Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes

Most Americans know Appalachia through stereotyped images: moonshine and handicrafts, poverty and illiteracy, rugged terrain and isolated mountaineers. Historian David Hsiung maintains that in order to understand the origins of such stereotypes, we must look critically at their underlying concepts, especially those of isolation and community. Hsiung focuses on the mountainous area of upper East Tennessee, tracing this area\u27s development from the first settlement in the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Through his examination, he identifies the different ways in which the region\u27s inhabitants were connected to or separated from other peoples and places. Using an interdisciplinary framework, he analyzes geographical and sociocultural isolation from a number of perspectives, including transportation networks, changing economy, population movement, and topography. This provocative work will stimulate future studies of early Appalachia and serve as a model for the analysis of regional cultures. David C. Hsiung is associate professor of history at Juniata College. Well organized and accessible, this book would prove ideal for use in Appalachian history courses . . . while telling what happened, Hsiung explains how to do social history. —Journal of Appalachian History Hsiung has given us a book which focuses exclusively on the question of Appalachian difference or, as he puts it, the origins of Appalachian stereotype. —Journal of Social History In demolishing several stereotypes, Hsiung gets tantalizingly close to revealing the sources of regional and national identity. —Journal of American History The originality of this contribution in approach and methodology must certainly be acknowledged, as well as its strongly interpretive character. —The Journal of Southern History Offers a great deal of new information about frontier society as well as imaginative ways of using it. —Georgia Historical Quarterlyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/1020/thumbnail.jp

A New Approach in Microprocessor/Microcontroller Courses/Laboratories Material Design and Development

Courses in microprocessors and microcontrollers are standard parts of the Engineering Technology core curricula. The traditional course material developments include both lectures and associated laboratory exercises. No matter how creative is the curriculum; it is usually budgetary constraints that confine the creativity when developing new curricula. This limits the freedom of the major approach in new course development. This article demonstrates new course lecture and laboratories material development that starts from ground up with both a hardware platform and simulation software design for microprocessor/microcontroller related courses. It is not only very cost effective, but also does not limit the instructor\u27s creativity when developing new curricula. The only obstacle is the instructor\u27s imagination on courses and laboratories activities. This system can be implemented at no cost to the department for sponsoring the courses. As a matter of fact, the initial trials of this system have generated revenue, thereby supporting future improvements and development needs. This new approach in course improvement starts with the design of a hardware platform in a custom made evaluation board. It involves the system circuit and power supply design, printed circuit board layout, prototype testing, and circuit board fabrication. The second step is to design the simulation software for laboratory uses. The total design and development of both software and hardware was a two year evolutionary process

What Does it Take to Deliver an Active Hands-on Course?

Distance Education has been implemented widely in different curricula at many institutions; different means have been used to ensure the delivery. This article introduces unique combination of different mechanisms in implementing the active/synchronous distance delivery of hands-on course(s) that is compatible and similar to the face-to-face on-campus course(s).There are three major developmental stages of these online courses - curriculum design, methodologies, and assessment to ensure the effectiveness of distance delivery of technical courses in engineering technology. The processes of curriculum design for the Embedded System Designs are discussed: (a) The development of course and labs modules for hands-on technical courses. (b) The methodologies used in the delivery processes that include unique combinations of different teaching strategies when implementing these online courses. The web portal is used as a means to deliver general rules and course information and content, and the implementations of Learning Management Systems (LMS) for course module organizations. In addition, the limitations and problems encountered during the delivery processes, and the solution of the problems will be addressed. (c) The assessment of the distance course(s) on data gathered in a preliminary study and the comparison of methodologies used in this distance course will be presented to set as a proof of concept of these effective distance delivery practices. Engineering technology focuses on both hands-on and mind-on design work. This article discussed the integration of existing technology products into real world applications. Through the implementation of the distance delivery or cyber-enabled learning environment, the effectiveness of the delivery is compatible to traditional face-to-face on-campus courses. This does not only benefit the interested faculty/teachers in better teaching technical courses online, but it also supports the students who are interested in learning more advanced technical concepts that are needed in the work environment requiring higher technical literacy for today and in the future. Highlights of the presentation will address the following: (1) Research and development of the virtual classrooms and open source service server. (2) Curriculum design and development of the supported material. (3) Implementation of teaching strategies and methodologies for the real-time distance hands-on approach. (4) Preliminary assessment of the teaching and learning. (5) Recommendations of potential adoption of the development. (6) Continuous improvement of teaching and learning in academic community

