Innovation for a Crowded Curriculum: A Textbook Companion for Thermodynamics

Energy is a basic human need; technologies for energy conversion and use are fundamental to human survival. As energy technology evolves to meet future demands for development and ecological sustainability, engineers need to have up-to-date skills and knowledge to meet the creative challenges our energy problems demand. Presently, most thermodynamics education adheres narrowly to an unspoken canon, grounded in 19th century developments of the steam engine in Europe, and subsequent fossil fuel technologies. Some texts have added updates, sidebars and problems on more recent technologies, including renewable energy, but for the most part they have not been reframed around the broader educational outcomes engineers need to attain to create the changes needed for a sustainable and just energy future. A series of learning modules have been designed for compilation in a textbook companion, connecting traditional textbooks with these broader skill and knowledge sets, leveraging pedagogies that foster intentional learning through hands-on and/or independent student explorations. These modules develop moral reasoning, critical thinking, social engagement, and communication skills as essential complements to the energy engineer’s technical expertise. In this seminar, attendees will have the opportunity through an interactive exercise to provide feedback on a module designed with chemical engineering students in mind

Climate Justice in Engineering Education

The goal of this research is to design a learning module for Purdue first-year engineering (FYE) students to learn climate fundamentals, and the role of engineers in responding to climate justice challenges. There is a lack of climate material within these classes currently, leading to a lack of climate conscious engineers in the future. The project entailed reviewing and synthesizing a wide variety of previous research on climate change education in engineering, including key learning objectives and their assessment. Because one of the key foci of the first-year engineering sequence relates to data analysis and management, we focused our work on identifying climate data sets compatible with current curricular materials and application tools in the course. We designed a module to fit within the learning targets of ENGR 132, while also including new learning targets identified in previous research that could be easily implemented within the guidelines of ENGR 132. Climate data forms a useful example of the kinds of complex data management challenges engineers face now and in the future. In particular, the problem of climate change reveals structural inequities that engineers must address in their design of solutions. Climate change is one of the grand socio-technical challenges of our day, and thus has the potential to engage many FYE students in discovering how different disciplines of engineering (and disciplines beyond engineering) can contribute to climate solutions. The module will be delivered to a key faculty member in Engineering Education for further development and implementation in the course

Workshop - Feminist Engineering Education: Building a Community of Practice

As a result of a series of papers and special sessions held at FIE between 2004 and 2008, a community of CSET educators interested in exploring feminist pedagogies has formed at FIE. Past participants in these sessions have expressed a desire to learn more about what makes a set of pedagogies feminist. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of research papers at FIE that draw on feminist research methods or topics. This workshop is designed to meet the needs of members of the FIE community who have some experience with feminist pedagogies or research methods, and who are looking to develop intellectual relationships with others also working in engineering educational research. We will discuss the history of feminist education and feminist research methods in the US, including a connection to science and engineering education; participants will then work in small groups focusing on a sub-topic (feminist pedagogies, feminist research methods, and feminist research topics/content). We invite participants to bring part of a project (such as a syllabus or course plan, assignment, class or research project, research question or protocol) to this workshop; some time will be dedicated to the guided design/redesign of this project

Connections: A Journal of Public Education Advocacy - Fall 2002, Vol. 9, No. 2

President's Message - Wendy D. Puriefoy sees education as the universal liberator and children as our nation's most valuable resource.Richard Riley on Transforming American Education - Don't shortchange adolescents, urges Richard W. Riley, Clinton administration secretary of education, as we build for a knowledge-driven economy.Q&A: Bob Moses - Civil rights activist Bob Moses promotes math literacy as the key to education and economic access.Making It Happen - Phyllis McClure, Title I expert, alerts parents and communities to valuable NCLB-mandated information on schools, districts, and states coming their way.Viewpoint - Boeing Company CEO Philip M. Condit links the need for a worldclass workforce to the need for quality public education.Conversations - Grassroots organizer Donna Cooper, Maryland lawmaker Pete Rawlings, and New York attorney Michael Rebell discuss accountability, adequacy, and fiscal equity as long-term investments in the future of our nation.End Notes - William Novelli, CEO, on how AARP members put lifelong learning into action

Hope in dirt: report of the Fort Apache Workshop on Forensic Sedimentology Applications to Cultural Property Crime, 15—19 October 2018

A 2018 workshop on the White Mountain Apache Tribe lands in Arizona examined ways to enhance investigations into cultural property crime (CPC) through applications of rapidly evolving methods from archaeological science. CPC (also looting, graverobbing) refers to unauthorized damage, removal, or trafficking in materials possessing blends of communal, aesthetic, and scientific values. The Fort Apache workshop integrated four generally partitioned domains of CPC expertise: (1) theories of perpetrators’ motivations and methods; (2) recommended practice in sustaining public and community opposition to CPC; (3) tactics and strategies for documenting, investigating, and prosecuting CPC; and (4) forensic sedimentology—uses of biophysical sciences to link sediments from implicated persons and objects to crime scenes. Forensic sedimentology served as the touchstone for dialogues among experts in criminology, archaeological sciences, law enforcement, and heritage stewardship. Field visits to CPC crime scenes and workshop deliberations identified pathways toward integrating CPC theory and practice with forensic sedimentology’s potent battery of analytic methods

