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Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) are a large class of anthropogenic compounds which are widespread emerging contaminants of concern in the environment. Their environmental recalcitrance, long-term stability, high mobility, and toxicity make these compounds a significant threat to groundwater sources. Many PFASs are surfactants, imparting properties that impact their mobility in the subsurface. In the last several years, progress has been made in the understanding of how these chemicals are retained and mobilized in the unsaturated zone by focusing on the mechanisms of partitioning from the water to the water-air interfaces within the pores. The fundamental knowledge of the mechanisms contributing to retention has been primarily studied using packed, one-dimensional laboratory columns with sands under highly idealized conditions. Few studies where either field soils are used in columns or pilot-scale field tests are conducted been reported or are in progress. Even without the chemical and physical complexities associated with the behavior of PFASs, modeling water infiltration and chemical transport in the field remains a challenge. Several factors, including spatial variability of the soil characteristics from pore to macro-scale, contribute to this challenge. The soil in natural field systems where contamination has occurred is a mixture of silt, clay, and sand. The structure of the soil in its natural form changes within the vertical profile due to different levels of compaction and disturbance resulting from vegetation growth, decay, soil fracturing, bioturbation, etc. In addition, the texture variability results in heterogeneity at different spatial scales from pores to soil pockets (lenses) and layering (stratification). The water infiltrating through the soil carries the PFAS from the surface soils, where the chemicals have been introduced and deeper into the soil profile before reaching the water table, contaminating the groundwater. The soil disturbances and heterogeneity result in non-uniform water pathways, thus affecting the retention, mobilization, and transport. Additional challenges to PFASs that behave as surfactants come from spatial variability of the soil-water interfaces resulting from immobile zones that change spatially and dynamically, depending on the infiltration rates. This paper discusses the conceptual issues that need to be addressed in transferring the knowledge and parameters determined using laboratory column studies where breakthrough data (BTC) are analyzed using many simplifications. Based on our experience of other problems of transport of chemicals in the vadose zone, the feasibility, challenges, and limitations of using multi-scale testing and modeling approach are presented.

In this programmatic essay, I approach the question "What is open-mindedness?" through three more specific questions, each designed to foreground a distinct dimension along which the analysis of open-mindedness might proceed: When is open-mindedness? What is not open-mindedness? and, Where is open-mindedness? The first question refers to the temporal dimension of open-mindedness, which I analyze in terms of Dewey’s distinction between recognition and perception and the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal. The second question refers to the dialectical dimension of open-mindedness, to what the many aspects of closed-mindedness reveal about open-mindedness. Here I recall Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. The third question refers to the dimension of scale, asking what open- and closed-mindedness look like on the interpersonal and social levels. To bring out this third dimension, I draw on Jonathan Lear's reading of the Republic and psychoanalytic group dynamics theory. Through these three related inquiries I show the range of this central intellectual virtue and bring out its connections to two central, related features of the moral life: the need for integration and the need for openness to newness and complexity.

Advanced nutrient removal in water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) can reduce coastal eutrophication, but can increase economic costs and indirect environmental impacts associated with energy and materials usage for WRRF construction and operation. A strategy of interest to reduce coastal eutrophication is the cultivation of seaweeds in proximity to WRRF discharge plumes to bioextract nutrients from coastal waters. We report economic and environmental trade-offs of this proposed strategy for a 1,170 m

Focal Point Positioning has developed a live-software-library version of its S-GPS "supercorrelation" technologies for deployment within the products of partner chipset companies. Last year Focal Point demonstrated performance improvements using data logged from Broadcom and u-blox development kits. This year Focal Point will unveil and explain the live version of this technology, covering how chipset manufacturers and application engineers can interface with the library to build it into their customer's devices. The talk will also demonstrate the performance improvements and new capabilities enabled by the software upgrade, such as anti spoofing and angle-of-arrival determination. S-GPS also provides improvements to the accuracy, sensitivity and integrity of any GNSS chipset. Focal Point are currently working with major chipset companies in 2019 to deploy into handsets in 2020 in the smartphone and automotive spaces. By the date of the ION GNSS+ conference it is hoped that we will be able to officially announce some of the partners and first customers of the S-GPS software upgrade.

