text:
Q: Nesting views deterioriates image quality I ran in to this problem on a recent project when the guys in the art department noticed deteriorating image quality. I'm not sure what's causing it however we were able to remedy the issue by removing the ScrollView it was nested in. But this is not a viable solution as we will need to nest images within views nested within scrollviews.
My code looked something like:
<View>
    <ScrollView>
         <View>
              <ImageView image="someImage.png" />
         </View>
    </ScrollView>
</View>

When we removed the ImageView from both the nested ScrollView and it's direct parent view it renders fine. I've created a repo with a simple project illustrating this. The dulling effect is most noticeable on the coloring of the letters, the white drop shadow on the text and the blurring of the grey border.
https://bitbucket.org/bwellons/blurry-images
Is this a bug that needs reporting or is there documentation somewhere that says "don't do it this way" that I don't know of?
Regards
Brant

A: I think this is caused by not defining bounds (width, height) and anchors (top, left, right, bottom) of views in a consistent manner, for example, if I just change this:
".parent": {
    width: '100%',
    height : 59,
}

To this:
".parent": {
    top : 0,
    width: '100%',
    height : 59
}

The blurring goes away. I think this is happening because you are mixing relative and absolute view layout techniques (percentages and absolute pixels) in a tightly bound box (the .parent view is the exact same height as the child image view) which is causing the layout calculations underneath to fudge a little when they draw the image inside the parent view.
I say this because this also works to noticeably eliminate the blur, by allowing more room for transformation error:
".parent": {
    width: '100%',
    height : 62 // Added 3 pixels of padding
}

Here are some other methods that work as well, by either using the same layout mechanism for both width and height, or giving more room for transforms:
".parent": {
    width: '100%',
    height : '50%' // Dont do this, but shows the point
}

".parent": {
    bottom : 0,
    width: Ti.UI.FILL, // I use Ti.UI.FILL instead of 100% generally
    height : 59
}

So generally, stay away from mixing percentages and absolute values in nesting view chains dimensions, unless you are willing to give some wiggle room in the parent, or define anchors (top, left, right, bottom) to make the drawing transformations work out.
Disclaimer: I only base this statement on about 15-20 different limited layout tests and my own experience (I did not go through native code, yet) so this is by no means science.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Stir cream cheese, Cheddar, pear, scallion white, salt and pepper together in a medium bowl.
Just before serving, combine pecans and the reserved scallion greens in a shallow dish. Roll the cheese ball in the mixture, pressing to adhere.
Make Ahead Tip: Prepare through Step 2 and refrigerate for up to 2 days.
This was a huge hit. I followed the suggestions from another reviewer and added toasted pecan bits and extra onion. I also made it the night before so the flavors could meld.


text:
Louder The world's biggest and best metal magazine
Slipknot vid & setlist
Ghost jigsaws
Foo Fighters' 25th anniversary plans
New Pearl Jam album
Machine Head's Burn My Eyes: Riots, religious cults and one hell of an album
By Dom Lawson (Metal Hammer) 2019-08-21T16:52:02Z
In a year of game-changing albums, Burn My Eyes was truly one for the ages. Inspired by riots, religious cults and a desire to push the boundaries of heavy music, this is the story behind an absolute classic
(Image credit: Machine Head)
"I rode my bike through the riots," Robb Flynn remembers, thinking back to the disorder that spread across San Francisco's streets in 1992, sparked by the riots in LA, where more than 50 people would be killed and more than 2,000 injured.
The unrest had begun after the acquittal of four white police officers charged with beating black motorist Rodney King.
"People were fighting police, cars were being lit on fire. Police were trying to chase me down, gang bangers were trying to chase me down, it was crazy, but I just had to feel that chaos, soak it in. I was possessed to be there, and a lot of that intensity came out in Machine Head."
They've become such a permanent, unquestioned fixture in the metal world that it's easy to forget the monstrous impact of Machine Head's first album, Burn My Eyes.
Released by Roadrunner Records on August 9, 1994, it was hailed as an instant classic and became the label's biggest-selling debut ever (an accolade it retained until Slipknot's breakthrough in '99).
It was crazy, but I just had to feel that chaos, soak it in
With its ground-breaking blend of thuggish grooves, vicious thrash and hip hop bravado, not to mention frontman Robb Flynn's incendiary lyrics, Burn My Eyes did more than most to redefine metal in the 90s.
