While most like to consider college and university campuses safe from discrimination, research demonstrates this is unfortunately not true. We know students with minority group status experience discrimination on campus at an alarming rate. Years of research has demonstrated the negative effects of experiencing discrimination on students’ well-being, sense of belonging, and future aspirations. However, research has also shown positive impacts that faculty relationships can have on students’ motivation, academic achievement, persistence, and aspirations. Faculty serve as institutional agents within the university, so they have considerable influence over students’ satisfaction with their university experience and overall wellness. Thus, this study investigates the extent to which college students’ trust in faculty acts as a buffer against the negative impacts of discrimination. Results of this research indicate a strong relationship between experiencing discrimination and feelings of stress and decreased sense of belonging, and that increased stress and decreased belonging negatively affect students’ future aspirations. However, our findings demonstrate that trust in faculty mitigates the negative effects of discrimination and can reduce feelings of stress and increase feelings of belonging, thereby increasing students’ future aspirations. Our findings demonstrate the important role faculty play in creating an affirming climate for students on college campuses.
Until recently, nationally representative survey data has been the primary source of information on the energy performance of buildings in the U.S., relative to their year of construction. The emergence of municipal energy benchmarking ordinances and public availability of benchmarking datasets now makes it possible to explore these relationships at the local level, and to link this data with information about a building’s historic designation status. This paper presents results from an initial statistical analysis examining the relationships between building energy use, year of construction, and historic designation status. First, municipal benchmarking data from six U.S. cities is used to examine local trends in the relationship between building age and energy performance. Second, an exploratory analysis of the energy performance of designated historic compared to non-historic buildings in New York City is presented. The methods described in this paper could be applied more widely to benchmarking datasets from other cities.
Prior work on black hole (BH) thermodynamics suggests the entropy depends not on the volume, but rather the surface area of the event horizon. Such findings highlight the intriguing nature of BHs and give rise to the idea that information may be entirely encoded on the surface. We study the case of a superficial Schwarzschild BH, and calculate the net force (Fnet) exerted on the surface of its spherical shell from the self-gravitational pull. We demonstrate that the Fnet is exactly c^4/4G, 3.025•10^43 Newtons, a force that is constant and independent of the size and the mass of the BH, meaning all such Schwarzschild BHs share the same Fnet. Surprisingly, the Fnet matches Fmax, the limit of the maximum force conjecture. This establishes a new potential connection between the formation of BHs and the Fmax. We demonstrate that under the validity of this Fmax, the mass of the superficial BH is contained at precisely the Schwarzschild radius. Finally, we provide further evidence to reject the concept of a point mass singularity and we theorize on the creation of a BH given the findings.
Interactive product prototyping has been widely taught in industrial design studio courses to prepare design students in dealing with dynamic interactions of using digital products. While it requires the integration of design and technology, the lack of systematic approaches of the studio curricula creates a great challenge for students who are not familiar with technology in creating interactive prototypes successfully. A theoretical framework is developed from the human-machine interaction model and the sequential flow of task analysis methods. Based on this framework, a human-machine interaction (HMI) flow diagram is proposed with which interaction elements, relationships, and flows are specified and categorized. The flow diagram is utilized to create a storyboard and an allocation flowchart subsequently. A structured design process based on these methods was applied to an interactive product design studio course in an undergraduate industrial design program. Students created working prototypes of interactive products, following the structured design process consisting of an HMI flow diagram, a storyboard, and an allocation flowchart. 104 students (87.4%) among 119 succeeded in translating their ideas to functioning circuits. 74 students (62.2%) successfully integrated electronics components into working physical prototypes while 30 students (25.2%) just made the circuits work. The structured design process makes a transition from initial ideation to programming smooth and incremental. This helps students without previous programming experience to understand the logic flow and to develop algorithms. The HMI flow diagram is useful for analysis, concept development, and the specification of interactions, and helps students to grasp the effect of interactive features on user experience.
Robotic animal-like companions for older adults are promising technologies that have shown to have health benefits, especially for individuals with dementia, and good adoption rates in some previous studies. Our project, Affordable Robotic Intelligence for Elderly Support, aims to design new capabilities for companionship and smart care, but at high affordability. In a 6-month longitudinal study of baseline acceptance and well-being, we assessed the impact of an Ageless Innovation Joy for All™ robotic pet on user acceptance and emotional well-being (depression, loneliness, positive emotions). Nineteen participants from independent and assisted living facilities completed three standardized in-person surveys, each 3 months apart, including the CES-D, measures of Loneliness, Emotions, Attitude towards Technology (ATI), and various measures of evaluation of and engagement with robotic technology. The measures showed modest to very good reliability and meaningful construct validity. Participants in this sample showed little depression or loneliness, and these levels did not further decrease over the six months. People welcomed the pet and expressed positive evaluations of it, and these sentiments were stable over time. Attitudes toward technology varied but were unrelated to well-being measures and to robot evaluations. Our current conclusion, on the basis of a small sample, is that the selected robotic pet companion is appreciated and seen as beneficial, and for adults who are already low in depression and loneliness, the robot companion helps maintain the adult’s emotional well-being but does not further increase it.
An expanded version of "The Future of Conflict: Neurowarfare", both of which discuss emerging neurotechnology, neuroscience, and their implications for war, politics, medicine, ethics, and society.
An overview of Walter A. McDougall's 1997 book "Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776" with some concluding thoughts.
Leo Marx, in his famous 1964 book, “The Machine in the Garden,” proposed that a central conflict in the American psyche resulted from the industrialization of the unspoiled, Eden-like landscapes of the new world. Wright’s Organic Modernism perhaps allowed 20th-century Americans to unconsciously feel that they could “resolve" that conflict by living in harmony with nature, while International Style Modernism and its machine-like buildings perhaps pointed too directly to the tragedy of industrial capitalism’s despoiling of the environment.
This is part one of a mini-series attempting to grapple with US grand strategy and the potential need for its re-assessment. The goal of this series is to introduce readers to grand strategy, ideally prompting more to grapple with US grand strategy and grand strategy more broadly. The author is fleshing out their own ideas, so don’t take the work as gospel, but rather as a starting point for your own journey.
In part one, an overview of the current state of US grand strategy is given. In part two, grand strategy is defined as a concept, a more detailed argument for the need of reassessment is put forth, and resources on grand strategy are listed for interested readers. In part three, four typologies of US grand strategic thought are summarized and contrasted with what US grand strategy has arguably been since the end of WWII. In part four, some general thoughts on the means and ends of reassessing US grand strategy will be described. Additional articles on grand strategy may appear over time.
What if the universe has a limit on the amount of energy that a certain mass can have? This article explores this possibility and suggests a theory for the creation and nature of black holes based on an energetic limit.
This is the first comment/addition to the theory published with the title "A First Note to the Short Theory on the Creation and Nature of Black Holes".
In the 1960"s and 1970', when most of these unfinished essays were written, I was a free thinking architecture student who perceived a fundamental disconnect within diverse institutions, including Architecture and Education and Money - Banking. I had an intuitive feeling that architecture is more than a visual aesthetic, rather a holistic social experience. The everyday objects with which we interact are an integral part of our social disposition and social wellbeing. The attempt is to develop a method for understanding some previously largely ignored aspects of environmental design – the role of Common Objects as a communication facilitator.- Eric M. Lee
