What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are alsoexpecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughoutengineering programmes. Nevertheless, there is still little known on how the process of evaluating ethics can best serve the function of accreditation ensuring quality assurance and quality improvement. The aim of this paper is to look at the top-down approach and analyse what role engineering ethics plays in national accreditation documentations in Europe. A multi-country analysis of how and where ethics appears in the systems of accreditation was carried out for the UK, Ireland, France, and Switzerland. The competencies, programme outcomes or learning outcomes were reviewed and explicit or implicit references to ethics education were identified. A quantitative and qualitative word analysis was carried out by extracting verbs and comparing verb definitions that were stated. Verbs were categorised under Doing actions, Thinking actions or both and compared to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. In all cases, ethics was explicitly mentioned however limited to 1 or 2 sections of the documents reviewed. The majority of statements linking to ethics were implicit,opening room for interpretation. A more conscious effort to engage engineeringethics in all aspects of engineering programmes as well as using higher levels ofBloom’s taxonomy should be made where engineering ethics education is applied in practice

What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are alsoexpecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughoutengineering programmes. Nevertheless, there is still little known on how the process of evaluating ethics can best serve the function of accreditation ensuring quality assurance and quality improvement. The aim of this paper is to look at the top-down approach and analyse what role engineering ethics plays in national accreditation documentations in Europe. A multi-country analysis of how and where ethics appears in the systems of accreditation was carried out for the UK, Ireland, France, and Switzerland. The competencies, programme outcomes or learning outcomes were reviewed and explicit or implicit references to ethics education were identified. A quantitative and qualitative word analysis was carried out by extracting verbs and comparing verb definitions that were stated. Verbs were categorised under Doing actions, Thinking actions or both and compared to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. In all cases, ethics was explicitly mentioned however limited to 1 or 2 sections of the documents reviewed. The majority of statements linking to ethics were implicit,opening room for interpretation. A more conscious effort to engage engineeringethics in all aspects of engineering programmes as well as using higher levels ofBloom’s taxonomy should be made where engineering ethics education is applied in practice

P-vortices and Drama of Gribov Copies

We present results of the careful study of the Gribov copies problem in SU(2) lattice gauge theory for the direct maximal center projection widely used in confinement studies. Applying simulated annealing algorithm we demonstrate that this problem is more severe than it was thought before. The projected (gauge noninvariant) string tension is not in the agreement with the physical string tension. We do not find any indications that P-vortices reproduce the full SU(2) string tension neither in the infinite volume limit nor in the continuum limit.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, Latex2e, typos correcte

DES15E2mlf: a spectroscopically confirmed superluminous supernova that exploded 3.5 Gyr after the big bang

We present the Dark Energy Survey (DES) discovery of DES15E2mlf, the most distant superluminous supernova (SLSN) spectroscopically confirmed to date. The light curves and Gemini spectroscopy of DES15E2mlf indicate that it is a Type I superluminous supernova (SLSN-I) at z = 1.861 (a lookback time of ∼10 Gyr) and peaking at MAB = −22.3 ± 0.1 mag. Given the high redshift, our data probe the rest-frame ultraviolet (1400–3500 Å) properties of the SN, finding velocity of the C III feature changes by ∼5600 km s−1 over 14 d around maximum light. We find the host galaxy of DES15E2mlf has a stellar mass of 3.5+3.6 −2.4 × 109 M, which is more massive than the typical SLSN-I host galaxy

DES13S2cmm: the first superluminous supernova from the Dark Energy Survey

We present DES13S2cmm, the first spectroscopically-confirmed superluminous supernova (SLSN) from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We briefly discuss the data and search algorithm used to find this event in the first year of DES operations, and outline the spectroscopic data obtained from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope to confirm its redshift (z = 0.663 +/- 0.001 based on the host-galaxy emission lines) and likely spectral type (type I). Using this redshift, we find M_U_peak = -21.05 +0.10 -0.09 for the peak, rest-frame U-band absolute magnitude, and find DES13S2cmm to be located in a faint, low metallicity (sub-solar), low stellar-mass host galaxy (log(M/M_sun) = 9.3 +/- 0.3); consistent with what is seen for other SLSNe-I. We compare the bolometric light curve of DES13S2cmm to fourteen similarly well-observed SLSNe-I in the literature and find it possesses one of the slowest declining tails (beyond +30 days rest frame past peak), and is the faintest at peak. Moreover, we find the bolometric light curves of all SLSNe-I studied herein possess a dispersion of only 0.2-0.3 magnitudes between +25 and +30 days after peak (rest frame) depending on redshift range studied; this could be important for 'standardising' such supernovae, as is done with the more common type Ia. We fit the bolometric light curve of DES13S2cmm with two competing models for SLSNe-I - the radioactive decay of 56Ni, and a magnetar - and find that while the magnetar is formally a better fit, neither model provides a compelling match to the data. Although we are unable to conclusively differentiate between these two physical models for this particular SLSN-I, further DES observations of more SLSNe-I should break this degeneracy, especially if the light curves of SLSNe-I can be observed beyond 100 days in the rest frame of the supernova.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS (2015 January 23), 13 pages, 6 figures, 2 table