Beyond the Big Leave: The Future of U.S. Automotive Human Resources

Based on industry interviews and trends analyses, forecasts employment levels and hiring nationwide and in Michigan through 2016, and compiles automakers' input on technical needs, hiring criteria, and suggestions for training and education curricula

Kaveri Raina Interview

Kaveri Raina is an artist working in Chicago, IL. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India and moved to the States at the age of eleven. In 2011 she received her BFA in Painting and Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in 2016 her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Raina was a 2016 recipient of the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, amongst others. In fall 2016 she completed a five-week residency at Ox-Bow, in Saugatuck, MI. Raina has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Ohio, among others. She has upcoming exhibitions at Chicago Artists Coalition, Devening Projects, Comfort Station, and Demo Project Space. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, OH. http://www.kaveriraina.com

Abundant Life Adventure Club Youth Program: Positive Youth Development through Outdoor Recreation and Adventure

This Capstone project was completed as a collaborative effort with another OTD student and through a partnership with Abundant Life Adventure Club (ALAC). ALAC is a Nashville based organization that focuses on curating outdoor adventures and experiences for Black adults. The focus of this project was on the creation of outdoor programming for urban-dwelling youth, specifically middle schooler, using the principles of positive youth development. The result is a complete digital program guide. The guide includes objectives to address each theme, discussion questions and statements, a lesson plan template, and an activities list to pair with a theme. Using this guide, ALAC can partner with other Nashville based organizations to provide outdoor adventures and experiences to urban youth

Field studies evaluate methods to prevent sudden oak death in oaks and tanoak

We conducted field studies to evaluate management methods for the prevention of sudden oak death (SOD), caused by Phytophthora ramorum. Phosphite was applied as a trunk spray at the product label rate (22.36% a.i. aqueous solution + Pentra-Bark® surfactant at 2.3% v/v) to a 1.35 ha block of 233 large-diameter (mean 46 cm) tanoaks. Annual phosphite applications began in 2008; symptoms of P. ramorum were not seen in the stand until 2011. In 2013, SOD incidence in treated trees was 32% compared to 18% in adjacent untreated trees. Subsequent discontinuation of phosphite treatment did not affect disease progress; SOD continued to increase at similar rates in phosphite-treated and control trees, reaching 47% among phosphite-treated trunks compared to 32% in untreated trunks. Preventative phosphite application did not delay SOD onset, or reduce SOD incidence or SOD-related mortality. In contrast, in other studies we found that removal of California bay (Umbellularia californica) around coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), California black oaks (Q. kelloggii), and Shreve oaks (Q. parvula var. shrevei) strongly decreased or prevented new disease development over study periods ranging from 5 to 7 years. In these studies, SOD incidence in oaks treated by removal of nearby California bay was 20 to 25% lower than in untreated controls

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells contribute to systemic but not local antiviral responses to HSV infections

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDC) produce type I interferons (IFN-I) and proinflammatory cytokines in response to viruses; however, their contribution to antiviral immunity in vivo is unclear. In this study, we investigated the impact of pDC depletion on local and systemic antiviral responses to herpes simplex virus (HSV) infections using CLEC4C-DTR transgenic mice. We found that pDC do not appear to influence viral burden or survival after vaginal HSV-2 infection, nor do they seem to contribute to virus-specific CD8 T cell responses following subcutaneous HSV-1 infection. In contrast, pDC were important for early IFN-I production, proinflammatory cytokine production, NK cell activation and CD8 T cell responses during systemic HSV-2 and HSV-1 infections. Our data also indicate that unlike pDC, TLR3-expressing cells are important for promoting antiviral responses to HSV-1 regardless of the route of virus administration

Innovative Design within the Context of Virtual Internships: How Can It Be Defined and How is It Related to the Student Design Process?