The Economic Impact of the Value Chain of a Marcellus Shale Well

The Economic Impact of the Value Chain of a Marcellus Shale Well Site examines the direct economic impact of a Marcellus Shale well located in Southwestern Pennsylvania. This study seeks to fill a critical information gap on the impact of gas drilling and extraction from Marcellus Shale deposits deep underground: an assessment of the economic impacts – emphasizing the direct economic impact, rather than just focusing on the perceived benefits and impacts affecting the region. Our analysis is based on extensive field research, including a site visit and interviews with industry participants. It is further cross-validated by examining similar costs for development of Marcellus Wells by a vertically-integrated exploration and production firm

Risk Factors for SARS Transmission from Patients Requiring Intubation: A Multicentre Investigation in Toronto, Canada

In the 2003 Toronto SARS outbreak, SARS-CoV was transmitted in hospitals despite adherence to infection control procedures. Considerable controversy resulted regarding which procedures and behaviours were associated with the greatest risk of SARS-CoV transmission.A retrospective cohort study was conducted to identify risk factors for transmission of SARS-CoV during intubation from laboratory confirmed SARS patients to HCWs involved in their care. All SARS patients requiring intubation during the Toronto outbreak were identified. All HCWs who provided care to intubated SARS patients during treatment or transportation and who entered a patient room or had direct patient contact from 24 hours before to 4 hours after intubation were eligible for this study. Data was collected on patients by chart review and on HCWs by interviewer-administered questionnaire. Generalized estimating equation (GEE) logistic regression models and classification and regression trees (CART) were used to identify risk factors for SARS transmission. ratio ≤59 (OR = 8.65, p = .001) were associated with increased risk of transmission of SARS-CoV. In CART analyses, the four covariates which explained the greatest amount of variation in SARS-CoV transmission were covariates representing individual patients.Close contact with the airway of severely ill patients and failure of infection control practices to prevent exposure to respiratory secretions were associated with transmission of SARS-CoV. Rates of transmission of SARS-CoV varied widely among patients

Increased pain intensity is associated with greater verbal communication difficulty and increased production of speech and co-speech gestures

Effective pain communication is essential if adequate treatment and support are to be provided. Pain communication is often multimodal, with sufferers utilising speech, nonverbal behaviours (such as facial expressions), and co-speech gestures (bodily movements, primarily of the hands and arms that accompany speech and can convey semantic information) to communicate their experience. Research suggests that the production of nonverbal pain behaviours is positively associated with pain intensity, but it is not known whether this is also the case for speech and co-speech gestures. The present study explored whether increased pain intensity is associated with greater speech and gesture production during face-to-face communication about acute, experimental pain. Participants (N = 26) were exposed to experimentally elicited pressure pain to the fingernail bed at high and low intensities and took part in video-recorded semi-structured interviews. Despite rating more intense pain as more difficult to communicate (t(25) = 2.21, p = .037), participants produced significantly longer verbal pain descriptions and more co-speech gestures in the high intensity pain condition (Words: t(25) = 3.57, p = .001; Gestures: t(25) = 3.66, p = .001). This suggests that spoken and gestural communication about pain is enhanced when pain is more intense. Thus, in addition to conveying detailed semantic information about pain, speech and co-speech gestures may provide a cue to pain intensity, with implications for the treatment and support received by pain sufferers. Future work should consider whether these findings are applicable within the context of clinical interactions about pain

Phytobiomes are compositionally nested from the ground up

Plant-associated microbes are critical players in host health, fitness and productivity. Despite microbes’ importance in plants, seeds are mostly sterile, and most plant microbes are recruited from an environmental pool. Surprisingly little is known about the processes that govern how environmental microbes assemble on plants in nature. In this study we examine how bacteria are distributed across plant parts, and how these distributions interact with spatial gradients. We sequenced amplicons of bacteria from the surfaces of six plant parts and adjacent soil of Scaevola taccada, a common beach shrub, along a 60 km transect spanning O’ahu island’s windward coast, as well as within a single intensively-sampled site. Bacteria are more strongly partitioned by plant part as compared with location. Within S. taccada plants, microbial communities are highly nested: soil and rhizosphere communities contain much of the diversity found elsewhere, whereas reproductive parts fall at the bottom of the nestedness hierarchy. Nestedness patterns suggest either that microbes follow a source/sink gradient from the ground up, or else that assembly processes correlate with other traits, such as tissue persistence, that are vertically stratified. Our work shines light on the origins and determinants of plant-associated microbes across plant and landscape scales

The Eye of the Beholder: Youths and Parents Differ on What Matters in Mental Health Services

The goal of this study was to examine the degree to which youths and caregivers attend to different factors in evaluating their experiences with mental health programs. Youth (n = 251) receiving mental health services at community agencies and their caregivers (n = 275) were asked open-ended questions regarding the positive and negative aspects of the services. Qualitative analyses revealed some agreement but also divergence between youth and caregivers regarding the criteria by which services were evaluated and aspects of services that were valued most highly. Youths’ positive comments primarily focused on treatment outcomes while caregivers focused more on characteristics of the program and provider. Youths’ negative comments reflected dissatisfaction with the program, provider, and types of services offered while caregivers expressed dissatisfaction mainly with program characteristics. Results support the importance of assessing both youth and caregivers in attempts to understand the factors used by consumers to evaluate youth mental health services