Dartmouth Outward Bound Center and the rise of experiential education 1957-1976

Purpose: The article discusses Outward Bound’s participation in the human potential movement through its incorporation of T-group practices and the reform language of experiential education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Design/methodology/approach: The article reports on original research conducted using materials from Dartmouth College and other Outward Bound collections from 1957-1976. It follows a case study approach to illustrate themes pertaining to Outward Bound’s creation and evolution in the United States, and the establishment of experiential education more broadly. Findings: Building on prior research (Freeman, 2011; Millikan, 2006), the present article elaborates on the conditions under which Outward Bound abandoned muscular Christianity in favor of humanistic psychology. Experiential education provided both a set of practices and a reform language that helped Outward Bound expand into the educational mainstream, which also helped to extend self-expressive pedagogies into formal and nonformal settings. Research implications: The Dartmouth Outward Bound Center’s tenure coincided with and reflected broader cultural changes, from the cold war motif of spiritual warfare, frontier masculinity, and national service to the rise of self-expression in education. Future scholars can situate specific curricular initiatives in the context of these paradigms, particularly in outdoor education. Originality/value: The article draws attention to one of the forms that the human potential movement took in education – experiential education – and the reasons for its adoption. It also reinforces emerging understandings of post-WWII American outdoor education as a product of the cold war and reflective of subsequent changes in the wider culture to a narrower focus on the self

Allelic Expression of Deleterious Protein-Coding Variants across Human Tissues

Personal exome and genome sequencing provides access to loss-of-function and rare deleterious alleles whose interpretation is expected to provide insight into individual disease burden. However, for each allele, accurate interpretation of its effect will depend on both its penetrance and the trait's expressivity. In this regard, an important factor that can modify the effect of a pathogenic coding allele is its level of expression; a factor which itself characteristically changes across tissues. To better inform the degree to which pathogenic alleles can be modified by expression level across multiple tissues, we have conducted exome, RNA and deep, targeted allele-specific expression (ASE) sequencing in ten tissues obtained from a single individual. By combining such data, we report the impact of rare and common loss-of-function variants on allelic expression exposing stronger allelic bias for rare stop-gain variants and informing the extent to which rare deleterious coding alleles are consistently expressed across tissues. This study demonstrates the potential importance of transcriptome data to the interpretation of pathogenic protein-coding variants

Bridging psychology and biology - the analysis of individuals in groups

Biological systems are particularly prone to variation, and the authors argue that such variation must be regarded as important data in its own right. The authors describe a method in which individual differences are studied within the framework of a general theory of the population as a whole and illustrate how this method can be used to address three types of issues: the nature of the mechanisms that give rise to a specific ability, such as mental imagery; the role of psychological or biological mediators of environmental challenges, such as the biological bases for differences in dispositional mood; and the existence of processes that have nonadditive effects with behavioral and physiological variables, such as factors that modulate the response to stress and its effects on the immune response. Variation occurs around every central tendency, bu

The Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline

In this paper, we describe the optical imaging data processing pipeline developed for the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) instrument. The HSC Pipeline builds on the prototype pipeline being developed by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's Data Management system, adding customizations for HSC, large-scale processing capabilities, and novel algorithms that have since been reincorporated into the LSST codebase. While designed primarily to reduce HSC Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) data, it is also the recommended pipeline for reducing general-observer HSC data. The HSC pipeline includes high level processing steps that generate coadded images and science-ready catalogs as well as low-level detrending and image characterizations.Comment: 39 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japa

The construction and evaluation of a map skills test for intermediate grades

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Quantifying uncertainty and bridging the scaling gap in the retrieval of leaf area index by coupling Sentinel-2 and UAV observations

Leaf area index (LAI) estimates can inform decision-making in crop management. The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, with observations in the red-edge spectral region, can monitor crops globally at sub-field spatial resolutions (10–20 m). However, satellite LAI estimates require calibration with ground measurements. Calibration is challenged by spatial heterogeneity and scale mismatches between field and satellite measurements. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), generating high-resolution (cm-scale) LAI estimates, provide intermediary observations that we use here to characterise uncertainty and reduce spatial scaling discrepancies between Sentinel-2 observations and field surveys. We use a novel UAV multispectral sensor that matches Sentinel-2 spectral bands, flown in conjunction with LAI ground measurements. UAV and field surveys were conducted on multiple dates—coinciding with different wheat growth stages—that corresponded to Sentinel-2 overpasses. We compared chlorophyll red-edge index (CIred-edge) maps, derived from the Sentinel-2 and UAV platforms. We used Gaussian processes regression machine learning to calibrate a UAV model for LAI, based on ground data. Using the UAV LAI, we evaluated a two-stage calibration approach for generating robust LAI estimates from Sentinel-2. The agreement between Sentinel-2 and UAV CIred-edge values increased with growth stage—R2 ranged from 0.32 (stem elongation) to 0.75 (milk development). The CIred-edge variance between the two platforms was more comparable later in the growing season due to a more homogeneous and closed wheat canopy. The single-stage Sentinel-2 LAI calibration (i.e., direct calibration from ground measurements) performed poorly (mean R2 = 0.29, mean NRMSE = 17%) when compared to the two-stage calibration using the UAV data (mean R2 = 0.88, mean NRMSE = 8%). The two-stage approach reduced both errors and biases by >50%. By upscaling ground measurements and providing more representative model training samples, UAV observations provide an effective and viable means of enhancing Sentinel-2 wheat LAI retrievals. We anticipate that our UAV calibration approach to resolving spatial heterogeneity would enhance the retrieval accuracy of LAI and additional biophysical variables for other arable crop types and a broader range of vegetation cover types

Analyses of Special Hazards and Flooding Problems in Tropical Island Environments

Data and results summarized in this paper show that development of urban projects and design of flood control works in tropical island catchments must consider clear water flooding as well as special hazards such as landslides, flow bulking, high sediment concentrations, mud and debris flows and flow avulsions. The needs for and methods to estimate peak flows, event volumes and the potential extent and depths of flooding during severe storm events in urbanizing tropical environments are described