Reflections: Academia's Emerging Crisis of Relevance and the Consequent Role of the Engaged Scholar

Universities are facing a crisis of relevance. While there are multiple reasons for this to be happening, one that deserves particular attention is the extent to which academic scholars do not see it as their role to engage in public and political discourse. However, increased engagement is unavoidable in an emerging educational context where the caliber of public discourse has become so degraded and social media is changing the nature of science and scientific discourse within society. Further, there is a demographic shift in play, where young scholars are seeking more impact from their work than their more senior colleagues. In this article, I begin the process of articulating what we know and what we don’t know about the evolving role of the engaged scholar by breaking the conversation into two parts. First, why should academic scholars engage in public and political discourse? Second, how can we structure a set of ground rules that could form what might be considered a handbook for public engagement? In the end, this article is about a reexamination of how we practice our craft, to what purpose and to which audiences.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136168/1/1343_Hoffman.pd

Solving Meno\u27s Puzzle, Defeating Merlin\u27s Subterfuge: Bodies of Reference Knowledge and Archaeological Inference

THE MIND OF Lewis Binford is nimble and constantly evolving. In part, one can map Binford\u27s prodigious intellectual growth by looking at the research trajectories of his students, who often continue on paths they began under his tutelage. In my case, certainly, this is very true. When I arrived at the University of New Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Binford was exploring the nature of the archaeological record: how to understand past human organization at a supra-ethnographic scale, what we might learn from bones and site structure, and how to reliably give meaning to the archaeological record. This chapter, harking back to the early 1980s, focuses on the latter and attempts to organize some of the many thoughts that have been offered on the notion initially known as middle-range theory. Fundamental questions in archaeology are: What is it? How old is it? Why did people make it? Why did they stop making it? What do these patterns in artifacts, structures, and so forth mean at a deeper level? When students of archaeology ask and answer these questions, they are confronted with Meno\u27s Puzzle and Merlin\u27s subterfuge. Meno was the imaginary debater with whom Plato puzzled over the detection of Virtue (Evans 1995). If we knew how to recognize Virtue in a person, then we could and would do so. But, if Virtue\u27s distinguishing characteristics are a mystery to us, how will we recognize a virtuous individual when one appears? Mark Twain\u27s Merlin, the resident magician in King Arthur\u27s court, was capable of discerning activities happening at great distances, even 10,000 miles away. Shockingly, however, Merlin could not reckon the contents of the Connecticut Yankee\u27s pocket, though both were located in the same room. In archaeology, three related problems surface. First, without traveling back in time, how can we really know what the past was like? Second, can we learn about the past without imposing the present on the past (Wobst 1978)? That is, can the past somehow speak for itself and tell us something different than we think we already know? Finally, assuming that we can learn about the past, how do we know those knowledge claims are secure

Managing Firm Competitiveness in Global Markets

The globalization profile of US food firms is mixed. US sales from foreign direct investment is now over six times the level of exports, while US processed food trade balance has moved from +$9 billion in 1995 to -$7 billion in 2004. Competitive forces drive firms to seek new areas of growth, with either portfolio expansion or penetration and expansion in new markets. Although the forces that weigh heavily on a firm are recognized, their influence in determining a firm’s action in choosing a particular strategy is not well understood. As the nature of food manufacturing is evolving and the operational scope of a food manufacturing firm has grown from local, to regional, national, and global, is there a new role for policy? What we do know is that a firm trades with other firms and that aggregate trade patterns do not fully reflect how firms view prospects, make decisions and factor in policies as they organize themselves for trade. Addressing the potential characterizations of competitiveness for the industry and the firm followed by the conflicting influences of R&D on competitiveness, we focus on what is meant by a global food firm with the use of the experiences of three industry case studies.Competitiveness, Food Manufacturing, Globalization, Case study

The Evolution of Luminous Compact Blue Galaxies: Disks or Spheroids?

Luminous compact blue galaxies (LCBGs) are a diverse class of galaxies characterized by high luminosities, blue colors, and high surface brightnesses. Residing at the high luminosity, high mass end of the blue sequence, LCBGs sit at the critical juncture of galaxies that are evolving from the blue to the red sequence. Yet we do not understand what drives the evolution of LCBGs, nor how they will evolve. Based on single-dish HI observations, we know that they have a diverse range of properties. LCBGs are HI-rich with M(HI)=10^{9-10.5} M(sun), have moderate M(dyn)=10^{10-12} M(sun), and 80% have gas depletion timescales less than 3 Gyr. These properties are consistent with LCBGs evolving into low-mass spirals or high mass dwarf ellipticals or dwarf irregulars. However, LCBGs do not follow the Tully-Fisher relation, nor can most evolve onto it, implying that many LCBGs are not smoothly rotating, virialized systems. GMRT and VLA HI maps confirm this conclusion revealing signatures of recent interactions and dynamically hot components in some local LCBGs, consistent with the formation of a thick disk or spheroid. Such signatures and the high incidence of close companions around LCBGs suggest that star formation in local LCBGs is likely triggered by interactions. The dynamical masses and apparent spheroid formation in LCBGs combined with previous results from optical spectroscopy are consistent with virial heating being the primary mechanism for quenching star formation in these galaxies.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in "Hunting for the Dark: The Hidden Side of Galaxy Formation", Malta, 19-23 Oct. 2009, eds. V.P. Debattista & C.C. Popescu, AIP Conf. Se

The MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft : humans and machines in action

Thesis (Ph. D. in Technology, Management and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. This version of the catalog record was uploaded July 2013.Includes bibliographical references.Remotely piloted aircraft and the people that control them are changing how the US military operates aircraft and those who fly, yet few know what "drone" operators actually do, why they do what they do, or how they shape and reflect remote air warfare and human-machine relationships. What do the remote operators and intelligence personnel know during missions to "protect and avenge" coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and how do they go about knowing what they know? In an ethnographic and historical analysis of the Air Force's preeminent weapon system for the counterinsurgencies in the two countries, this study describes how social, technical, and cognitive factors mutually constitute remote air operations in war. Armed with perspectives and methods developed in the fields of the history of technology, sociology of technology, and cognitive anthropology, the author, an Air Force fighter pilot, describes how distributed crews represent, transform, and propagate information to find and kill targets and traces the observed human and machine interactions to policy assumptions, professional identities, employment concepts, and technical tools. In doing so, he shows how the people, practices, and machines associated with remotely piloted aircraft have been oriented to and conditioned by trust in automation, experience, skill, and social interactions and how they have influenced and reflected the evolving operational environment, encompassing organizations, and communities of practice.by Timothy M. Cullen.Ph.D.in Technology, Management and Polic

Seawater capacitance – a promising proxy for mapping and characterizing drifting hydrocarbon plumes in the deep ocean

Hydrocarbons released into the deep ocean are an inevitable consequence of natural seep, seafloor drilling, and leaking wellhead-to-collection-point pipelines. The Macondo 252 (Deepwater Horizon) well blowout of 2010 was even larger than the Ixtoc event in the Gulf of Campeche in 1979. History suggests it will not be the last accidental release, as deepwater drilling expands to meet an ever-growing demand. For those who must respond to this kind of disaster, the first line of action should be to know what is going on. This includes knowing where an oil plume is at any given time, where and how fast it is moving, and how it is evolving or degrading. We have experimented in the laboratory with induced polarization as a method to track hydrocarbons in the seawater column and find that finely dispersed oil in seawater gives rise to a large distributed capacitance. From previous sea trials, we infer this could potentially be used to both map and characterize oil plumes, down to a ratio of less than 0.001 oil-to-seawater, drifting and evolving in the deep ocean. A side benefit demonstrated in some earlier sea trials is that this same approach in modified form can also map certain heavy placer minerals, as well as communication cables, pipelines, and wrecks buried beneath the seafloor

Developmental system drift and flexibility in evolutionary trajectories

The comparative analysis of homologous characters is a staple of evolutionary developmental biology and often involves extrapolating from experimental data in model organisms to infer developmental events in non-model organisms. In order to determine the general importance of data obtained in model organisms, it is critical to know how often and to what degree similar phenotypes expressed in different taxa are formed by divergent developmental processes. Both comparative studies of distantly related species and genetic analysis of closely related species indicate that many characters known to be homologous between taxa have diverged in their morphogenetic or gene regulatory underpinnings. This process, which we call “developmental system drift” (DSD), is apparently ubiquitous and has significant implications for the flexibility of developmental evolution of both conserved and evolving characters. Current data on the population genetics and molecular mechanisms of DSD illustrate how the details of developmental processes are constantly changing within evolutionary lineages, indicating that developmental systems may possess a great deal of plasticity in their responses to natural selection

Using Inquiry-Based Teaching and Kids Inquiry Conferences to Strengthen Elementary Science Instruction and to Encourage More Students to Pursue Science Careers

For the past 20 years, there has been a push to improve the teaching and learning of science in elementary schools. One strong reason for this was the release of the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). The Standards articulated not only what K-12 students should know (science content standards), but also how science teachers needed to teach (teaching standards) and be continuously supported (professional development standards). The Standards also considered ways to support inquiry-based and meaningful science learning for K-12 students (program and system standards). According to the NRC, one ot:·the four reasons underpinning all of this is because the goals for science education within the school day are to educate students who could increase their economic productivity through the use of knowledge, understanding and skills of the scientifically literate person in their careers (1996, p. 13). Additional reasons for this push include greater attention to the STEM fields, evolving and expanding global networks, and an ever-increasing list of accountability mechanisms thrust upon schools and teachers (Marx and Harris 2006). Clearly, in order to pursue a career in a scientific field, children need knowledge and skills very different from those traditionally taught in elementary schools. Unfortunately, what occurs in elementary schools is the opposite of what the Standards advocate

Developing nursing competence: Future proofing nurses for the changing practice requirements of 21st century healthcare.

There's a conundrum that is taxing us at the moment – how can we see into the future to know what we need to know, to be prepared for things to come? Obviously none of us has the actual ability to ‘see’ into the future, but we are very good at distilling trends from the past, projecting them forwards and developing plans for action in the here and now. We try to create what Alvin Toffler calls ‘time spanners’ – things to connect us to the future (Toffler, 1970). However, the further we move away from today, the more uncertain we become about our predictions and our ability to cope: our spanners are too short. We can see elements of this conundrum in the preamble to the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) draft Standards of Proficiency for Registered Nurses, the council stated that: “Registered nurses provide care to people at every stage of life across all care settings. They work in the context of continual change, challenging environments, growing diversity and rapidly evolving technologies. It is therefore essential that they are equipped with the knowledge, confidence and transferrable skills needed to respond to these demands. (NMC, 2017, p.3)

American Lawyers and International Competence

Lawyers trained in U.S. law schools learn that the Constitution gives Congress the power [t]o define and punish... offenses against the Law of Nations. Some might also be able to cite the oft-quoted dicta from the Supreme Court\u27s decision in The Paquete Habana that International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. But what does this mean for today\u27s practitioner? One century after Paquete Habana, we ask what is international law, how does it affect U.S. legal practice, and how should the law schools prepare their students? This article will proceed with the following main arguments: 1. What we call international law is currently in a period of rapid transformation; 2. It is more important than ever that graduating law students have at least a basic knowledge of the structure and instruments of public and private international law, as well as comparative law, because: a. International law is increasingly part of the U.S. lawyer\u27s world, whether they know it [or] not; and, b. U.S. law has been and continues to be a defining feature of international law. By assessing how the practice of law is evolving, this article hopes to provide signposts for ways in which the academy should adjust the methods and substance of legal education