The educational technologist as a change agent for innovation at a German school. An auto-ethnography in the form of a dialogue

https://www.ester.ee/record=b5373447*es

Surface Treatments on Clay and Making Meaning

This is a student centered art-based research project that explores surface treatments on clay and how they may influence creativity and making meaning. It involved me introducing more surface treatments that are alternatives to glazes into my high school classroom. I wanted to broaden my own knowledge as well as provide more opportunities for my students so they would feel a greater sense of choice, power, and meaning in their artwork. This process forced me to learn about materials, open up to the unknown, and release power to the students. It was a rewarding experience that will forever make an imprint on my ceramics studio and possibly other content areas in the future. I learned to think about the many ways art can be meaningful and to reflect on the biases about such a topic I hold as an art teacher

Corporate history and curatorial practice at Buffalo Trace distillery.

This work seeks to explore curatorial integrity in public museums and corporate history institutions by discussing historic preservation and display at The Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, KY. The history of curatorial narrative in public museums begins with elitist displays of state treasures in 16th century Europe and develops over centuries into publicly held, education based institutions. Emerging in the form of factory tours during the Industrial Revolution, many corporations today have moved beyond basic advertising and toward meaningful positioning of their company, not only in the market place, but also within community and national identities. A National Historic Landmark, Buffalo Trace Distillery is the oldest continuously operating distillery in the United States. As such, it boasts a rich history with connections to early settlement, industrial revolution, Prohibition, and modern innovations in distilling. As the Archivist at Buffalo Trace, my first curatorial responsibilities began with a collaboration to develop educational interpretation of the Old Taylor House, a historic home at the distillery, and populating expanded areas of the Visitor Center with historic materials. The combination of historic preservation with new construction expansion provides a unique backdrop to discuss integrity and narrative in corporate museums. Many doubt the voice of corporate history institutions, expecting persuasion in the place of authenticity. However, Buffalo Trace Distillery, like many museums, collects, preserves, and interprets their collection in hopes of using its materials to share its rich history with the public. I hope to demonstrate through research and methodology that theseinstitutions value accurate historical narrative, not solely as a marketing tool, but as a way to connect with their community and build knowledge about long-standing institutions within local, regional and national history. By connecting the Old Taylor House and Visitor Center displays to exhibition standards developed by the American Alliance of Museums committee, the National Association for Museum Exhibition, and demonstrating that the facility qualifies as a corporate museum by Victor Danilov’s standards. Finally, by making this claim I hope to call for increased recognition of corporate museums through the accreditation process by AAM. Though AAM has made great strides to become more inclusive in recent years, increased acceptance of corporate museums would benefit both corporations and the museum field as a whole

Divided Agencies: Internal Strife in the Fight Against Castro

This thesis examines how the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. State Department differed in their approaches to dealing with the Castro regime from 1959 through the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Using declassified documents from the CIA and State Department, I argue that the approaches of the CIA in dealing with the Castro regime were more aggressive than the approaches of the U.S. State Department. Many of the primary sources used in this work were accessed in the CIA electronic reading room and on the office of the historian website. The office of the historian is an official government office within the Bureau of Public Affairs responsible for publishing declassified historical documents related to U.S. foreign policy. The thesis contributes to the historiography of U.S.-Cuban relations by exposing tensions and rifts inside the U.S. government during a pivotal era in the history of both nations

Stochastic Tree Models for Macroevolution: Development, Validation and Application

