Critical Thinking Activities and the Enhancement of Ethical Awareness: An application of a ‘Rhetoric of Disruption’ to the undergraduate general education classroom

This article explores how critical thinking activities and assignments can function to enhance students’ ethical awareness and sense of civic responsibility. Employing Levinas’s Othercentered theory of ethics, Burke’s notion of ‘the paradox of substance’, and Murray’s concept of ‘a rhetoric of disruption’, this article explores the nature of critical thinking activities designed to have students question their (often taken-for-granted) moral assumptions and interrogate their (often unexamined) moral identities. This article argues that such critical thinking activities can trigger a metacognitive destabilization of subjectivity, understood as a dialectical prerequisite (along with exposure to otherness) for increased ethical awareness. This theoretical model is illustrated through a discussion of three sample classroom activities designed to destabilize moral assumptions and identity, thereby clearing the way for a heightened acknowledgment of otherness. In so doing, this article provides an alternative (and dialectically inverted) strategy for addressing one of the central goals of many General Education curricula: the development of ethical awareness and civic responsibility. Rather than introducing students to alternative perspectives and divergent cultures with the expectation that heightened moral awareness will follow, this article suggests classroom activities and course assignments aimed at disrupting moral subjectivity and creating an opening in which otherness can be more fully acknowledged and the diversity of our world more fully appreciated

Theoretical study of the thermal behavior of free and alumina-supported Fe-C nanoparticles

The thermal behavior of free and alumina-supported iron-carbon nanoparticles is investigated via molecular dynamics simulations, in which the effect of the substrate is treated with a simple Morse potential fitted to ab initio data. We observe that the presence of the substrate raises the melting temperature of medium and large $Fe_{1-x}C_x$ nanoparticles ($x$ = 0-0.16, $N$ = 80-1000, non- magic numbers) by 40-60 K; it also plays an important role in defining the ground state of smaller Fe nanoparticles ($N$ = 50-80). The main focus of our study is the investigation of Fe-C phase diagrams as a function of the nanoparticle size. We find that as the cluster size decreases in the 1.1-1.6-nm-diameter range the eutectic point shifts significantly not only toward lower temperatures, as expected from the Gibbs-Thomson law, but also toward lower concentrations of C. The strong dependence of the maximum C solubility on the Fe-C cluster size may have important implications for the catalytic growth of carbon nanotubes by chemical vapor deposition.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, higher quality figures can be seen in article 9 at http://alpha.mems.duke.edu/wahyu

Building productive relationships with young people with SEBD in transition: the role of identity

This article reports a study of the experiences of school leavers with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD), which identified supportive relationships as key elements in young people demonstrating resilience through this transitional period. Almost all the young people involved in the study had access to potential helpers, but few managed to establish productive relationships with them. Analysis of interviews, conducted over a 15 month period with a group of 15 school leavers, their parents and those who worked with them, suggested that barriers and facilitators to relationship development existed at two levels: institutional and individual. This article focuses on the individual level, in which identity processes appear to play a key role. These processes are used to explain why some school leavers built productive relationships and thrived, whilst many failed to do so, and struggled. These findings have implications for policy, practice and theory

Mapping of functionalized regions on carbon nanotubes by scanning tunneling microscopy

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) gives us the opportunity to map the surface of functionalized carbon nanotubes in an energy resolved manner and with atomic precision. But this potential is largely untapped, mainly due to sample stability issues which inhibit reliable measurements. Here we present a simple and straightforward solution that makes away with this difficulty, by incorporating the functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) into a few layer graphene - nanotube composite. This enabled us to measure energy resolved tunneling conductance maps on the nanotubes, which shed light on the level of doping, charge transfer between tube and functional groups and the dependence of defect creation or functionalization on crystallographic orientation.Comment: Keywords: functionalization, carbon nanotubes, few layer graphene, STM, CITS, ST

A Study of the Formation of Single- and Double-Walled Carbon Nanotubes by a CVD Method

