Getting the Right Stuff with the Write Stuff: Instructional Methods to Improve Writing in a First Year Engineering Course

Engineering Problem Solving (ENGR 1300) is a first year engineering course at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) designed to prepare students for the rigors of the engineering majors by introducing them to engineering skills such as problem solving, programming, and professional writing. This embedded writing element, taught by members of the UTA English Department, differentiates this first-year course from many others. Heeding the concern of faculty members regarding the students’ ability to write professionally, the curriculum committee for ENGR 1300 collaborated with the English Department to create an initial curriculum that tasked students with basic writing tasks such as professional emails, resumes, reports, and simple process papers. While these assignments seemed to answer some of the overall concerns of faculty, the wide range of reading and writing abilities we see among our students caused many to be frustrated because they could not complete these tasks, while others expressed resentment at having to replicate tasks they had mastered in high school. Writing instructors, too, noted their limited effectiveness when attempting to give meaningful feedback to large enrollment sections of students. To address these issues, the writing curriculum was revised to include the rhetorical précis assignments that build upon each other. These rhetorical précis assignments require students to assimilate large amounts of technical information and summarize it into a few, complex sentences. Using these assignments for our writing instruction not only allows writing faculty to give specific feedback even in large enrollment sections, but also challenges advanced writers, offers sentence level writing practice to less-prepared writers, requires critical thinking, and encourages complex synthesis of ideas. This paper will explore the effectiveness of this method for all writing levels and will attempt to identify and compare correlations between the students’ writing and overall grades in the course using these two methods.Cockrell School of Engineerin

The Humiliation of Beasts

I\u27m drunk in the bar car, deep in the spirit, sitting across from a toothless old cripple at one of the yellow tables bolted into the floor. He wears a black cowboy hat on his way back to Colorado after burying his grandson in California. We\u27re staring sideways out the long train window. Two walking canes hang on the back of a bolted chair next to old Bill

Book Review: Built to Last

Book review of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, written for the Spring 2016 Semester MGMT 641: Organizational Leadership and Project Team Management class

On the invariants of the quotients of the Jacobian of a curve of genus 2

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comInternational audienceLet C be a curve of genus 2 that admits a non-hyperelliptic involution. We show that there are at most 2 isomorphism classes of elliptic curves that are quotients of degree 2 of the Jacobian of C. Our proof is constructive, and we present explicit formulae, classified according to the involutions of C, that give the minimal polynomial of the j-invariant of these curves in terms of the moduli of C. The coefficients of these minimal polynomials are given as rational functions of the moduli