Definitions of “innovative design” vary among authors and fields of study. This makes it difficult to establish how to determine innovative designs in new design environments, such as in a virtual internship environment. Nephrotex is a virtual internship which encourages players, who assume the role of virtual interns within the game, to fully explore a constrained design space with the goal of producing an optimized dialysis membrane. As a useful starting point for our definition of “innovative design” within this design environment, we referenced the work of Baregheh et al. (2009) and formed the following definition: “A process that not only leads to unique physical or technical product attributes but also adds value beyond existing designs on the market.” We defined uniqueness based on the design occurring infrequently amongst the final products of student design teams. Quality was assessed based on the work of Arastoopour and colleagues (2014), taking technical and economic performance into consideration to determine how well the design was able to meet the Nephrotex internal consultant requirements for the design. Using this definition, we sought to answer the following research question: How does the design process differ for a team that generates an innovative vs. non-innovative design within a virtual internship? Specifically, do innovative teams report more frequently that they spend the most time on certain design activities (grouped using Dym’s design framework) versus non-innovative teams? Further, do innovative teams make their final design justifications on the basis of different factors than non-innovative teams do? This research was conducted with sophomore chemical engineering students in the spring 2014 and 2015 semesters. A total of 50 teams of approximately 4-5 students each were studied. Student design processes were evaluated based on innovativeness as well as weekly journal entries where students reported the three activities they spent the most time on. Our results showed no significant differences between innovative and non-innovative teams in terms of their reports of the Dym’s-based activities that they spent the most time on, although our sample size was small. The Management category was associated with the largest effect size (d=0.68), with innovative teams reporting more frequently than non-innovative teams that they spent the most time on design activities that were Management-related. In terms of attributes that contributed to innovative products, teams with higher innovation scores tended to prioritize cost and membrane efficiency (as determined by maximum allowable flux) over patient comfort (measured by blood cell reactivity) and projected market sales. Our results are intended to provide a map for design processes that may ultimately lead to more innovative designs within a virtual internship environment

In Search of Conversational Grain Size: Modelling Semantic Structure Using Moving Stanza Windows

Analyses of learning based on student discourse need to account not only for the content of the utterances but also for the ways in which students make connections across turns of talk. This requires segmentation of discourse data to define when connections are likely to be meaningful. In this paper, we present an approach to segmenting data for the purposes of modeling connections in discourse using epistemic network analysis. Specifically, we use epistemic network analysis to model connections in student discourse using a temporal segmentation method adapted from recent work in the learning sciences. We compare the results of this study to a purely conversation-based segmentation method to examine the affordances of temporal segmentation for modeling connections in discourse

Assessing the Effectiveness of Shah\u27s Innovation Metrics for Measuring Innovative Design within a Virtual Design Space

Epistemic games, such as the virtual engineering internship Nephrotex, allow students to explore creative ways to approaching engineering problems while providing a novel alternative to the direct transmission method of instruction. Within Nephrotex, students choose a polymer, manufacturing process, surfactant, and percentage of carbon nanotube to create a functioning kidney dialysis membrane prototype. The performance of the membrane is measured using cost, flux, blood cell reactivity, marketability, and reliability thresholds given by stakeholders within the fictitious company. Although Nephrotex has been shown to be a valuable educational tool for modeling the product design process, only limited work has been done to investigate whether it is capable of providing an environment that allows students to generate innovative designs. The innovation assessment framework of Shah and colleagues employs four metrics of innovation – novelty, variety, quality, and quantity; novelty is further divided into a priori and a posteriori metrics. This work found that a priori and a posteriori novelty, variety, and quality were applicable metrics of innovation in the epistemic game environment of Nephrotex. Literature ranges for a priori and a posteriori novelty scores aligned with those found in this study. Comparing prior work on Nephrotex that identified innovative student designs based on a proposed literature definition, it was found that the Shah metrics between the innovative and non-innovative groups showed little variation and no statistically significant differences. A t test and a Mann-Whitney U test showed no significant difference between innovative and non-innovative groups with regard to variety or novelty scores; however, these tests did show a significant difference between groups with regards to the quality score. The same results were found when calculating Cohen’s Effect Size – a priori novelty, a posteriori novelty, and variety had a small effect when comparisons were made between the innovative and non-innovative groups while quality had a large effect. The significant difference and large effect in regards to quality however, may be the result of the previous literature definition which employed quality as a measure to define innovation. Results from this study demonstrate that novelty is perhaps the most aligned innovation metric for an epistemic game environment and that both variety and quality can be helpful in understanding the designs generated within these contexts although they may need adjustment based on the application to a constrained design space