Standards, Standards Everywhere: Assessing Current Initiatives for Human Spaceflight Standards and Their Potential Effect on Future Regulations

One of the critical questions facing the human spaceflight industry is how its activities will be regulated during the infancy of the industry. It is generally agreed that regulation is necessary to address safety risks to crew, passengers and third parties. However, there is also a concern that government agencies may over-regulate the industry in a manner that could create unnecessary administrative burdens and interfere with technological innovation. In fact, the growth of regulation over the human space industry has been quite slow. Although the United States enacted the Human Space Flight Requirements for Crew and Space Flight Participants in 2006, a moratorium on design and operations requirements was imposed until 2012 (later extended to 2015). Other countries have yet to issue regulations specifically addressing the human spaceflight industry. But while formal regulation is evolving slowly, multiple initiatives have been undertaken to develop voluntary operational and design standards that would establish best practices for the industry. Most notably, in 2013 the FAA issued Draft Established Practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety that will likely lay the groundwork for future regulations. Non-governmental organizations are also developing operational and design standards, including the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, the International Standards Organization, and the IAASS. Multiple questions arise from this situation. Do these standard-setting processes have sufficient participation from industry to render the resulting standards legitimate? Do some standards rely excessively on legacy government program practices at the expense of innovative future practices? Could voluntary adherence to safety standards forestall excessive government regulation? Of course, the ultimate question is whether these standards will have a beneficial influence on the success of the human spaceflight industry

Common Sense About the Common Core

Is the Common Core the best thing since sliced bread, or the work of the devil? Is it brand new, or a rehash of old ideas? Is it anything more than a brand name, or is there substance? Can it work, given the implementation challenges in our political and school systems? Opinions about the Common Core are everywhere, but the op-eds I’ve seen are often short on facts, and equally short on common sense. A mathematician by training, I’ve worked for nearly 40 years as an education researcher, curriculum materials developer, test developer, standards writer, and teacher. What follows is a Q&A based on that experience. I focus on the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, known as CCSSM, but the issues apply to all standards (descriptions of what students should know and be able to do)

Once Upon a Time: A Model Literature Based Approach to Teaching Social Studies in Early Childhood

The purpose of this project was to design an early childhood social studies curriculum that integrated the use of children\u27s literature, to be used in early childhood classrooms. Listening to and reading stories about social studies topics helps students to see the importance of various social studies issues and will allow them to connect personally with the theme by completing a wide range of related activities. National and state standards require students to understand many social studies concepts and using children\u27s literature as a vehicle for learning the required standards can help students see the idea that social studies relates to everyone, everywhere

Implementation-Oblivious Transparent Checkpoint-Restart for MPI

This work presents experience with traditional use cases of checkpointing on a novel platform. A single codebase (MANA) transparently checkpoints production workloads for major available MPI implementations: "develop once, run everywhere". The new platform enables application developers to compile their application against any of the available standards-compliant MPI implementations, and test each MPI implementation according to performance or other features.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

A Dying Penalty?

The death penalty is doomed. Nothing is more certainly engraved in the book of human destiny than that capital punishment eventually will be abolished everywhere, including Georgia. It is not a question of whether but only of when, to adopt the felicitous words of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society will end all executions forever

Education Safety For Cosmetology In The Dallas Independent School District

It is most pertinent that safety habits be established and practiced, because of the essentiality placed upon human being. It is imperative that attention be given to the welfare and health of the individual* There is probably no other problem which is of rare increasing concern everywhere than safety—safety in the home, on the highway, in industry and school. host accidents in a beauty school are preventable. They do not just happen they are caused. It is obvious that they are caused by carelessness, ignorance, or negligence on somebody\u27s part. Accidents result from mistakes of individuals and misuse of materials and equipment. The vocational teacher undoubtedly can exert more influence. in having students to become safety-conscious than anyone else* A \u27well-qualified teacher, moreover, can keep unsafe student behavior at a minimum by providing his class with careful instruction, conscientious supervision, and intelligent, sympathetic guidance. THE PROBLEM Statement of the Problem.This study is an attempt to find out how adequately Cosmetology Departments in Dallas County Senior Schools meet safety standards set-up by the Texas State Board of Hairdressers and Cosmetologists and Texas Education Agency, ln approaching this problem, it is anticipated that the results of the findings will answer the following questions: 1* What are the Tarns State Board of Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Safety Standards fear Beauty Culture? 2 What are the Texas Education Agency Safety- Standards? 3 To What extent does the cosmetology instructor agree with these standards? 4. How well does the cosmetology instructor try to meet these standards? 5. To what extent has the cosmetology instructor prepared safety standards of her own? 6. Does knowing, practicing, and having necessary equipment reduce accidents in the cosmetology department

