The Workplace Relevance of the Liberal Arts Political Science BA and How It Might Be Enhanced: Reflections on an Exploratory Survey of the NGO Sector

Reflecting on a survey of employees of NGOs based in Ontario, Canada, the article considers two questions: How well are our BA programs preparing students for the workplace? Can we enhance workplace relevance without sacrificing our commitment to liberal education? Key findings are presented, including the BA continues to be a desired and employable degree and skills associated with it are valued; employers are not convinced that graduates with BAs necessarily possess these skills; and respondents associate their formal education with individual skills and extracurricular activities with interpersonal skills. Three strategies to enhance the workplace relevance of BA programs without sacrificing liberal education are suggested, and faculty are encouraged to think more holistically about their BA programs and what students need from them

Cultural Rights and Internal Minorities: Of Pueblos and Protestants

This article considers the question: should rights extended to cultural communities to help them preserve themselves include the right to discipline dissident members who violate cultural norms? The case of the Pueblo Protestants is employed to consider two important defenses of cultural rights (revisionist liberal and cultural communitarian) that offer conflicting answers. Both are found unsatisfactory because of their implicit reliance on “cultural monism” (that is, the assumption that individuals identify with only one cultural community). An approach to defining cultural rights is then outlined that avoids this assumption and its application is illustrated with respect to the Pueblo case

Liberal-Democratic States Should Privilege Parental Efforts to Instill Identities And Values

Liberal-democratic states’ commitments to equality and personal autonomy have always proven problematic with respect to state regulation of relations between parents and children. In the parental authority literature positions have varied from invoking children’s interests to argue for limitations on parental efforts to instill identities and values to invoking parental rights to justify state privileging of such efforts. This article argues that liberal-democratic states should privilege parental efforts to raise their children to share their identities and values. Its approach is distinctive in two ways: i) it engages in interdisciplinary reflection upon selected findings in psychological literature on immigrant youth, acculturation, and identity development to assess philosophical arguments about parental authority; and ii) it argues that children’s, and not parental, interests should be viewed as the primary basis for parental rights to instill identities and values. Ultimately, the article argues, parental authority to instill identities and values is justified by children’s interests in psychological wellbeing and personal autonomy

Student Use of the Internet for Research Projects: A Problem? Our Problem? What Can We Do About It?

The Internet and other electronic media have changed the way undergraduate students conduct research. The effects of this technological change on the role of the professor are still not well understood. This article reports on the findings of a recent study that evaluated the scholarly content of student citations in a political science course and tested two interventions designed to improve their quality. The study finds that these students’ use of electronic sources was not as poor as some may have assumed, and that the quality of bibliographies improved when in-class instruction was combined with academic penalties. This article reflects on the study’s findings, and offers suggestions for how instructors might encourage students to improve the quality of their research

They Want to Be Global Citizens: Now What?: Implications of the NGO Career Arc for Students and Faculty Mentors

Once faculty have inspired their students to want to become global citizens, many of these students will approach them for advice about careers that will enable them to live out their commitment to global justice. This article seeks to inform such discussions by providing students and their faculty mentors with information to help consider whether the NGO sector is a good fit for the student, how to prepare for it, and how to advance within it. It does so by providing a snapshot of the nonprofit/NGO career arc based upon analysis of 220 responses to a survey conducted in 2010 of staff of “NGOs that advance human rights” located in Ontario, Canada. Topics discussed include: the importance of when people take an interest in the sector; the relationship between campus clubs and volunteering and NGO careers; the importance of the BA versus the MA to employability; the typical career pattern; what recent entrants might learn from more established staff; types of specific occupation in the sector; how executive directors differ from other staff; and patterns related to gender within the sector

