Teaching ethos from the dumpster: Dive and food waste rhetoric

Courses: Rhetorical Criticism, Composition, Environmental Communication

Objectives: This unit activity, for which students view a documentary to identify and evaluate persuasive ethos and then create their own rhetorical messages for reducing food waste, serves as a platform for teaching both the critique and practice of rhetoric, as well as familiarizing students with the complexities of the global food system and food waste.     

The Battle of the Downs

The first newspaper publishers of the seventeenth century faced a momentous challenge. How could they compete in a highly competitive news market with their periodical invention? The newspaper was generally a cautious medium, offering an assortment of short international news reports without overarching editorial opinion. The newspaper rarely displayed the wit and polemic present in other news media of the early modern period, and operated with a rigid schedule of publication. This article portrays how such standards could be cast off in the face of military victory and defeat. The naval battle of the Downs in 1639 engaged two rival newspaper markets in Amsterdam and Antwerp. By analysing the simultaneous reporting of the battle in the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Netherlands it becomes clear that newspaper publishers employed numerous tactics in order to shape the coverage of the battle—and to strive for the relevance of their newspapers.     

Edwin Mansfield’s contributions to the economics of technology

Edwin Mansfield’s contributions to the economics of technology are summarized from the early 1960s through his death in 1997. Mansfield’s methodology is discussed, as are his contributions on: the diffusion of technical innovation, the effect of firm size on innovation, the role of academic and basic research in increasing innovation and productivity, international technology transfer and the inaccuracy of technological forecasts. The economics profession’s evaluation of the relative importance of Mansfield’s work is presented, using as evidence citation counts of his works collected from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). Identified as among Mansfield’s most important contributions are his work on the importance of academic research for industrial innovations, his empirical estimation of the rates of diffusion of different innovations, and his estimation of the private and social returns from investments in industrial innovations. Finally, we present Mansfield’s advice on the future of the economics of technology.     

The Humble Pie – Half‐Baked or Well Done?

This article re‐examines the much maligned piechart and provides justification for its use. It identifies common pitfalls when drawing piecharts in Microsoft Excel and offers advice on how to avoid them.     

Processes of Early Childhood Interventions to Adult Well‐Being

This article describes the contributions of cognitive–scholastic advantage, family support behavior, and school quality and support as processes through which early childhood interventions promote well‐being. Evidence in support of these processes is from longitudinal cohort studies of the Child–Parent Centers and other preventive interventions beginning by age 4. Relatively large effects of participation have been documented for school readiness skills at age 5, parent involvement, K‐12 achievement, remedial education, educational attainment, and crime prevention. The three processes account for up to half of the program impacts on well‐being. They also help to explain the positive economic returns of many effective programs. The generalizability of these processes is supported by a sizable knowledge base, including a scale up of the Child–Parent Centers.     

A VSE equation of state for normal liquids—I. n-Heptane

A volume—entropy—energy (VSE) equation of state, unlike a PVT equation of state, can be used to calculate “all conceivable” thermodynamic quantities, including specific heats, without supplemental calorimetric data. A VSE equation for liquids, based on simple theoretical concepts, is proposed and, in this paper, applied specifically to n-heptane. This equation of state requires only ten arbitrary parameters, seven of which may be calculated from data at but three temperatures, e.g., 25°, 50° and the normal boiling point. It yields calculated values of many thermodynamic properties nearly as accurate as the best experimental data, from a few degrees above the melting temperature all the way to the critical temperature. PVT equations of state of comparable accuracy over such broad ranges would require at least as many parameters, as well as supplemental calorimetric data, to calculate many thermodynamic quantities that are obtainable directly from our VSE equation.     

The structure of invention

This paper explores the process by which radically novel technologies - ones such as radar, the turbojet, or the polymerase chain reaction - come into being. It shows that this process - “invention” - has a certain logical structure common to all cases. Invention is a process of linking some purpose or need with an effect that can be exploited to satisfy it. It may begin with a purpose or need for which existing methods are not satisfactory; this forces the seeking of a new principle (the idea of an effect in action). Or it may begin with a phenomenon or effect itself - usually a freshly discovered one - for which some associated principle of use suggests itself. Either way, translating this base principle into physical reality requires the creation of suitable working parts and supporting technologies. These raise their own challenges or problems, the solution of which may raise further challenges. As a result, invention is a recursive process: it repeats until each challenge or problem (and subproblem, and sub-subproblem) resolves itself into one that can be physically dealt with. It is challenging, usually lengthy, part-conceptual, and part-experimental.     

The effect of the controllability of auditory discriminative stimuli in the performance of go/no-go discriminations by pigeons

Compared with their performance with localized (on-key) visual stimuli, pigeons are notoriously poor at performing go/no-go discriminations when keypecking for food in the presence of auditory discriminative stimuli. The difference might reflect the fact that an aversive visual onkey stimulus signaling nonreward can be escaped by looking away and not pecking, which contributes to the measure of good discriminative performance, while an auditory stimulus cannot be escaped. In Experiment 1, discriminative performance was significantly improved by providing pigeons with a response incompatible with keypecking by which they could escape a tone S+ and a tone S?. However, the pattern, frequency, and duration of escape responses were found to be insufficient to explain the improvement. In Experiment 2, it was found that the capacity to escape only S+ or only S? enhanced discriminative performance as much as the capacity to escape both. It is theorized that the Pavlovian relationship between the absence of the discriminative stimuli and the nonoccurrence of food might transfer to the instrumental relationships learned in a go/no-go discrimination. The possibility that intermittent stimuli command more attention than continuous stimuli is also considered.     

全球社会中的公民教育

公民是有知觉的道德主体,每个社会都要求有公民教育,而公民道德教育又是其重要的方面。教学者总是希望公民的教与学成为课程的一部分,对学生来说,就要求他们在实践中运用说教、经验、反思这三个方法。如果要形成某种意义上的全球公民的概念,那么教育的作用是至关重要的。要使全球公民成为现实,就需要有合作和相互依存的心态,超越国家界限和传统的束缚,这也将寄希望于未来的一代。