Webscapes: An academic vision for Digital Humanities Projects on the web

The mathematical model of multilayer scattering and absorbing media containing moving scatterers is constructed in the article. The influence of biological tissue optical parameters on the characteristics of back scattering light is under research. Possibilities of blood parameters diagnostics of microcirculation inside human skin in vivo are considered.

Chapters 1–3 of these lectures were given at the University of Oslo during my academic free half-year August l985–January 1986 which I spent at the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE). Chapter 4 was given by T Riste during my journeys to other Scandinavian institutions where I held seminars covering much of what is reflected in Chapter 5. That chapter represents a contribution to chaos theory that was carried out in collaboration with J Palmore.In place of the universal properties of unimodal maps, which are well-treated in the books by Cvitanovic and Schuster, I have instead based my elementary introduction to scaling and universality upon the damped driven pendulum and circle maps, which are of current interest to experimenters at IFE and elsewhere, as is reflected in the literature over the past year. Also, the circle map has not been so well-treated pedagogically in available texts. The discussion in Chapter 3 is not advanced, but it should prepare the reader for a better appreciation of the literature in that field. I should say that these lectures for the most part were written for students, for experimenters, and for curious theorists from other fields in physics, but not for the experts in nonlinear dynamics. For example, Chapter 3 ends where the hardest work begins.Tn preparing the lectures, I drew heavily upon the books by Arnol'd, Jorna, Jordan and Smith, Lichtenberg and Lieberman, and Schuster, and upon numerous journal articles. The level of the lectures is that of a second year graduate course at the University of Houston, but beginning with undergraduate-level topics in ordinary differential equations. Throughout, I have emphasized my interest in the connection of nonlinear dynamics to statistical mechanics, as well as my interest in "computer arithmetic". I hope that the reader will also find these subjects to be of interest since they have provided me with a great deal of intellectual enjoyment.My free-half-year at IFE would have been impossible without the aid and moral support provided by Tormod Riste. Gerd Jarrett helped and befriended me and my family in more ways than I should wish to count, and the entire physics staff at IFE, E Andersen, A F Andresen, G Jarrett, K Otnes, T Riste, A Skjeltorp and O. Steinsvoll helped to slake my heavy thirst for Norwegian history and culture, and agreed from the start to speak Norwegian to me daily in order to help me in my effort to learn to speak that language. Gerd Jarrett performed above and beyond the call of duty by tirelessly typing the original lecture notes, which appear as the internal report IFE/I-86/003 + KGF. I also owe thanks to Lynn Smith for typing the revisions that yielded this final version at the University of Houston. I willingly thank J Fröyland, J Palmore and F Ravndal for several helpful discussions and comments, and M Golubitsky, J Palmore, D Schiller and O Steinsvoll for proof-reading several of the chapters (blame for remaining errors is entirely my own, however). I also wish to thank P Alström, E Aurell, T Bohr, P Cvitanovic, E H Hauge, P C Hemmer, J Hertz, J Ketoja, T Kohonen, J Kurkijärvi, K Lindgren, J Myrheim, R Ritala and S Stenholm for interesting discussions during my journeys to other Scandinavian institutions. I am especially grateful to J Fröyland for guestfriendship at the University of Oslo, and to A K M F Hussain for encouraging in 1984 that I should put my lecture notes into print.Finally, my academic free-year was supported financially by the American Scandinavian Foundation, NORDITA and the University of Houston. All my travel costs within Scandinavia were paid by NORDITA

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged educators in numerous ways. One particular area of challenge has been the inability of students to go to traditional service learning sites. The present article explores electronic service learning, which focuses on service-learning opportunities that do not require face-to-face interaction with community partners, and provides two examples of alternative service-learning assignments used in a developmental psychology course. Eighteen students enrolled in an upper-level course on child development engaged with course material and empirical articles to understand the content of various children's books or to create educational videos for children. A library of storybook recordings and electronic videos produced by the students was then shared with a local nonprofit organization's preschool teachers to use in their classrooms. Students reported very positive experiences with these assignments and highlighted the benefits of electronic service learning, in particular. This assignment could easily be adapted to other courses within psychology and some examples are described. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

SUMMARY The world of Internet applications is expanding faster than many academics and other professionals can follow. Although it is extremely challenging to provide a helpful review of such quickly changing issues, particularly those relating to local nonprofit organizations, we consider previous Internet and e-commerce research, the current state of organizational Web applications, different types of local nonprofit organizations and how their different missions and objectives may impact their strategic Web decisions. Perhaps more important, we also address a wide range of important individual e-technology issues and implications. For any nonprofit considering integrating an Internet presence into their promotion and offering mix, the process may seem to require almost heroic determination and dedication. It is a continuous challenge for professionals to search out critical information sources (books, articles, on-line postings, etc.) and many such sources are included here as examples and references. Finally, this review suggests that the Internet revolution is not just a new type of advertising technique, but has the potential to redefine organizations (including local nonprofits) and the professionals who run them.

In recent years, many universities have started working on development projects in developing and underdeveloped countries and have started to manage their own programs such as, EPICS. There are also several engineering organizations dedicated towards the needs in developed and developing countries such as, Engineering without Boarders, and Engineering for Sustainable World. In these programs, engineering students, young professionals, and faculty members are directly involved in international development initiatives and projects in developing and underdeveloped countries. Traditionally, in the Service-learning literature, most of the studies have focused on the learning outcomes, perspectives and experiences of the students. Although research focusing on understanding the perspectives of community partners about Service-learning outcomes, is gaining momentum and continuously increasing, most of them focus on domestic Service-learning projects. Although, community partners' perspectives (in domestic service learning program) research grounds in theory and the implications and results are valuable and useful, but because of the complexities of cross-cultural differences associated with ISL programs, these findings may not be suitable and applicable for international service learning (ISL) programs. In a recent study Reynolds, calls for more informed and community centered research on the impacts of ISL programs and partnerships not only from students' perspectives but also on the host communities. This work- in- progress paper is the part of a larger project in which we intend to look into the community partners' perspectives on the outcomes of an international Service-learning program. Our major objective is to understand the community partner's motivations, benefits and challenges of partnerships with an international Service-learning program and develop recommendations to enhance partnership relationship in ISL programs. Through this work-in-progress paper we present a background literature review and description of project scope and methods.

In Summer 2024, the Whitman College Human-Centered Design (HCD) program piloted its first iteration of an annual Summer Design Lab (SDL), during which a faculty director, community partners from a local preschool and non-profit organization dedicated to early learning, and a group of six undergraduate students from multiple disciplinary backgrounds collaborated on a proposed early-stage design for a playground for birth-to-three-year-old children. This chapter frames the project in terms of relational design (Alvarado, 2024; Escobar et al., 2024) within community-engaged learning, which prioritizes the relationships among and between people and communities involved throughout the co-design process alongside nonhuman elements such as landscape, plants, and climate as integral to any socially and environmentally sustainable design. Using human-centered design methods and a design thinking approach (Ideo, 2015; Stanford d.school., n.d.), the SDL students conducted an iterative and inclusive co-design process, culminating in an interactive playground design pitch for local stakeholders.

BackgroundIn Vietnam, drowning claims nearly 2,000 children’s lives annually. Aimed at reducing child drowning deaths, the Prime Minister released a 10-Year National Program on Child Injury Prevention in 2021, which...

Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

A common assumption in Digital Humanities (dh) project design is that ‘data’ is simply there, ready to ‘drive’ the research. The funders of a dh project described in this paper adhered to this positivistic assumption in their founding White Paper. They saw disciplines as blinders, best left behind in order to better see ‘patterns’. However, positivism was not a real-world option for the social scientists, mathematicians, and information scientists engaged in this ‘blue sky’ project, which investigated digitized historical newspaper texts. Far from being a hindrance to their work, disciplinary traditions were central to any success they achieved. Instead of moving ‘beyond’ disciplines, they developed a pluralist, cross-disciplinary dialogue. Each participant contributed out of the epistemic convention that had proven fruitful in their discipline. The approach required an intellectual and emotional commitment to dialogue, and produced tantalizing rather than wholly satisfying results. But it holds promise of more.

Monitoring and evaluation of forestry projects for local community development

This paper presents the research design and preliminary findings from a study on supporting online students in a collaborative design project. The Collaborative Investigation, Design, Evaluation and Revision (CIDER) approach was used to scaffold the learning activities. CIDER is a learn-technology-by-design approach for collaborative resource design and development. This phase of the study was conducted in a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education unit at an Australian university. Participants, working in small groups, collaboratively developed electronic teaching resources, including a digital story and a website. Data sources for this study include student artefacts, evaluation data, survey data and peer-review feedback from two unit cohorts. The results indicate that geographical proximity was not the key factor in the group's success; rather, a shared disciplinary area was a better indicator of the students' ability to develop an online resource. Moreover, the results indicate that formative evaluation via a peer review process offered a practical way of determining the quality or potential quality of a web-based learning resource before it is published.

Collaborative evaluation is still a less explored subject within the collaboration field. This paper proposes a methodology to collaborative evaluation based on the 3C collaboration model, which can be applied both in learning or working groups. This paper also presents two case studies run on graduate courses of the Computer Science Department of Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro for collaborative evaluation of the students work. The case studies suggest that the methodology is appropriate for this type of assessment. In addition, students participating in the experiment rated the experience as positive, confirming the premise that students value and miss the collaborative evaluation.

This article presents an energy-efficient multiplex housing project proposed in response to a local affordable housing crisis among low-income urban neighborhoods in Chattanooga, TN, in the United States. The project adopted the systems thinking approach, which encouraged design students to think beyond individual components and consider the interconnections of various systems within and around the multiplex housing, including daylight analysis, market analysis, life cycle assessment, and energy performance evaluation. To respond to the local-specific housing market and climate conditions, the students from the multidiscipline collaboratively engaged in the design process to understand the project's environmental, social, and economic contexts and implement the passive design strategies into energy-efficient and affordable multiplex housing design to meet low-income families’ economic and social needs. The project site and design requirements were provided by a local nonprofit housing development organization that was a client of the project. This article highlights the significance of students’ systems thinking exercises in achieving energy-efficient affordable housing solutions in low-income urban neighborhoods through passive design strategies.

This article explores the potential of the collaborative approach for local government program evaluation, particularly programs administered by nonprofits. City budget staff in Charlotte, North Carolina, partnered with the nonprofit in charge of a special tax district in a collaborative evaluation (CE) to assess the district's impact. An examination of this experience suggests that CEs are costly in terms of time and staff resources and raises questions about cooption and bias. However, it also suggests the promise of increased communication and better relations between local governments and nonprofits, improved evaluation skills of program staff, and increased likelihood of utilization of evaluation results.