An international collaboration for the development of a research training course in an emergent academic discipline

Proceedings of INTED2010 Conference. 8-10 March 2010, Valencia, Spain.In professional areas such as the creative and performing arts and design, the academic model of research has not been clearly articulated. This means that often the values held in advanced professional practice run counter to the traditional models of knowledge and research that are adopted in academia. As a result, there is a problem in accounting for research in these areas in ways that will be recognised and valued by both communities. There is an ongoing debate about the best way of dealing with and reflecting these professional values in academic research. This debate has substantiated an emergent type of research that is called ‘Practice-based Research’ (PbR). PbR introduces the claim that creative practice has an instrumental role in academic research in areas such as design and urban planning. This role is different from the one of experimentation in traditional empirical research, and different from the one of practice in professional creative practice. This paper describes the development and delivery of a research methods training course in the department of spatial planning and design (Stedenbouw) at the Technical University Delft (TU Delft, Netherlands) that engages directly with these fundamental problems. The course, Research and Design Methods, has served as a testing ground for many ideas stemming from the cooperation between TU Delft and the University of Hertfordshire (UH, UK). As part of the international knowledge transfer initiative, a member of staff from TU Delft has been working at the UH for a year. One of the outcomes of this collaboration is the design and delivery of a new course at TU Delft, which tackles the relationship between academic research and planning and design, through a dialogue between different views on the activities of the urban planner and the designer. There are challenges that arise when structuring a course within an area for which the epistemological, ontological and methodological questions are still under discussion by the community. The broad aim was to offer insight into non-traditional academic research tools and methods for different areas of urban design and planning within a broader academic context. This included the analysis of different academic traditions that were relevant for urban planning and design. We define research as a systematic investigation of a subject that leads to the production of explicit knowledge, and adds to the existing body of knowledge about the subject. In the paper, we analyse the way in which research and practice are problematized in the TU Delft course and claim that PbR manifests the differences between the worldviews of academic research and professional practice, with their different aims and values. As a result, training and expertise in the professional values of creative practice is insufficient for academic research. There is therefore a need for specific research training that addresses these differences. This need for discipline specific research training has been recognized in the Bologna Process and the TU Delft course represents one such training programme.otherPeer reviewe

Linear Filament Array Sheet for EUV Production.

An EUV radiation source that generates a sheet of a liquid target material that has a width that matches the desired laser spot size for good conversion efficiency and a thickness that matches the laser beam/target interaction depth. The EUV source includes a reservoir containing a pressurized cryogenic liquid target material. such as liquid Xenon. The reservoir also includes an array of closely spaced orifices into a vacuum chamber as separated liquid stream filaments of the target material that define the sheet. The liquid streams freeze to form an array of frozen target filaments. A laser beam is directed to a target area in the vacuum chamber where it irradiates the stream of filaments to create a plasma that emits EUV radiation

High Temperature EUV Source Nozzle

A nozzle for a laser-plasma EUV radiation source that provides thermal isolation between the nozzle body and the target material flowing therethrough. A target delivery tube is provided that extends through the nozzle body. The delivery tube has an expansion aperture positioned behind an exit collimator of the nozzle body. The delivery tube is made of a low thermal conductivity material, such as stainless steel, and is in limited contact with the nozzle body so that heating of the nozzle body from the plasma does not heat the liquid target material being delivered through the delivery tube. The expansion aperture has a smaller diameter than the exit collimator

Gasdynamically-Controlled Droplets as the Target in a Laser-Plasma Extreme Ultraviolet Light Source

A target material delivery system in the form of a nozzle for an EUV radiation source. The nozzle includes a target material supply line having an orifice through which droplets of a liquid target material are emitted, where the droplets have a predetermined size, speed and spacing therebetween. The droplets are mixed with a carrier gas in a mixing chamber enclosing the target material chamber and the mixture of the droplets and the carrier gas enter a drift tube from the mixing chamber. The droplets are emitted into an accelerator chamber from the drift tube where the speed of the droplets is increased to control the spacing therebetween. A vapor extractor can be mounted to the accelerator chamber or the drift tube to remove the carrier gas and target material vapor, which would otherwise adversely affect the EUV radiation generation

Teaching for Urbanism: a didactical experience in a newly academicized area

This paper describes a didactical experience in the Masters course of the Department of Urbanism of the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and issues related to the academicization of its curriculum. Although urbanism is a firmly established discipline in many curricula, in The Netherlands it has entered higher education as a practical and vocational discipline from the engineering tradition. The experience of the implementation of a stronger academic approach in such an environment reveals differences in worldviews among practitioners and academics, which result in frictions about the role and the form of academic research in Masters’ education. This is becoming more evident as urbanism is confronted with the need to situate research actions and outcomes in relation to other more established disciplines, for example through research assessments. We have found problems related to a dysfunctional relationship between research claims and research actions, problems with assessment, trans-disciplinary dialogue and other issues common to areas of knowledge and practice recently entering academia. Here we discuss how new courses and requirements were introduced, that aimed to encourage an academic attitude and improve outputs in relation to academic standards, and how this was done by seeking a dialogue between research and design practice. The experience is examined both from the point of view of staff’s expectations and students’ reception

Guiding The Work Of Writing: Reflections On The Writing Process

The phenomenon of teaching and learning the writing for publication process was examined from the perspectives of instructors and the students

Using Critical Race Theory: An Analysis Of Cultural Differences In Healthcare Education

Critical Race Theory (CRT) was used as a lens of analysis to examine cultural competency in healthcare. Fourteen articles were found related to race/ethnicity and equity. Four themes emerged from our thematic analysis, which were cultural differences, access to healthcare, healthcare disparities, and healthcare education. It is evident that disparities do exist within healthcare and vary among cultures. The healthcare industry must continue to address issues of race, ethnicity and equity through cultural competency. Although there is no simple solution to achieve cultural competency, it can be fostered within healthcare practitioners and education to change the way different cultures are viewed. Healthcare institutions and healthcare professionals must bridge the gaps that still exist between individuals to provide fair, equal and impartial care

Special Section on the Forty-First Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2009)

This issue of SICOMP contains nine specially selected papers from the Forty-first Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, otherwise known as STOC 2009, held May 31 to June 2 in Bethesda, Maryland. The papers here were chosen to represent both the excellence and the broad range of the STOC program. The papers have been revised and extended by the authors, and subjected to the standard thorough reviewing process of SICOMP. The program committee consisted of Susanne Albers, Andris Ambainis, Nikhil Bansal, Paul Beame, Andrej Bogdanov, Ran Canetti, David Eppstein, Dmitry Gavinsky, Shafi Goldwasser, Nicole Immorlica, Anna Karlin, Jonathan Katz, Jonathan Kelner, Subhash Khot, Ravi Kumar, Leslie Ann Goldberg, Michael Mitzenmacher (Chair), Kamesh Munagala, Rasmus Pagh, Anup Rao, Rocco Servedio, Mikkel Thorup, Chris Umans, and Lisa Zhang. They accepted 77 papers out of 321 submissions