Learning to Serve

If you\u27re ready to initiate a service learning program with your students and want to know where to begin, you\u27ve come to the right place! This section will give you a step-by-step guide to starting a service learning program

Think different: A comparison of the critical thinking abilities of education majors

In an increasingly complex society, the need for people to exercise critical thinking effectively is clearly evident. The institution of education recognizes that its responsibility to teach students to think critically is vital in order for them to negotiate decisions humanely and intelligently in an ever-changing world; Hundreds of reports from various committees and researchers along with such insidious incidents as the rise in murderous assaults on children inside school buildings, such as the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, attest to the fact that schools fail to teach students to evaluate social life critically. While educators advocate critical thinking, teacher education faculty must insure that prospective elementary teachers possess and exercise critical thinking abilities to pass on later to their students; This was an exploratory investigation. It sought to examine the critical thinking abilities of both elementary education and secondary education majors in a local university in a city in the Southwest. A review of the literature revealed little research that compared critical thinking abilities among prospective elementary education teachers and secondary education majors as well as among prospective teachers and typical college students having different academic backgrounds. This study identified the difference between the critical thinking skills of prospective elementary education teachers and prospective secondary education teachers (research hypothesis 2) and identified the difference in critical thinking appraisal scores between prospective elementary and secondary education teachers\u27 scores and the scores of typical college students as measured by the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (research hypothesis 1). The following research hypotheses were investigated: (1) Prospective teachers have lower critical thinking appraisal scores than typical college students as measured by the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. (2) Prospective elementary education teachers differ from prospective secondary education teachers with respect to critical thinking skills. Results of testing supported both hypotheses

Jefferson Award Winning Attorney Champions Underdogs, Changes Policy

Morton Cohen, a Bay Area attorney, has been building a legacy in the courtroom and the classroom. His volunteer work has earned him this week’s Jefferson Award

Analyzing the Impact of Blood Transfusion Kits and Triage Misclassification Errors for Military Medical Evacuation Dispatching Policies via Approximate Dynamic Programming

Members of the armed forces greatly rely on having an effective and efficient medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) process for evacuating casualties from the battlefield to medical treatment facilities (MTF) during combat operations. This thesis examines the MEDEVAC dispatching problem and seeks to determine an optimal policy for dispatching a MEDEVAC unit, if any, when a 9-line MEDEVAC request arrives, taking into account triage classification errors and the possibility of having blood transfusion kits on board select MEDEVAC units. A discounted, infinite-horizon continuous-time Markov decision process (MDP) model is formulated to examine such problem and compare generated dispatching policies to the myopic policy of sending the closest available unit. We utilize an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) technique that leverages a random forest value function approximation within an approximate policy iteration algorithmic framework to develop high-quality policies for both a small-scale problem instance and a large-scale problem instance that cannot be solved to optimality. A representative planning scenario involving joint combat operations in South Korea is developed and utilized to investigate the differences between the various policies. Results from the analysis indicate that applying ADP techniques can improve current practices by as much as 29% with regard to a life-saving performance metric. This research is of particular interest to the military medical community and can inform the procedures of future military MEDEVAC operations

Towards reputation-as-a-service

Reputation is used to regulate relationships of trust in online communities. When deploying a reputation system, it needs to accommodate the requirements and constrains of the specific community in order to assist the community to reach their goals. This paper identifies that there is a need for a framework to define a configurable reputation system with the ability to accommodate the requirements of a variety of online communities. Such a reputation system can be defined as a service on the Cloud, to be composed with the application environment of the online community. This paper introduces the concept of RaaS (Reputation-as-a-Service) and discusses a potential framework for creating a RaaS. In order to achieve such a framework, research is conducted into features of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) components, user requirements for trust and reputation, and features of current reputation frameworks that can be configured in order to support a reputation service on the Cloud

Assessing Transit Accessibility in African American Communities. A Case Study of the Houston Metropolitan Area