Standards are Everywhere: A Freely Available Introductory Online Educational Program on Standardization for Product Development

The collaboration between the Purdue Libraries and the Purdue Polytechnic Institute on standards education goes back to the 1980’s.[i] With a shared goal of preparing students for success after graduation, the Libraries and (then) Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) devised activities and instruction to show students that they will need to be able to find information ‘beyond the textbook’ to solve the problems they will face in the workplace. They will need specific information that relates to their particular circumstance, whether it is a material property, production technique, or an industry standard. In recent years, the Libraries and Polytechnic have incorporated basic information literacy skills—such as the abilities to seek, evaluate, apply, and document information—into a first-year Introduction to Design Thinking course, which is required of all majors. This leaves more time later in the curriculum to focus on building skills with specialized resources such as industry standards. Surveys of students[ii] identified that they needed to use standards as an important part of their co-op experiences, and that they learned about standards from interactions with their academic librarians. A survey of employers[iii] similarly found that they believed engineers need to understand the “fundamentals of standards development and knowledge to find and apply standards prior to employment.” ABET accreditation criteria also highlight the need for students to achieve facility with standards, with the Engineering Technology Accreditation Commission (ETAC)[iv] requiring the student outcomes of “an ability to conduct standard tests and measurements” (3.c), “an ability to…identify and use appropriate technical literature” (3.f), and the Mechanical Engineering Technology criteria requiring “basic familiarity and use of industry codes, specifications, and standards,” (e) and Electrical Engineering Technology, the “application of…engineering standards” (a). The new ABET Engineering Accreditation Criteria (EAC)[v] accreditation student outcomes are more general, but include “an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability” (3.c). Many of these considerations are impacted or governed by standards. The crux of the collaboration between libraries and engineering technology disciplines surrounds the complementary disciplinary expertise of finding and evaluating information (libraries) with that of interpreting and applying that information (engineering technology). As we surveyed the landscape of available online tutorials, we noticed that there was a gap; there is little, if any, material that is not specific to a particular Standards Developing Organization (SDO), institution, or discipline; targeted to undergraduate students; interactive; and includes information literacy components. Since there are many more engineering and engineering technology instructors than engineering librarians, we felt it was likely harder to find expertise in locating, evaluating, and organizing standards, the forte of librarians, in the typical classroom,. Thus, we felt a treatment of standards from an information perspective would be most beneficial contribution to the standards education community. As highly modular objects, the tutorial components can be easily dropped into any course as a supplementary resource or targeted to provide context for specific activities. In order to allow more time in the classroom for active learning, we sought to create online instructional objects that students could interact with before their activities in the classroom. We also wanted to make the resources available to anyone else interested in using them, including ‘feeder institutions’ to Purdue programs, so that students will be prepared to use standards in their advanced courses on our campus. With the generous support of NIST’s Standards Services Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program (#70NANB16H261), we were able to create these resources and make them available across campus and to a global audience. Our NIST-funded project consists of three components: a set of animated online tutorials which students can view as needed or directed by their instructors; a collection of case studies of ‘standards in action’ commissioned from students to show the importance and utilization of standards from a student viewpoint; and microcredentials (badges) to acknowledge student achievement in standards knowledge and application. All of these materials can be accessed from our project website (http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/NIST_standards). These materials are aimed at the novice student, perhaps in their first or second year of undergraduate study, when they are just exploring the discipline but have little technical expertise. The tutorials can be used as a stand-alone overview of standards, answering the questions such as what is a standard, how are they developed, how are they used, and what is the structure of a standard (i.e., how do you read a standard)

Trade’s Hidden Costs: Worker Rights in a Changing World Economy

[Excerpt] For decades, the U.S. foreign assistance program has sought with limited results to further economic development and growth in Third World countries. We have witnessed some countries making real progress toward development through industrialization, only to find more of their people trapped in hunger and poverty. Hopefully, it is apparent that for development to be effective, it must benefit the broadest sectors of the population within any society. Why are worker rights crucial to the development process? The capacity to form unions and to bargain collectively to achieve higher wages and safer working conditions is essential to the overall struggle of working people everywhere to achieve minimally decent living standards and to overcome hunger and poverty. The denial of worker rights, especially in Third World countries, tends to perpetuate poverty, to limit the benefits of economic development and growth to narrow, privileged elites and to sow the seeds of social instability and political rebellion

So You\u27re the Club Vice-President...

You, and all 4-H officers, are representatives. You represent not only the local group, but the whole 4-H program. Your skills and abilities, standards and ideals, grooming, speech, and even smiles represent 4-H’ers everywhere. Representing others is one of your most important responsi-bilities because it exists at all times—not just while you are at the 4-H meetings. Those who are not acquainted with 4-H, judge it by its officers.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/extension_4h_pubs/1021/thumbnail.jp