In fact, forging a new path for metal was precisely what Robb had in mind when he formed Machine Head as a side-project, while still a member of Bay Area thrashers Vio-lence.
"I love those guys and I loved all the music that we made together, but I was ready for something else in my life," Robb recalls today.
"So I quit Vio-lence in '92. Right around that time, Ministry needed a touring guitar player. They were fucking massive at that point, it was the Psalm 69 era. They wanted to hear some stuff and I don't know why, but I had some chip on my shoulder and didn't want to send them old music. I wanted to send them new music."
Robb had already written a handful of new songs, including Death Church, a slow-burning monster that was purposefully distinct from anything he'd written with Vio-lence or his other former band, Forbidden.
With syncopated, grinding riffs redolent of Godflesh and Neurosis, and lyrics that went straight for religion's jugular, Machine Head already had a strong identity.
(Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)
Meanwhile, Robb needed help to record his audition for Ministry's touring guitarist role, so he enlisted drummer Chris Kontos, a veteran of the Bay Area hardcore scene with the likes of Attitude Adjustment and Grinch.
"One of Chris's bands had a rehearsal place in Oakland, three blocks from where the stab bing incident happened at the gas station [as documented in Machine Head's Triple Beam, from last year's Catharsis album].
"So going into this neighbourhood, we were bringing guns, we had hoodies up, just trying to be super-incognito and it was tense! But we got in there and Chris had this high-tech boombox so we could record in stereo, and we just sat and jammed. It was exciting!
"As far as I was concerned, that was it. Chris was in bands that were doing stuff… I was at ground zero… I'm hoping to tour with Ministry… so there was no talk of him joining the band."
As Robb notes with a wry smile, the call from Ministry never came. Instead, Robb powered ahead with his new band.
Completed by bassist Adam Duce, guitarist Logan Mader and drummer Tony Costanza, with whom Robb wrote several songs that would end up on Burn My Eyes, the first Machine Head line-up set about establishing themselves as a ferocious new force in the Bay Area and beyond.
"Tony got us our first gig in Las Vegas, a club show," Robb recalls. "We went down to Vegas, played to 40 people and then got wasted! Ha ha!
"After that, we had a couple of things under our belts and right about that time Joey [Huston] became our manager and that's when things really started happening."
If Machine Head's demo hadn't been enough to convince Al Jourgensen, it certainly grabbed the attention of Roadrunner Records, who signed the band in 1993 before even having seen them play live.
With the likes of Fear Factory, Sepultura, Obituary and Type O Negative on their books, Roadrunner were the perfect home for Robb's epoch-wrenching take on the metal blueprint: all the band needed was a debut album worthy of their burgeoning reputation.
With Tony Costanza departing and Chris Kontos returning, this time on a permanent basis, Machine Head were ready to deliver the goods on tape.
Recorded at Berkeley's Fantasy Studios, and produced by legendary metal guru Colin Richardson, Burn My Eyes' ultra-modern metal anthems perfectly encapsulated both Robb's intense focus and the self-inflicted chaos of the young band's lives.
"It was a crazy, intense time. We'd go in and record every day," says Robb. "The guys were all smoking weed. I was sober because I was so fucking focused on getting shit right.
"But Chris tells this story about how we smoked so much weed that we set off the fire alarms and almost killed everybody with the Halon gas that was going to be released. It sucks all of the oxygen out! Ha ha!"
Twenty-five years on, few fans would dispute the enduring power of songs like Davidian, Block and Blood For Blood.
With enough old-school bite to keep the thrash contingent happy and vast quantities of contemporary punch and invention, Burn My Eyes made a decent fist of uniting the tribes.
The album's impact was immediate, particularly in the UK and Europe, but until those sales figures rolled in, Robb remained unsure whether the band had a bright future.
We had guns and our hoodies up, trying to be super-incognito
"We didn't think we were going to conquer the world," he shrugs. "We knew the shit we were playing was super-aggressive and was never going to fly on the radio.
"I wasn't sitting there thinking, 'Oh this is going to set the world on fire!' I just remember trying to make it as heavy, intense, pissed-off, experimental and wild as possible."
Was he conscious of his sound being genuinely new and groundbreaking? Machine Head got tagged with the Pantera/'groove metal' thing, but they never really sounded like that...
"Yeah, that's something that got stuck with us because Pantera were popular at the time. Did we like Pantera? Of course.
