Practical Toolkit For Embedding Ethics In The Engineering Curriculum

The need to embed ethics into the engineering curriculum is a collective imperative if we are to successfully navigate complexity, uncertainty and challenging ethical issues to build a sustainable society that works for everyone. To maximise positive impact, behaviours such as inclusivity and sustainability must become instinctive – golden threads running through everything that engineers think and do. Proactively, bringing engineering ethics to the fore in engineering programmes is one way UK higher education equips future engineers with the skills and mindset they need to succeed. This workshop brings together best practice from expert practitioners across the UK, introducing a nationally curated ‘Engineering Ethics Toolkit’. To help educators to know and use the toolkit the workshop offered an attractive translation of engineering ethics teaching theory to the practice of engineering education. In this workshop, participants were introduced to a pragmatic approach to integrating ethics content into their teaching, using examples and a detailed and interactive curriculum map, which connects the elements of the toolkit. Our aim is to ensure the toolkit becomes an ongoing, regular component of engineering teaching and highlighting excellence in integrating ethics. The workshop was as a seed to encourage further case studies to be developed and to also explore what can yet be done in this space to ensure the next generation of engineers are well-equipped to address the ethical issues they face

PRACTICAL TOOLKIT FOR EMBEDDING ETHICS IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

The need to embed ethics into the engineering curriculum is a collective imperative if we are to successfully navigate complexity, uncertainty and challenging ethical issues to build a sustainable society that works for everyone. To maximise positive impact, behaviours such as inclusivity and sustainability must become instinctive - golden threads running through everything that engineers think and do. Proactively, bringing engineering ethics to the fore in engineering programmes is one way UK higher education equips future engineers with the skills and mindset they need to succeed. This workshop brings together best practice from expert practitioners across the UK, introducing a nationally curated 'Engineering Ethics Toolkit'. To help educators to know and use the toolkit the workshop offered an attractive translation of engineering ethics teaching theory to the practice of engineering education. In this workshop, participants were introduced to a pragmatic approach to integrating ethics content into their teaching, using examples and a detailed and interactive curriculum map, which connects the elements of the toolkit. Our aim is to ensure the toolkit becomes an ongoing, regular component of engineering teaching and highlighting excellence in integrating ethics. The workshop was as a seed to encourage further case studies to be developed and to also explore what can yet be done in this space to ensure the next generation of engineers are well-equipped to address the ethical issues they face

Foraging Behavior and Success of a Mesopelagic Predator in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Insights from a Data-Rich Species, the Northern Elephant Seal

The mesopelagic zone of the northeast Pacific Ocean is an important foraging habitat for many predators, yet few studies have addressed the factors driving basin-scale predator distributions or inter-annual variability in foraging and breeding success. Understanding these processes is critical to reveal how conditions at sea cascade to population-level effects. To begin addressing these challenging questions, we collected diving, tracking, foraging success, and natality data for 297 adult female northern elephant seal migrations from 2004 to 2010. During the longer post-molting migration, individual energy gain rates were significant predictors of pregnancy. At sea, seals focused their foraging effort along a narrow band corresponding to the boundary between the sub-arctic and sub-tropical gyres. In contrast to shallow-diving predators, elephant seals target the gyre-gyre boundary throughout the year rather than follow the southward winter migration of surface features, such as the Transition Zone Chlorophyll Front. We also assessed the impact of added transit costs by studying seals at a colony near the southern extent of the species’ range, 1,150 km to the south. A much larger proportion of seals foraged locally, implying plasticity in foraging strategies and possibly prey type. While these findings are derived from a single species, the results may provide insight to the foraging patterns of many other meso-pelagic predators in the northeast Pacific Ocean

Journal of Teaching Effectiveness and Student Achievement Volume 1, Issue 1

JournalAngelo State University College EducationSupervised Field Experiences for Pre-­Service Teachers:Is it Worth the Effort? Dr. Tammy Abernathy, Dr. Ginny Beck, and Dr. Shanon Taylor………….…..5 Math Remediation?-­ Success is Possible! Dr. Deborah Banker and Dr. Stella Filizola …………………………...……………..17 Improving Pre-­Service Teacher Dispositions Dr. Marcia Bolton and Dr. Dana Reisboard ……….………………………………...24 An Investigation into the Expansive-­‐Restrictive Nature of Teachers’ Learning Situated in the Workplace Dr. Eric J. Feeney ……………………………………………………………………….………33 Using Metacognitive Awareness of Fluency to Enhance Vocabulary Dr. Teri Fowler and Dr. William Laird ………………………………………….……..44 Culturally Responsive Teaching: Increasing Involvement of Minority Students and Parents Ms. Angela Piña …………………………………………………………………………………52 Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions of Special Education Dr. S. Nina Saha-­‐Gupta, Dr. Margarita Lara, and Mr. Jeffrey House………………….60 The Teacher Preparation Initiative Dr. Yolanda Salgado, Dr. Janet A. Carter, Dr. Jeannine Hurst, and Dr. Ann Marie Smith……...…..7

