Training Graduate Engineering Students in Ethics

The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas embarked on providing ethics instruction to incoming graduate students in the form of a mandatory workshop. The College has a diverse graduate student population, including a sizable international component, who are enrolled in several M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs within four departments. Faculty felt that training in ethics was needed to better prepare incoming students for successful graduate studies and working professionally after graduation. Therefore, a standalone workshop was developed that covered four major topics: Research Ethics, Computer Coding Ethics, Publishing Ethics, and Intellectual Property. The last topic covered copyright law, patent law, and trade secrets. To develop this ethics workshop, some ethics instruction programs at U.S. engineering colleges were investigated

Exploring Participatory Design Methods to Engage with Arab Communities

ArabHCI is an initiative inaugurated in CHI17 SIG Meeting that brought together 45+ HCI Arab and non-Arab researchers/practitioners who are conducting/interested in HCI within Arab communities. The goal of this workshop is to start dialogs that leverage our "insider" understanding of HCI research in the Arab context and assert our culture identity in design in order to explore challenges and opportunities for future research. In this workshop, we focus on one of the themes that derived our community discussions in most of the held events. We explore the extent to which participatory approaches in the Arab context are culturally and methodologically challenged. Our goal is to bring researchers/practitioners with success and failure stories while designing with Arab communities to discuss methods, share experiences and learned lessons. We plan to share the results of our discussions and research agenda with the wider CHI community through different social and scholarly channels

Old enough to know : consulting children about sex and AIDS education in Africa

This compelling study, comprising of a sample of eight schools in three countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania – examines the sources, contents and processes of children´s community-based sexual knowledges and asks how these knowledges interact with AIDS education programmes in school. Old enough to know showcases the possibilities of consulting pupils using engaging, interactive and visual methods including digital still photography, mini-video documentaries, as well as interviews and observations. These innovative methods allow children to speak freely and openly in contexts where talking about sex to adults is a cultural tabo

Mobility and Energy Impacts of Shared Automated Vehicles: a Review of Recent Literature

The purpose of this review is to present findings from recent research on Shared automated vehicles (SAV) impacts on mobility and energy.While the literature on potential SAV impacts on travel behavior and the environment is still developing, researchers have suggested that SAVs could reduce transportation costs and incur minimal increases in total trip time due to efficient routing to support pooling. Researchers also speculate that SAVs would result in a 55% reduction in energy use and ~ 90% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.SAV impacts on mobility and energy are uncertain. Researchers should carefully track SAV technology developments and adjust previous model assumptions based on real-world data to produce better impact estimates. SAVs could prove to be a next technological advancement that reshapes the transportation system by providing a safer, efficient, and less costly travel alternative

Deceptive cultural practices that sabotage HIV/AIDS education in Tanzania and Kenya

In spite of numerous HIV/AIDS‐prevention education efforts, the HIV infection rates in Sub‐Saharan Africa remain high. Exploring and understanding the reasons behind these infection rates is imperative in a bid to offer life skills and moral education that address the root causes of the pandemic. In a recent study concerning effective HIV/AIDS‐prevention education, conducted in Tanzania and Kenya among teacher trainees and their tutors, the notion of mila potofu (defined by educators as ‘deceptive’ cultural practices) emerged as a key reason for educators’ difficulties in teaching HIV/AIDS prevention education in schools and for high HIV infection rates. Since these cultural practices cause harm, and in many cases lead to death, they are of moral concern. This paper outlines some of these cultural practices identified by educators, including ‘wife inheritance’, ‘sexual cleansing’ and the taboo against certain foods, and discusses how these practices contribute towards HIV/AIDS vulnerability. It then offers recommendations for classroom‐based life skills and moral education following Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in understanding how ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘adaptation’ can help people discard mila potofuin a culturally sensitive manner

Effects of Cannabinoids on Ligand-gated Ion Channels

Phytocannabinoids such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, endocannabinoids such as N-arachidonoylethanolamine (anandamide) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol, and synthetic cannabinoids such as CP47,497 and JWH-018 constitute major groups of structurally diverse cannabinoids. Along with these cannabinoids, CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors and enzymes involved in synthesis and degradation of endocannabinoids comprise the major components of the cannabinoid system. Although, cannabinoid receptors are known to be involved in anti-convulsant, anti-nociceptive, anti-psychotic, anti-emetic, and anti-oxidant effects of cannabinoids, in recent years, an increasing number of studies suggest that, at pharmacologically relevant concentrations, these compounds interact with several molecular targets including G-protein coupled receptors, ion channels, and enzymes in a cannabinoid-receptor independent manner. In this report, the direct actions of endo-, phyto-, and synthetic cannabinoids on the functional properties of ligand-gated ion channels and the plausible mechanisms mediating these effects were reviewed and discussed

Biomechanics of porcine renal arteries and role of axial stretch.

International audienceIt is known that arteries experience significant axial stretches in vivo. Several authors have shown that the axial force needed to maintain an artery at its in vivo axial stretch does not change with transient cyclical pressurization over normal ranges. However, the axial force phenomenon of arteries has never been explained with microstructural considerations. In this paper we propose a simple biomechanical model to relate the specific axial force phenomenon of arteries to the predicted load-dependent average collagen fiber orientation. It is shown that (a) the model correctly predicts the authors' experimentally measured biaxial behavior of pig renal arteries and (b) the model predictions are in agreement with additional experimental results reported in the literature. Finally, we discuss the implications of the model for collagen fiber orientation and deposition in arteries