The reduction in H2/CH4 atmosphere of aluminum-iron oxides produces metal particles small enough to catalyze the formation of single-walled carbon nanotubes. Several experiments have been made using the same temperature profile and changing only the maximum temperature (800-1070 °C). Characterizations of the catalyst materials are performed using notably 57Fe Mo¨ssbauer spectroscopy. Electron microscopy and a macroscopical method are used to characterize the nanotubes. The nature of the iron species (Fe3+, R-Fe, ç-Fe-C, Fe3C) is correlated to their location in the material. The nature of the particles responsible for the high-temperature formation of the nanotubes is probably an Fe-C alloy which is, however, found as Fe3C by postreaction analysis. Increasing the reduction temperature increases the reduction yield and thus favors the formation of surface-metal particles, thus producing more nanotubes. The obtained carbon nanotubes are mostly single-walled and double-walled with an average diameter close to 2.5 nm. Several formation mechanisms are thought to be active. In particular, it is shown that the second wall can grow inside the first one but that subsequent ones are formed outside. It is also possible that under given experimental conditions, the smallest (<2 nm) catalyst particles preferentially produce double-walled rather than single-walled carbon nanotubes

Writing as skin:Negotiating the body in(to) learning about the managed self

We draw on the notion of ‘skin’ to discuss the ways in which writing in management and organisation studies wrestles with two drives in its endeavour to represent the reality of our ‘organised’ lives: the drive to share internal lived experience, and the drive to externalise and abstract. Through exploring skin as a metaphor for a negotiating interface between these forces in our writing, we (a) argue that both are critical parts of writing, needed in order to learn about management and organisation and (b) explore different ways in which they might be brought into contact. Reviewing, synthesising and building on critiques of ‘scientific’ writing that have been made from within management and organisation studies, and on creative commentary from the arts, we think reflexively about the ways in which writing mediates learning by being both representative of experience and an experience in itself. A collaboration between management scholar and creative writer, the text of this article is a critical-creative experiment that outlines the experiential ‘skin-text’ while simultaneously producing an example of such a text.</p

Expiratory flow rate, breath hold and anatomic dead space influence electronic nose ability to detect lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Electronic noses are composites of nanosensor arrays. Numerous studies showed their potential to detect lung cancer from breath samples by analysing exhaled volatile compound pattern ("breathprint"). Expiratory flow rate, breath hold and inclusion of anatomic dead space may influence the exhaled levels of some volatile compounds; however it has not been fully addressed how these factors affect electronic nose data. Therefore, the aim of the study was to investigate these effects. METHODS: 37 healthy subjects (44 +/- 14 years) and 27 patients with lung cancer (60 +/- 10 years) participated in the study. After deep inhalation through a volatile organic compound filter, subjects exhaled at two different flow rates (50 ml/sec and 75 ml/sec) into Teflon-coated bags. The effect of breath hold was analysed after 10 seconds of deep inhalation. We also studied the effect of anatomic dead space by excluding this fraction and comparing alveolar air to mixed (alveolar + anatomic dead space) air samples. Exhaled air samples were processed with Cyranose 320 electronic nose. RESULTS: Expiratory flow rate, breath hold and the inclusion of anatomic dead space significantly altered "breathprints" in healthy individuals (p 0.05). These factors also influenced the discrimination ability of the electronic nose to detect lung cancer significantly. CONCLUSIONS: We have shown that expiratory flow, breath hold and dead space influence exhaled volatile compound pattern assessed with electronic nose. These findings suggest critical methodological recommendations to standardise sample collections for electronic nose measurements

Thermal Decomposition of Co-Doped Calcium Tartrate and Use of the Products for Catalytic Chemical Vapor Deposition Synthesis of Carbon Nanotubes.

Thermal decomposition of Co-doped calcium tartrate in an inert atmosphere or air was studied using thermogravimetric analysis and X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectroscopy. It was shown that the powder substance containing 4 at.% of cobalt completely decomposes within 650-730 °C, depending on the environment, and the formation of Co clusters does not proceed before 470 °C. The products of decomposition were characterized by transmission electron microscopy, XAFS, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Surfaceoxidized Co metal nanoparticles as large as ∼5.6 ( 1.2 nm were found to form in an inert atmosphere, while the annealing in air led to a wide distribution of diameters of the nanoparticles, with the largest nanoparticles (30-50 nm) mainly present as a Co3O4 phase. It was found that the former nanoparticles catalyze the growth of CNTs from alcohol while a reducing atmosphere is required for activation of the latter nanoparticles. We propose the scheme of formation of CaO-supported catalyst from Co-doped tartrate, depending on the thermal decomposition conditions