864 research outputs found
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Teaching Engineering Ethics in the Classroom through a Town Hall Meeting Activity
Engineers often contribute to projects that impact many people and have ethical implications. Some may even move to a career of political advocacy and policy-making. However, most engineering curricula have a strongly technical focus and do not require students to think critically about ethical issues related to engineering. To bridge this gap, we developed a classroom-based town hall meeting activity that demonstrates the ethical issues that may arise when engineers are advocating for or helping craft public policies. Our town hall meeting scenario, which was set in a fictional tourist town called Rainbow Town, divided a class of twenty engineering students into groups of engineers, politicians, and voters. There were two opposing political groups and two engineering groups with competing interests. The voters had individual characters with varying careers and objectives. The town hall meeting was a debate on whether Rainbow Town should undertake a construction project that would bring jobs to the city, but could potentially adversely impact fish population at the town’s natural heritage site, the main source of income for the town. The objective of the activity varied based on what role each student was playing. The politicians’ job was to further the objectives of their own party while simultaneously keeping their voter base happy. The engineers’ job was to help voters make an informed decision about which policy (or party) to vote for, while helping politicians craft the right policy. The voters’ job was to protect their own livelihoods. Despite the simplicity of the town hall meeting scenario, the students wholeheartedly donned the mantle of their assigned role, taking the objectives of their role seriously. At the post-activity debrief, students commented that the activity was harder on the engineers since they had to prove everything with facts, but the politician groups did not.Cockrell School of Engineerin
South Koreas Diplomacy and the Evolution of Korea-Japan Security Relations, 1965-2015
Since the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965, South Korea and Japan have developed their security relations in diverse ways. Concerning the causes and mechanisms of Korea-Japan security relations, some researchers have focused on the role of the US in the Asia-Pacific region in propelling the two allies towards more friendly or contentious security relations. Other scholars have emphasized the role of Japans diplomacy in Korea-Japan security relations in terms of Japans overall national security policy. This paper illuminates the role of South Koreas national strategy and diplomacy in developing Korea-Japan security relations. The Park Chung-hee, Roh Taewoo, and Kim Dae-jung administrations underscored the importance of Korea-Japan security relations by developing the national strategies of Fatherland Modernization, Nordpolitik, and the so-called Sunshine Policy, respectively. In contrast, the administrations of Kim Young-sam, Roh Moo-hyun, and Lee Myung-bak failed to develop Korea-Japan security relations due to rising nationalist sentiment against Japan during their presidency. This occurred despite initial national strategy orientations that emphasized mutual security cooperation. The incumbent Park Geun-hye administration seemed to set South Korea on a similar path as her predecessors, Lee Myung-bak and Roh Moohyun. Considering these patterns and tendencies, South Koreas security relations with Japan in the near future will be determined by the interaction of its national strategy and national sentiment in the context of a rising China and a provocative North Korea
LightLearn: Occupant centered lighting controller using reinforcement learning to adapt systems to humans
Humans spend up to 90% of their time indoors, thus building systems should maintain the indoor environment within the comfort range. In this paper, we present LightLearn, a reinforcement learning based occupant centered lighting controller. The control agent interacts with the occupant non-intrusively, learns her/his preferences, and determines actions for achieving both human comfort and energy saving. We present system hardware, control algorithm, and experimental results of LightLearn for an office space. Compared to the full (9am-5pm) and occupancy based control, LightLearn reduced 83% and 63% of operation time, respectively, by adapting to the occupant
Background and necessity of implementing the subspecialty of pediatric emergency medicine in Korea
The members of a task force team of the Korean Society of Pediatric Emergency Medicine prepared the document to apply for the subspecialty accreditation of pediatric emergency medicine by the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences in spring 2020. Here, we summarize the background and necessity of implementing the subspecialty of pediatric emergency medicine in Korea. The goals of the implementation are as follows: 1) to augment research, 2) to cope with the development of medical technology, 3) to respond to the change in disease patterns, 4) to meet the increasing demand for medical care, and 5) to improve real aspects of the medical delivery system
Disturbance of greedy publishing to academia
Questionable publications have been accused of "greedy" practices; however,
their influence on academia has not been gauged. Here, we probe the impact of
questionable publications through a systematic and comprehensive analysis with
various participants from academia and compare the results with those of their
unaccused counterparts using billions of citation records, including liaisons,
e.g., journals and publishers, and prosumers, e.g., authors. The analysis
reveals that questionable publications embellished their citation scores by
attributing publisher-level self-citations to their journals while also
