Public Education and "Special Interest": An Example from the History of Mechanical Engineering

1966 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Berenice M. Fisher
Author(s):  
Warren F. Smith

The “Warman Design and Build Competition”, running across Australasian Universities, is now in its 26th year in 2013. Presented in this paper is a brief history of the competition, documenting the objectives, yearly scenarios, key contributors and champion Universities since its beginning in 1988. Assuming the competition has reached the majority of mechanical and related discipline engineering students in that time, it is fair to say that this competition, as a vehicle of the National Committee on Engineering Design, has served to shape Australasian engineering education in an enduring way. The philosophy of the Warman Design and Build Competition and some of the challenges of running it are described in this perspective by its coordinator since 2003. In particular, the need is for the competition to work effectively across a wide range of student group ability. Not every group engaging with the competition will be competitive nationally, yet all should learn positively from the experience. Reported also in this paper is the collective feedback from the campus organizers in respect to their use of the competition as an educational experience in their classrooms. Each University participating uses the competition differently with respect to student assessment and the support students receive. However, all academic campus organizer responses suggest that the competition supports their own and their institutional learning objectives very well. While the project scenarios have varied widely over the years, the intent to challenge 2nd year university (predominantly mechanical) engineering students with an open-ended statement of requirements in a practical and experiential exercise has been a constant. Students are faced with understanding their opportunity and their client’s value system as expressed in a scoring algorithm. They are required to conceive, construct and demonstrate their device with limited prior knowledge and experience, and the learning outcomes clearly impact their appreciation for teamwork, leadership and product realization.


1910 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. H. Peters

The following observations upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea were made in Mansfield during the summer and autumn of 1908. The fact that at the time the writer was engaged in preparing a paper—to which the present paper is to some extent complementary—upon the epidemiological relations of season and disease, lent special interest to the enquiries regularly made from the Health Department of this town into the circumstances attending fatal attacks of diarrhoea. Early in the season a more than usually extensive enquiry was made into one of these fatal attacks in an area where an outbreak of diarrhoea appeared to be spreading outwards from a group of old privy-middens. To test how far the condemnation of the latter was justifiable another area was taken on the other side of the town, where the houses were newly built and provided exclusively with water-closets; and records, collected by house-to-house visitation, were obtained of all cases of epidemic diarrhoea, whether non-fatal or otherwise, occurring in these localities. The enquiries thus begun were afterwards extended so as to embrace two fairly large districts, a chance of doing this being provided by the opportune postponement of the addition to the department of certain work of inspection which had been impending at the beginning of the summer. These districts were several times revisited and scattered observations were also made throughout the other parts of the town. During 1909, while there was no opportunity of making extended observations, there were valuable opportunities during the course of the routine inspections of the summer of testing and re-testing the principal results obtained during 1908.


2021 ◽  
pp. 128-146
Author(s):  
Т.А. Зайцева

В  статье рассмотрены выявленные в  Научной музыкальной библиотеке Санкт-Петербургской государственной консерватории имени Н. А. РимскогоКорсакова партитуры симфонических произведений Милия Алексеевича Балакирева, входившие в  состав его личного собрания. Таковы поэма «В  Чехии», Увертюра на тему испанского марша, где особый интерес представляют пометы автора, проанализированные в  статье. Их изучение вносит вклад в  подготовку полного собрания сочинений Балакирева. Наряду с этими раритетами были подвергнуты описанию прижизненные издания балакиревской Симфонии C-dur, поэмы «Тамара» с маргиналиями выдающихся музыкантов — современников композитора: Э. Ф. Направника, А. К. Глазунова. Эти четыре партитуры, две из которых входили в балакиревскую библиотеку, — бесценный материал к темам, раскрывающим проблемы интерпретации симфонической музыки мастера, истории ее жизни на концертной эстраде. The article presents the scores of Balakirev’s symphonic works identified in the library of the Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory, which were part of his personal library. These are the poem In the Czechia and an Overture on the theme of the Spanish march with the author’s notes being on a special interest and analyzed in the article. This study becomes a good investment in the preparation of the complete works of Balakirev. Along with these rarities, the article also describes life editions of the Balakirev’s Symphony in C-dur, the poem Tamara with marginalia of outstanding musicians — contemporaries of the composer: Eduard F. Napravnik, Alexander K. Glazunov. This is an invaluable material for topics that reveal the problems of interpretation of the master’s symphonic music, the history of its life on the concert stage.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Mariza Da Gama Leite de Oliveira

