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Engineering professionalism : engineering practices in work and education
The research presented in this book provides analytical frameworks and case studies on engineering practices in education and professional work. The studies are inspired by practice theory as well as science and technology studies. The contributions demonstrate how these practices mutually dependent in co-construction processes in different domains of engineering. In order to demonstrate these essentially dynamic features, the empirical material is aimed at unravelling the interrelatedness of educational and work practices in engineering and analysing them as inherently situated in order to understand how engineering professionalism is produced. The studies focus on the responses to societal challenges in education and professional work settings. The outcomes show how engineering has responded to challenges concerning environment, energy, sustainability, design, user interactions, community engagement and entrepreneurship. This has been done through the identification of codes of meaning and the institutions that frame the translation from challenges to professional responses. How these responses are performed within engineering professionalism is crucial for the societal role of engineering. The concluding chapter synthesizes the answers to these questions and the lessons learned from attempts to develop engineering in the different settings studied. It highlights the linkages among them, drawing on findings and details from the individual chapters as well as the literature in which they are situated, showing how the different sites interact and produce specific representations and frameworks central to engineering professionalism.
Book
Hard Structures for Coastal Protection, Towards Greener Designs
Over recent years, many coastal engineering projects have employed the use of soft solutions as these are generally less environmentally damaging than hard solutions. However, in some cases, local conditions hinder the use of soft solutions, meaning that hard solutions have to be adopted or, sometimes, a combination of hard and soft measures is seen as optimal. This research reviews the use of hard coastal structures on the foreshore (groynes, breakwaters and jetties) and onshore (seawalls and dikes). The purpose, functioning and local conditions for which these structures are most suitable are outlined. A description is provided on the negative effects that these structures may have on morphological, hydrodynamic and ecological conditions. To reduce or mitigate these negative impacts, or to create new ecosystem services, the following nature-based adaptations are proposed and discussed: (1) applying soft solutions complementary to hard solutions, (2) mitigating morphological and hydrodynamic changes and (3) ecologically enhancing hard coastal structures. The selection and also the success of these potential adaptations are highly dependent on local conditions, such as hydrodynamic forcing, spatial requirements and socioeconomic factors. The overview provided in this paper aims to offer an interdisciplinary understanding, by giving general guidance on which type of solution is suitable for given characteristics, taking into consideration all aspects that are key for environmentally sensitive coastal designs. Overall, this study aims to provide guidance at the interdisciplinary design stage of nature-based coastal defence structures.
Journal Article
Golden rice : the imperiled birth of a GMO superfood
\"Ordinary white rice is nutrient poor, it consists of carbohydrates and little else. About one million people who subsist on rice become blind or die each year from vitamin A deficiency. Golden rice, which was developed in the hopes of combating that problem by a team of European scientists in the late '90s, was genetically modified to provide an essential nutrient that white rice lacks: beta carotene, which is converted into vitamin A in the body. But twenty years later, this potentially sight- and lifesaving miracle food still has not reached the populations most in need, and tens of millions of people in India, China, Bangladesh, and throughout South and Southeast Asia have gone blind or have died waiting. Supporters claim that the twenty-year delay in Golden Rice's introduction is an unconscionable crime against humanity. Critics have countered that the rice is a \"hoax\", that it is \"food's gold\" and \"propaganda for the genetic engineering industry\". Here, science writer Ed Regis argues that Golden Rice is the world's most controversial, maligned, and misunderstood GMO. Regis tells the story of how the development, growth, and distribution of Golden Rice was delayed and repeatedly derailed by a complex but outdated set of operational guidelines and regulations imposed by governments, and sabotaged by anti-GMO activists in the very nations where the rice is most needed. Regis separates hyperbole from facts, overturning the myths, distortions, and urban legends about this uniquely promising superfood. Anyone interested in GMOs, social justice, or world hunger will find \"Golden rice\" a compelling, sad, and maddening true-life science tale.\" -- Provided by publisher
Book
The environmental and economic impact of structural optimization
According to the well-known mathematician Leonhard Euler: “Nothing takes place within the universe in which the rule of maximum or minimum does not appear.” The development of optimization algorithms can be traced back to the days of Kepler, Newton, Lagrange and Cauchy and the concept of minimization much earlier to the days of Euclid. However, despite these early developments, very little progress on their use was achieved until the middle of twentieth century when digital computers made possible the application of the optimization algorithms and motivated further research, producing massive literature on the subject and development of new optimization techniques. Nevertheless, professional structural engineers and practitioners are highly sceptical in adopting such procedures in their professional life, while software applications implementing optimization techniques fall short of meeting their needs. Therefore, in this study the question that I will try to answer from an environmental and economic perspective is: “Is it worth performing structural optimization studies?” and will aim to prove that adopting optimization based design procedures will have drastic environmental impact and contribute on the economic development of the construction industry.
Journal Article
Human factors in healthcare : a field guide to continuous improvement
Have you ever experienced the burden of an adverse event or a near-miss in healthcare and wished there was a way to mitigate it? This book walks you through a classic adverse event as a case study and shows you how. It is a practical guide to continuously improving your healthcare environment, processes, tools, and ultimate outcomes, through the discipline of human factors. Using this book, you as a healthcare professional can improve patient safety and quality of care. Adverse events are a major concern in healthcare today. As the complexity of healthcare increases-with technological advances and information overload-the field of human factors offers practical approaches to understand the situation, mitigate risk, and improve outcomes. The first part of this book presents a human factors conceptual framework, and the second part offers a systematic, pragmatic approach. Both the framework and the approach are employed to analyze and understand healthcare situations, both proactively-for constant improvement-and reactively-learning from adverse events. This book guides healthcare professionals through the process of mapping the environmental and human factors; assessing them in relation to the tasks each person performs; recognizing how gaps in the fit between human capabilities and the demands of the task in the environment have a ripple effect that increases risk; and drawing conclusions about what types of changes facilitate improvement and mitigate risk, thereby contributing to improved healthcare outcomes.
