Multidisciplinary Engineering Systems 2nd and 3rd Year College-Wide Courses

Undergraduate engineering education today is ineffective in preparing students for multidisciplinary system integration and optimization - exactly what is needed by companies to become innovative and gain a competitive advantage in this global economy. While there is some movement in engineering education to change that, this change is not easy, as it involves a cultural change from the silo approach to a holistic approach. The ABET-required senior capstone multidisciplinary design course too often becomes a design-build-test exercise with the emphasis on just getting something done. Students rarely break out of their disciplinary comfort zone and thus fail to experience true multidisciplinary system design. What is needed are multidisciplinary systems courses, with a balance between theory and practice, between academic rigor and the best practices of industry, presented in an integrated way in the 2nd and 3rd years that prepares students for true multidisciplinary systems engineering at the senior level and beyond. The two courses presented here represent a significant curriculum improvement in response to this urgent need

Do Child Tax Benefits Affect the Wellbeing of Children? Evidence from Canadian Child Benefit Expansions

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family’s ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, books, and other expenditure-related inputs to a child’s development. In addition to this channel, many scholars have investigated the relationship between income and the psychological wellbeing of the family. By reducing stress and conflict, more income helps to foster an environment more conducive to healthy child development. In this paper, we exploit changes in child benefits in Canada to study these questions. Importantly, our approach allows us to make stronger causal inferences than has been possible with the existing, mostly correlational, evidence. Using variation in child benefits across province, time, and family type, we study outcomes spanning test scores, mental health, physical health, and deprivation measures. The findings suggest that child benefit programs in Canada had significant positive effects on test scores, as has been featured in the existing literature. However, we also find that several measures of both child and maternal mental health and well-being show marked improvement with higher child benefits. We find strong and interesting differences in the effects of benefits by sex of the child: benefits have stronger effects on educational outcomes and physical health for boys, and on mental health outcomes for girls. Our findings also provide some support for the hypothesis that income transfers operate through measures of family emotional well-being.Child Tax Benefits, Income Transfers, Child Development, Standardized Tests, Mental Health

Do Child Tax Benefits Affect the Wellbeing of Children? Evidence from Canadian Child Benefit Expansions

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family's ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, books, and other expenditure-related inputs to a child's development. In addition to this channel, many scholars have investigated the relationship between income and the psychological wellbeing of the family. By reducing stress and conflict, more income helps to foster an environment more conducive to healthy child development. In this paper, we exploit changes in child benefits in Canada to study these questions. Importantly, our approach allows us to make stronger causal inferences than has been possible with the existing, mostly correlational, evidence. Using variation in child benefits across province, time, and family type, we study outcomes spanning test scores, mental health, physical health, and deprivation measures. The findings suggest that child benefit programs in Canada had significant positive effects on test scores, as has been featured in the existing literature. However, we also find that several measures of both child and maternal mental health and well-being show marked improvement with higher child benefits. We find strong and interesting differences in the effects of benefits by sex of the child: benefits have stronger effects on educational outcomes and physical health for boys, and on mental health outcomes for girls.wellbeing,child tax,child benefits, health outcomes

The Integration of Child Tax Credits and Welfare: Evidence from the National Child Benefit Program

In 1998, the Canadian government introduced a new child tax credit. The innovation in the program was its integration with social assistance (welfare). Some provinces agreed to subtract the new federally-paid benefits from provincially-paid social assistance, partially lowering the welfare wall. Three provinces did not integrate benefits, providing a quasi-experimental framework for estimation. We find large changes in social assistance take-up and employment in provinces that provided the labour market incentives to do so. In our sample, the integration of benefits can account for around one third of the total decline in social assistance receipt between 1997 and 2000.

Methane, Carbon Monoxide, and Ammonia in Brown Dwarfs and Self-Luminous Giant Planets

We address disequilibrum abundances of some simple molecules in the atmospheres of solar composition brown dwarfs and self-luminous extrasolar giant planets using a kinetics-based 1D atmospheric chemistry model. Our approach is to use the full kinetics model to survey the parameter space with effective temperatures between 500 K and 1100 K. In all of these worlds equilibrium chemistry favors CH4 over CO in the parts of the atmosphere that can be seen from Earth, but in most disequilibrium favors CO. The small surface gravity of a planet strongly discriminates against CH4 when compared to an otherwise comparable brown dwarf. If vertical mixing is like Jupiter's, the transition from methane to CO occurs at 500 K in a planet. Sluggish vertical mixing can raise this to 600 K; but clouds or more vigorous vertical mixing could lower this to 400 K. The comparable thresholds in brown dwarfs are $1100\pm100$ K. Ammonia is also sensitive to gravity, but unlike CH4/CO, the NH3/N2 ratio is insensitive to mixing, which makes NH3 a potential proxy for gravity. HCN may become interesting in high gravity brown dwarfs with very strong vertical mixing. Detailed analysis of the CO-CH4 reaction network reveals that the bottleneck to CO hydrogenation goes through methanol, in partial agreement with previous work. Simple, easy to use quenching relations are derived by fitting to the complete chemistry of the full ensemble of models. These relations are valid for determining CO, CH4, NH3, HCN, and CO2 abundances in the range of self-luminous worlds we have studied but may not apply if atmospheres are strongly heated at high altitudes by processes not considered here (e.g., wave breaking).Comment: Astrophysical Journal, in press. Clarity improvements throughout and one new figure. 17 figures, 20 page

Flexor Reflex Decreases during Sympathetic Stimulation in Chronic Human Spinal Cord Injury

A better understanding of autonomic influence on motor reflex pathways in spinal cord injury is important to the clinical management of autonomic dysreflexia and spasticity in spinal cord injured patients. The purpose of this study was to examine the modulation of flexor reflex windup during episodes of induced sympathetic activity in chronic human spinal cord injury (SCI). We simultaneously measured peripheral vascular conductance and the windup of the flexor reflex in response to conditioning stimuli of electrocutaneous stimulation to the opposite leg and bladder percussion. Flexor reflexes were quantified using torque measurements of the response to a noxious electrical stimulus applied to the skin of the medial arch of the foot. Both bladder percussion and skin conditioning stimuli produced a reduction (43–67%) in the ankle and hip flexor torques (p \u3c 0.05) of the flexor reflex. This reduction was accompanied by a simultaneous reduction in vascular conductance, measured using venous plethysmography, with a time course that matched the flexor reflex depression. While there was an overall attenuation of the flexor reflex, windup of the flexor reflex to repeated stimuli was maintained during periods of increased sympathetic activity. This paradoxical depression of flexor reflexes and minimal effect on windup is consistent with inhibition of afferent feedback within the superficial dorsal horn. The results of this study bring attention to the possible interaction of motor and sympathetic reflexes in SCI above and below the T5 spinal level, and have implications for clinicians in spasticity management and for researchers investigating motor reflexes post SCI