The use of system dynamics for energy and environmental education

The use of system dynamics as a learning tool for developing sustainable energy strategies and environmental education has advanced in recent years with the availability of new modelling software and webtools. Among the existing models, we highlight the online 2050 Calculators, which aim at simulating scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, energy planning, sustainable land use, and food consumption. The objective of this study is to assess the available calculators and their contribution to an interdisciplinary education via systems thinking. We carried out a review of the existing models worldwide and ran some of the tools with students from three different postgraduate programmes at master’s level at Imperial College London (United Kingdom) and IFP School (France), whilst also assessing their individual views afterwards. The assessments were conducted once a year during three subsequent years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. The results are discussed under the epistemology of critical pedagogy, showing that the use of webtools, such as the 2050 Calculators, can significantly contribute to the students’ environmental awareness and political engagement, providing important lessons about the use of system dynamics for policy and science education

Ficção científica na transposição didática do conceito de Entropia: a última pergunta de Isaac Asimov [Science fiction in the didactic transposition of the concept of Entropy: Isaac Asimov’s last question]

This paper presents and analyzes the methodology for teaching the concept of entropy supported by a science fiction text. In previous publications, we have presented ways of articulating Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning and Matthew Lipman’s Education theories, the object of his Philosophy Program. We show how this articulation considers the prerogatives of meaningful learning, linking it to higher-order thinking established by research communities and suggesting aggregating methods. As a theoretical-methodological expansion of these references, we transferred the notion of didactic transposition, via science fiction texts, to reinforce these postulates about teaching and cognition. The translational research involved researchers from the field of Physics teaching and 58 second-year high school students from a public institution. In the pedagogical mediation, as a basis for the discussion of the concept of entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we use one of the most acclaimed short stories by the popular Russian-American author, Isaac Asimov, entitled “The Last Question”. For data analysis, we resorted to techniques of semantic frequency and medium order of evocation as constructs of a taxonomy for the investigation of social representations arising from the implemented proposition. The results indicated consistency with the perspective of meaningful learning, consolidating reflections for similar interventions and contiguous research

An assessment of the integration between corporate social responsibility practices and management systems in Brazil aiming at sustainability in enterprises

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is associated with the idea that every organization should integrate environmental, economic and social issues as part of their organizational philosophy. In companies with a higher degree of development in terms of CSR, sustainable practices are integrated into management systems. When focusing on Latin America, this integration may be at its first steps, but there is a vacuum in the literature in this field. Based on this reality, this paper aims to evaluate the integration between CSR practices and management systems in companies in Brazil based on experts’ perceptions. Employing a conceptual model covering how stakeholder demands are incorporated in organizational practices using a continuous improvement approach, we performed a survey with experts in the area. Results revealed opportunities for improvements in all CSR practices evaluated, most of which were considered by the experts to have been implemented only superficially. In a comparative analysis, two practices stood out in relation to the others: reporting of CSR results to stakeholders and evaluation of the performance of CSR activities using pre-established indicators. Practices associated with planning of CSR activities are the most superficially implemented, adversely affecting CSR performance. The authors believe that the findings of this study could be useful for business managers and academics as guidance towards improved CSR efforts

Implementation of cleaner production: A ten-year retrospective on benefits and difficulties found

leaner production is a fast-growing area with numerous important developments seen over the years,which have led to substantial improvements, both in technological, process and organization terms. Yet there is a paucity of literature organizing the body of knowledge on the benefits and difficulties seen inthis field. Thus, following a systematic literature review protocol, this paper provides a ten-year state-of-the-art analysis on the benefits and difficulties faced in the implementation of cleaner productionstrategies, and outlines some means via which they may be addressed. Main results point out thatcompanies and governments have been able to successfully reap both tangible and intangible benefits after Cleaner Production implementation as its appeal to attract customers and reap reputation gain increases, for example. However, the results also show a series of difficulties that remain and hinders the widespread advancement of this methodology

Measurement of the cross-section of high transverse momentum vector bosons reconstructed as single jets and studies of jet substructure in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents a measurement of the cross-section for high transverse momentum W and Z bosons produced in pp collisions and decaying to all-hadronic final states. The data used in the analysis were recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 7 TeV;{\rm Te}{\rm V}$and correspond to an integrated luminosity of$4.6\;{\rm f}{{{\rm b}}^{-1}}$. The measurement is performed by reconstructing the boosted W or Z bosons in single jets. The reconstructed jet mass is used to identify the W and Z bosons, and a jet substructure method based on energy cluster information in the jet centre-of-mass frame is used to suppress the large multi-jet background. The cross-section for events with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson, with transverse momentum${{p}_{{\rm T}}}\gt 320\;{\rm Ge}{\rm V}$and pseudorapidity$|\eta |\lt 1.9$, is measured to be${{\sigma }_{W+Z}}=8.5\pm 1.7$ pb and is compared to next-to-leading-order calculations. The selected events are further used to study jet grooming techniques

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente

Observation of associated near-side and away-side long-range correlations in √sNN=5.02 TeV proton-lead collisions with the ATLAS detector

Two-particle correlations in relative azimuthal angle (Δϕ) and pseudorapidity (Δη) are measured in √sNN=5.02  TeV p+Pb collisions using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements are performed using approximately 1  μb-1 of data as a function of transverse momentum (pT) and the transverse energy (ΣETPb) summed over 3.1<η<4.9 in the direction of the Pb beam. The correlation function, constructed from charged particles, exhibits a long-range (2<|Δη|<5) “near-side” (Δϕ∼0) correlation that grows rapidly with increasing ΣETPb. A long-range “away-side” (Δϕ∼π) correlation, obtained by subtracting the expected contributions from recoiling dijets and other sources estimated using events with small ΣETPb, is found to match the near-side correlation in magnitude, shape (in Δη and Δϕ) and ΣETPb dependence. The resultant Δϕ correlation is approximately symmetric about π/2, and is consistent with a dominant cos⁡2Δϕ modulation for all ΣETPb ranges and particle pT