New civil engineering program criteria: The rest of the story

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) organized the Civil Engineering Program Criteria Task Committee in October 2012 whose charge is to determine if the current ABET Civil Engineering Program Criteria (CEPC) should be changed to reflect one or more of the 24 outcomes of the second edition of the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge published in 2008. After two years of work, a proposed CEPC has been approved by the relevant ASCE committees and forwarded to ABET for approval and incorporation into accreditation criteria. A paper chronicling the committee’s efforts through a review of the literature, the committee’s methodology and process, and the key issues that emerged was presented at the 2014 ASEE Annual Conference in Indianapolis. This paper updates that effort by presenting the resulting proposed criteria, the changes generated by constituency feedback, progress on the Commentary, the existing gap between the proposed accreditation criteria and the current body of knowledge, and the future work of the committee

Accreditation insights and the next body of knowledge

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published the second edition of the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge (BOK2) in 2008 expanding the knowledge, skills and attitudes required of future civil engineers. There were major changes to the BOK2 as the number of expected outcomes increased from 15 to 24 and the cognitive level of attainment was more precisely defined. A major implementation and enforcement mechanism for the BOK is the ABET accreditation criteria which includes both general criteria 3 and 5 and the discipline-specific program criteria. Of those, the program criteria are the easiest to change. In 2013, ASCE created the Civil Engineering Program Criteria Task Committee (CEPCTC) whose charge was to determine if the current CEPC should be changed to reflect an additional one or more of the 24 outcomes of BOK2. After two years of meetings, conference calls, draft criteria, constituency input, and associated revisions, a proposed change to the CEPC was approved by ASCE and submitted to ABET for approval. The CEPC was supplemented with an associated commentary. The proposed CEPC are currently going through the two-year ABET approval process and are expected to go into effect in September 2016. The results of the committee’s work were presented in papers at the 2014 and 2015 ASEE Annual Conferences in Indianapolis and Seattle.1,2 The Body of Knowledge is a living document that will continue to be updated and revised. ASCE has developed an eight year cycle of change that will make future iterations of the BOK and CEPC both systematic and predictable.3 As such, a Body of Knowledge Task Committee (BOKTC) is scheduled to be formed in October 2016. The BOKTC could recommend no revisions, minor revisions, or extensive revisions to BOK2. If substantive changes are recommended to BOK2, the master plan calls for the completion of the third edition of the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century (BOK3) before October 2018. Because the CEPC was created to be compatible with the BOK2 outcomes, the CEPCTC studied the BOK2 in depth. The BOK2 is an aspirational and visionary document which only partially accounts for the real-world constraints faced by engineering programs in terms of mandated maximum units in an undergraduate program and additional requirements imposed by a state government or a university. Conversely, the ABET accreditation criteria (general plus program) define the minimum requirements for a program to receive accreditation. There will naturally be a gap between those two standards. For the cycle of change to be successful, the insights and lessons learned from the development of the CEPC should be communicated with the BOKTC and vice versa. This paper attempts to do that. The paper will define the gap between (1) the BOK2 and (2) EAC/ABET accreditation criteria (general plus proposed CEPC) and make recommendations for closing the gap. During their work, the CEPCTC encountered issues with the BOK2 that suggest potential revisions for the BOK3. This paper is a mechanism for sharing CEPCTC insights, lessons learned, suggestions and recommendations with the rest of the academic and professional community

Interdisciplinary design - Forming and evaluating teams

The College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University has offered an upper division, interdisciplinary experience for every student in the form of a project based, team oriented five unit studio laboratory. The course is now in its fifth year and requires small teams of architecture, engineering and construction students to complete the schematic level design of an actual building for a real client. The quality of the projects and student deliverables has been outstanding and students are clearly meeting the objective to prepare an integrated building design. The other course objective is to function as a member of an interdisciplinary team, which is more difficult to quantify. This paper focuses on the selection and assessment of teams in this course. Various personality and skills assessments are completed and used in the formations of teams. Assessment data on team performance are presented and future actions for this project are discussed

Structural and superconducting transition in selenium under high pressures

First-principles calculations are performed for electronic structures of two high pressure phases of solid selenium, $\beta$-Po and bcc. Our calculation reproduces well the pressure-induced phase transition from $\beta$-Po to bcc observed in selenium. The calculated transition pressure is 30 GPa lower than the observed one, but the calculated pressure dependence of the lattice parameters agrees fairly well with the observations in a wide range of pressure. We estimate the superconducting transition temperature $T_{\rm c}$ of both the $\beta$-Po and the bcc phases by calculating the phonon dispersion and the electron-phonon interaction on the basis of density-functional perturbation theory. The calculated $T_{\rm c}$ shows a characteristic pressure dependence, i.e. it is rather pressure independent in the $\beta$-Po phase, shows a discontinuous jump at the transition from $\beta$-Po to bcc, and then decreases rapidly with increasing pressure in the bcc phase.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure

Pair fluctuation induced pseudogap in the normal phase of the two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model at weak coupling

One-particle spectral properties in the normal phase of the two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model are investigated in the weak coupling regime using the non-selfconsistent T-matrix approximation. The corresponding equations are evaluated numerically directly on the real frequency axis. For temperatures sufficiently close to the superconducting transition temperature a pseudogap in the one-particle spectral function is observed, which can be assigned to the increasing importance of pair fluctuations.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figure

Bcc 4^4He as a Coherent Quantum Solid

In this work we investigate implications of the quantum nature of bcc $^{4}$% He. We show that it is a unique solid phase with both a lattice structure and an Off-Diagonal Long Range Order of coherently oscillating local electric dipole moments. These dipoles arise from the local motion of the atoms in the crystal potential well, and oscillate in synchrony to reduce the dipolar interaction energy. The dipolar ground-state is therefore found to be a coherent state with a well defined global phase and a three-component complex order parameter. The condensation energy of the dipoles in the bcc phase stabilizes it over the hcp phase at finite temperatures. We further show that there can be fermionic excitations of this ground-state and predict that they form an optical-like branch in the (110) direction. A comparison with 'super-solid' models is also discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Pressure-dependence of electron-phonon coupling and the superconducting phase in hcp Fe - a linear response study

A recent experiment by Shimizu et al. has provided evidence of a superconducting phase in hcp Fe under pressure. To study the pressure-dependence of this superconducting phase we have calculated the phonon frequencies and the electron-phonon coupling in hcp Fe as a function of the lattice parameter, using the linear response (LR) scheme and the full potential linear muffin-tin orbital (FP-LMTO) method. Calculated phonon spectra and the Eliashberg functions $\alpha^2 F$ indicate that conventional s-wave electron-phonon coupling can definitely account for the appearance of the superconducting phase in hcp Fe. However, the observed change in the transition temperature with increasing pressure is far too rapid compared with the calculated results. For comparison with the linear response results, we have computed the electron-phonon coupling also by using the rigid muffin-tin (RMT) approximation. From both the LR and the RMT results it appears that electron-phonon interaction alone cannot explain the small range of volume over which superconductivity is observed. It is shown that ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as well as scattering from magnetic impurities (spin-ordered clusters) can account for the observed values of the transition temperatures but cannot substantially improve the agreeemnt between the calculated and observed presure/volume range of the superconducting phase. A simplified treatment of p-wave pairing leads to extremely small ($\leq 10^{-2}$ K) transition temperatures. Thus our calculations seem to rule out both $s$- and $p$- wave superconductivity in hcp Fe.Comment: 12 pages, submitted to PR

Measurement of the Charged Multiplicities in b, c and Light Quark Events from Z0 Decays

Average charged multiplicities have been measured separately in $b$, $c$ and light quark ($u,d,s$) events from $Z^0$ decays measured in the SLD experiment. Impact parameters of charged tracks were used to select enriched samples of $b$ and light quark events, and reconstructed charmed mesons were used to select $c$ quark events. We measured the charged multiplicities: $\bar{n}_{uds} = 20.21 \pm 0.10 (\rm{stat.})\pm 0.22(\rm{syst.})$, $\bar{n}_{c} = 21.28 \pm 0.46(\rm{stat.}) ^{+0.41}_{-0.36}(\rm{syst.})$ $\bar{n}_{b} = 23.14 \pm 0.10(\rm{stat.}) ^{+0.38}_{-0.37}(\rm{syst.})$, from which we derived the differences between the total average charged multiplicities of $c$ or $b$ quark events and light quark events: $\Delta \bar{n}_c = 1.07 \pm 0.47(\rm{stat.})^{+0.36}_{-0.30}(\rm{syst.})$ and $\Delta \bar{n}_b = 2.93 \pm 0.14(\rm{stat.})^{+0.30}_{-0.29}(\rm{syst.})$. We compared these measurements with those at lower center-of-mass energies and with perturbative QCD predictions. These combined results are in agreement with the QCD expectations and disfavor the hypothesis of flavor-independent fragmentation.Comment: 19 pages LaTex, 4 EPS figures, to appear in Physics Letters

Ripples in a pond: Do social work students need to learn about terrorism?

In the face of heightened awareness of terrorism, however it is defined, the challenges for social work are legion. Social work roles may include working with the military to ensure the well-being of service-men and women and their families when bereaved or injured, as well as being prepared to support the public within the emergency context of an overt act of terrorism. This paper reviews some of the literature concerning how social work responds to confl ict and terrorism before reporting a smallscale qualitative study examining the views of social work students, on a qualifying programme in the UK, of terrorism and the need for knowledge and understanding as part of their education