This site provides lesson plans that aim to teach pysics using the sun as an example. The lesson plans are called: 1. position, velocity and acceleration, 2. centripetal force and the law of universal gravitation, 3. center of mass of the solar system, and 4. introduction to magnetic spectrum.
This website, from the University of California, Berkeley, provides a description of the study of stellar motion around the center of a galaxy, and includes a graph of rotational speed versus distance from the center. The site relates this study to the prediction of dark matter. The page also gives explanations of other lines of evidence for dark matter. ____________________________________
This page provides a set of context-rich physics problems on center of mass, moment of inertia, angular momentum, torques, and rotational energy. Each context-rich problem is based on a real-world situation, and includes both information that is relevant to solving the problem and extraneous information. Strategies for problem solving are not explicitly provided. Each problem is formulated so it is too difficult for one student to solve alone, yet not too difficult for a group to master. This resource is based on the research results of the Minnesota Physics Education Research group.
Walter Christaller, a German geographer, originally proposed the Central Place Theory (CPT) in 1933 (trans. 1966). Christaller was studying the urban settlements in Southern Germany and advanced this theory as a means of understanding how urban settlements evolve and are spaced out in relation to each other. The question Christaller posed in his landmark book was “Are there rules that determine the size, number and distribution of towns?” He attempted to answer this question through a theory of central places that incorporated nodes and links in an idealistic situation.
G. William Skinner’s groundbreaking research into rural Chinese economic systems displayed the value of spatially explicit theories such as central place theory in applied situations that served to explain or even fundamentally reshape our understanding of social and economic systems in a way that other approaches could not.