"I'm not gonna say that they weren't an influence. When we were making Burn My Eyes, I was all about Dimebag's guitar tone, it was the sickest shit ever! But musically we were coming from a different place.
"We were coming from Metallica and Slayer, we were coming from Neurosis, we were coming from hardcore and rap.
"It was just this confluence of music and passion and drive, in a really intense time in our lives, and it became this crazy mishmash of music that really shouldn't have worked. No one realised it was possible.
"But we did it and it went on to change stuff. It's nuts."
If Machine Head's music was an unstoppable force, Robb Flynn's identity as a lyricist was established with similar vigour on Burn My Eyes.
Remorselessly furious but literate and inventive, he wrote about the bloody Waco Siege of 1993 in legendary opener Davidian.
David Koresh, leader of religious cult the Branch Davidians, was holed up in his compound in Texas when a stand-off started between him and the government, who wanted to arrest him on charges of illegal firearms and explosives.
Fifty-one days into the siege, he and almost 80 followers died in a fire following an FBI assault. The FBI maintain they did not start the fires.
Robb wrote about the riots in LA in 1992 in twisted interlude Real Eyes, Realize, Real Lies and album closer Block. Meanwhile, other songs took pointed jabs at religion and political corruption, while slow-burner I'm Your God Now tackled the horrors of drug addiction.
Twenty-five years later, it all seems disturbingly relevant to mankind's current state of disarray.
When Robb expressed doubts about the lyrics to Davidian ('Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast!') after the mass shooting in Vegas in October 2017, it emphasised the edgy, subversive power that Machine Head were wielding back in those early days: this was music born of chaos and rage.
No compromise, no fucks given.
"I feel proud of what I was able to say in those songs," Robb states. "I don't want to say it's political, but songs like Davidian and Block were documenting all the crazy shit that was going on.
"Until then, there was a lot of fantasy stuff in metal and I couldn't connect with it. Rap and punk rock were still about the streets and protest and anger. Anger, whether it was right or wrong, just spraying it everywhere, is definitely what was getting me off."
We smoked so much weed that we set off the fire alarms and nearly died
As it turned out, a lot of people shared Robb's proclivity for fury.
Within a matter of months, Machine Head were being talked about as heavyweights, and following a major European tour as main support to Slayer, the band were soon back as headliners.
The rest, as they say, is history – albeit history with a shitload of ups, downs and unexpected detours.
In 2019, Robb is a very different man from the incensed, snotty hooligan who bellowed those Burn My Eyes classics.
But despite being older and wiser, there lingers a sense that if a riot breaks out any time soon, Robb will be on his bike and into the fray before you can say 'fuck it all'. This autumn, Oakland's premier riot-starters ride again.
"Think about what would've happened if I had got the Ministry gig," chuckles Robb. "Machine Head may never have fucking happened.
"Life is so crazy like that. Burn My Eyes could've been our only chance, so we had to come out swinging and swinging harder than any motherfucker out there."
Chris Kontos and Logan Mader rejoin Machine Head to play Burn My Eyes in full later this year.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Home Editors' Picks Dutch firm to start preparation work for Bulacan airport in Q1
Dutch firm to start preparation work for Bulacan airport in Q1
By Arjay L. Balinbin, Senior Reporter
CONSTRUCTION of the P740-billion airport project in Bulacan is set to begin in the first quarter of 2021, San Miguel Corp. (SMC) said on Tuesday, with land development work to be undertaken by a Dutch company.
The Manila International Airport project "is set to take off in the first quarter of 2021, after it awarded global firm Boskalis a $1.73-billion contract" to restore the land where it will be built, SMC said in an e-mailed statement.
The company in October said groundbreaking for the Bulacan airport would take place "by the end of the year."
SMC said it selected Dutch firm Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., through its local unit Boskalis Philippines, Inc., to undertake land development work for the project, which will be built in the coastal areas of Bulakan town, Bulacan.
"Our selection of a global giant in dredging shows how ready, willing, and committed we are to do everything necessary to make sure this airport project is developed properly and sustainably," SMC President and Chief Operating Officer Ramon S. Ang said in the statement.
Mr. Ang said the mega-airport is expected to be fully completed by 2024.
He noted the Dutch dredging firm, which has been involved in development projects in South Korea, Panama, Indonesia, and Amsterdam, will prepare the area to "withstand potential large earthquakes, local typhoon conditions, and even future sea level rise."
To recall, SMC's airport project has faced criticism from various groups over its environmental impact.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said during a Senate hearing in September that the airport project is at risk of flooding and ground shaking.
