The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

A Multidisciplinary Course to Implement Bioengineering Design Projects for Persons with Disabilities

There is a growing need to educate future engineers in the multidisciplinary aspects of bioengineering systems design that go beyond the traditional senior design experience. Faculty in Engineering, Education, and Psychology at the University of Denver (DU), collaborated with faculty at the Denver Health Medical Center and received a grant from the National Science Foundation to address this need and develop projects that would aid persons with disabilities. Our approach is to educate the students in an elective course called Bioengineering System Design in the first quarter of the senior year to develop interview skills, interact with medical professionals, identify potential customers, and develop initial design requirements. Our course is then followed by the required senior design sequence in the second and third quarter. The lessons we learned while creating and delivering this course will be described in this paper

Using violence, seeking votes

In many cases, including some of the most destructive civil conflicts and some of the newest emerging democracies, militant and ex-militant groups form political parties to participate in elections. Despite the prevalence of such electoral participation, it has rarely been studied, and scholars have not explored its influence on outcomes such as conflict or democratization. A lack of comprehensive data has impeded this research. The dataset introduced in this article provides annual data on militant and ex-militant group participation in legislative elections between 1970 and 2010. The Militant Group Electoral Participation (MGEP) dataset allows for further empirical study of the patterns, causes, and consequences of this behavior. Moreover, in combination with other datasets, MGEP stands to provide additional insights on conflict, peace, democratization, and electoral politics more broadly. In this article, I describe MGEP, provide summary statistics on the data, and show its applications, including through a replication study on post-conflict elections