Deep Springs College

Abstract This work compiles a global record of 123 fatal human crush events between 1900 and 2017. Completeness of the compiled record appears to improve through time, with more events of all sizes recorded in more recent decades. The three countries with the most documented fatal crush events are, in decreasing order, India, United States and Saudi Arabia, while the countries with the most documented fatalities, in decreasing order, are Saudi Arabia, India, and Iraq. The fatality record of 123 global crush events between 1900 and 2017 is found to exhibit power law frequency-size scaling. Using a statistical approach often applied to earthquakes, the parameters of the scaling relationship are used as the basis for probabilistic forecasting of the recurrence interval of events with 100 and 1000 fatalities. Based on the 2003 to 2017 record, events with 100 or more fatalities are forecast to have a global recurrence interval of every 1.3 years (± 1 standard deviation 1.0 to 1.8 years) and events with 1,000 or more fatalities are forecast to have a global recurrence interval of every 7.4 years (± 1 standard deviation range of 4.7 to 9.1 years). The primary contributions of this work are a compilation of global fatal crush events in the past century and the finding that fatalities associated with global fatal crush events follow power law scaling.

Empowering students and scholars to effectively address complex societal challenges frequently entails embracing unconventional pathways to foster transdisciplinary (TD) education. This empowerment is further facilitated by collaborative efforts supported by the TD experience. This paper examines one such initiative: a student-centered, experimental design of a TD doctoral pilot program for environmental sustainability at the University of British Columbia, a large, research-intensive public university in Canada. In this study, we documented shifts in participants’ development and assessed the impact of TD collaboration conditions on the educational design process. The findings indicate that engaging in collaborative TD experiences yields substantial pedagogical benefits, introducing novel opportunities for design and experimentation. This TD space appears to offer conducive conditions for students and faculty to more effectively navigate adaptive and innovative contexts within higher education. Pedagogical experimentation of this nature provides insights that are challenging to derive from theoretical speculation alone, offering potential pathways for today’s learners and educators as they confront complex societal challenges.

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Contrary to previous assumptions that most mutations are deleterious, there is increasing evidence for persistence of large-effect mutations in natural populations. A possible explanation for these observations is that mutant phenotypes and fitness may depend upon the specific environmental conditions to which a mutant is exposed. Here, we tested this hypothesis by growing large-effect flowering time mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana in multiple field sites and seasons to quantify their fitness effects in realistic natural conditions. By constructing environment-specific fitness landscapes based on flowering time and branching architecture, we observed that a subset of mutations increased fitness, but only in specific environments. These mutations increased fitness via different paths: through shifting flowering time, branching, or both. Branching was under stronger selection, but flowering time was more genetically variable, pointing to the importance of indirect selection on mutations through their pleiotropic effects on multiple phenotypes. Finally, mutations in hub genes with greater connectedness in their regulatory networks had greater effects on both phenotypes and fitness. Together, these findings indicate that large-effect mutations may persist in populations because they influence traits that are adaptive only under specific environmental conditions. Understanding their evolutionary dynamics therefore requires measuring their effects in multiple natural environments.