Bionanotechnology to Save the Environment

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating atoms and molecules in the nanoscale thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. The world market for products that contain nanomaterials is expected to increase enormously in the future. The use of nanotechnology has stretched across various streams of science, from electronics to medicine and has also found applications in the field of cosmetics. How will this revolution impact our lifestyle and our planet? Very often the progresses of science, human knowledge and evolution of our lifestyle has been associated with devastating effects on our forests, oceans and more in general on our planet. The real challenge in the years to come is the sustainability of human evolution. The reader of this interesting book will discover how nanotechnology, and in particular nanomaterials derived from plant biomass and fishery’s waste, can improve the quality of our environment by reducing carbon emissions, improving the recycling of materials and even, in the long run, became a profitable business. Green nanotechnologies can be applied to a huge number of products ranging from intelligent textiles to smart drugs or functional polymers which can have a big impact on our daily lives, but nevertheless help us in saving our biodiversity and our planet. However, to fully achieve all these benefits, companies and scientists should be supported by National and International Agencies and Institutions in order to facilitate and support scientific development in this field allowing from one side the protection of intellectual property, but on the other giving accessibility of these technologies to emerging countries for improving the quality of life and the environment all over the world equally

Biocatalysis: Chemical Biosynthesis

This book has been written with the purpose of providing a vision of a topic which is on the edge of biology and chemistry. As well, we want to provide an updated vision of the potentials and limitations of biocatalysis, especially with respect to applications in processes of organic synthesis, fine chemicals, and medicine. This book pretends to illustrate the potential of an excellent overview of recent progress on the assessment of granted patents as a useful tool in asymmetric synthesis. Some distinguished researchers have contributed to this endeavor with their knowledge, their commitment and their encouragemen

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Did You Take Care of Everybody? Insights on Crisis Management From Senior Student Affairs Professionals

This constructivist narrative study explored the experiences of five senior student affairs administrators who responded to an organizational crisis impacting their universities. Crisis management is a critical competency for higher education leaders (Peters, 2014) and involves the prevention, mitigation, and planning prior to a crisis; response and recovery during the crisis; and learning and changing following a crisis (Zdziarski, 2006). This study was guided by the research question: how do campus leaders at an institution of higher education (IHE) make meaning of a campus crisis event? Five participants, all of whom are senior student affairs professionals with extensive crisis management experience, shared their stories of responding to the death of a student or staff member on campus. Death is often unexpected and particularly challenging on college campuses, since college is often considered to be a safe environment characterized by tight-knit social communities (Cintrón, 2007). Using crystallization as an overarching framework for understanding, this researcher used narrative interviewing and reflective drawing to facilitate participants’ sharing of their crisis stories. Two distinct scholarly contributions emerged from this study, each employing divergent analytical approaches that were then represented as research manuscripts. The first manuscript, which used organizational frames as a theoretical framework to analyze participants’ stories, drew upon the narrative interview data to elicit the following themes: student affairs’ leaders’ interactions with families, impacts on student affairs leaders’ families, tensions between structure and intuition, adaptability as necessity, and applying lessons learned to organizational change. The second piece, in which the author created transcription poetry as an analytical strategy, situated poems derived from transcript data adjacent to narrative passages and the participants’ reflective drawings to create a tapestry of meaning. Following the presentation of this tapestry, the author reflected upon the methodological challenges that emerged during the research process, including how narrative interviewing opened the way for deep sharing of stories, the use of poemishness and dilemmas of poetic (re)presentation, dilemmas in generating participant-driven reflective images, and the author’s own process of meaning-making while wrestling with the topic of death. The findings in both articles make significant contributions to both the scholarly literature on crisis management in student affairs and higher education as well as the methodological literature on arts-based research, namely the use of transcription poetry and reflective drawing. Since crisis management is an essential competency for student affairs leaders, implications for student affairs graduate preparation and professional practice are discussed

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe