Steam's Third Man ---

Something about William Murdock, whose efforts not only helped James Watt, but are still making life easier for us toda

Fracture with Sequestrum

On July 10, 1951 a 9-month-old Guernsey heifer was admitted to Stange Memorial Clinic with a bony growth located on the left mandible

The Present and Future of Lighting Research

The aim of this paper is to consider where lighting research is today and what its future might be. There is little doubt that, today, lighting research is an active field. A brief review of the topics being studied reveals that they range from residual studies on visibility and visual discomfort, through attempts to identify the influence of lighting on factors beyond visibility such as mood and behaviour, to the whole new field of light and health. But activity alone is not enough to justify a future. For lighting research to have a future it is necessary for it to be influential. To become influential, research needs to focus its attention on outcomes that matter to people and the elements of those outcomes on which lighting is known to have a major influence. Further, researchers will have to be determined to overcome the barriers to changing lighting practice. By doing this, lighting research may change the world for the better, to be an important topic, not an irrelevance

In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster, and Race After Katrina

Studies evidence of environmental disparities by which poor and minority communities are disproportionately exposed to disasters, are less prepared, and have less access to relief agencies. Makes recommendations for preparedness and environmental justice

Perceptual-cognitive Training Improves Cross-Cultural Communication

Authoring adaptive training can present challenges because instructors, unit leaders, and other non-technical users need to understand and control adaptation in order to accept and make use of a training system such as GIFT. Therefore, adaptation should be presented in a manner that parallels the way these end users think about instruction (Wray, Folsom-Kovarik, Woods, & Jones, 2015). This work enabled future improvements in authoring for adaptation by adding several constructs inside GIFT. First, patterns added a new construct for defining learner behaviors and analytics that can drive adaptation. Second, misconceptions added information to GIFT concepts in the Learner Module about reasons that individuals might be performing Below Expectation. Third, mid-lesson reports tested a specific type of adaptive intervention that prompts learner reflection during training, with reduced authoring via reusable prompts.A randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the training effectiveness of GIFT when driving adaptive feedback in a newly integrated tool for perceptual and cognitive skills relevant to cross-cultural communication. The combination of GIFT plus the skill training was evaluated by a population of 74 West Point Cadets. A preliminary analysis supported the value of the patterns to identify different classes of learner experience and, in future, to let non-technical personnel define what high-level behaviors and groups of observations would help GIFT respond to these. The analysis also suggested new domain-general misconceptions that might be able to inform adaptation. The evaluation showed an improvement between pre-test and post-test scores across all users. The discovery of new patterns and misconceptions highlights opportunities for instructors or unit leaders to gather evidence about how training is progressing in GIFT and, with future incorporation into the GIFT authoring suite, to quickly add new adaptive interventions that make training more effective

Robert Tombs, Emile Chabal (eds), Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory

For the past century Britain and France have remained uneasy neighbours, despite their common membership in NATO and the European Union, and despite their struggle for survival against a common enemy in two world wars. This is usually explained by reference to their long history of mutual antagonism in earlier times and their imperial rivalry which endured into the twentieth century. However, the contributors to this important collection of essays argue that it is also bound up with their dif..