Strategies For Enhancing The Scholarly Productivity Of Engineering Technology Educators

Scholarship is now a requirement for promotion and tenure at most institutions with Engineering Technology (ET) programs. ET faculty that have previously focused only on teaching are now required to demonstrate evidence of scholarly activity on an annual basis. To underscore the importance of the scholarship issue, the Engineering Technology Council (ETC) of ASEE states in its 2003-2006 Strategic Plan’s Goal # 5: “The ETC will develop guidelines and promote appropriate scholarship for engineering technology educators.” Many ET educators sincerely want to engage in scholarly activities, but lack the experience in this arena because of the non-existence of the scholarship culture within many ET programs. It is, therefore, incumbent on the ET community to develop strategies to facilitate the growth of scholarly activities among ET faculty. Indeed, the mantra for the ET community with regards to scholarship should be: “Scholarship, You can do it, we can help!” In a recent paper, the author and his collaborators, as members of the ETC Task Force on Scholarship, developed guidelines for scholarship in ET and proposed a faculty workload model. The current paper focuses on strategies that will encourage, facilitate, and provide support for the growth of scholarship in ET. Some of the “ways and means” for increasing scholarly productivity that are currently being implemented in the College of Applied Science and Technology (CAST) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) are discussed. These include: developing a college scholarship website, developing a scholarship mentoring program, developing web-based venues of dissemination and peer review, developing grant proposal and scholarly writing workshops, and identification and cultivation of support resources for scholarship. The early results and experiences from implementing some of these strategies at RIT are discussed and recommendations are offered that would be of help to other ET programs interested in cultivating the scholarship culture within their programs

Consequences of Unhappiness While Developing Software

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding the positive side of happiness -- positive emotions and moods -- is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that also studying the negative side -- unhappiness -- could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, and is mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the experienced consequences of unhappiness among software developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the responses given by 181 questionnaire participants, we identified 49 consequences of unhappiness while doing software development. We found detrimental consequences on developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data, will spawn new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.Comment: 6 pages. To be presented at the Second International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, colocated with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'17). Extended version of arXiv:1701.02952v2 [cs.SE

Application of virtual learning environment in the teaching of engineering drawing to enhance students' mental rotation skills

Virtual learning environment seems to transform education process in a more flexible way as compared to other modes of learning and have great potential in ensuring successful learning. This study investigates the effectiveness of virtual learning environment in teaching engineering drawing in order to enhance mental rotation skills. A quasi- experimental design study was used involving engineering students in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The intervention group in this study was exposed to virtual learning environment courseware. Students in this study were given a pre-test before the intervention and a post-test prior to the intervention. The result of this research indicates that there are significant improvements in the mental rotation skills of the students who were being exposed to the virtual learning environment. This study also investigates the gender differences in visualization skills. Thus, this study shows that using courseware in the teaching of engineering drawing can act as a catalyst in enhancing productivity and quality of engineering drawing. As a result, students are capable of enhancing their visualization skills which is vital in engineering drawing

Enhancing the productivity of supercoiled plasmid upstream bioprocessing through plasmid engineering

This study was set out to develop an approach for producing highly supercoiled plasmid DNA. Potentially, the level of supercoiling can have an impact on ease of downstream processing. A 7.2kb plasmid was developed by cloning of Bacteriophage-Mu Strong gyrase-binding sequence (Mu-SGS) into 6.8kb pSVβ-Gal. Four E. coli strains were transformed with both the modified pSVβ-Gal398 plasmid and pSVβ-Gal. Small scale fermentations and analysis were carried out in triplicate cultures to screen for best performing strains. Two of the four strains selected amplified the plasmids efficiently. There was over 20% increase in the total plasmid yield with pSVβ-Gal398 in both strains. The supercoiled topoisomer content was increased by 5% in both strains leading to a 27% increase in the overall yield. The two strains were investigated further in shake flasks. Increases in supercoiling and plasmid yield were also observed. The extent of supercoiling was examined by superhelical density quantification, with pSVβ-Gal398 maintaining a supercoil density of -0.022 and pSVβ-Gal -0.019 in both strains. The compactness of the plasmid DNA was also quantified by hydrodynamic diameter measurement using the Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) and it was observed that pSVβ-Gal398 was more compact with a Dh of 40-59nm compared to pSVβ-Gal with Dh of 70-90nm for both strains examined. The report of this study has shown that plasmid engineered to contain the Mu-phage SGS sequence has a beneficial effect on improving not only the yield of total plasmid but also the supercoiled topoisomer content of therapeutic plasmid DNA during bioprocessing. References: Hassan, S., Keshavarz‐Moore, E., & Ward, J. (2016). A cell engineering strategy to enhance supercoiled plasmid DNA production for gene therapy. Biotechnology and bioengineering, 113(9), 2064-2071. Yau, S. Y., Keshavarz‐Moore, E., & Ward, J. (2008). Host strain influences on supercoiled plasmid DNA production in Escherichia coli: Implications for efficient design of large‐scale processes. Biotechnology and bioengineering, 101(3), 529-544

