ABET accreditation criteria, Outcome h and global competencies in engineering education

The dissertation focuses on one aspect of the accreditation process of engineering programs in the United States, which is conducted under the standards of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Engineering programs seeking accreditation are required to comply with the so called Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000), which has been divided into eleven learning outcomes, labeled a through k. The dissertation addresses one of them, Outcome h , which specifically calls for the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context. ;The dissertation examines what engineering departments, from the Southern Regional Educational Board (SREB) area, are doing to comply with Outcome h requirements for accreditation. Thus the purpose of this study is to examine the approaches engineering departments are using to respond to the challenges posed by Outcome h, and what impact this has had in the acquisition of global competencies by engineering graduates, as perceived by chairs of their engineering programs.;The data obtained were analyzed using both inferential and descriptive statistics, which produced significant findings in understanding the situation of engineering departments after the implementation of criteria Outcome h. Although engineering departments have very similar ways of operating, there is no unanimity on what constitutes an adequate response to the challenge posed by Outcome h in engineering. The difficulty comes, in part, from the conceptual confusion about the meaning of international education for engineers and global awareness. However, some contradiction appears as to what constitutes the best way to acquire global competencies

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field

Observation of WWW Production in pp Collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector

This Letter reports the observation of W W W production and a measurement of its cross section using 139     fb − 1 of proton-proton collision data recorded at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events with two same-sign leptons (electrons or muons) and at least two jets, as well as events with three charged leptons, are selected. A multivariate technique is then used to discriminate between signal and background events. Events from W W W production are observed with a significance of 8.0 standard deviations, where the expectation is 5.4 standard deviations. The inclusive W W W production cross section is measured to be 820 ± 100   ( stat ) ± 80   ( syst )     fb , approximately 2.6 standard deviations from the predicted cross section of 511 ± 18     fb calculated at next-to-leading-order QCD and leading-order electroweak accuracy