A Collaborated Process with a Wireless Autonomous Vehicle at it\u27s Center

Developing partnerships between high schools, community colleges and universities is critical for the successful transitions to a lifelong STEM careers. How do you develop these partnerships? The sharing of a technology platform such as autonomous vehicles can bridge the gap by using a common core group of materials. Collaborations between teachers and faculty indifferent schools that share common interests in teaching control systems and robotics technology can be an excellent start. The university as catalyst in the process by designing the curriculum, system hardware and software then through the common interest deploying them in the high schools and community college. The community college using the advanced manufacturing tools at their disposal to manufacture these systems. In the days of limited budgets and the need for a platform that spark the interest of the middle to high school students that can be used in advanced studies beyond high school. Collaborating and implementing the common core platform allows all involved institutions reduce teaching redundancy and assist interested students in easier transition into STEM related majors. Reducing the time spent in helping students up to speed will enhance the instruction on the needed technical knowledge that can bring the path to the STEM related career. This project provides useful tools that make teaching and learning of complex control and robotics subjects appealing and it can also easily be accepted in Autonomous Vehicle designs and applications. This collaborate process can be used in any applicable form to fit in different school, curriculum, course, and club activates. The training platform and teaching modules are what make the system so appealing to the partners, the common core can be used at all levels of the instruction that can fit at different stage of the teaching and learning objectives. The implementation plans and results are presented in the following topics:• Design and development of a project based mobile vehicle platform through a collaborate effort.• Collaborate between teachers/faculty in different schools to share common interests.• Implement an application project to attract potential student in STEM majors.• Join efforts in sharing and teaching in different classroom with different audiences/students.• Assess the effectiveness of the collaborate efforts.• Recommendations technical content learning in different schools

Development of media production processes for CAR-T therapies

Many of the standard cell culturing unit operations utilized by early stage CAR-T manufacturing processes have been derived from benchtop scale academic processes and require further development to become commercially viable. Critical unit operations, such as isolation, activation, transduction, and expansion are often the focus of next generation or automation technologies. Development of ancillary processes such as medium production, however, should not be overlooked and can take advantage of economies of scale and technologies that have been proven in other pharmaceutical industries like biologics. Special consideration should be taken when developing these medium scale-up processes since cell therapies are complex and can be highly sensitive to medium composition changes. In addition, significant changes may be needed to update medium production processes from a process suited for an academic setting to one suited for a commercialized product. This poster discusses Celgene’s approach for developing a commercially sustainable media preparation process by applying available filtration and bulk solution preparation technologies and the unique challenges associated with applying these technologies to CAR-T therapies

Design a Portable Sensing Platform with a Lidar and TI ARM M4 Controller

The Microcontrollers/microelectronics have been used in variety of engineering applications on complex and efficient operations. One of the challenges in applying existing microelectronic technologies to these engineering systems lies in the need of modular portability, scalability, customizability, and compatibility. This paper focuses on addressing such challenges by designing a portable sensing platform that integrates a Lidar with USB interface and TI ARM M4 microcontroller. This developed sensing system will serve as an effective teaching platform to create new or enhance existing microelectronic courses that allow students to gain hands-on experiences in mobile embedded system designs. Moreover, the customizability and portability of the embedded sensing platform can also be used for the unmanned aerial vehicles in the GPS-denied environments. Highlights of the presentation will address the following: • Hardware and software interface design of TI ARM M4 microcontrollers with short range USB based Lidars • Demonstrations of the use of the developed embedded sensing platform for the object identification and obstacle avoidance applications • Recommendations of potential research applications and the curriculum development of the developed sensing platfor

Thermodynamic curvature measures interactions

Thermodynamic fluctuation theory originated with Einstein who inverted the relation $S=k_B\ln\Omega$ to express the number of states in terms of entropy: $\Omega= \exp(S/k_B)$. The theory's Gaussian approximation is discussed in most statistical mechanics texts. I review work showing how to go beyond the Gaussian approximation by adding covariance, conservation, and consistency. This generalization leads to a fundamentally new object: the thermodynamic Riemannian curvature scalar $R$, a thermodynamic invariant. I argue that $|R|$ is related to the correlation length and suggest that the sign of $R$ corresponds to whether the interparticle interactions are effectively attractive or repulsive.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures (added reference 27