Mr. Ang said the company will use engineering intervention to avoid the risks that come with building an airport in a coastal area.
To address such concerns, SMC has tapped Groupe ADP (Aeroports de Paris), Meinhardt Group and Jacobs Engineering Group for the construction of the airport. These firms are behind Singapore's Changi airport, France's Charles de Gaulle airport, and the United States' Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport.
WRIT OF KALIKASAN
Meanwhile, Oceana Philippines in a statement said fisherfolk and civil society groups filed a petition for a Writ of Kalikasan against SMC's airport project before the Supreme Court.
The petitioners included Bulacan-based fishermen Teodoro Bacon and Rodel Alvarez, Oceana Philippines Vice-President Gloria Estenzo Ramos, Archbishop Roger Martinez of the Archdiocese of San Jose del Monte, and Aniban ng mga Mangagawa sa Agrikultura led by Renato de la Cruz.
Oceana Philippines said the petition was filed to stop the reclamation of Manila Bay in order to save marine life, endangered birds and mangroves and ecosystems. They also claimed that the airport project did not have an environmental compliance certificate (ECC), as it was SMC's contractor Silvertides Holdings that was issued an ECC on June 14 last year.
"We have to keep on working together in the protection, rehabilitation, and conservation of Manila Bay, not only for its economic importance and contribution to national food security, and for its historical, cultural, and aesthetic value but to make ecosystems and people resilient to the impacts of climate change," Oceana's Ms. Ramos said.
The case respondents include Mr. Ang, Silvertides President Hercules V. Galicia, Environment Secretary Roy A. Cimatu, Environmental Management Bureau Region III Regional Director Wilson L. Trajeco, and Transportation Secretary Arthur P. Tugade.
A Writ of Kalikasan is a legal remedy that protects the people's constitutional right to a healthy environment.
As of press time, SMC has not yet replied to BusinessWorld's query for comment.
SMC shares closed 1.08% lower at P137.70 apiece on Tuesday. — with Angelica Y. Yang
Australian nuclear body joins search for missing radioactive capsule January 31, 2023 | 3:50 pm
Human capital damage from coronavirus could worsen poverty — WB
7s Football League commences new season with Kampeon Cup
GMA unit signs partnership with Singapore Press Holdings/Mediacorp JV


In today's ever-changing security landscape, incident response teams often miss out on potential threats that can impact their organization because they're time-strapped by manual processes and high alert volume. They're unable to take advantage of the breadth of external threat intelligence available and instead focus only on internal logs and data. Security teams need a platform that can centralize threat intelligence across sources and harness that information to drive action across security environments.
To meet these challenges, users can combine the comprehensive threat intelligence of Anomali ThreatStream with the security orchestration and automation features of Demisto to improve threat visibility and accelerate incident response.
Automate Anomali ThreatStream enrichment of IPs, domains, and file hashes as playbook-driven tasks within Demisto.
Access reputation of an email in Anomali ThreatStream from Demisto in real-time.
Search for threat intelligence details in ThreatStream Cloud from within Demisto.
Leverage hundreds of Demisto product integrations to further enrich Anomali ThreatStream data and coordinate response across security functions.
Run thousands of commands (including for Anomali ThreatStream) interactively via a ChatOps interface while collaborating with other analysts and Demisto's chatbot.
The disparate nature of threat intelligence and incident response tools can make it tough for SOC teams to track the lifecycle of an incident due to moving between screens, fragmented information, and the lack of single-window documentation. Incident response will also often involve a host of important but repetitive actions that analysts need to perform, leaving them time-strapped for actual problem-solving and decision-making.
SOCs using Anomali ThreatStream for threat intelligence and Demisto Enterprise for security orchestration and incident response respectively can automate indicator enrichment through Demisto playbooks. These playbooks will harness Anomali ThreatStream indicator intelligence and use that information to execute actions across the entire stack of products that a SOC uses.
For example, analysts can leverage Anomali ThreatStream to enrich domains, IPs, and file hashes as automatable playbook tasks.
Demisto playbooks coupled with Anomali ThreatStream actions can standardize and speed up triage and resolution of security alerts. Analysts get a comprehensive view of the response workflow on a single screen. With repeatable tasks now automated, analyst time is freed up for deeper investigation and strategic action.