O artigo destaca os maiores desafios da Instrução Pública Primária na cidade do Rio de Janeiro no início do século XX quando era capital federal. Nesse período emergiram debates envolvendo médicos e profissionais de diversas áreas da sociedade em torno de questões educacionais e sanitárias. As principais fontes utilizadas são a revista A Escola Primária e o relatório do médico Alvimar de Carvalho sobre o teste da vacina BCG, ambos do acervo da Biblioteca Nacional. Como aporte teórico, utilizam-se as possibilidades abertas pela nova história política (RÉMOND, 2003) e o auxílio da observação microscópica (GINZBURG, 1990), o que permite restaurar personagens e processos através dos indícios deixados pelos sujeitos históricos. As descobertas realizadas pelo estudo empreendido traduzem a importância do uso de fontes e de métodos variados no resgate da história das instituições escolares e sua intercessão com a história política e social.Tuberculosis in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the BCG vaccine test in public school students (1933-1935). The article highlights the major challenges of Primary Public Education in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century, when it was the federal capital. In this period, debates involving physicians and professionals from various areas of society emerged around educational and health issues. The main sources used are: the magazine A Escola Primária and the report of the doctor Alvimar de Carvalho on the BCG vaccine test, both from the collection of the National Library. As a theoretical contribution, the possibilities opened by the new political history (RÉMOND, 2003) and the aid of microscopic observation (GINZBURG, 1990) are used to restore characters and processes through the clues left by historical subjects. The findings of the study show the importance of the use of varied sources and methods in the rescue of the history of school institutions and their intercession with political and social history.  Keywords: Tuberculosis, Primary Public Education of Rio de Janeiro, Alvimar de Carvalho, Instituto Ferreira Vianna, "The Primary School" Magazine.


2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Rousmaniere

Of the many organizational changes that took place in public education in North America at the turn of the last century, few had greater impact on the school than the development of the principal. The creation of the principal's office revolutionized the internal organization of the school from a group of students supervised by one teacher to a collection of teachers managed by one administrator. In its very conception, the appointment of a school-based administrator who was authorized to supervise other teachers significantly restructured power relations in schools, realigning the source of authority from the classroom to the principal's office. Just as significant was the role that the principal played as a school based representative of the central educational office.


Author(s):  
Kira Ilina

Introduction. The article is focused on reconstruction of the practices of forming a disciplinary group of classical philologists in the Russian Empire universities in the 1830s – 1850s. Methods. For this purpose, the archival materials of the Ministry of Education, as well as Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Kiev Universities are considered. The research methodology is based on a combination of both traditional general historical methods and methods of classical source studies, and approaches developed in the framework of the history of science, the sociology of knowledge and the history of disciplines. Analysis and results. It is important to analyze three points: the political context, practices in building career trajectories and academic networks of professors of Greek and Roman literature and antiquities at Russian universities. The transformation of the existing network of universities into the system of public education was carried out by the Minister of Public Education Sergey Uvarov in the 1830s. Transferring to Russia the European model of secondary education based on the study of classical languages, Uvarov created a system of general education and relentlessly promoted antiquity studies in the Russian Empire. Teaching classical disciplines was expanded at gymnasiums and universities. Following the academic personnel reform of the late 1830s, a number of “antiquity chairs” at universities was headed by young philologists and historians who had spent two or three years of training at universities in Germany, mainly in Berlin, attending lectures and seminars of leading German classical philologists. In the 1840s – 1850s, an artificially constructed group of classical philologists gradually transformed into a disciplinary community.


1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence I. Conrad

The caliphate of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (105–25/724–43) was undoubtedly one of the most important periods in early Islamic history, and as witness to the history of this era a source of paramount importance is certainly the Ta'rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī. This in itself makes the publication of Volume xxv of the English translation of this work by Dr Khalid Yahya Blankinship, covering all but the last five years of Hishām's long reign, a matter of special interest to historians of the eastern lands of Islam. The reader will immediately notice that al-Ṭabarī devotes the bulk of his narrative for this period to events in Khurāsān and Transoxania, specifically, to the Umayyad campaigns there and hostilities with the Türgish khāqān Sü-lü Čur. In the course of this narrative one finds not only a wealth of information on military matters, but also much valuable data on the customs of the western Turks and life in Central Asia in general. The author's reasons for giving his work such a markedly eastern emphasis at this point are not unrelated to a desire, as Blankinship observes, to set forth the background for the 'Abbāsid revolution. But most of what al-Ṭabarī reports for this period is in fact not of immediate relevance to the advent of the 'Abbāsids, and indeed, the subject of 'Abbāsid propaganda activities hardly seems to be a prominent one in this volume.


2014 ◽  
Vol 116 (14) ◽  
pp. 383-410
Author(s):  
Deirdre M. Kelly

This chapter delineates three models of democracy, noting the role that alternative education plays within each model. Then, from the perspective of the participatory democracy model, I examine various initiatives to foster democracy in alternative learning contexts, drawing relevant examples from the literature to highlight critical issues, tensions, and dilemmas, and lessons learned. … the history of the public alternative schools movement is more than an account of the development of preference in public education, it is a story about competing ideas on purposes and goals of schooling; it is a story about democratizing public education. (Neumann, 2003, p. 2)


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Fehring ◽  
Terry S. Reynolds

The engineering involved in transportation provided one of the points from which the modern mechanical engineering profession in the United States emerged. The shops that produced the steam engines for river boats and the locomotives for railroads had, by the 1840s, become a leading training ground for the first generation of professional mechanical engineers. As railroads became the primary means of long-distance transport for goods in the late nineteenth century, they also became a leading employer of mechanical engineers. Not surprisingly, the Rail Transportation Division was one of the original eight divisions created when ASME in 1920 adopted a divisional organization; it remains among that organization’s most active divisions. Unfortunately, despite the rail industry’s importance to American history and to the history of mechanical engineering, few articles dealing with the history of this form of land transportation have appeared in Mechanical Engineering magazine over the past fifty years. None were selected for this volume.


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