Phylogenetic trees capture the relationships between species and can be investigated by morphological and/or molecular data. When focusing on macroevolution, one considers the large-scale history of life with evolutionary changes affecting a single species of the entire clade leading to the enormous diversity of species obtained today. One major problem of biology is the explanation of this biodiversity. Therefore, one may ask which kind of macroevolutionary processes have given rise to observable tree shapes or patterns of species distribution which refers to the appearance of branching orders and time periods. Thus, with an increasing number of known species in the context of phylogenetic studies, testing hypotheses about evolution by analyzing the tree shape of the resulting phylogenetic trees became matter of particular interest. The attention of using those reconstructed phylogenies for studying evolutionary processes increased during the last decades. Many paleontologists (Raup et al., 1973; Gould et al., 1977; Gilinsky and Good, 1989; Nee, 2004) tried to describe such patterns of macroevolution by using models for growing trees. Those models describe stochastic processes to generate phylogenetic trees. Yule (1925) was the first who introduced such a model, the Equal Rate Markov (ERM) model, in the context of biological branching based on a continuous-time, uneven branching process. In the last decades, further dynamical models were proposed (Yule, 1925; Aldous, 1996; Nee, 2006; Rosen, 1978; Ford, 2005; Hernández-García et al., 2010) to address the investigation of tree shapes and hence, capture the rules of macroevolutionary forces. A common model, is the Aldous\\\'' Branching (AB) model, which is known for generating trees with a similar structure of \\\"real\\\" trees. To infer those macroevolutionary forces structures, estimated trees are analyzed and compared to simulated trees generated by models. There are a few drawbacks on recent models such as a missing biological motivation or the generated tree shape does not fit well to one observed in empirical trees. The central aim of this thesis is the development and study of new biologically motivated approaches which might help to better understand or even discover biological forces which lead to the huge diversity of organisms. The first approach, called age model, can be defined as a stochastic procedure which describes the growth of binary trees by an iterative stochastic attachment of leaves, similar to the ERM model. At difference with the latter, the branching rate at each clade is no longer constant, but decreasing in time, i.e., with the age. Thus, species involved in recent speciation events have a tendency to speciate again. The second introduced model, is a branching process which mimics the evolution of species driven by innovations. The process involves a separation of time scales. Rare innovation events trigger rapid cascades of diversification where a feature combines with previously existing features. The model is called innovation model. Three data sets of estimated phylogenetic trees are used to analyze and compare the produced tree shape of the new growth models. A tree shape statistic considering a variety of imbalance measurements is performed. Results show that simulated trees of both growth models fit well to the tree shape observed in real trees. In a further study, a likelihood analysis is performed in order to rank models with respect to their ability to explain observed tree shapes. Results show that the likelihoods of the age model and the AB model are clearly correlated under the trees in the databases when considering small and medium-sized trees with up to 19 leaves. For a data set, representing of phylogenetic trees of protein families, the age model outperforms the AB model. But for another data set, representing phylogenetic trees of species, the AB model performs slightly better. To support this observation a further analysis using larger trees is necessary. But an exact computation of likelihoods for large trees implies a huge computational effort. Therefore, an efficient method for likelihood estimation is proposed and compared to the estimation using a naive sampling strategy. Nevertheless, both models describe the tree generation process in a way which is easy to interpret biologically. Another interesting field of research in biology is the coevolution between species. This is the interaction of species across groups such that the evolution of a species from one group can be triggered by a species from another group. Most prominent examples are systems of host species and their associated parasites. One problem is the reconciliation of the common history of both groups of species and to predict the associations between ancestral hosts and their parasites. To solve this problem some algorithmic methods have been developed in recent years. But only a few host parasite systems have been analyzed in sufficient detail which makes an evaluation of these methods complex. Within the scope of coevolution, the proposed age model is applied to the generation of cophylogenies to evaluate such host parasite reconciliation methods. The presented age model as well as the innovation model produce tree shapes which are similar to obtained tree structures of estimated trees. Both models describe an evolutionary dynamics and might provide a further opportunity to infer macroevolutionary processes which lead to the biodiversity which can be obtained today. Furthermore with the application of the age model in the context of coevolution by generating a useful benchmark set of cophylogenies is a first step towards systematic studies on evaluating reconciliation methods

Exploiting Adaptive and Collaborative AUV Autonomy for Detection and Characterization of Internal Waves

Advances in the fields of autonomy software and environmental sampling techniques for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have recently allowed for the merging of oceanographic data collection with the testing of emerging marine technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems (LAMSS) group conducted an Internal Wave Detection Experiment in August 2010 with these advances in mind. The goal was to have multiple AUVs collaborate autonomously through onboard autonomy software and real-time underwater acoustic communication to monitor for the presence of internal waves by adapting to changes in the environment (specifically the temperature variations near the thermocline/pycnocline depth). The experimental setup, implementation, data, deployment results, and internal wave detection and quantification results are presented in this paper.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-08-1-0013)United States. Dept. of DefenseUnited States. Air Force Office of Scientific ResearchAmerican Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (32 CFR 168a