Action research began as an ambitious epistemological and social intervention. As the concept has become reified, packaged for methodology textbooks and professional development workshops, it has degenerated into a cure that may be worse than the disease. The point is not the trivial one that action research, like any practice, sometimes shows up in cheap or corrupt forms. The very idea that action research already exists as a live option is mystifying, distracting us from the deep challenge that action research ultimately represents. Though Joseph Schwab is sometimes credited as a forerunner of action research, it is likely that he would see the new talk of ‘the teacher as researcher’ as indicative of the very epitomization of which he warned. Dewey’s new conception of knowledge, action, and communication – and the vision of the teacher as learner it entails – requires nothing short of a radical rethinking of teaching and inquiry, schooling and teacher education. This essay recalls the promise of...

In this essay, Chris Higgins sets out to disentangle the tradition of humane learning from contemporary distinctions and debates. The first section demonstrates how a bloated and incoherent “humanism” now functions primarily as a talisman or a target, that is, as a prompt to choose sides. It closes with the image of Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, suggesting that humanism is more like the uncertain footing of Salcedo's fissure than the footholds on either side. The second section suggests that this “alien humanism” is hiding in plain sight, requiring us only to read an inch beyond the poster-ready copy fueling the polemics. Even a cursory glance at the texts from which these epitomes are drawn — from Terence's “Nothing human is foreign to me,” through Shakespeare's “What a piece of work is a man,” to Arnold's “The best of what has been thought and said” — is enough to reconnect us with a tradition stranger and more dynamic than that portrayed by boosters and knockers alike. The third section explores the tensions between the research university and the tradition of humane letters it has come to house, arguing that it will not do to escape this rancor by hiding behind the functionalist, and ultimately circular, term “humanist,” defined as one who does research in the humanities. The final section shows that if this older tradition pulls away, to some extent, from the modern humanities, it simultaneously embraces scientific and professional fields, as demonstrated by the long tradition of the physician-humanist.

Focal Point Positioning has developed new signal processing methods for the correlation stage of a GNSS receiver that enable many seconds of coherent integration while the receiver system is undergoing dynamic motions. These innovative methods have been successfully trialled using low-cost, consumer-grade receivers such as those found within smartphones. We will be showing our latest real world results from a variety of tests in a variety of locations, explaining how our signal processing techniques work, including our newest Ultracorrelation technique, and we will explain how these methods can be implemented into current chipset designs. Objectives: These new signal processing stages change the correlators from the “textbook” PRN sequences into a particular pattern of phase correcting sequences that account for receiver motion and local clock variations. The resulting Supercorrelator couples strongly (coherently) to the line-of-sight energy coming from each satellite, but simultaneously attenuates energy arriving at the antenna from non line of sight directions. The result is high gain on the line of sight energy, and the mitigation of multipath interference before the creation of the correlation peak. Note that this is all in software, we make no hardware changes, nor do we require new antennas. Results: We will show the results of walking and driving tests in a variety of locations and will demonstrate the tracking of GNSS signals deep indoors using our Supercorrelation and Ultracorrelation techniques. We will also demonstrate our sky scan technology which can directly image the angular arrival of energy from the line of sight, and separately from reflected signals, again just using a single moving antenna and standard consumer grade sensing. Key innovations: The Supercorrelation technique is the next generation step beyond deep-coupling of inertial measurements and GNSS. We will also explain how our new Ultracorrelation technique works, which can extend the coherent integration time out to 5 seconds and more, even on moving low-cost consumer devices with uncompensated crystals. Significance: Supercorrelation and Ultracorrelation provide clear improvements to existing GNSS receiver designs through software upgrades to the DSP stage in current generation GNSS chipsets. The technologies will have a significant impact on the performance of consumer GNSS receivers in urban environments once deployed by our customer GNSS chipset manufacturers.

