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1. Ethics in engineering or engineering in ethics?

   Fore, G. A.; Hess, J. L.; Katz, A. (June 2020, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   This paper explores how the relationship between ethics and engineering has been and could be framed. Specifically, two distinct framings will be conceptualized and explored: ethics in engineering and engineering in ethics. As with other disciplines, engineering typically subsumes ethics, appropriating it as its own unique subfield. As a framing, ethics in engineering produces specialized standards, codes, values, perspectives, and problems distinct to engineering thought and practice. These form an engineering education discourse with which engineers engage. It is epistemological in its focus, meaning that this framing constructs knowledge of proper disciplinary conduct. On the other hand, engineering in ethics as a framing device insists that engineering become a specialized articulation of ethical thought and action. Here, “engineer” and “engineering” are not nouns but verbs, referring to particular processes and technologies for transformation. One is not an “engineer;” rather, one “engineers.” One is first an ethical subject – an historical aggregate of continuous experiences/becomings – concerned with the pursuit of “the good” in the present; then, when contextually relevant, such a subject’s engineering knowledge and skills may be employed as powerful means for the becoming-good of shared worlds. In this paper, engineering in ethics is further conceptualized through a playful intermingling of an ethic of care, via the scholarship of Joan Tronto, and a Deweyian approach to ethical inquiry. Tronto’s four elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness – are joined with what are arguably four key components of Dewey’s process of ethical inquiry: awareness, judgment, experimentation, and iteration. This paper argues that 1) being attentive is required to achieve awareness of a given need or problem, 2) taking responsibility is a necessary practice for making and acting on one’s judgements related to the need at hand, 3) competence in a relevant skill is needed to experiment with one’s judgements, and 4) careful consideration of how others respond to how one has addressed a need is essential for the purposes of iteration. While all four contribute to the notion of engineering in ethics, the relationship between competence and experimentation is where engineering is most evidently seized as an ethical expression. How one competently wields engineering knowledge and skillfully performs disciplinary techniques is, here, foremost about actively inquiring into how to provide care for a specific need and, in doing so, creating a world aligned with one’s vision of “the good.” This paper will close with a brief consideration of the educational implications of engineering in ethics. 

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2. Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Models in Hydrology

   Chatterjee, Somya Sharma; Ghosh, Rahul; Renganathan, Arvind; Li, Xiang; Chatterjee, Snigdhansu; Nieber, John; Duffy, Christopher; Kumar, Vipin (August 2023, ACM)

   In hydrology, modeling streamflow remains a challenging task due to the limited availability of basin characteristics information such as soil geology and geomorphology. These characteristics may be noisy due to measurement errors or may be missing altogether. To overcome this challenge, we propose a knowledge-guided, probabilistic inverse modeling method for recovering physical characteristics from streamflow and weather data, which are more readily available. We compare our framework with state-of-the-art inverse models for estimating river basin characteristics. We also show that these estimates offer improvement in streamflow modeling as opposed to using the original basin characteristic values. Our inverse model offers a 3% improvement in R2 for the inverse model (basin characteristic estimation) and 6% for the forward model (streamflow prediction). Our framework also offers improved explainability since it can quantify uncertainty in both the inverse and the forward model. Uncertainty quantification plays a pivotal role in improving the explainability of machine learning models by providing additional insights into the reliability and limitations of model predictions. In our analysis, we assess the quality of the uncertainty estimates. Compared to baseline uncertainty quantification methods, our framework offers a 10% improvement in the dispersion of epistemic uncertainty and a 13% improvement in coverage rate. This information can help stakeholders understand the level of uncertainty associated with the predictions and provide a more comprehensive view of the potential outcomes. 

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3. Recent Innovations in Drilling in Ice

   Albert, M; Slawny, K; Boeckmann, G; Gibson, C; Johnson, J; Makinson, K; Rix, J (December 2021, CRC Press)

   Bar-Cohen, Y; Zacny, K (Ed.)

   The need for scientific ice drilling in glaciers and ice sheets has been driven by many fields of science, including drilling ice cores for evidence of past environment and paleoclimate information, and drilling access holes through the ice to gather data relevant to glacial dynamics, history of glacier extent, sediment sampling, and discovery of ecosystems within and beneath the ice. Many nations have contributed to drilling technologies relevant to each of these fields, and developments in any one nation often build on prior designs from other nations. A description of the very early polar ice coring endeavors in Greenland and Antarctica is provided in Langway (2008). Ice drilling and coring technologies that were developed before 2008 are well described in Bentley et al (2009), including a wide array of ice coring drills, drills designed to create holes in ice only, and autonomous instruments that melt their way through ice. The text by [Talalay 2016] provides a review of mechanical ice drilling technology that includes design, parameters and performance of an assortment of tools and drills for making holes in snow, firn and ice. Described in detail are direct-push drilling, hand- and power-driven portable drills, percussion drills, conventional machine-driven rotary drill rigs, flexible drill-stem drill rigs, cable-suspended electromechanical auger drills, cable-suspended electromechanical drills with bottom-hole circulation, and drilling challenges and perspective for future development. In this chapter our goal is to describe new ice drilling and coring technologies that have been designed, built, and used in the field in the most recent decade. Some of these technologies are improvements on prior drills, while other technologies such as a replicate ice coring drill, geologic drilling underneath many meters of glacial ice, and the rapid access isotope drill are the first of their kind. There are many additional ice drilling and sampling designs currently in the design or development stage that are not included in this chapter; rather our goal in this chapter is to describe proven ice drilling technologies that have been developed since 2009. 

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4. Negotiating Tensions in Collaborations and its Role in Disciplinary Engagement in Science

   Krishnan, H.; Jaber, L. J.; Schellinger, J.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2022, Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association)

   While recent reforms in science education envision engaging students in doing science as a way to learn science, less is known about how such an engagement can take hold in the classroom. In an effort to address this gap, this study examines the dynamics of students’ disciplinary engagement in small groups in a middle school science classroom. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we conducted a comparative case analysis of three groups of students to examine the dynamics of their engagement along conceptual, epistemological, social, and affective dimensions. Through this analysis, our findings highlight tensions that emerge along these dimensions and the ways in which students negotiate these tensions in ways that support or hinder disciplinary engagement. 

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5. Recent Advances in In Vivo Neurochemical Monitoring

   https://doi.org/10.3390/mi12020208  

   Tan, Chao; Robbins, Elaine M.; Wu, Bingchen; Cui, Xinyan Tracy (February 2021, Micromachines)

   null (Ed.)

   The brain is a complex network that accounts for only 5% of human mass but consumes 20% of our energy. Uncovering the mysteries of the brain’s functions in motion, memory, learning, behavior, and mental health remains a hot but challenging topic. Neurochemicals in the brain, such as neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, gliotransmitters, hormones, and metabolism substrates and products, play vital roles in mediating and modulating normal brain function, and their abnormal release or imbalanced concentrations can cause various diseases, such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. A wide range of techniques have been used to probe the concentrations of neurochemicals under normal, stimulated, diseased, and drug-induced conditions in order to understand the neurochemistry of drug mechanisms and develop diagnostic tools or therapies. Recent advancements in detection methods, device fabrication, and new materials have resulted in the development of neurochemical sensors with improved performance. However, direct in vivo measurements require a robust sensor that is highly sensitive and selective with minimal fouling and reduced inflammatory foreign body responses. Here, we review recent advances in neurochemical sensor development for in vivo studies, with a focus on electrochemical and optical probes. Other alternative methods are also compared. We discuss in detail the in vivo challenges for these methods and provide an outlook for future directions. 

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