Apart from running automated actions, attack investigations usually require additional real-time tasks such as pivoting from one suspicious indicator to another to gather critical evidence, drawing relations between incidents, and finalizing resolution. Running these commands traps analysts in a screen-switching cycle during investigation and a documentation-chasing cycle after investigations end.
After running enrichment playbooks, analysts can gain greater visibility and new actionable information about the attack by running Anomali ThreatStream commands in the Demisto War Room. For example, if playbook results throw up indicator information, analysts can get additional context from Anomali ThreatStream in real time by running the threatstream-intelligence command with relevant arguments.


I just love watching this cat clip. If it makes you laugh it is because we tend to laugh at things that are unexpected. The cat opens its mouth and we expect a "meow" but we hear a "honk" instead.
In the Bible story about Joseph and his brothers, (Genesis 37-45) we hear Joseph say something we do not expect. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery and then lied to their father. Joseph ended up in prison before God's plan for him played out. Joseph was the number two ruler in Egypt when his brothers came to him for food for their starving families.
We would expect Joseph to say angry things. We would expect him to deny his brothers food and instead throw them into prison.
But the words that came out of Joseph's mouth were words of mercy.
Because Joseph had forgiveness from God, he was able to forgive his brothers for the terrible things they did to him.
You are also forgiven by God and God can help you to say the unexpected. The next time a brother or sister, or a classmate, does something mean, let the words that come out of your mouth show mercy. Let them be unexpected. Let your words be kind and forgiving.
The reaction you get just might be unexpected, too.


The most effective way to communicate the nature of this course is to identify its motivation. We live in a place and at a time in which we have ready access to information—scientific information—of unprecedented value to our individual and collective welfare. But the proportion of this information that is effectively used—by individuals and by society—is shockingly small. The evidence for this conclusion is reflected in the manifestly awful decisions people make, and outcomes they suffer as a result, in their personal health and financial planning. It is reflected too not only in the failure of governmental institutions to utilize the best available scientific evidence that bears on the safety, security, and prosperity of its members, but in the inability of citizens and their representatives even to agree on what that evidence is or what it signifies for the policy tradeoffs acting on it necessarily entails.
If so moved, you can find materials from previous years' versions of this seminar here.
Do you think this is good or bad for public trust in scientists and science?
Do you have any plan this year to introduce evidence-based communication techniques for defusing perceived identity-based conflicts?


text:
Home › AAC&U News, June/July 2019 › Newsletter › 2018 › AAC&U News, September 2018
In 2006, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) convened a committee of eighteen of the biggest names in engineering—including former US secretary of defense William Perry and Google cofounder Larry Page—to examine the toughest issues facing the world in the twenty-first century.
Figure 1. The Fourteen Grand Challenges
Advance personalized learning
Make solar energy economical
Enhance virtual reality
Reverse-engineer the brain
Engineer better medicines
Advance health informatics
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Secure cyberspace
Provide access to clean water
Provide energy from fusion
Prevent nuclear terror
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
Two years later, the committee created a list of fourteen "Grand Challenges" organized around four broad themes: sustainability, security, global health, and joy of living (see fig. 1).
Realizing that higher education plays a vital role in preparing future engineers to tackle these challenges, three campus leaders—Richard Miller, president of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering; Tom Katsouleas, former dean of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering (now provost at the University of Virginia); and Yannis Yortsos, dean of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering—worked with the NAE to launch the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) in 2009.
The only firm GCSP requirement is that participating students achieve five core competencies:
Talent: mentored research/creative experience on a Grand Challenge-like topic
Multidisciplinary: understanding multidisciplinarity of engineering systems solutions developed through personal engagement
Viable Business/Entrepreneurship: understanding, preferably developed though experience, of the necessity of a viable business model for solution implementation
Multicultural: understanding different cultures, preferably through multicultural experiences, to ensure cultural acceptance of proposed engineering solutions
Social Consciousness: understanding that the engineering solutions should primarily serve people and society reflecting social consciousness
"The emphasis on higher education as purely technical job training is problematic," said Alison Wood, assistant professor of environmental engineering and director of the GCSP program at Olin College, one of the first three institutions to implement an operational GCSP program. "Even for students who are pursuing very technical degrees, there are elements of a liberal arts education that are critical to their development as students, as scholars, as professionals, and as people. And GCSP is a vehicle for injecting those elements into an engineering degree."
