The Rise and Run of Women Corporate Leaders

The purpose of this research was to understand the contexts that support the barriers to women’s advancement and to identify the conditions under which women leaders overcome the barriers to attain top corporate leadership positions. I have identified and discussed three distinct approaches for understanding how we can increase women’s representation and influence in the executive and director ranks within top U.S. corporations. The first approach investigates the complexities of leveraging the social and cultural capital attained through post-secondary education in order gain entry into the corporate elite. The second approach examines gendered stereotypes of risk-taking versus the organizational risk-taking realities that are inherent in women corporate leaders’ climb to the top. The final approach considers the impact of external pressures in increasing the prevalence, power and influence of women corporate directors. Findings reveal some of the complexity in both the antecedents and consequences of gender diversity within top leadership of large U.S. firms. Taken together, the results convey the organizational and societal contexts that lead to more diverse corporate leadership

Design Thinking Portfolio

The Design Thinking Portfolio engages students in the design thinking process through problem-based and collaborative learning. The portfolio project starts with compiling things that students wish were better, then having them work across the spectrum of design thinking to sell their ideas though team pitches. Students use a design thinking mindset to solve a regional social or civic issue as social entrepreneurs. Coming together and sharing their own diverse backgrounds forces students to think outside of their own views to create an open and innovative solution. The portfolio project introduces several professional tools needed for finding the right problem in order to compile many solutions based on research, empathy maps, interviews, observations, identifying users and stakeholders, considering constraints, user needs, producing customer journey maps, creating prototypes and developing pitches to obtain the best solution. This portfolio will not only walk students through the process, but also serve as an artifact of their abilities to apply design thinking in revaluating complex problems.https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/1818/thumbnail.jp

Next Generation Open Textbooks: A Case Study

Design Across the Disciplines: Learning the value of communication design through practice” is an OER (open educational resource), digital textbook under prototype testing in a media design course. The text is created in collaboration with a librarian, two faculty from different colleges and two students who have completed the course. This interdisciplinary team was formed with the directive to embrace the powers of design thinking through digital content to develop a product that truly recognizes the needs of the primary users, our students and key stakeholders, the faculty. Several semesters of student feedback provided the insights for considering textbook cost; the need for continual access to the text even after the course is completed; simplicity of use; and the need for multi-modal content. From this feedback, the design evolved to employ the chunking of content with scalable vector illustrations; limited and direct text; short, highly directive instructional videos; and assessments that provide internship and employment artifacts that are evidence of a student’s digital design capabilities. The design is a prototype in action being tested in class as well as through a research study on faculty perceptions to OER textbooks. The execution of this textbook is based not only in the empathetic approach to gathering user needs through the employment of several prototypes and observations, but also through student and faculty interviews to determine desirability, viability and feasibility conditions for success. This presentation shares what a librarian, marketing professor, design professor and graphic design student learned through a two-year process in developing a OER digital textbook

Mars Dust Storms: Interannual Variability and Chaos

The hypothesis is that the global climate system, consisting of atmospheric dust interacting with the circulation, produces its own interannual variability when forced at the annual frequency. The model has two time-dependent variables representing the amount of atmospheric dust in the northern and southern hemispheres, respectively. Absorption of sunlight by the dust drives a cross-equatorial Hadley cell that brings more dust into the heated hemisphere. The circulation decays when the dust storm covers the globe. Interannual variability manifests itself either as a periodic solution in which the period is a multiple of the Martian year, or as an aperiodic (chaotic) solution that never repeats. Both kinds of solution are found in the model, lending support to the idea that interannual variability is an intrinsic property of the global climate system. The next step is to develop a hierarchy of dust-circulation models capable of being integrated for many years

Exploring Planets with Directed Aerial Robot Explorers

Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC) is developing a revolutionary system architecture for exploration of planetary atmospheres and surfaces from atmospheric altitudes. The work is supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). The innovative system architecture relies upon the use of Directed Aerial Robot Explorers (DAREs), which essentially are long-duration-flight autonomous balloons with trajectory control capabilities that can deploy swarms of miniature probes over multiple target areas. Balloon guidance capabilities will offer unprecedented opportunities in high-resolution, targeted observations of both atmospheric and surface phenomena. Multifunctional microprobes will be deployed from the balloons once over the target areas, and perform a multitude of functions, such as atmospheric profiling or surface exploration, relaying data back to the balloons or an orbiter. This architecture will enable low-cost, low-energy, long-term global exploration of planetary atmospheres and surfaces. This paper focuses on a conceptual analysis of the DARE architecture capabilities and science applications for Venus, Titan and Jupiter. Preliminary simulations with simplified atmospheric models show that a relatively small trajectory control wing can enable global coverage of the atmospheres of Venus and Titan by a single balloon over a 100-day mission. This presents unique opportunities for global in situ sampling of the atmospheric composition and dynamics, atmospheric profiling over multiple sites with small dropsondes and targeted deployment of surface microprobes. At Jupiter, path guidance capabilities of the DARE platforms permits targeting localized regions of interest, such as "hot spots" or the Great Red Spot. A single DARE platform at Jupiter can sample major types of the atmospheric flows (zones and belts) over a 100-day mission. Observations by deployable probes would reveal if the differences exist in radiative, dynamic and compositional environments at these sites

Planetary atmospheres

Four years is approximately the doubling time for knowledge of extra-terrestrial planetary atmospheres. During 1975–8 the results of several important missions to Venus, Mars, Jupiter and its satellites were analyzed, and during 1979 more spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter and Saturn. Spacecraft data are supplemented by ground-based observations, often at higher spectral resolution and extending over longer periods of time. As a result of this rapid growth of information, many first-order questions concerning the composition, physical state and kinematics of planetary atmospheres have been answered

Creating a Student Driven OER Digital Textbook

Design Across the Disciplines: Learning the value of communication design through practice” is an OER (open educational resource), digital textbook under prototype testing in a media design course. The text is created in collaboration with a librarian, two faculty from different colleges and two students who have completed the course. This interdisciplinary team was formed with the directive to embrace the powers of design thinking through digital content to develop a product that truly recognizes the needs of the primary users, our students and key stakeholders, the faculty

How hummingbirds hum: acoustic holography of hummingbirds during maneuvering flight

Hummingbirds make a characteristic humming sound when they flaptheir wings. The physics and the biological significance of hummingbird aeroacoustics is still poorly understood. We used acoustic holography and high-speed cameras to determine the acoustic field of six hummingbirds while they either hovered stationary in front of a flower or maneuvered to track flower motion. We used a robotic flower that oscillated either laterally or longitudinally with a linear combination of 20 different frequencies between 0.2 and 20 Hz, a range that encompasses natural flower vibration frequencies in wind. We used high-speed marker tracking to dissect the transfer function between the moving flower, the head, and body of the bird. We also positioned four acoustic arrays equipped with 2176 microphones total above, below, and in front of the hummingbird. Acoustic data from the microphones were back-propagated to planes adjacent to the hummingbird to create the first real-time holograms of the pressure field a hummingbird generates in vivo. Integration of all this data offers insight into how hummingbirds modulate the acoustic field during hovering and maneuvering flight