IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 7, Issue 2, Summer 2018

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In the weeks and months following August 12, 2017, members of the Boston University community struggled — like Americans everywhere — to comprehend the series of troubling, and tragic, events which would come, almost immediately, to be denoted in the national imagination by the metonym “Charlottesville.” This special issue of Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning comprises a series of responses to these events and their aftermath, as well as the conditions which enabled them, by faculty members from across the BU campus

“A Question of Relevance”: The Establishment of a Canadian Parachute Capability, 1942–1945

“The great trouble with starting anything new,” argued Brigadier-General William Mitchell, “is to break away from the conservative policy of those who have gone before.” His observation was born from his own experience as a result of the inertia which existed in the interwar years. Not surprisingly, Canada did little during this period to ensure that it was capable of participating in a modern war. The vacuum of peace was insufficient to overcome the vacillation of military and political decision makers. It was only the stunning German victories of 1939–1940, which provided the catalyst for change and a template of what a modern army required. Predictably, Canadian officers serving overseas in the cauldron of Europe, in May 1940, formed distinct impressions of the new techniques of warfare which had been showcased. The use of airborne forces was one such innovation but proposals to establish a Canadian parachute capability were quickly rejected. The senior military command could not visualize a role for these special troops. More important, there existed an explicit institutional hostility towards the concept. Conventional military minds spurned the distinct, special or unique, and paratroops were seen as a distraction to the serious business of building an army. Nonetheless, the persistent efforts of Colonel E.L.M. Burns, greatly assisted by a growing American and British interest in airborne forces, eventually resulted in the organization of a modest Canadian parachute capability. The reason for this abrupt change is shrouded by inconsistencies. The relevance of a distinct Canadian airborne force was never credibly rationalized. The fact that at war’s end it was quickly dismantled provided silent testimony to its perceived utility. This was the reality of the Canadian airborne experience. Despite the actual performance and unrivalled reputation of the nation’s paratroopers, they never gained the full acceptance of the military establishment. This became the legacy of Canada’s airborne soldiers. Their existence ebbed and flowed on the basis of political expediency and powerful personalities. The failure to rationalize a realistic need for airborne forces, and develop a doctrine which would guide their employment, would remain a weakness which would be the root of their eventual destruction. The Canadian indifference to parachute troops in the interwar period is not surprising. With the exception of Russian and later German experimentation, airborne ideas did not figure largely in the thinking of military commanders in Britain or the United States, much less Canada. However, this lethargy, which in England and in the United States was cloaked in a mantle of slow study and experimentation, was shattered by the chaos of events in Europe. British Air Chief Marshal Sir John Slessor recalled that the “bold and brutal” German airborne operations in Norway and the Low Countries, in the Spring of 1940, deeply impressed everyone, notably Prime Minister Winston Churchill. These events became the catalyst for action

Voter Information in the Digital Age: Grading State Election Websites

Voter Information in the Digital Age: Grading State Election Websites examines the extent to which state election websites provide voters with sufficient information to make informed choices. The report assesses the quantity and quality of candidate and ballot measure information offered by the 50 state and District of Columbia election websites and ranks them from one to 51. It recommends a number of best practices currently used by some state or local jurisdictions, as well as innovations on other websites that are used rarely or not at all on state election websites. The authors recommend that states follow new technologies and trends in information delivery and design, and offer voters a full range of candidate and ballot information in innovative formats and media

Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine

Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)

A State’s Gendered Response to Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy in Semi-Authoritarian El Salvador (1944-1972)

Unlike much of the gender and welfare literature, this study examines why a regime that constrains pressure from below would adopt gendered social policies. The Salvadoran case (1944-1972) suggests that political instability rather than societal pressures may prompt semi-authoritarian regimes to adopt gendered labor reforms. We extend the motivations for adopting gendered labor reforms to include co-opting labor by examining gendered labor reforms in the context of El Salvador’s historically contingent labor strategy. This gendered analysis helps explain how a semi-authoritarian regime secured political stability and reveals the special appeal gendered labor reforms may have to semi-authoritarian regimes