Medical tourism involves travelling to other countries to avail medical, dental, or surgical care. A combination of various factors, such as exorbitant costs of healthcare in industrialised nations, the increased ease and affordability of international travel, favourable currency exchange rates in the global economy, rapidly improving medical technology and standards of care in many countries a...

The infrared sky from space is the sum of a cosmic signal from galaxies, quasars, and perhaps more exotic sources; and foregrounds from the Milky Way and from the Solar System. At a distance of 1 AU from the Sun, the foreground from interplan-etary dust is very bright between 5 and 100 µm, but " very bright " is still several million times fainter than the background produced by ground-based te...

This proposal seeks to utilize analytics on student demographics and grade records in combination with data on their performance in the GenEd NMS class G131 “Oceans and Our Global Environment” to assess how performance in the class and its range of assignments may be related to specific student characteristics. The project is structured to examine such connections by testing six specific hypoth...

This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize teaching and learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a theoretical model for vital competencies of learning astronomy is proposed: Reading the Sky. This model takes into account not only disciplinary knowledge but a...

Spinning particles in curved space-time can have fermionic symmetries generated by the square root of bosonic constants of motion other than the Hamiltonian. We present a general analysis of the conditions under which such new supersymmetries appear, and discuss the Poisson-Dirac algebra of the resulting set of charges, including the conditions of closure of the new algebra. An example of a new...

The MAGIC telescope, with its 17-m diameter mirror, is currently the largest single-dish Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescope. It is located on the Canary Island of La Palma, at an altitude of 2200 m above sea level, and is operating since 2004. The accessible energy range is in the very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) γ-ray domain, and roughly 40% of the duty cycle is devoted to observation of extra...

Over the last four years, Nepal’s political ‘transition’ has dominated public debate on social, cultural and political issues in the new republic. However, although the term ‘transition’ has been applied loosely when referring to many elements of political and social change which have occurred in the wake of the Jana Andolan II and the end of the People’s War, what exactly does this transition ...

We present the results of our methods to “mine” the blazar sky, i.e., select blazar candidates with very high efficiency. These are based on the crosscorrelation between public radio and X-ray catalogs and have resulted in two surveys, the Deep X-ray Radio Blazar Survey (DXRBS) and the “Sedentary” BL Lac survey. We show that data mining is vital to select sizeable, deep samples of these rare ac...