controlling the journal-level self-citations to circumvent the evaluation of
journal-indexing services. This approach makes it difficult to detect
malpractice by conventional journal-level metrics. We propose
journal-publisher-hybrid metric that help detect malpractice. We also
demonstrate that the questionable publications had a weaker disruptiveness and
influence than their counterparts. This indicates the negative effect of
suspicious publishers in the academia. The findings provide a basis for
actionable policy making against questionable publications.Comment: 16 pages of main text including 4 figures + 32 pages of supplementary
information including 30 supplementary figure
ALDI++: Automatic and parameter-less discord and outlier detection for building energy load profiles
Data-driven building energy prediction is an integral part of the process for
measurement and verification, building benchmarking, and building-to-grid
interaction. The ASHRAE Great Energy Predictor III (GEPIII) machine learning
competition used an extensive meter data set to crowdsource the most accurate
machine learning workflow for whole building energy prediction. A significant
component of the winning solutions was the pre-processing phase to remove
anomalous training data. Contemporary pre-processing methods focus on filtering
statistical threshold values or deep learning methods requiring training data
and multiple hyper-parameters. A recent method named ALDI (Automated Load
profile Discord Identification) managed to identify these discords using matrix
profile, but the technique still requires user-defined parameters. We develop
ALDI++, a method based on the previous work that bypasses user-defined
parameters and takes advantage of discord similarity. We evaluate ALDI++
against a statistical threshold, variational auto-encoder, and the original
ALDI as baselines in classifying discords and energy forecasting scenarios. Our
results demonstrate that while the classification performance improvement over
the original method is marginal, ALDI++ helps achieve the best forecasting
error improving 6% over the winning's team approach with six times less
computation time.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
Alternative RNA Splicing Expands the Developmental Plasticity of Flowering Transition
Precise control of the developmental phase transitions, which ranges from seed germination to flowering induction and senescence, is essential for propagation and reproductive success in plants. Flowering induction represents the vegetative-to-reproductive phase transition. An extensive array of genes controlling the flowering transition has been identified, and signaling pathways that incorporate endogenous and environmental cues into the developmental phase transition have been explored in various plant species. Notably, recent accumulating evidence indicate that multiple transcripts are often produced from many of the flowering time genes via alternative RNA splicing, which is known to diversify the transcriptomes and proteasomes in eukaryotes. It is particularly interesting that some alternatively spliced protein isoforms, including COβ and FT2β, function differentially from or even act as competitive inhibitors of the corresponding functional proteins by forming non-functional heterodimers. The alternative splicing events of the flowering time genes are modulated by developmental and environmental signals. It is thus necessary to elucidate molecular schemes controlling alternative splicing and functional characterization of splice protein variants for understanding how genetic diversity and developmental plasticity of the flowering transition are achieved in optimizing the time of flowering under changing climates. In this review, we present current knowledge on the alternative splicing-driven control of flowering time. In addition, we discuss physiological and biochemical importance of the alternative splicing events that occur during the flowering transition as a molecular means of enhancing plant adaptation capabilities
Substitution of Heavy Complementarity Determining Region 3 (CDR-H3) Residues Can Synergistically Enhance Functional Activity of Antibody and Its Binding Affinity to HER2 Antigen
To generate a biobetter that has improved therapeutic activity, we constructed scFv libraries via random mutagenesis of several residues of CDR-H3 and -L3 of hu4D5. The scFv clones were isolated from the phage display libraries by stringent panning, and their anti-proliferative activity against HER2-positive cancer cells was evaluated as a primary selection criterion. Consequently, we selected AH06 as a biobetter antibody that had a 7.2-fold increase in anti-proliferative activity (IC50: 0.81 nM) against the gastric cancer cell line NCI-N87 and a 7.4-fold increase in binding affinity (K-D : 60 pM) to HER2 compared to hu4D5. The binding energy calculation and molecular modeling suggest that the substitution of residues of CDR-H3 to W98, F100c, A101 and L102 could stabilize binding of the antibody to HER2 and there could be direct hydrophobic interactions between the aromatic ring of W98 and the aliphatic group of I613 within HER2 domain IV as well as the heavy and light chain hydrophobic interactions by residues F100c, A101 and L102 of CDR-H3. Therefore, we speculate that two such interactions were exerted by the residues W98 and F100c. A101 and L102 may have a synergistic effect on the increase in the binding affinity to HER2. AH06 specifically binds to domain IV of HER2, and it decreased the phosphorylation level of HER2 and AKT. Above all, it highly increased the overall level of p27 compared to hu4D5 in the gastric cancer cell line NCI-N82, suggesting that AH06 could potentially be a more efficient therapeutic agent than hu4D5.OAIID:RECH_ACHV_DSTSH_NO:T201620640RECH_ACHV_FG:RR00200001ADJUST_YN:EMP_ID:A002901CITE_RATE:2.67DEPT_NM:화학생물공학부EMAIL:[email protected]_YN:YCONFIRM:
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