Developing a New College Course: A Journey Using Applied Critical and Creative Thinking Towards Philosophy, Decision Making, and Possibilities

In recent years, certain events made me question the lack of training and preparation that many young adults have as they unsteadily exit high school (and even college) unable, and sometimes unwilling, to make real life/real world decisions. This paper explores my journey through a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts - Boston in Critical and Creative Thinking, ending with a fully realized template for a brand new college 100/200 level course, tentatively titled: Philosophy: Making Better Decisions. I start with the specific impetus that set me on my path: a “rotten decision” made by three co-workers that collided into my life, and how that event set me on the course of wanting to explore possible solutions towards better decision-making. My two-year journey came to include using each of my thirteen master’s classes as a framework from which I could better understand how we humans make decisions, critically, creatively, mentally, philosophically, in counseling and teaching, and as a student -- always looking and learning with a fresh approach. This post-graduate work of investigations, readings, and coursework brought me from insulted to inspired. My goal towards understanding decision-making soon became a quest to design an entirely new thirty-two class, one-semester college course, putting a modern and entirely fresh practical twist on teaching a decision making class. Decision-making is not exclusive to any one religion, nor to any one section of the commercial world. Yet the halls of academia endlessly couples decision-making with either a strict spiritual foundation or the corporate business world, along with a smattering of classes specifically for the likes of the medical profession, war strategists, foreign policy makers, public health officials, lawyers, and mathematicians. Under the heading of the “Philosophy,” most colleges hold steady with their tried-and-true introductory classes on classical logic, values, reality, religion, and knowledge. In their goal to combine any of these basic curriculums with critical thinking skills, institutions usually teach via long lectures behind a lectern. These traditional courses allow little-to-no time to explore and integrate everyday skills into philosophy. This leaves students open to questions like: How do emotions help and/or hinder my ability to choose? What roles do critical and creative thinking play? What are options for generating possibility? How does self-awareness help? What is “The Big Picture?” What communication skills do I need? Do I have a cognitive bias? How do I know what questions to ask? Is reflection important? What does it mean to avoid distortions? How do I use evaluation skills? How does stress factor into decisions? Who sets the ground rules? What is individual vs. groupthink? What’s a paradox? How do I decide between right and right? How do I start to handle delicate subjects in the broader methodology of practical life decision-making? My project combines my belief in the necessity for a real-world philosophical base from which young adults of any background can define their principles and understand how their thinking and actions can affect their world. I make a case that this can be done better with ideals such as non-maleficence, beneficence, veracity, and fidelity to that which is truthful, logical, debated, kind, and just. This paper reflects all aspects of my journey thus far on discovering the various elements that go into making better decisions

Preliminary design review report - sludge offload system

This report documents the conceptual design review of the sludge offload system for the Spent Nuclear Fuel Project. The design description, drawings, available analysis, and safety analysis were reviewed by a peer group. The design review comments and resolutions are documented

A Study of student radio broadcasting as a motivation in speech improvement

Not available.Margaret Eller McWethyNot ListedNot ListedMaster of ArtsDepartment Not ListedCunningham Memorial Library, Terre Haute, Indiana State University.isua-thesis-1954-mcwenthyMastersTitle from document title page. Document formatted into pages: contains 75p. : ill. Includes appendix and bibliography

An outline for individual instruction sheets for seventh and eighth grade woodwork

Not Available.John S. McWethyNot ListedNot ListedMaster of ArtsDepartment Not ListedCunningham Memorial library, Terre Haute, Indiana State University.isua-thesis-1934-mcwethyMastersTitle from document title page. Document formatted into pages: contains 116p. : ill. Includes appendix and bibliography

Pinus contorta invasions increase wildfire fuel loads and may create a positive feedback with fire

Invasive plant species that have the potential to alter fire regimes have significant impacts on native ecosystems. Concern that pine invasions in the Southern Hemisphere will increase fire activity and severity and subsequently promote further pine invasion prompted us to examine the potential for feedbacks between Pinus contorta invasions and fire in Patagonia and New Zealand. We determined how fuel loads and fire effects were altered by P. contorta invasion. We also examined post-fire plant communities across invasion gradients at a subset of sites to assess how invasion alters the post-fire vegetation trajectory. We found that fuel loads and soil heating during simulated fire increase with increasing P. contorta invasion age or density at all sites. However, P. contorta density did not always increase post-fire. In the largest fire, P. contorta density only increased significantly post-fire where the pre-fire P. contorta density was above an invasion threshold. Below this threshold, P. contorta did not dominate after fire and plant communities responded to fire in a similar manner as uninvaded communities. The positive feedback observed at high densities is caused by the accumulation of fuel that in turn results in greater soil heating during fires and high P. contorta density post-fire. Therefore, a positive feedback may form between P. contorta invasions and fire, but only above an invasion density threshold. These results suggest that management of pine invasions before they reach the invasion density threshold is important for reducing fire risk and preventing a transition to an alternate ecosystem state dominated by pines and novel understory plant communities.Fil: Taylor, Kimberley. State University of Montana; Estados UnidosFil: Maxwell, Bruce. State University of Montana; Estados UnidosFil: McWethy, David. State University of Montana; Estados UnidosFil: Pauchard, Aníbal. Universidad de Concepción; Chile. Universidad de Chile; ChileFil: Nuñez, Martin Andres. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Whitlock, Cathy. State University of Montana; Estados Unido