A Human Factors Framework for Payload Display Design

During missions to space, one charge of the astronaut crew is to conduct research experiments. These experiments, referred to as payloads, typically are controlled by computers. Crewmembers interact with payload computers by using visual interfaces or displays. To enhance the safety, productivity, and efficiency of crewmember interaction with payload displays, particular attention must be paid to the usability of these displays. Enhancing display usability requires adoption of a design process that incorporates human factors engineering principles at each stage. This paper presents a proposed framework for incorporating human factors engineering principles into the payload display design process

A New Lean Model: Improving Race Team Performance through Team-Driver Communication Efficacy

In some organizational settings and in the field of competitive automobile racing, certain situations and rules place an emphasis on and sometimes escalate the need for effective team communications. This dissertation hypothesizes that effective and dense communications contributes directly to team performance. Supported by organizational behavioral and lean six sigma theory, communications is declared a form of waste within the context of Industrial Engineering subject to data collection, measurements, and real-time, value-added metrics. Measuring and reporting trends in communications provides a basis for a new and unique model called a Communications Productivity Model (CPM) with an associated Communications Density Report (CDR). Industrial Engineering productivity, statistics, linguistic and text analysis tools were combined to develop a unique Dynamic Productivity Index (DPI) enhancing the CDR as a means to rapidly provide meaningful and value-added feedback on recent and future performance. Data was collected on actual automobile racing teams to validate the new communications model, report on the results using the CDR and introduce the DPI. Future research is also proposed in this dissertation to enhance the new communications model whereby speech recognition technologies are evaluated and tested

Enhancing IT investments productivity: Integrating network QOS and it indirect costs

Increasing productivity is considered one of the major driving factors for a successful business. From an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure perspective, obtaining an optimised performance of resources is expected to improve productivity. From a technical viewpoint, the introduction of Quality of Service (QoS) models have been perceived to optimise the performance of the organisation network backbone. These models aim to provide an acceptable level of service assurance to the newly introduced applications and services such as voice and video. From a management viewpoint, the proper management of IT investments indirect costs can lead to a reduction of the overall cost portfolio. Consequently, both benefits and productivity increase are likely to be realised. This paper introduces network QoS strategy within the hierarchy of business infrastructure. In addition, it aims to identify the relationship between network QoS and IT indirect costs. Such integration demonstrates how network QoS strategy can be used to control IT indirect costs as well as enhancing network performance

Contending European agendas for agricultural innovation

Amid expectations for a European ‘transition to sustainable agriculture’, there are competing transitional processes. Given the widely acknowledged harm from agro-industrial systems, ‘unsustainable agriculture’ has divergent diagnoses and innovative solutions. This rivalry can be analysed as contending innovation agendas; the analysis here combines theoretical paradigms of agricultural innovation. In an EU policy context of a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE), there are divergent accounts of its key terms: biological resources, economy, relevant knowledge and knowledge-producers. Likewise, divergent accounts are found of innovation, intensification, resource efficiency, resilience, bio-energy, horizontal integration, etc. These divergent agendas are promoted by distinct stakeholder networks. The dominant agenda favours laboratory-based techno-scientific innovation as a source of ‘efficient’ inputs, which can use renewable resources more efficiently for competitive advantage in global value chains. By contrast, other agendas promote farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, especially via agro-ecological methods which can reduce energy inputs, increase productivity and add value through quality. With those contending agendas, rival stakeholder networks seek to influence R&D priorities. From the standpoint of multifunctional agriculture, such contending agendas can play complementary roles in different rural spaces. Some agro-food practices may combine aspects of different paradigms. As a concept, Agricultural Knowledge Systems may provide a common space for interchanges between divergent agendas and their research priorities. However, these innovation agendas promote conflicting visions of the future

Nootropics use in the workplace. Psychiatric and ethical aftermath towards the new frontier of bioengineering

OBJECTIVE: The authors have sought to expound upon and shed a light on the rise of nootropics, which have gradually taken on a more and more relevant role in workplaces and academic settings. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Multidisciplinary databases have been delved into by entering the following keys: "nootropics", "cognitive enhancement", "workplace", "productivity", "ethics", "bioengineering". In addition, a broad-ranging search has been undertaken on institutional websites in order to identify relevant analysis and recommendations issued by international institutions and agencies. Papers and reports have been independently pored over by each author. This search strategy has led to the identification of 988 sources but only 64 were considered appropriate for the purposes of the paper after being selected by at least 3 of the authors, independently. RESULTS: The notion of an artificially enhanced work performance - carried out by the 'superworker' - is particularly noteworthy and resonates with the conception of contemporary work on so many different levels: the rising need and demands for higher degrees of flexibility and productivity on the job, the implications of a '24/7' society, where more and more services are available at any time, the ever greater emphasis on entrepreneurial spirit, individual self-reliance and self-improvement, and last but not least, the impact of an ageing society on economic standards and performance. CONCLUSIONS: Moreover, it is worth mentioning that human enhancement technologies will predictably and increasingly go hand in hand with gene editing, bioengineering, cybernetics and nanotechnology. Applications are virtually boundless, and may ultimately affect all human traits (physical strength, endurance, vision, intelligence and even personality and mood)