Transportation is the pulse that keeps today’s society moving. The movement of people, places, and things all rely on some form of transportation. There are various ways to move people; mass public transit, personal vehicles, and private transit entities are just a few ways that people move. Access to viable transportation is essential in the quality-of-life aspect of today’s society; in many cases, African American populations lack access to viable transportation. Work, school, and shopping are just a few activities that almost always require some form of transportation. Houston, Texas, is known for its diverse culture. Ordinarily, residents in the Houston region tend to inhabit together in their respective assemblage. The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO) and similar agencies aim to move people in the Houston region efficiently. This study will analyze transit equity between African American communities and Caucasian Communities. It is an unforgiving truth that there is an alarming number of inequities concerning transit access in America. This study intends to examine the existing transit infrastructure in the Metropolitan Area of Houston, Texas. Focusing on the concept of transit accessibility inequities for African American Communities (AACs) in the region, the study seeks to investigate various urban and suburban AACs compared to one predominantly white community to depict inequities in transit access. At its core, this study aims to provide information to render increased transit equity for the African American community. The study found that there were statistical differences in transit access between the three selected study areas. Although the major differences the study determined that the transit system was equitable as the Metropolitan transit authority of Harris County provided services based on need

A 64-channel inductively-powered neural recording sensor array

This paper reports a 64-channel inductively powered neural recording sensor array. Neural signals are acquired, filtered, digitized and compressed in the channels. Additionally, each channel implements a local auto-calibration mechanism which configures the transfer characteristics of the recording site. The system has two operation modes; in one case the information captured by the channels is sent as uncompressed raw data; in the other, feature vectors extracted from the detected neural spikes are transmitted. Data streams coming from the channels are serialized by an embedded digital processor and transferred to the outside by means of the same inductive link used for powering the system. Simulation results show that the power consumption of the complete system is 377μW.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-0844

4 Channel Sterilizer Calibrator

Thermocouple (Thermocouple) is a type of temperature sensor used to detect or measure temperature through two types of metal conductors, whose working principle is that each end of a metal conductor is combined to create a "Thermoelectric" effect. One type of metal conductor contained in a thermocouple will serve as a reference with a constant temperature (fixed), while a metal conductor functions as a metal conductor that detects hot temperatures. Sterilisator is a device used to sterilize medical instruments to avoid the bacteria that attach to the remainder of the use of medical instruments. The temperature of the sterilizer varies but generally for dry sterilizers ranges from 175 ° Celsius. From the above problems, the author wants to develop a "4 Channel Sterilizer Calibrator", Using the Arduino Nano Atmega328 as a minimum system, K type thermocouple and MAX6675 module as a sensor. Measurements were made by comparing modules with standard measuring instruments, obtained the smallest error 0.2% at T3 and T4 when measuring 100 ° C, and the largest 4.4% at T2 when measuring 150 ° C

12 V Automotive systems

Standard level N-channel MOSFET in an LFPAK56 (Power SO8) package using TrenchMOS technology. This product has been designed and qualified to AEC Q101 standard for use in high performance automotive applications. 2. Features and benefit

A Multi-channel Application Framework for Customer Care Service Using Best-First Search Technique

It has become imperative to find a solution to the dissatisfaction in response by mobile service providers when interacting with their customer care centres. Problems faced with Human to Human Interaction (H2H) between customer care centres and their customers include delayed response time, inconsistent solutions to questions or enquires and lack of dedicated access channels for interaction with customer care centres in some cases. This paper presents a framework and development techniques for a multi-channel application providing Human to System (H2S) interaction for customer care centre of a mobile telecommunication provider. The proposed solution is called Interactive Customer Service Agent (ICSA). Based on single-authoring, it will provide three media of interaction with the customer care centre of a mobile telecommunication operator: voice, phone and web browsing. A mathematical search technique called Best-First Search to generate accurate results in a search environmen