Neural mechanisms of social cognition – the mirror neuron system and beyond

In my PhD thesis, I present three functional magnetic resonance imaging studies aimed at investigating neurobiological mechanisms underlying social cognition. My thesis focuses on fast and automatic processes that are proposed to build the basis of social understanding, and might be activated in parallel to more effortful deliberate mechanisms. The proposed neural substrate of fast and automatic processes are mirror neurons, which according to the theory of embodied simulation allow humans to understand other individuals’ actions, and even emotions and intentions. Since non-invasive techniques cannot be applied to measure mirror neurons, but only neural populations assumed to constitute the mirror neuron system, experimental paradigms and analysis routines that allow approximation of mirror neuron functions need to be developed. In study 1, I demonstrated that different social cognitive skills, including imitation, affective empathy and theory of mind share a common neural basis, located in regions associated with the mirror neuron system. In addition to standard analyses, a shared voxel analysis was applied that revealed common activation for social-cognitive processes not only across, but also within participants. Study 2 was set up to investigate whether the mirror neuron system can distinguish the valence of facial configurations. The use of a functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation paradigm allowed to determine neural populations sensitive to emotional valence. While the fusiform gyrus was sensitive to changes from fearful to smiling faces and also from smiling to fearful faces, Brodmann area 44 reaching into insula, and superior temporal sulcus, i.e. regions more commonly associated with the mirror neuron system and with the so called mentalizing network, showed particularly increased activation for switches from smiling to fearful faces. Study 3 was dedicated to the investigation of decision making in the context of ambiguous facial configurations. While probabilistic decision making on these facial configurations lead to activation in the executive control network, final decisions for an emotion resulted in nucleus accumbens activation. In addition, perceiving fear in a face lead to higher nucleus accumbens activation during final decisions than perceiving happiness. This finding can be linked to salience processing in the nucleus accumbens. In conclusion, all three studies show an involvement of fast and automatic processing regions for different social-cognitive processes. Study 3 additionally examined the interaction with slower and more deliberate processes, as involved in probabilistic decision making on ambiguous faces. The mirror neuron system seems to be critically involved in different social-cognitive tasks and also sensitive to emotional valence. In cases when automatic processing is not possible, as when presented with ambiguous facial configurations, brain regions commonly associated with probabilistic decision making assist, and the nucleus accumbens, possibly by directing salience, is involved in the final decision. These results deepen the understanding of the mechanisms of social cognition and encourage the use of sophisticated methods in experimental paradigms and analysis

Autonomous and Adaptive Underwater Plume Detection and Tracking with AUVs: Concepts, Methods, and Available Technology

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with environmental sensors and an on-board autonomy system can greatly increase the efficiency of environmental data collection and the synopticity of the data set collected simply by autonomously adapting its motion to changes it senses in its local environment. One application of this is tracking ocean features in an unknown ocean environment. This can be accomplished with one or multiple AUVs collaborating in near-real-time using acoustic communications. To further explore one example of this application, this paper focuses on using multiple AUVs to track underwater plumes. We evaluate various types of plumes (e.g., hydrothermal vent plumes, algal blooms, oil leaks), how each plume type may be detected and its spatial extent determined, what types of sensors can be used, and how AUVs can be employed to autonomously and adaptively track these dynamic plumes. Since AUVs vary significantly in design, mobility, deployment duration, on-board processing power, etc., it is also necessary to consider the best choice of AUV (or combination of AUVs) to track a plume. Thus, an operator/scientist's choice of AUV type(s) will likely depend the type of plume to be tracked, or vice versa. Since most underwater plumes are highly spatiotemporally dynamic, employing environmentally adaptive autonomy to track them with a fleet of AUVs is one of the most efficient ways to do so, given today's technology. Keywords: Autonomous vehicles; Adaptive systems; Marine systems; Sampling systems; Tracking applications; Marine environmental sampling; Underwater plume

Deficits in Education Endanger Germany's Innovative Capacity

The innovative capacity of advanced industrial countries is their most important source of prosperity and growth. DIW Berlin has investigated Germany's innovative capacity for the fourth time in an international comparative survey. The survey evaluates the ability of countries to create and transform knowledge into marketable products and services (i.e., innovations) using a system of indicators that provides an overall composite indicator of innovative capacity as well as a detailed profile of strengths and weaknesses. Of the seventeen leading industrial nations investigated under the survey, Germany only ranked 8th, as it did in 2007, thus remaining in the broad middle range. Relative to its most important competitors Germany was unable to improve its position. Sweden, the US, Switzerland, Finland, and Denmark headed up the list. Germany is particularly successful in international markets for new products and services and in its ability to network key participants in the innovation process. Deficiencies in Germany's educational system and in the financing conditions for innovation and the founding of new companies remain the country's two greatest weaknesses. Prospects are dim for the considerable improvement needed in these areas.Innovation system,Composite indicator,Industrialized countries