College Announces Upcoming Seminars

CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY SEMINARS:

Monday, November 10th, 4pm, W140 BNSN
R. PAUL PHILIP, University of Oklahoma, will present "Environmental Forensics, or Who Was Responsible for the Spill?"

Friday, November 14th, 4pm, W140 BNSN
ARMEN ZAKARIAN, University of California, Santa Barbara, will present "Recent Advances in the Total Synthesis of Natural Products"

Dr. Zakarian's research group is exploring natural products as a platform for the development of new chemistry that may ultimately enable more efficient preparation of useful organic materials for a variety of applications, such as pharmaceuticals, new therapies, or in materials chemistry.

Biologically active compounds displaying promising anticancer, antibacterial, neurotoxic or other interesting activities are our typical targets. Natural products derived from marine environment are among favorite targets for our synthetic efforts due to their scarcity and structural novelty. Structural novelty inspires the development of new strategies and methods for organic synthesis, and scarcity makes totals synthesis an ideal venture to provide sufficient amount of material for further biological studies, fundamental or clinical.

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR:

Thursday, Nov. 13th, 11:00 AM, 1170 TMCB
MICHAEL QUINN, Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Seattle University, will present "Web 2.0, the Global Village, and the Code of Fair Information Practices"

Is it wrong to post a photo of a person without that person's permission?
The term "global village" has taken on a new meaning with the introduction of social networks that make it possible to post photos and videos that anyone with Internet access and a Web browser can see. Web 2.0 applications can stir complete strangers into collective action, for good or for ill. In this talk, Dr. Quinn will describe how collective action based on Internet images has changed people's lives, examine the practice of posting and labeling photos in the light of the Code of Fair Information Practices, and use case-based reasoning to evaluate the morality of several cases involving posting photos to the Web.

GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES SEMINAR:

Thursday, November 13th, 11:00 AM, C295 ESC
DAVID CLARK, University of Wisconsin Madison, will present "Life After BYU"

Similar to the fictitious Princes of Serendip who traveled the world in order to gain experiences that would complement their formal education, BYU geology graduates will leave Provo and test their newly acquired knowledge in the world. So can geologic serendipity be expected for BYU graduates? For one geology graduate serendipitous events included definition of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic paleoclimatology and paleontology of the Arctic Ocean, and significant contributions to a world-wide Paleozoic and Triassic conodont biostratigraphy, both events never visualized at the time of graduation.

MATHEMATICS SEMINAR:

Tuesday, November 11th, 4:00 PM in 1170 TMCB
DUSAN REPOVS, University of Liubliana, will present "Embeddability of Cones and Suspensions"

Thursday, November 13th, 4:00 PM in 1170 TMCB
RODNEY FORCADE, Brigham Young University, will present "Fun with Continued Fractions and Cryptography"

A continued fraction is an expression which looks like little more than a fun way to exercise our arithmetic skills. Surprisingly, these interesting expressions have a lot to tell us about approximating numbers with fractions (as when we conveniently approximate pi by the fraction 22/7). The RSA cryptosystem, on the other hand, uses modular exponentiation and the difficulty of factoring large numbers to protect secure internet connections (for example). After briefly exploring these two disparate mathematical ideas, we’ll discover a delightful connection between them, first proposed by Michael J. Wiener in 1990. In particular, an incautious user of RSA might find his code broken in a tiny fraction of a second – on a laptop.

MATHEMATICS EDUCATION SEMINARS:

Monday, November 10th, 3:00 PM in 1170 TMCB
GUERSHON HAREL, Professor of Mathematics at University of California, San Diego, will present "Intellectual Need and Epistemological Justification: Historical and Pedagogical Considerations"

Most students, even those who desire to succeed in school, are intellectually aimless in mathematics classes because often they do not realize an intellectual need for what we intend to teach them. The notion of intellectual need is inextricably linked to the notion of epistemological justification: the learners’ discernment of how and why a particular piece of knowledge came to be. This talk addresses historical and philosophical aspects of these two notions, as well as ways teachers can be aware of students’ intellectual need and address it directly in the mathematics classroom.

Thursday, November 13th, 11:00 AM in 2107 JKB
JIM HIEBERT, University of Delaware, will present "The Constantly Underestimated Challenge of Improving Mathematics Instruction"

Many U.S. efforts to improve mathematics learning opportunities for students have not made it through the classroom door. Teaching is the single common pathway along which improvements reach students and mathematics teaching has not changed much over the past century. Why is teaching so hard to change? The reasons seem to lie in an incomplete understanding of why mathematics teaching looks like it does, what aspects of teaching should change, and how teachers learn to teach mathematics in different ways. Examining these issues reveals a number of challenging research agendas.

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY SEMINAR:

Wednesday, November 12th, 4:00 PM in C215 ESC
JUSTIN PEATROSS, Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University will present "Photo Emission by Individual Electron Wave Packets in Strong Laser Fields"

A free electron whose wave packet is initially the size of an atom undergoes natural quantum spreading, quickly reaching the scale of optical wavelengths. Moreover, a free wave packet in a very strong laser focus is pulled apart by the sharp field gradients. Different parts of the same electron wave packet may even be propelled out opposite sides of the laser focus. The question naturally arises as to how such highly non-dipole wave packets scatter laser radiation. For small wave packets, it is customary to use the quantum probability current (multiplied by the electron charge) as a source current for Maxwell’s equations. This approach predicts dramatic suppression of radiation scattered out the side of an intense laser focus. The result can be tested experimentally and may shed light on the fundamental question of what constitutes a quantum measurement.

STATISTICS SEMINAR:

Thursday, November 13th, 4:00 PM in 3104 JKB
THOMAS HERZOG, Federal Housing Administration, will present "Data Quality and Record Linkage Techniques"

This talk will cover basic concepts in data quality and record linkage. Thomas Herzog will illustrate these results with a variety of examples, including several that go to the essence of the housing crisis in the United States. He also discusses tools (other than quantitative skills) that may be useful in dealing with others within your organization whose training is in other disciplines.