87th Annual Georgia Public Health Association Meeting & Conference Report

The 87th Annual Meeting of the Georgia Public Health Association (GPHA) was held in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 22-23, 2016, with pre-conference (March 21st) and post-conference (March 23rd) Executive Board meetings. As Georgia’s leading forum for public health researchers, practitioners, and students, the annual meeting of the GPHA brings together participants from across the state to explore recent developments in the field and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. In recent years the venue for the GPHA annual conference has been Atlanta, with the 2017 GPHA Annual Meeting and Conference also scheduled to be held in Atlanta. Several new initiatives were highlighted as part of this year’s conference. These included three pre-conference workshops, expansion of academic sponsorships, an enhanced exhibit hall integrated with the poster sessions, silent auction, breaks and President’s Reception, an information booth, and an inaugural administration section track. The 2016 Annual Meeting & Conference added the Certified in Public Health (CPH) Continuing Education (CE) designation. The theme for the conference was Understanding Public Health: Research, Evidence and Practice, which reflects the science of public health

Is the Effect of Forest Structure on Bird Diversity Modified by Forest Productivity?

Currently, the most common strategy when managing forests for biodiversity at the landscape scale is to maintain structural complexity within stands and provide a variety of seral stages across landscapes. Advances in ecological theory reveal that biodiversity at continental scales is strongly influenced by available energy (i.e., climate factors relating to heat and light and primary productivity). This paper explores how available energy and forest structural complexity may interact to drive biodiversity at a regional scale. We hypothesized that bird species richness exhibits a hump-shaped relationship with energy at the regional scale of the northwestern United States. As a result, we hypothesized that the relationship between energy and richness within a landscape is positive in energy-limited landscapes and flat or decreasing in energy-rich landscapes. Additionally, we hypothesized that structural complexity explains less of the variation in species richness in energy-limited environments and more in energy-rich environments and that the slope of the relationship between structural complexity and richness is greatest in energy-rich environments. We sampled bird communities and vegetation across seral stages and biophysical settings at each of five landscapes arrayed across a productivity gradient from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains within the five northwestern states of the contiguous United States. We analyzed the response of richness to structural complexity and energy covariates at each landscape. We found that (1) richness had a hump-shaped relationship with available energy across the northwestern United States, (2) the landscape-scale relationships between energy and richness were positive or hump shaped in energy-limited locations and were flat or negative in energy-rich locations, (3) forest structural complexity explained more of the variation in bird species richness in energy-rich landscapes, and (4) the slope of the relationship between forest structural complexity and richness was steepest in energy-limited locations. In energy-rich locations, forest managers will likely increase landscape-scale bird diversity by providing a range of forest structural complexity across all seral stages. In low-energy environments, bird diversity will likely be maximized by managing local high-energy hotspots judiciously and adjusting harvest intensities in other locations to compensate for slower regeneration rates

Late Holocene records of fire and human presence in New Zealand

New Zealand, and the South Island in particular, can be considered an excellent test site for the study of the\ud early impact of humans on the environment for two main reasons: the Polynesian settlement occurred only\ud about 700-800 y BP and resulted in abrupt and huge landscape modifications. Burning forest for land clearance\ud impacted dramatically on an ecosystem that was not adapted to fire, changing the composition of the vegetation\ud as documented by sedimentary charcoal and pollen records. Although charcoal data give incontrovertible\ud evidence of some unprecedented fire events right after the arrival of the Maori, its significance as a tracer for local\ud and anthropogenic fire events has been questioned, stressing the need for new markers to confirm and complete the information about human presence and its effective impact.\ud In the present work, faecal sterols and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were individuated as suitable\ud molecular markers and analyzed by GC-MS in a sediment core from Lake Kirkpatrick, located in the Lake\ud Wakatipu catchment at 570 m a.s.l. in the South Island of New Zealand. Coprostanol accounts for about 60%\ud of total sterol content in human faeces, being much less relevant in animal dejections. Together with its\ud degradation product epi-coprostanol, it is well conserved in sedimentary archives and can be highly useful in\ud paleoenvironmental reconstructions of human settlements. PAHs are produced in relevant amounts by combustion in conditions of oxygen depletion, and diagnostic ratios (DR) between specific molecules can be used for inferring fuel and sources.\ud The charcoal record for Lake Kirkpatrick shows major fire episodes around AD 1350, confirmed by corresponding high levels of PAHs ascribable to biomass burning (as further evidenced by DR) at c. AD 1350. Moreover, the same trend is observed also in the fluxes of coprostanol and epi-coprostanol, whose sum results in two peaks at c. AD 1346 and 1351. This finding confirms not only the massive presence of humans in the area and the large use of fire at the time, but also complements and refines the reconstructions enabled by charcoal analysis