Faculty experiences facilitating study abroad

Faculty who teach at the college level are often responsible for their own pedagogical training and development, and leading a short-term study abroad program may be one strategy for helping faculty with this development. This study explores the experiences of faculty who have led short-term study abroad programs and provides insight into how the experiences align with experiential learning models and ways that they can lead to pedagogical development. Nine faculty members were interviewed and asked questions about their teaching backgrounds, their introduction to study abroad, and their experiences related to teaching and learning while abroad. The findings show that faculty have opportunities for learning while leading programs abroad and that the learning opportunities could spur pedagogical change and improvement. To ensure that faculty learn from their experiences, they should progress through a formal experiential learning process that requires them to reflect on and conceptualize their experiences and then plan to implement changes. A model for guiding faculty through this process is proposed. Recognizing and reflecting on experiences leading programs abroad has the potential to impact faculty teaching, and a formalized experiential learning process will ensure that faculty fully realize the benefits of these experiences through improvements in their teaching

Development of a Small Scale Rotating Detonation Engine

The Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE) has been researched extensively in recent years, but the minimum size limits of an RDE have not been well investigated. The goal of this research was to build an RDE small enough to produce a detonation frequency above 20 kHz with a single detonation wave while also reducing the engine\u27s mass ow rate. An engine with these design characteristics would reduce hazards associated with previous RDE testing. This research objective resulted in the design of an RDE with an outer diameter sized at 28 mm using ethylene and nitrous oxide as a fuel and oxidizer. The engine was tested over a range of equivalence ratios between 0.5-1.5 and at mass ow rates of 0.025-0.075 kg/s to characterize its operation. Key design parameters were the injection hole diameter, detonation channel gap, detonation channel length, and detonation channel diameter. Detonation was achieved in an RDE of this scale, which proved operability of an engine with these design characteristics was possible

The Equity Premium in Brock's Asset Pricing Model

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper we combine dynamic programming methods with projection methods for solving stochastic growth models. As an application of these methods, we solve Brock’s asset pricing model with a variety of parameterizations. We focused on finding parameterizations that result in an equity premium that is high relative to the variation in consumption. We show (both analytically and numerically) that the equity premium can be higher in a production based asset pricing model than it is in the consumption based asset pricing model, even when the real output level is the same in both models. r 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved