Embedding sustainability through systems thinking in practice: some experiences from the Open University

One initiative that has emerged during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through the work of the Open University Systems group has been its postgraduate programme in Systems Thinking and Practice (STiP). Built on some forty years’ experience of systems teaching and research at the Open University (OU), this open learning, distance taught programme is designed to develop students’ abilities to tackle complex messy situations, to provide skills to think more holistically and to work more collaboratively to avoid systemic failures. This paper critically reviews the trajectory of this programme –its past, present and future. It discusses the STiP programme’s many boundaries with other programmes and across sectors. Challenges of epistemology, ethics and purpose are explored, in relation to education for sustainability. The programme’s many and varied teaching and learning processes are explicated. The pedagogy of the STiP programme is grounded in a diverse range of students’ experiences and needs that by no means all focus explicitly, or primarily, on sustainability or sustainable development. Many OU students study part-time alongside their other commitments, both work and community-based. STiP students are all interested in systems and learning. But what STiP is a part of for them varies considerably. Students come mainly from the UK and rest of Europe. Many of their interactions are online through several different fora. A diverse, active and critical OU STiP alumni community has developed, initiated by the early graduates of the programme. Academics responsible for the programme also participate in this community’s deliberations, at the invitation of student alumni. In this paper, the authors build on their various experiences of the STiP programme and re-explore its contexts and boundaries from an ESD point of view. They use some of the systems heuristics that they teach, to critically reflect on both what is being achieved through this programme in relation to education for sustainability and what they and some of their past students and associate lecturers think ought to be occurring in this respect as they go forward

Elastohydrodynamic study of actin filaments using fluorescence microscopy

We probed the bending of actin subject to external forcing and viscous drag. Single actin filaments were moved perpendicular to their long axis in an oscillatory way by means of an optically tweezed latex bead attached to one end of the filaments. Shapes of these polymers were observed by epifluorescence microscopy. They were found to be in agreement with predictions of semiflexible polymer theory and slender-body hydrodynamics. A persistence length of $7.4 \pm 0.2 \mu$m could be extracted.Comment: RevTex, 4 pages, 5 eps figs, submitted to PR

Misconceptions about Violence and Undocumented Immigrants

This issue briefs examines the perceived link between undocumented immigrants and criminal activity, with a primary focus on the states in the American Southwest. Many prominent American politicians have made claims about illegal immigrants and violent crime and these claims have been determined to be false in many cases

Catholicism and the Latino Vote

This brief focuses on Latinos and how Catholicism might influence their voting behavior. A large majority of Latinos are Catholic and a key indicator of how they cast their ballots is how closely a candidate or policy reflects traditional Catholic values. The Republican Party shares so many of these values which makes it attractive to Latinos, however, because of a recent absence of strong “Catholic rhetoric” in the Republican Party, not only are more Latinos joining the Democrats, they are becoming less religious

Issue brief: Arab Americans and language policy

This brief describes the contemporary state of language policy in the US focusing on Arab Americans role in American language policy. Also it serves to show education rates and levels of discrimination on Arab Americans

African Americans and Social Welfare

This issue brief details the modern interaction between African Americans and Social Welfare in the United States. Furthermore, it examines the employment and other economic indicators of African Americans and whether the social welfare is working to improvement these figures

The Occurrence and Distribution of River Redhorse, Moxostoma carinatum and Greater Redhorse, Moxostoma valenciennesi in the Sandusky River, Ohio

Author Institution: Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Division of Water Quality Monitoring and AssessmentElectrofishing collections at 10 locations in the middle Sandusky River mainstem between Tiffin and Fremont revealed the presence of previously unknown populations of river redhorse (Moxostoma carinatum) and greater redhorse (Moxostoma valenciennesi). The discovery of these populations expands the Lake Erie drainage distribution of both species which have been either declining in abundance or extirpated in many areas. It is doubtful that these species have recently invaded the middle Sandusky River since barriers to upstream fish movements have been in place in the vicinity of Fremont since the early 1800s. Both species snowed a preference for locations with a moderate to swift current, pool-run-riffle habitat, and a convoluted bedrock channel with a boulder, rubble, and gravel substrate. Sampling locations that were impounded or where the river was predominantly pooled contained comparatively few or no individuals

Towards the automation of forensic facial individualisation: Comparing forensic to non forensic eyebrow features

The Facial Identification Scientific Working Group (FISWG) publishes recommendations regarding one-to-one facial comparisons. At this moment a draft version of a facial image comparison feature list for morphological analysis has been published. This feature list is based on casework experience by forensic facial examiners. This paper investigates whether the performance of the FISWG eyebrow feature set can be considered as being "state-of-the-art". We compare the recognition performance of one particular state-of-the-art non forensic eyebrow feature set to a semi-automated version of the forensic FISWG eyebrow feature set. The recognition performance is measured in terms of the forensic relevant log-likelihood-ratio cost metric Cllr. It is shown the FISWG feature set can be considered as being "state-of-the-art" and there actually exists a collection of feature sets that have similar performance