Kinematics of the Broad Line Region in M81

A new model is presented which explains the origin of the broad emission lines observed in the LINER/Seyfert nucleus of M81 in terms of a steady state spherically symmetric inflow, amounting to 1 x 10^-5 Msun/yr, which is sufficient to explain the luminosity of the AGN. The emitting volume has an outer radius of ~1 pc, making it the largest broad line region yet to be measured, and it contains a total mass of ~ 5 x 10^-2 Msun of dense, ~ 10^8 cm^-3, ionized gas, leading to a very low filling factor of ~ 5 x 10^-9. The fact that the BLR in M81 is so large may explain why the AGN is unable to sustain the ionization seen there. Thus, the AGN in M81 is not simply a scaled down quasar.Comment: Accepted for Publication in ApJ 7/21/0

Gas inflows towards the nucleus of NGC1358

We use optical spectra from the inner 1.8 $\times$ 2.5kpc$^2$ of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC1358, obtained with the GMOS integral field spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope at a spatial resolution of $\approx$ 165pc, to assess the feeding and feedback processes in this nearby active galaxy. Five gaseous kinematical components are observed in the emission line profiles. One of the components is present in the entire field-of-view and we interpret it as due to gas rotating in the disk of the galaxy. Three of the remaining components we interpret as associated to active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback: a compact unresolved outflow in the inner 1 arcsec and two gas clouds observed at opposite sides of the nucleus, which we propose have been ejected in a previous AGN burst. The disk component velocity field is strongly disturbed by a large scale bar. The subtraction of a velocity model combining both rotation and bar flows reveals three kinematic nuclear spiral arms: two in inflow and one in outflow. We estimate the mass inflow rate in the inner 180pc obtaining $\dot{M}_{in}$ $\approx$ 1.5 $\times 10^{-2}$M$_{\odot}$yr$^{-1}$, about 160 times larger than the accretion rate necessary to power this AGN.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1701.0086

Chemistry by Mobile Phone (or how to justify more time at the bar)

By combining automatic environment monitoring with Java smartphones a system has been produced for the real-time monitoring of experiments whilst away from the lab. Changes in the laboratory environment are encapsulated as simple XML messages, which are published using an MQTT compliant broker. Clients subscribe to the MQTT stream, and produce a user display. An MQTT client written for the Java MIDP platform, can be run on a smartphone with a GPRS Internet connection, freeing us from the constraints of the lab. We present an overview of the technologies used, and how these are helping chemists make the best use of their time

Feeding and Feedback in the Inner Kiloparsec of the Active Galaxy NGC2110

We present two-dimensional gaseous kinematics of the inner 1.1 x 1.6kpc^2 of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC2110, from optical spectra obtained with the GMOS integral field spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope at a spatial resolution of 100pc. Gas emission is observed over the whole field-of-view, with complex - and frequently double - emission-line profiles. We have identified four components in the emitting gas, according to their velocity dispersion (sigma), which we refer to as: (1) warm gas disk (sigma = 100-220km/s); (2) cold gas disk (sigma = 60-90km/s); (3) nuclear component (sigma = 220-600km/s); and (4) northern cloud (sigma = 60-80km/s). Both the cold and warm disk components are dominated by rotation and have similar gas densities, but the cold gas disk has lower velocity dispersions and reaches higher rotation velocities. We attribute the warm gas disk to a thick gas layer which encompasses the cold disk as observed in some edge-on spiral galaxies. After subtraction of a rotation model from the cold disk velocity field, we observe excess blueshifts of 50km/s in the far side of the galaxy as well as similar excess redshifts in the near side. These residuals can be interpreted as due to nuclear inflow in the cold gas, with an estimated ionized gas mass inflow rate of 2.2 x 10^(-2)Msun/yr. We have also subtracted a rotating model from the warm disk velocity field and found excess blueshifts of 100km/s to the SW of the nucleus and excess redshifts of 40km/s to the NE, which we attribute to gas disturbed by an interaction with a nuclear spherical outflow. This nuclear outflow is the origin of the nuclear component observed within the inner 300pc and it has a mass outflow rate of 0.9Msun/yr. In a region between 1" and 4" north of the nucleus we find a new low sigma component of ionized gas which we attribute to a high latitude cloud photoionized by the nuclear source.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, 1 table; accepted for publication in MNRA