A four-lane street narrows to two to accommodate workers repairing a large pothole. one worker holds a stop sign loosely in his left hand as he waves cars through with his right. human drivers don't ...think twice about whether to follow the gesture or the sign; they move smoothly forward without stopping.
We present the first public version (v0.2) of the open-source and community-developed Python package, Astropy. This package provides core astronomy-related functionality to the community, including ...support for domain-specific file formats such as Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files, Virtual Observatory (VO) tables, and common ASCII table formats, unit and physical quantity conversions, physical constants specific to astronomy, celestial coordinate and time transformations, world coordinate system (WCS) support, generalized containers for representing gridded as well as tabular data, and a framework for cosmological transformations and conversions. Significant functionality is under active development, such as a model fitting framework, VO client and server tools, and aperture and point spread function (PSF) photometry tools. The core development team is actively making additions and enhancements to the current code base, and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the development of future Astropy versions.
Model social processes useful in facilitating sustainable development are advanced from our team experiences with a case study. The processes are: learn how to learn as a team and community, use a ...model process that reveals shared interests and leverageable points, and then facilitate local stakeholders in developmental action. The case provided the team the opportunity to learn to describe and comprehend the case agroecosystem as a whole-natural elements and social relationships. Dialogue among stakeholders created an awareness and clarity of leverageable issues. Team engagement with local stakeholders facilitated efforts to organize, integrate information and motivate developmental action. Case issue lessons were: farmers need information to transition to more sustainable forms of agriculture, institutional mechanisms are needed to support the development of new markets, consumers need information on the benefits of using agriculural products that enhance their environment, and the public needs to share responsibility for food safety and health rather than generating more governmental regulation. This sustainable development model process is presented to inform other farm-community change efforts.
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