TRPV1 in Brain Is Involved in Acetaminophen-Induced Antinociception

Background: Acetaminophen, the major active metabolite of acetanilide in man, has become one of the most popular overthe- counter analgesic and antipyretic agents, consumed by millions of people daily. However, its mechanism of action is still a matter of debate. We have previously shown that acetaminophen is further metabolized to N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-5Z,8Z,11Z,14Z-eicosatetraenamide (AM404) by fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) in the rat and mouse brain and that this metabolite is a potent activator of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) in vitro. Pharmacological activation of TRPV1 in the midbrain periaqueductal gray elicits antinociception in rats. It is therefore possible that activation of TRPV1 in the brain contributes to the analgesic effect of acetaminophen. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we show that the antinociceptive effect of acetaminophen at an oral dose lacking hypolocomotor activity is absent in FAAH and TRPV1 knockout mice in the formalin, tail immersion and von Frey tests. This dose of acetaminophen did not affect the global brain contents of prostaglandin E-2 (PGE(2)) and endocannabinoids. Intracerebroventricular injection of AM404 produced a TRPV1-mediated antinociceptive effect in the mouse formalin test. Pharmacological inhibition of TRPV1 in the brain by intracerebroventricular capsazepine injection abolished the antinociceptive effect of oral acetaminophen in the same test. Conclusions: This study shows that TRPV1 in brain is involved in the antinociceptive action of acetaminophen and provides a strategy for developing central nervous system active oral analgesics based on the coexpression of FAAH and TRPV1 in the brain

Genetic variants of HvCbf14 are statistically associated with frost tolerance in a European germplasm collection of Hordeum vulgare

Two quantitative trait loci (Fr-H1 and Fr-H2) for frost tolerance (FT) have been discovered on the long arm of chromosome 5H in barley. Two tightly linked groups of CBF genes, known to play a key role in the FT regulatory network in A. thaliana, have been found to co-segregate with Fr-H2. Here, we investigate the allelic variations of four barley CBF genes (HvCbf3, HvCbf6, HvCbf9 and HvCbf14) in a panel of European cultivars, landraces and H. spontaneum accessions. In the cultivars a reduction of nucleotide and haplotype diversities in CBFs compared with the landraces and the wild ancestor H. spontaneum, was evident. In particular, in cultivars the loss of HvCbf9 genetic variants was higher compared to other sequences. In order to verify if the pattern of CBF genetic variants correlated with the level of FT, an association procedure was adopted. The pairwise analysis of linkage disequilibrium (LD) among the genetic variants in four CBF genes was computed to evaluate the resolution of the association procedure. The pairwise plotting revealed a low level of LD in cultivated varieties, despite the tight physical linkage of CBF genes analysed. A structured association procedure based on a general liner model was implemented, including the variants in CBFs, of Vrn-H1, and of two reference genes not involved in FT (α-Amy1 and Gapdh) and considering the phenotypic data for FT. Association analysis recovered two nucleotide variants of HvCbf14 and one nucleotide variant of Vrn-H1 as statistically associated to FT

Measurement of neutron star parameters: a review of methods for low-mass X-ray binaries

Measurement of at least three independent parameters, for example, mass, radius and spin frequency, of a neutron star is probably the only way to understand the nature of its supranuclear core matter. Such a measurement is extremely difficult because of various systematic uncertainties. The lack of knowledge of several system parameter values gives rise to such systematics. Low-mass X-ray binaries, which contain neutron stars, provide a number of methods to constrain the stellar parameters. Joint application of these methods has a great potential to significantly reduce the systematic uncertainties, and hence to measure three independent neutron star parameters accurately. Here we review the methods based on (1) thermonuclear X-ray bursts; (2) accretion-powered millisecond-period pulsations; (3) kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillations; (4) broad relativistic iron lines; (5) quiescent emissions; and (6) binary orbital motions.Comment: 30 pages, 20 figures, 1 table, An Invited and Refereed Review, will be published in "Advances in Space Research

Dark halo microphysics and massive black hole scaling relations in galaxies

We investigate the black hole (BH) scaling relation in galaxies using a model in which the galaxy halo and central BH are a self-gravitating sphere of dark matter (DM) with an isotropic, adiabatic equation of state. The equipotential where the escape velocity approaches the speed of light defines the horizon of the BH. We find that the BH mass (m•) depends on the DM entropy, when the effective thermal degrees of freedom (F) are specified. Relations between BH and galaxy properties arise naturally, with the BH mass and DM velocity dispersion following m• ∝ σF/2 (for global mean density set by external cosmogony). Imposing observationally derived constraints on F provides insight into the microphysics of DM. Given that DM velocities and stellar velocities are comparable, the empirical correlation between m• and stellar velocity dispersions σ⋆ implies that 7 6 the dense dark envelope surrounding the BH approaches the mean density of the BH itself, while the outer halo can show a nearly uniform kpc-scale core resembling those observed in galaxies