Tackling the Grand Challenges at Olin College
Located just outside of Boston in Needham, Massachusetts, Olin College has less than four hundred students, all undergraduates and all engineering majors. Despite its technical focus, Olin has always been committed to delivering students the kind of well-rounded, multidisciplinary education often found at liberal arts institutions.
"Grand Challenges was a natural fit for Olin because what GCSP is about—integrating skills and mindsets like interdisciplinarity and social consciousness into a STEM or engineering education—is already built into Olin's educational philosophy," Wood said.
From the start, Olin's GCSP program has been a "student-run, student-led, student-driven, student-centered program," said Yevgeniya V. Zastavker, inaugural director of Olin's GCSP program (now director of the Research Institute for Experiential Learning Science at Northeastern University). With Zastavker acting as a mentor, students developed the ideas, vision, and implementation plan in the initial program proposal, and a student steering committee continues to work closely with Wood to implement the program.
The program is open to all students, who can work with faculty mentors and other GCSP students to find opportunities within existing courses and assignments across the curriculum. For example, in a software design course that most Olin students take, GCSP students could focus their assignments and projects on GCSP themes and competencies.
However, the competencies also reach all Olin students through the required core curriculum. Students do hands-on research projects from the day they walk in the door until graduation, Wood said, and in User-Oriented Collaborative Design, a sophomore-level engineering course, students learn basic ethnographic research skills and apply them to the principles of user-centered engineering design. Every student must also have a concentration (similar to a minor) in an arts, humanities, social sciences, or entrepreneurship field. A required entrepreneurship course, Products and Markets, examines value creation theory and how to connect customers with the products students hope to make.
Every senior at Olin takes a year-long capstone course, working collaboratively with other students and community partners on an extended project. While most Olin students complete capstones through existing partnerships with local industries, about 30 percent of Olin students take an alternative capstone, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship, in which students develop a plan, fundraise, and work with community partners to enact their vision.
One GCSP student worked with a team of other students to research infant warming systems for premature babies, which are prohibitively expensive for much of rural Southeast Asian. The team designed a safe and effective infant warmer that can be built and deployed at much lower cost than existing options. Another GCSP student's team worked with a Mississippi community to create a mobile classroom in a trailer that travels across the area to help local high schoolers design and build innovative projects, including a four-stringed guitar. This trailer provided the local teenagers "some creative opportunities, some hands-on making opportunities, as well as the constructive social opportunity of coming together with like-minded young people from their own community," Wood said.
Experiences like these, where Olin students interact with people from other backgrounds, is key to achieving the multicultural and social consciousness competencies, Wood said. "Embedding yourself in a culture that's unfamiliar to yourself is very powerful, and going abroad is one way to do that. But the student who worked with the group in Mississippi is a great example of how you can stay right here in the United States with people who speak the same language you do but whose culture and lived experiences are so different from yours."
Throughout the GCSP experience, faculty mentors guide students in deep reflection, using portfolios to make connections between various GCSP courses and projects. These portfolios often explore "those questions that we all tend to ask ourselves very intensely around the age of twenty-one, twenty-two, or twenty-three: Where am I going next? Who is the person I'm going to be in the world? And we want to provide support for that questioning," Wood said. "In a perfect world, we would have all of our students doing that kind of deep, intense reflection, and one of the reasons I love GCSP is it might, over time, be a vehicle for us to do that for all of Olin's students."
Using student feedback about GCSP experiences, the program continues to evolve. Olin is developing a course-tagging system to make GCSP opportunities more visible, and GCSP is expanding the robust (but currently informal) faculty-student mentorship model by piloting for-credit workshops for first-year students and a practicum to support seniors completing capstone research projects.
This kind of assessment and adaptation is critical to the long-term success of GCSP programs. "The student population who created Olin's initial program in 2009 was very different from the current population," Zastavker said. "The programs on each campus need to be adaptable and dynamic to respond to the needs and values of all its constituencies, specifically students."
Bridging STEM and the Arts and Sciences at Lawrence Technological University
In ten years, GCSP has grown rapidly—programs are now operational or in development at over 150 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. Each fall, faculty and staff from many of these institutions come together at the GCSP annual meeting to discuss best practices and troubleshoot problems.
Olin College continues to benefit from its "nice reciprocal relationship" with other GCSP institutions, Wood said. "To some degree we are leading the way as one of the pioneers of GCSP, but we're also learning quite a bit from our partners."
One partner is Lawrence Technological University, a private university just outside Detroit, Michigan. Jason Barrett, chair of the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication, first learned about the Grand Challenges as part of a 2015 Teagle Foundation grant to expand GCSP by recruiting humanities and social sciences faculty from STEM-focused schools.
