From Informational Barrier to Ethical Obligation: Evolving Perceptions of Teaching Energy in Architecture

In 1973, the OPEAC oil embargo shocked America out of its energy complacency—the era of cheap, seemingly limitless energy had come to an abrupt, disruptive halt. The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) responded, publishing Architecture, Energy & Education in 1984, a mere 11 years after the energy crisis began. Architecture, Energy & Education identified four barriers to teaching energy in architecture: methodological, structural, attitudinal, and informational. Of the four barriers, the informational barrier was arguably the most formidable, because energy modeling was slow and inaccessible during the 1980s. However, this situation rapidly changed in the 1990s and early 2000s during what has been called the “digital turn in architecture.” With more computing power and accessible, graphic-based interfaces, energy modeling left the realm of the programming specialist and joined the realm of the practitioner. Flash forward to today, when architects have access to nearly real-time energy modeling. This paper argues that the accessibility of such modeling mandates that architects use it for the benefit of society. In other words, the digital turn has resulted in an ethical obligation

Writing-in-Action: Teaching Technical Writing through the Lens of the Reflective Practitioner

Technical writing is a critical component of technical education. Many professors who teach environmental building systems, structures, or other technical courses realize the value of assigning technical reports, which require students to gather data, to analyze that data, and to draw conclusions in a cogent manner. Those of us who teach technical courses and read our students’ reports also know how poorly written those reports typically are. Gerald Grow argued in The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers that architects think—and therefore write—differently than the general population. If Grow is right, should we not develop a unique pedagogy for teaching architects how to communicate through technical writing? And if so, which pedagogy is correct? In The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön investigated the way that architects and other professionals work through a problem using a process of testing potential solutions, what Schön called “knowing-in-action,” “reflection-in-action,” and “reflecting on reflection-in- action” (his term for meta-thinking). Because the writing process mirrors the design process in many ways, Schön’s ideas for educating the reflective practitioner should be appropriate for teaching architecture students to write more effectively, specifically when they are assigned technical reports. This paper is the first step in a planned investigation of applying Schön’s theory of the “reflective practitioner” to the discipline of technical writing. As a first step, this paper begins with a literature review that examines writing manuals created for architects and other design professionals, identifying the way those manuals apply techniques compatible with Schön’s theories. Next, this paper offers a brief review of writing programs at several architecture schools. Following that discussion, this paper introduces some of Donald Schön’s major concepts. Finally, this paper concludes with a next steps section that outlines a proposed, long-term research project built around the proposed concept of “writing-in-action.

Entropy locking

We prove that in certain one-parameter families of piecewise continuous piecewise linear interval maps with two laps, topological entropy stays constant as the parameter varies. The proof is simple and applies to a large set of families

An Analysis of Sex Differences in Teacher-Student Interaction as Manifest in Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior Cues

Purpose The purpose of this investigation was to analyze sex differences in teacher-student interaction as manifest in verbal and nonverbal behavior cues. Procedure Four female fifth and sixth-grade teachers and 105 gifted students (53 males and 52 females) were the subjects whose verbal and nonverbal behavior was recorded on 16 videotapes during 16 forty-minute class sessions. Following randomization, 8,648 behavior cues were coded on a matrix designed to accommodate a modified version of the French and Galloway IDER system of behavior analysis. Special reference was made to the sex differential as identified in the two categories of the system which specify teacher-initiated and student-initiated student talk. Thirteen null hypotheses were subjected to chi square tests for significance of difference. Findings Ten of the 13 null hypotheses were rejected. Although the percentages and ratios of the three exceptions indicated a tendency to differentiate, the differences were not statistically significant. In summary, the results were as follows: The female teachers of the fifth and sixth-grade gifted students initiated significantly more talk with male students than with female students; discriminated significantly between male and female students in favor of the male; tended to exhibit more restricting behavior toward female than toward male students; and exhibited more indirectness than directness and encouraging than restricting behavior toward both male and female students. Male students initiated talk with the female teacher significantly, more often than did female students. Conclusions Within its scope and limitations, the analysis derived the following conclusions: 1. There were manifest sex differences in teacher-student interaction in the classroom. 2. There was an apparent relationship between teacher-student sex differential and student docility. 3. There was an apparent relationship between sex differential in teacher-student interaction and teacher effectiveness. 4. There was an apparent relationship between sex differential in teacher-student interaction and student participation. 5. Students of the same sex as the teacher demonstrated more passivity in teacher-student verbal and nonverbal interaction than students of the opposite sex. 6. Opposite sex teachers manifested greater flexibility in teacher-student verbal and nonverbal behavior than teachers of the same sex as the student. 7. Opposite sex students responded more often to the teacher than students of the same sex as the teacher. 8. Opposite sex students initiated responses with the teacher more often than did same sex students. 9. Teachers tended to exhibit restricting behavior more often toward same sex students than toward opposite sex students

Beyond Human RIghts

The concept of Human Rights today holds the same sanctity as the divine right of kings. Underpinning Human Rights is a concept of a Human as an enduring metaphysical entity, a concept that has been inscribed onto bodies throughout history. Human Rights, as we think of them, say, in the context of international politics, operate through an ethics of equivalence, which is to say that underpinning these rights is an assumption of equality of all Humans universally. This ethic abstracts from the very Human beings it claims to represent, and it rests on the claim that there is an essence embedded within them that is inalienable, eternal, and equivalent in every Human. The problem is that these doctrines do not actually make people equal; they instead allow Humans to be viewed in abstraction from everything that makes them the persons that they are. My task is to challenge this concept

Neoadjuvant ifosfamide and epirubicin in the treatment of malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors

Background and Objectives. Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNSTs) are aggressive soft tissue sarcomas with poor overall survival. Response to chemotherapy has been debated for these tumors. Methods. We performed a retrospective analysis of the patients at our institution with a biopsy-proven diagnosis of MPNST that underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy prior to surgery. Results. We retrospectively identified five patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy with epirubicin and ifosfamide that demonstrated a 30% reduction in tumor growth and a 60% response rate by RECIST criteria. Additionally, a metabolic response was observed in all three patients who received serial PET scans during neoadjuvant treatment. The clinical benefit rate, which includes stable disease, was 100%. Conclusions. Our data suggest that MPNSTs do respond to epirubicin and ifosfamide based chemotherapy and prospective studies are warranted to further define the clinical benefit

In the absence of visual input: Electrophysiological evidence of infants’ mapping of labels onto auditory objects

Despite the prominence of non-visual semantic features for some words (e.g., siren or thunder), little is known about when and how the meanings of those words that refer to auditory objects can be acquired in early infancy. With associative learning being an important mechanism of word learning, we ask the question whether associations between sounds and words lead to similar learning effects as associations between visual objects and words. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, 10- to 12-month-old infants were presented with pairs of environmental sounds and pseudowords in either a consistent (where sound-word mapping can occur) or inconsistent manner. Subsequently, the infants were presented with sound-pseudoword combinations either matching or violating the consistent pairs from the training phase. In the training phase, we observed word-form familiarity effects and pairing consistency effects for ERPs time-locked to the onset of the word. The test phase revealed N400-like effects for violated pairs as compared to matching pairs. These results indicate that associative word learning is also possible for auditory objects before infants’ first birthday. The specific temporal occurrence of the N400-like effect and topological distribution of the ERPs suggests that the object’s modality has an impact on how novel words are processed