Action research began as an ambitious epistemological and social intervention. As the concept has become reified, packaged for methodology textbooks and professional development workshops, it has degenerated into a cure that may be worse than the disease. The point is not the trivial one that action research, like any practice, sometimes shows up in cheap or corrupt forms. The very idea that action research already exists as a live option is mystifying, distracting us from the deep challenge that action research ultimately represents. Though Joseph Schwab is sometimes credited as a forerunner of action research, it is likely that he would see the new talk of ‘the teacher as researcher’ as indicative of the very epitomization of which he warned. Dewey’s new conception of knowledge, action, and communication—and the vision of the teacher as learner it entails—requires nothing short of a radical rethinking of teaching and inquiry, schooling and teacher education. This essay recalls the promise of action research, exploring its pitfalls, and attempts to get clear on the ongoing challenge it represents.

This chapter traces some of the shifting meanings of the public and private in educational thought from Plato to the present, with special reference to the United States and the idea of the common school. It identifies two distinct lines of debate: one concerning the nature of public educational goods and the other concerning the fate of individuation and self-cultivation. Reconstructing these debates side by side leads to a surprising conclusion. What looks like ‘public schooling’ can be shown to be the pursuit of merely overlapping private goods. At the same time, what looks like a system prioritizing the individual’s private purposes can be shown in fact to largely stifle individual self-formation. Modern schooling is best described as an expression of what Arendt calls the ‘social’ and thus falls short of cultivating either public or private life.

Environmental policy involving citizen science (CS) is of growing interest. In support of this open data stream, validation or quality assessment of the CS data and their appropriate usage for evidence-based policy making, needs a flexible and easily adaptable data curation process ensuring transparency. Addressing these needs, this paper describes an approach for automatic quality assurance as proposed by the Citizen OBservatory WEB (COBWEB) FP7 project. This approach is based upon a workflow composition that combines different quality controls, each belonging to seven categories or ‘pillars’. Each pillar focuses on a specific dimension in the types of reasoning algorithms for CS data qualification. These pillars attribute values to a range of quality elements belonging to three complementary quality models. Additional data from various sources, such as Earth Observation (EO) data, are often included as part of the inputs of quality controls within the pillars. However, qualified CS data can also contribute to the validation of EO data. Therefore, the question of validation can be considered as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Based on an invasive species CS study, concerning Fallopia japonica (Japanese knotweed), the paper discusses the flexibility and usefulness of qualifying CS data, either when using an EO data for the validation within the quality assurance process, or validating an EO data product that describes the risk of occurrence of the plant. Both validation paths are found to be improved by quality assurance of the CS data. Addressing the reliability of CS open data, issues and limitations of the role of quality assurance for validation, due to the quality of secondary data used within the automatic workflow, are described, e.g. error propagation, paving the route to improvements in the approach.

Volunteer geographical information (VGI), either in the context of citizen science or the mining of social media, has proven to be useful in various domains including natural hazards, health status, disease epidemics, and biological monitoring. Nonetheless, the variable or unknown data quality due to crowdsourcing settings are still an obstacle for fully integrating these data sources in environmental studies and potentially in policy making. The data curation process, in which a quality assurance (QA) is needed, is often driven by the direct usability of the data collected within a data conflation process or data fusion (DCDF), combining the crowdsourced data into one view, using potentially other data sources as well. Looking at current practices in VGI data quality and using two examples, namely land cover validation and inundation extent estimation, this paper discusses the close links between QA and DCDF. It aims to help in deciding whether a disentanglement can be possible, whether beneficial or not, in understanding the data curation process with respect to its methodology for future usage of crowdsourced data. Analysing situations throughout the data curation process where and when entanglement between QA and DCDF occur, the paper explores the various facets of VGI data capture, as well as data quality assessment and purposes. Far from rejecting the usability ISO quality criterion, the paper advocates for a decoupling of the QA process and the DCDF step as much as possible while still integrating them within an approach analogous to a Bayesian paradigm.