"It was very clear to me from the very beginning that [GCSP] was not going to be a program just for engineers alone," said Zastavker, who has been a member of the NAE's GCSP Steering Committee since 2011. "Grand Challenges are human challenges which cross all kinds of boundaries, so we need everybody—we need political scientists, we need humanists, we need artists, we need designers, and we need engineers—to help us solve those problems."
Though Lawrence Tech is still finishing the GCSP proposal process, they have been running a "Grand Challenges" curriculum since 2016, making them one of the few GCSP-affiliated programs to allow students from any major—including humanities, arts, or STEM fields—to earn GCSP certification on their transcript.
"We intentionally designed the curriculum so that arts and sciences majors work collaboratively on projects with STEM and engineering majors," Barrett said.
Like Olin College, Lawrence Tech's GCSP program is open to all faculty or students. As part of her role on the NAE GCSP steering committee, Zastavker mentors programs like Lawrence Tech through the proposal process, paying close attention to GCSP admission policies (like GPA requirements) that prevent students from having equal access opportunities. "The hope is that GCSP is going to be yet another tool that will allow institutions to diversify their engineering, scientific, or STEM population," she said.
All first-year students take a one-credit Research Pathways course that introduces the fourteen challenges. Throughout the semester, students create a research poster that imagines what they will research for their senior capstone.
"We're asking students, 'What are you interested in? What's your field? And how is it related to these paradigm-shattering, technological, cutting-edge grand challenges?'" Barrett said.
One first-year nursing student imagined that she could develop a new design for female catheters. Her poster won a College of Arts and Sciences research fair and later won one of Lawrence Tech's coveted Presidential Undergraduate Research Award, a rare honor for a first-year student. As she looks forward to completing other GCSP courses leading to her capstone, she has been researching her design at a local hospital and working with venture capitalists at "Tech Town Detroit," an entrepreneurial hub that Lawrence Tech runs downtown.
"She's been down there developing this idea and talking with real people about where investment money could come from," Barrett said. "And all of this started from her first two weeks on campus when I did a classroom presentation on the Grand Challenges."
Because students must meet very strict requirements for their senior research projects, students are more likely to engage directly with GCSP through special sections of general education courses in communications, literature, history, and philosophy. Faculty members volunteer to teach a GCSP section, and other faculty members help them integrate a STEM perspective. For example, one philosophy course investigates the engineering principles needed to design a perfect republic in Plato's Republic, and a literature class connects Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to global health by exploring cultural reactions to disease and physical abnormalities and the line between machines and humanity. Entrepreneurial Design Studio, a required second-year engineering course—sees students from across all majors collaborating to create products for a metro Detroit organization.
Juniors and seniors also take a humanities seminar that integrates an ongoing research project from a STEM field. For example, the biomedical engineering and philosophy departments morphed a generic ethics class into a course on live human experimentation.
In the future, GCSP hopes to grow into one of the many prestigious research programs on campus that design things like concrete canoes or motorsports vehicles. "If you leave Lawrence Tech as one of the star players on the solar car team, there are any number of firms in metro Detroit that want you to be their first interviewee for a job, and so we have to make the Grand Challenges a similar kind of program," Barrett said.
To do this, GCSP is leveraging various research opportunities, including an ongoing partnership between the psychology department and Panasonic to research how lights on dashboards affects peripheral vision and attention. The Department of Arts and Sciences is also building partnerships with companies in China to create research abroad opportunities for GCSP students. Such hands-on, research-intensive experiences often lead directly to internships and "fantastic" starting careers, Barrett said.
GCSP also helps students build their social consciousness as they engage with the local community through programs in K–12 schools and summer robotics camps. The College of Arts and Sciences has also adapted the Research Pathways course as a one-credit dual-enrollment opportunity for local high school students.
"Not only are these [high school] students possible future Lawrence Tech students, but this is our contribution in metro Detroit to enriching the K–12 education system, which needs everybody's help," Barrett said. "We are preparing the pipeline for students who are going to end up in STEM programs by getting them to think about how the liberal arts inform their interests, but also for liberal arts majors, who aren't going to come to Lawrence Tech, so they understand the importance of STEM and the technological parameters of their interests."
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AAC&U News is written and edited by Ben Dedman. If you have questions or comments about the newsletter's contents, please email dedman@aacu.org.