Women of Faith in Science: the Double Glass Ceiling

The majority of female pre-service elementary school teachers pursuing licensure is choosing English as their cognate rather than mathematics or science. The reason females are not choosing science as their cognate may be due to the fact that science has long been considered a masculine pursuit. To complicate the issue, pre-service female teachers of deep religious faith are further challenged to navigate the dichotomy of science and religion. As a result, women, and especially women of deep religious faith, are at risk of not participating in science studies. The author suggests that there is room in the science classroom for open dialogue with students regarding the distinction between science and religion. This dialogue may help students, especially women of faith, gain a deeper understanding of the nature of science and encourage participation in science

Optimizing Synchronization Stability of the Kuramoto Model in Complex Networks and Power Grids

Maintaining the stability of synchronization state is crucial for the functioning of many natural and artificial systems. In this study, we develop methods to optimize the synchronization stability of the Kuramoto model by minimizing the dominant Lyapunov exponent. With the help of the recently proposed cut-set space approximation of the steady states, we greatly simplify the objective function, and further derive its gradient and Hessian with respect to natural frequencies, which leads to an efficient algorithm with the quasi-Newton's method. The optimized systems are demonstrated to achieve better synchronization stability for the Kuramoto model with or without inertia in certain regimes. Hence our method is applicable in improving the stability of power grids. It is also viable to adjust the coupling strength of each link to improve the stability of the system. Various operational constraints can also be easily integrated into our scope by employing the interior point method in convex optimization. The properties of the optimized networks are also discussed