face of current communication vehicles and media convergence.     

A Microcomputer Interfacing Course for Computer Science Majors

This paper describes a microcomputer interfacing course for computer science students. Students build simple logic circuits to interface a microcomputer with real‐world devices, such as stepper motor and digital displays, and program the computer to monitor and control these devices. Programs are written in Pascal and assembly language. The emphasis is placed on applications rather than on theory. This course is especially designed for computer science students who are proficient in software programming but have little or no experience in electronics. The experiments described here have been developed on the Apple ft microcomputer, but they can be easily adapted to other microcomputers.     

The First Digit 1

Benford’s Law or The First Digit Law as it is commonly known has been a fascination to many generations. This counter-intuitive law proposes that given a sequence of numbers (usually from a data set like length of rivers, height of mountains, populations of nations or any source of data from real life), the first digit is ‘1’ roughtly 30% of the time. Many mathematical sequences, such as Fibonacci sequences also follow Benford’s Law. Benford’s Law has some interesting applications, especially in fraud detection!     

Transfinite numbers

In a series of revolutionary articles written during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the great German mathematician Georg Cantor removed the age-old mistrust of infinity and created an exceptionally beautiful and useful theory of transfinite numbers. This is an introductory article on this topic.     

Stress,Oxidative Injury and Disease

The living system on earth is largely using oxygen for burning metabolic fuel for energy. The toxicity of oxygen is largely due to the formation of free radicals in living systems. Stress is also responsible for the generation of free radicals. The evidence for the involvement of free radicals and oxidative injury in producing metabolic disturbance, maladjustment and many diseases has been accumulating since long. It is largely believed that the root cause of many chronic diseases is stress induced free radicals and resultant oxidative injury.