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The Standard Model of particle physics and the theory of General Relativity (GR) currently provide a good description of almost all phenomena of particle physics and gravitation that have received controlled experimental tests. However, the…
General Relativity (GR) exists in different formulations. They are equivalent in pure gravity but generically lead to distinct predictions once matter is included. After a brief overview of various versions of GR, we focus on metric-affine…
The recently proposed fractional scoring scheme is used to attribute publications to percentile rank classes. It is shown that in this way uncertainties and ambiguities in the evaluation of percentile ranks do not occur. Using the…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
This case study of a typical U.S. particle physics experiment explores the issues of gender bias and how it affects the academic career advancement prospects of women in the field of physics beyond the postdoctoral level; we use public…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
Changing institutions is an integral part of an academic life. Yet little is known about the mobility patterns of scientists at an institutional level and how these career choices affect scientific outcomes. Here, we examine over 420,000…
Machine learning methods tend to outperform traditional statistical models at prediction. In the prediction of academic achievement, ML models have not shown substantial improvement over logistic regression. So far, these results have…
Peer grading systems aggregate noisy reports from multiple students to approximate a true grade as closely as possible. Most current systems either take the mean or median of reported grades; others aim to estimate students' grading…
Generative models hold great potential, but only if one can trust the evaluation of the data they generate. We show that many commonly used quality scores for comparing two-dimensional distributions of synthetic vs. ground-truth data give…
Despite the empirical success of meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL), there are still a number poorly-understood discrepancies between theory and practice. Critically, biased gradient estimates are almost always implemented in practice,…
Students from statistically underrepresented minority (URM) groups and women earn a smaller fraction of undergraduate and graduate degrees in most physical sciences, particularly physics. This underrepresentation is also prevalent at the…
In deciding on a student's grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point…
A partially unusual behaviour was found among 14 sophomore students of civil engineering who took a pre test for a free fall laboratory session, in the context of a general mechanics course. An analysis contemplating mathematics models and…
Peer grading systems make large courses more scalable, provide students with faster and more detailed feedback, and help students to learn by thinking critically about the work of others. A key obstacle to the broader adoption of peer…
The lack of diversity in physics and astronomy PhD programmes is well known but has not improved despite decades of efforts. PhD bridge programmes provide an asset-based model to help overcome the societal and disciplinary obstacles to…
Recent years have seen substantial progress in neural generation of text, images, and audio, supported by mature training pipelines and large-scale optimization. For graphs, however, comparable progress has been more limited. We attribute…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
The Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) describes student attitudes and expectations toward learning, and might be used to predict normalized gains on tests such as the Force and Motion Concept Evaluation (FMCE). These predictions…
In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States" (arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians, the authors use data to…