In “The Humanist Moment,” Chris Higgins sets out to recover a tenable, living humanism, rejecting both the version vilified by the anti-humanists and the one sentimentalized by the reactionary nostalgists. Rescuing humanism from such polemics is only the first step, as we find at least nine rival, contemporary definitions of humanism. Which movement or theory is the real humanism? Higgins contends that we can reconstruct a critical, dialectical humanism from the very tensions in these conceptions. On this view, humanism is neither a theory nor a movement, but a moment, a specific intervention evincing characteristic sensibilities, enabling us to navigate through one of a number of recurring dead spots in the life of culture. Higgins outlines four ongoing human dialectics whose vibrant center the humanist helps us regain: genuine hope/acceptance in the face of both fantasy and cynicism; combined awareness of our connectedness and distinctiveness rejecting both dogmatic universalizing and particularizing discourses; and humane learning as distant from scholasticism as it is from anti-intellectualism. An entire section is devoted to the fourth dialectic, showing how humanism has appeared as a corrective both to historicism and to presentism, helping us reconnect with the untimely, living voice of tradition.

Lighting environment with LED grow lights is one of the main components of PFALs or vertical farming technology. We see more and more PFAL growers have lately been installing LED lightings as a light source and see the increasing number of lighting companies entering into this industry worldwide. There is a question whether producing plants with light source such as LEDs without sunlight can ever be economically feasible. Moreover, actual growers are facing challenges comparing LED lighting options and deciding a right source which is economically sustainable for them. Sharing a sample of how and what to consider while comparing light options by economic analysis should be beneficial. In this chapter, we first overview global LED lighting players, discuss market analysis on growing with LED lighting, rethink the current PFAL and LED grow light business structure trends, and finally discuss a market creation for PFALs with LED lightings.

The North American indoor vertical farming industry, known as plant factories (PFALs) in Japan and as city farms in Europe, is best described as nascent. Although there has been a significant amount of discussion and enthusiasm about this industry, in actuality, very few commercial vertical farms have been built in the USA and Canada. However, there have been significant developments and improvements in electric light sources for producing plants without sunlight. This chapter will focus on the following topics: background of the North American vertical farming industry, market trends for vertical farm lighting, LED companies and predictions for lighting vertical farms as a growing industry.

This article describes a project to apply and validate a conceptual framework of clusters of purposeful learning activity involving ICT tools. The framework, which is based in a socio-cultural perspective, is described as ‘DECK’, and comprises the following major categories of the use of digital technologies to support learning: distributed thinking and knowing; engagement; community and communication; and knowledge building. Small-scale research to test the framework was carried out with 12 teachers in English primary and secondary schools. The methods involved mind mapping, ‘think aloud’ procedures and interviews. The framework was modified in the light of teachers' responses and offers a way of describing and thinking about the diverse uses of digital technologies to support learning in various contexts.

This article explores the development of the Journal over the first 20 years of its existence, reflecting a period of ongoing change in educational technologies and their role in teacher education and development. This exploration is undertaken through an analysis of the abstracts of articles published in the first 19 volumes of the Journal. Word clouds are used for the first level of analysis, and deeper investigation is undertaken using text mining, based on latent semantic analysis, to derive thematic clusters of articles, reflecting the changes in the wider landscape of educational technology. The authors also investigate the changing picture of widening international participation in the Journal. They conclude that, whilst some underlying themes of the Journal remain consistent, other themes reflect aspects of external changes.

The phrase ‘‘public school’’ tends to evoke too little passion or too much. In everyday use, it has a bland and bureaucratic meaning. It refers simply to a school that is funded by tax dollars, overseen by elected officials, operating with open admissions within its district, and so on. However, when we sense that public schooling is under siege, in debates over vouchers for example, we may become less nominalistic and more idealistic. The trouble is that when we rush to the defense of the public schools, we are immediately overtaken by pieties: the public schools ensure an educated electorate; safeguard against the balkanization of the republic into class, racial, and religious groups; guarantee economic opportunity to those whose families are not well off and well connected. There is nothing wrong with these statements, except for the fact that they are all probably, more or less, false. The electorate is not particularly well educated. The United States is severely balkanized. And the poor seem to be getting poorer. If friends of these public ideals — people who care deeply about such notions of civic life, multicultural awareness, and equal opportunity — sometimes hesitate to ask whether the public schools actually make good on these public missions, it may be because there are so many who seem ready to seize any pretext to call the whole project into question. Between the banality of the phrase in some contexts and its sacredness in others, it is hard even to ask the most basic question: what makes a public school public?

