What's the Use? History and Engineering Education Research

A massive stellar bulge in a regularly rotating galaxy 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang

“…The gas velocity dispersion of ALESS 073.1 is consistent with the extrapolations from data at z < 3.5 (Fig. 3A) but lies at the low s V boundary of the prediction of a semi-empirical model based on Toomre's disk instability parameter (21), despite the galaxy hosting a starburst and a dust-obscured AGN. The rotational support of the gas disk of ALESS 073.1 is much higher than the value predicted by the same model (Fig.…”

“…Gas disks in the early Universe are expected to be more turbulent than their local analogs: the gas velocity dispersion is thought to increase with redshift, whereas the degree of rotational support (V rot /s V ) decreases (21,24). The enhanced turbulence may be driven by gravitational instabilities from cold gas flows, and/or by stellar and AGN feedback (25).…”

“…In (A), the black dot-dashed line and the blue dashed line show the velocity dispersion evolution inferred from warm ionized gas data (black circles; averages from galaxy samples) and cold neutral gas data (blue squares; averages for z = 0 and individual galaxies for z > 0.5), respectively (24). In (B), black diamonds and red bars show, respectively, the median and 90% distribution of ionized gas surveys (21). The red star represents ALESS 073.1.…”

What Are They Talking About? Depth of Engineering Student Sociotechnical Thinking in a Technical Engineering Course

“…Such a conceptual framework, while popular in social sciences in the mid-20th century, have largely been discounted as complete explanations of technological development 45,47 . Nonetheless, conceptions of technological determinism remain common in popular culture and STEM fields 48,49 . The engineering students in this study extensively adopted these concepts in both the Public Acceptance and Economic Efficiency themes.…”

Contextualizing Statics: Our Process and Examples

“…Wisnioski, a historian of engineering studies, reflected in his 2015 editorial that, while calls for engineering education reform towards "global, economic, environmental, and societal context" [7] have been existent since as early as the 1920s, "each wave of reform has come with incomplete efforts to establish institutional rewards that value such historical and contextual work." [8] However, since Wisnioski's editorial, much progress towards contextualization has been made in the engineering community, largely in part due to support from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which are two of the largest governing institutions of engineering accreditation and funding, respectively. In the latest revision of student outcomes for accreditation (2019-2020), ABET changed Outcome F from "an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility" to Outcome 4, which specifically adds on that these responsibilities must "consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal context."…”