Book
Empathic Design in Engineering Education and Practice: An Approach for Achieving Inclusive and Effective Community Resilience
In this paper, we argue that an inclusive and effective community resilience approach requires empathy as a missing component in the current engineering education and practice. An inclusive and effective community resilience approach needs to be human-centric, individual- and communal-sensitive, justice-oriented, and values-based consistent. In this paper, we argue that three kinds of empathy, namely cognitive, affective, and conative, play a central role in creating and sustaining an inclusive and effective approach to community resilience. Finally, we discuss empathetic education through learning theories and analytics skills to cultivate empathy in engineering education. Cultivating empathy in engineering education could help advance the impact and contribution of engineering to well-being.
Journal Article
Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators
Practicing engineers are hired, retained, and rewarded for solving problems, so engineering students should learn how to solve workplace problems. Workplace engineering problems are substantively different from the kinds of problems that engineering students most often solve in the classroom; therefore, learning to solve classroom problems does not necessarily prepare engineering students to solve workplace problems. These qualitative studies of workplace engineering problems identify the attributes of workplace problems. Workplace problems are ill‐structured and complex because they possess conflicting goals, multiple solution methods, non‐engineering success standards, non‐engineering constraints, unanticipated problems, distributed knowledge, collaborative activity systems, the importance of experience, and multiple forms of problem representation. Some implications for designing engineering curricula and experiences that better prepare students for solving workplace problems are considered.
Journal Article
The impact of STEM curriculum on students’ engineering design abilities and attitudes toward STEM
While it has been recognized that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education requires an interdisciplinary approach, integrating multiple subjects in a meaningful way remains challenging for teachers. This study aimed to design a STEM curriculum, emphasizing explicit and continuous scaffolding of students’ reflection on scientific and engineering knowledge. The primary goal was to foster knowledge integration in their engineering designs and enhance their attitudes toward STEM. The study involved fifty tenth-grade students who were guided to discuss and reflect on relevant scientific and engineering knowledge and to apply mathematics for data collection and analysis during the design of their technology products. The research instruments included an assessment of the progression of knowledge integration in students’ engineering designs through student journals and pre- and post-test surveys on attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and the learning environment. The results reveal that the introduction and explicit scaffolding students’ reflection on scientific and engineering knowledge led to a gradual improvement in knowledge integration within their engineering designs. Students also significantly enhanced their attitudes toward STEM and the learning environment compared to the general school curriculum. This study contributes to interdisciplinary learning that promotes the integration of scientific and engineering knowledge in students' engineering design processes, and to interdisciplinary assessment that evaluates students' knowledge integration across learning progressions and outcomes.
Journal Article
Non destructive assessment of in situ concrete strength: comparison of approaches through an international benchmark
Strength assessment of concrete in existing structures is a key issue. Many non destructive techniques (NDT) are available which can provide information about the material condition and several approaches can be used to derive strength estimates from NDT test results. However, common practice suffers from many drawbacks: (a) it is difficult to ascertain the level of accuracy/confidence of concrete strength estimates, (b) one lacks established guidelines for estimating the concrete strength variability, (c) the best way to combine NDT methods and coring remains an open issue. The RILEM TC 249 “Non destructive in situ strength assessment of concrete” is addressing these problems. A benchmark was carried out in order to compare (a) how experts define and can carry out an NDT investigation program and (b) how experts derive strength values from the NDT measurements. The benchmark was based on synthetic simulations which reproduced a synthetic data set corresponding to a grid of twenty 3 m-high columns defining a single-storey building structure. The comparison of the various strategies and the analysis of results enabled identification of the most influential parameters that define an investigation approach and influence its efficiency and accuracy. A special emphasis was placed on the magnitude of the measurement error. A model of the investigation strategy is proposed, that will be detailed in future guidelines. The reader is invited to refer to a companion paper (Alwash et al. in Mater Struct,
1
. doi:
10.1617/s11527-016-0962-x
), based on more extensive Monte-Carlo simulations of the same case-study, which analyzes and quantifies the efficiency of the investigation strategies with respect to both average strength and strength variability assessment, in order to draw conclusions based on rational analyses rather than on the element of chance.
Journal Article
Engineering practices as a framework for STEM education: a proposal based on epistemic nuances
The role of engineering education has gained prominence within the context of STEM education. New educational perspectives such as the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education consider engineering practices one of the central pillars of a sound STEM education. While this idea of developing a set of practices analogous to those of professional engineering resonates with recent views of STEM education research, current approaches such as the NRC’s Framework seem too dependent on and interlinked with the list for scientific practices and adheres to this list too strictly. This paper draws on the NRC’s Framework proposing a new set of engineering practices that seek to incorporate the epistemic nuances that differentiate engineering from science. The nine engineering practices proposed contain epistemological nuances that are missing in other proposals, including essential aspects such as problem scoping, identifying multiple solutions, selecting, testing and improving solutions and materializing solutions. This epistemic approach may facilitate students’ content learning and thinking development, offering a more comprehensive and realistic view of the STEM fields.
Journal Article