Search literacy: learning to search to learn

People can often find themselves out of their depth when they face knowledge-based problems, such as faulty technology, or medical concerns. This can also happen in everyday domains that users are simply inexperienced with, like cooking. These are common exploratory search conditions, where users don’t quite know enough about the domain to know if they are submitting a good query, nor if the results directly resolve their need or can be translated to do so. In such situations, people turn to their friends for help, or to forums like StackOverflow, so that someone can explain things to them and translate information to their specific need. This short paper describes work-in-progress within a Google-funded project focusing on Search Literacy in these situations, where improved search skills will help users to learn as they search, to search better, and to better comprehend the results. Focusing on the technology-problem domain, we present initial results from a qualitative study of questions asked and answers given in StackOverflow, and present plans for designing search engine support to help searchers learn as they search

Desert Research and Technology Studies Exposure of Lotus Coated Electrodynamic Shield Samples

The passive Lotus dust mitigation coating currently being developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), was selected by the Habitation Demonstration Unit Deep Space Habitat (HDU-DSH) for participation in the 2011 Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RaTS). Based on the unique surface architecture of the Lotus leaf, the nano-engineered Lotus coating seeks to replicate these structures on space flight and habitation surfaces. By decreasing both the surface energy and area for particle attachment, the Lotus coating greatly diminishes dust accumulation on surfaces. This is a problem that can be encountered on lunar, Martian, and asteroid missions. Two different application methods of this coating were tested in summer 2011 at the D-RaTS site: the wet chemistry applied version and combustion chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) applied version. These Lotus coatings, along with two common thermal control coatings, were combined with the active dust mitigation electrodynamic shield (EDS) technology developed at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The EDS technology uses an electrified grid to remove dust particles from the surface of a Kapton (Trademark) substrate. The Lotus coating and thermal control coatings were applied to these Kapton (Trademark) substrates for testing. The combination of these two innovations was theorized to be an applicable countermeasure for addressing dust accumulation during long-duration human space exploration. This theory was tested and characterized prior to, during, and after D-RaTS exposure

A pilot study of respiratory rate derived from a wearable biosensor compared with capnography in emergency department patients

© 2019 Li et al. Purpose: Respiratory rate is assessed less frequently than other vital signs, and documented respiratory rates are often erroneous. This pilot study compared respiratory rates derived from a wearable biosensor to those derived from capnography. Methods: Emergency department patients with respiratory complaints were enrolled and had capnography via nasal cannula and a wireless, wearable biosensor from Philips applied for approximately one hour. Respiratory rates were obtained from both of these methods. We determined the difference between median respiratory rates obtained from the biosensor and capnography and the proportion of biosensor-derived respiratory rates that were within three breaths/minute of the capnography-derived respiratory rates for each patient. A Spearman correlation coefficient was calculated to assess the strength of the correlation between mean respiratory rates derived from both methods. Plots of minute-by-minute respiratory rates, per patient, for each monitoring method were shown to two physicians. The physicians identified time periods in which the respiratory rates appeared invalid. The proportion of time with invalid respiratory rates for each patient, for each method, was calculated and averaged. Results: We analyzed data for 17 patients. Median biosensor-derived respiratory rate was 20 breaths/minute (range: 7-40 breaths/minute) and median capnography-derived respiratory rate was 25 breaths/minute (range: 0-58 breaths/minute). Overall, 72.8% of biosensorderived respiratory rates were within three breaths per minute of the capnography-derived respiratory rates. Overall mean difference was 3.5 breaths/minute (±5.2 breaths/minute). Respiratory rates appeared invalid 0.7% of the time for the biosensor and 5.0% of the time for capnography. Conclusion: Our pilot study suggests that the Philips wearable biosensor can continuously obtain respiratory rates that are comparable to capnography-derived respiratory rates among emergency department patients with respiratory complaints

An Exploratory Initiative for Improving Low-Cost Housing in Texas

In 1996 the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University released a report indicating that the population of Texas would double in the next 30 years and that a majority of the 18 million new Texans would be have low to very-low incomes. In order to house that many low income persons, it is apparent that a significant number of affordable housing units must be built in a relatively short time frame. Based on these predictions, our interdisciplinary team made a proposal in the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Strategic Initiatives Program to explore technologies related to the production of affordable housing. The purpose of the work is to identify opportunities for research into systems, materials, and processes that might contribute to the development of a low-cost housing industry in Texas that could meet state housing needs and might create export possibilities. The proposal was funded by the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, the Center for Housing and Urban Development, and the College of Architecture Research Fund. This report summarizes the results of the effort

Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion

Toward a geography of black internationalism: Bayard Rustin, nonviolence and the promise of Africa

This article charts the trip made by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin to West Africa in 1952, and examines the unpublished ‘Africa Program’ which he subsequently presented to leading American pacifists. I situate Rustin’s writings within the burgeoning literature on black internationalism which, despite its clear geographical registers, geographers themselves have as yet made only a modest contribution towards. The article argues that within this literature there remains a tendency to romanticize cross-cultural connections in lieu of critically interrogating their basic, and often competing, claims. I argue that closer attention to the geographies of black internationalism, however, allows us to shape a more diverse and practiced sense of internationalist encounter and exchange. The article reconstructs the multiplicity of Rustin’s black internationalist geographies which drew eclectically from a range of Pan-African, American and pacifist traditions. Though each of these was profoundly racialized, they conceptualized race in distinctive ways and thereby had differing understandings of what constituted the international as a geographical arena. By blending these forms of internationalism Rustin was able to promote a particular model of civil rights which was characteristically internationalist in outlook, nonviolent in principle and institutional in composition; a model which in selective and uneven ways continues to shape our understanding of the period

Climate and colonialism

Recent years have seen a growth in scholarship on the intertwined histories of climate, science and European imperialism. Scholarship has focused both on how the material realities of climate shaped colonial enterprises, and on how ideas about climate informed imperial ideologies. Historians have shown how European expansion was justified by its protagonists with theories of racial superiority, which were often closely tied to ideas of climatic determinism. Meanwhile, the colonial spaces established by European powers offered novel ‘laboratories’ where ideas about acclimatisation and climatic improvement could be tested on the ground. While historical scholarship has focused on how powerful ideas of climate informed imperial projects, emerging scholarship in environmental history, history of science and historical geography focuses instead on the material and cognitive practices by which the climates of colonial spaces were made known and dealt with in fields such as forestry, agriculture and human health. These heretofore rather disparate areas of historical research carry great contemporary relevance of studies of how climates and their changes have been understood, debated and adapted to in the past