The Role of Criminology in the Courtroom

Criminology and expert witness testimony play a crucial role in modern-day court proceedings. Scientific data and insights utilized in criminology can assist with seeking justice and fairness. This essay aims to provide a basis for the history of criminology and define the practice. It will explore the evolution of criminology practices and how theories have developed that are still utilized today. Furthermore, it will discuss criminologists’ many contributions as expert witnesses, including the role of ethics that criminologists must follow in court. Some key ideas presented include the methodologies criminologists use to present evidence and what standard criminologists must follow as they serve as expert witnesses. This will emphasize the importance of impartiality and truthfulness, which must be followed with their testimony. Additionally, this essay discusses real-life court cases where criminology played a fundamental role in shaping judicial outcomes. By highlighting the intersection between criminology and law, this essay will give insight into the importance of balancing scientific data and ethical standards to ensure fair and accurate practices

Grand challenges for human factors and ergonomics

Contemporary society faces a growing set of complex global issues representing significant human health, well-being, and sustainability threats. Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) has a critical role to play in responding to these issues; however, there remain a set of grand challenges that require resolution. This paper presents and discusses six grand challenges for HFE and related key research thrust areas for each of the challenges. The grand challenges are (1) Evolution in Societal Thinking; (2) Future of Human Work in Industry 5.0; (3) Climate Change and Sustainability; (4) Future of Education and Training; (5) Future of Personalized Health, and (6) Life, Technology, and the Metaverse. These grand challenges and key research thrust areas were derived by twenty HFE professionals who are the authors of this paper. The implications of these grand challenges for education, training, research, and implementation of HFE principles and methods for the benefit of humankind are discussed

Collective liberation through critical pedagogy

The collective liberation of queer and trans people—which is inherently tied to the liberation of those oppressed by white supremacy and racism, ableism, classism, ageism, and other asymmetrical power distributions—is possible when we develop critical consciousness through critical pedagogy. As young people develop an awareness of the contradictions and falsehoods they are taught (e.g., the myth of meritocracy), they begin to work to change their environments and offer resistance to the structures that inequitably shape their world. The vast majority of research on queer and trans adolescents, though, has been shaped by dominant, deficit-based views of queerness that presuppose that queer and trans youth are always already only victims who are damaged by their society. This leads most research to rely on unspoken assumptions that queer and trans youth are passive victims whose most salient features are the presence, absence, or severity of mental health concerns. Critical pedagogy provides a framework for researchers, educators, and adolescents themselves to better understand the power that queer and trans youth cultivate through their adolescence, without ignoring the harms that heterosexist and cissexist environments enact on them. Indeed, critical pedagogy provides a fruitful avenue for researchers to examine the ways that queer and trans adolescents experience discovery, joy, and freedom as they work to change the broken world they have inherited

Spartan Daily, March 11, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 20https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2025/1019/thumbnail.jp

The Post-War Lives of Amputee Civil War Veterans

In August 1865, Ora D. Walbridge sat down with a pen in his left hand to produce a specimen of his best business penmanship. Three years earlier, a gunshot had left Walbridge’s right arm paralyzed. When he submitted his penmanship specimen, he joined a unique group of Civil War veterans: the self-proclaimed “Left-Armed Corps.” This talk examines the lives of these veterans in the decades following the conflict to highlight the lasting resonance of missing limbs during national reconciliation. Demographic and biographical information provides insights into how the veterans’ lives were shaped by their service and their wounds.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1064/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, March 5, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 18https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2025/1017/thumbnail.jp

A morphological cell atlas of the freshwater sponge Ephydatia muelleri with key insights from targeted single-cell transcriptomes

How animal cell types, tissues, and regional body plans arose is a fundamental question in EvoDevo. Many current efforts attempt to link genetic information to the morphology of cells, tissues and regionalization of animal body plans using single-cell sequencing of cell populations. However, a lack of in-depth understanding of the morphology of non-bilaterian animals remains a considerable block to understanding the transitions between bilaterian and non-bilaterian cells and tissues. Sponges (Porifera), one of the earliest diverging animal phyla, pose a particular challenge to this endeavour, because their body plans lack mouths, gut, conventional muscle and nervous systems. With a goal to help bridge this gap, we have studied the morphology, behaviour and transcriptomics of cells and tissue types of an easily accessible and well-studied species of freshwater sponge, Ephydatia muelleri. New features described here include: a polarized external epithelium, a new contractile sieve cell that forms the entry to incurrent canals, motile cilia on apopyle cells at the exit of choanocyte chambers, and non-motile cilia on cells in excurrent canals and oscula. Imaging cells in vivo shows distinct behavioural characteristics of motile cells in the mesohyl. Transcriptomic phenotypes of three cell types (cystencytes, choanocytes and archaeocytes) captured live indicate that cell-type transcriptomes are distinct. Importantly, individual archaeocytes show a range of transcriptomic phenotypes which is supported by the distinct expression of different genes by subsets of this cell type. In contrast, all five choanocyte cells sampled live revealed highly uniform transcriptomes with significantly fewer genes expressed than in other cell types. Our study shows that sponges have tissues whose morphology and cell diversity are both functionally complex, but which together enable the sponge, like other metazoans, to sense and respond to stimuli