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in the culture of performativity, not only the public school but public life itself is hollowed out and debased. Qualities are recast as quantities, judgments replaced by rubrics, teaching and learning turned into exchange values. Schools should be central to public life: key locations for the regeneration of values, the cultivation of judgment, and the creation of the conditions for positive freedom. In this article Chris Higgins, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, goes beyond typical treatments of the schools as equalizer of individual opportunity to explore three aspects of educational publicity: the school as an object of communal concern, schooling as preparation for public life, and the classroom as public space.

The use of a semantically rich registry containing a Feature Type Catalogue (FTC) to represent the semantics of geographic feature types including operations, attributes and relationships between feature types is required to realise the benefits of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Specifically, such information provides a more complete representation of the semantics of the concepts used in the SDI, and enables advanced navigation, discovery and utilisation of discovered resources. The presented approach creates an FTC implementation in which attributes, associations and operations for a given feature type are encapsulated within the FTC, and these conceptual representations are separated from the implementation aspects of the web services that may realise the operations in the FTC. This differs from previous approaches that combine the implementation and conceptual aspects of behaviour in a web service ontology, but separate the behavioural aspects from the static aspects of the semantics of the concept or feature type. These principles are demonstrated by the implementation of such a registry using open standards. The ebXML Registry Information Model (ebRIM) was used to incorporate the FTC described in ISO 19110 by extending the Open Geospatial Consortium ebRIM Profile for the Web Catalogue Service (CSW) and adding a number of stored queries to allow the FTC component of the standards-compliant registry to be interrogated. The registry was populated with feature types from the marine domain, incorporating objects that conform to both the object and field views of the world. The implemented registry demonstrates the benefits of inheritance of feature type operations, attributes and associations, the ability to navigate around the FTC and the advantages of separating the conceptual from the implementation aspects of the FTC. Further work is required to formalise the model and include axioms to allow enhanced semantic expressiveness and the development of reasoning capabilities.

Background/Context If education centrally involves self-cultivation, and the teacher's own robust selfhood is necessary for inspiring self-cultivation in students, then teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education. But teaching is seen as a helping profession, where helping others always seems, in practice if not in principle, to preclude helping oneself. Some scholars refer to teaching as a praxis, a form of ethical/political conduct where knowing and doing become fused, where freedom is enacted. But is this simply wishful thinking? Perhaps, as institutionalized, teachers are a cog in a bureaucratic machine, or at best selfless servants of their students in a “noble” calling. This study asks what aspects of teaching, if any, might nurture the teacher's own quest to flourish, without thus becoming a selfish betrayal of the role. What might it mean to speak of teaching as “self-ful”? Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The philosophy of Hannah Arendt is a fruitful context in which to refine and explore this question. Arendt offers a rich typology of practical activities, distinguishing “labor” and “work” from action proper. And she puts action at the center of her theory of education. However, it is the natality and action of students that drives education, and Arendt seems to suggest that teaching itself amounts to only labor or work. The problem is that if the teacher's core project is not actional, she will grow estranged from her own natality, and thus be incapable of recognizing and responding to the natality of her students. How can we theorize teaching as action without violating the spirit of Arendt's compelling accounts of education and of action? Research Design This is a theoretical paper and uses philosophical methods such as concept clarification and development, textual analysis, and thought experiments. Conclusions/Recommendations Arendt's conception of the classroom as mediating space, sheltered from full exposure to the public realm and the demands of action, is a sound one. However, this need not entail that teaching cannot be a form of action. The classroom mediates but does not entirely exclude the public. Meanwhile, action for Arendt itself involves mediation. The classroom is a theatrical space where participants may adopt roles, but politics too is theatrical for Arendt. The curriculum involves representations of aspects of the cultural inheritance, making education akin to an ongoing (cultural) constitutional convention, where making is always remaking, where the polis is again called into existence by its representatives.