Diverse Toolkit Research Articles

A review of translation and interpretation services provided by children's hospices in the UK, March

IntroductionThe review was commissioned by the Children's Hospices UK Diversity Reference Group to take forward the work of the Diversity Toolkit (2009) that was developed in collaboration with Help the...

Supporting workplace diversity: emerging roles for employment counselors

Employment counselors generally understand the benefits of workplace diversity; most are actively engaged in supporting diverse clients to attach to the workforce. However, they are less likely to be involved in supporting organizations to create workplaces where diverse workers are welcomed, appreciated, and fully engaged. In this article, results from a Canadian project to develop the Supporting Employers Embracing Diversity (S.E.E.D.) tool kit are presented and 10 emerging roles that employment counselors can play are introduced.

Colorado 14ers, Pixel by Pixel

This document describes a capstone learning exercise designed for undergraduates enrolled in an introductory geospatial tools course. The overarching theme of the exercise, Colorado 14ers, Pixel by Pixel, is mountain geography. While immersed in a digital mountainous landscape, students explore topics of geomorphology and geomorphometry and discover how it is possible for a summit that rises well above 14,000 feet not to qualify as a true Colorado ‘14er’. To address these topics, students examine freely-available digital elevation models (DEMs) using common geospatial analysis tools. The exercise was developed with five purposes in mind: (1) students should be introduced gently to geospatial software; (2) students should enter upper-level geography courses armed with basic computer skills and a diverse geospatial toolkit; (3) students should internalize the fact that invariably digital geographic explorations are influenced by scale; (4) students of geography should be able to identify natural and anthropogenic impacts to a landscape, and; (5) to help students conceptualize what geographers do, learning exercises should include local and interesting case studies. As an exercise intended to synthesize geographic concepts covered throughout a course, the learning objectives range from grasping broad theoretical concepts related to scale and measurement to learning specific computer skills related to directory structures and file naming conventions. Deliverables of the exercise include posting four maps and answers to nine questions to a website. The outcome of the exercise is a confident, geospatial toolsavvy student who is eager to further investigate the field of geography.

Diversity in the Psychology Curriculum: The Development of a Toolkit to Audit, Monitor and Enhance Responsiveness to Diversity in an Inclusive Curriculum

The recent implementation of the UK Equality Act should guarantee that all students have equality of opportunity within higher education (HE), and that HE institutions are responsive towards diversity in its broadest sense. This report describes the development of a diversity toolkit for auditing and monitoring academic departments' responsiveness to diversity, with a particular focus on undergraduate psychology programmes. The toolkit was the culmination of a two-year action research project conducted within one school of psychology in the United Kingdom, which was partly funded by the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network Departmental Teaching Enhancement Scheme.

The Eckles Clovis Site, 14JW4: A Clovis Site in Northern Kansas

Clovis archaeological sites in the central Great Plains are rare. A surface assemblage of Clovis lithics from the Eckles Site in north central Kansas can therefore make a significant contribution to understanding Clovis lithic procurement, landscape use and mobility. The lithic assemblage is unique in that it contains a discarded tool kit and evidence of a newly produced tool kit both made of White River Group silicate that outcrops about 450 km to the west northwest at Flattop Butte in northeast Colorado. A diverse toolkit indicates that the site was a probable camp site near a kill/processing event. Long distance movement of lithic materials to the east southeast and transport of this material in the form of large bifaces is indicated.

Continuous performance monitoring of industrial products as a key to their safe delivery and operation

The integrated task of ensuring safety of industrial products delivery at various levels from the physical parameters inspection during products transportation from suppliers to users up to limited access to the information about products, suppliers, and users is analyzed. The architecture of an information system for continuous lifecycle monitoring with a case study of aircraft components is proposed. The following featured properties of the considered system are shown: unified product description, using diverse machine-treatable information media and toolkits for its recording both in manual and automatic modes. Composition and functionality of the system software and some hardware components are outlined.

Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania

Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology.

Middle Stone Age starch acquisition in the Niassa Rift, Mozambique

The quest for direct lines of evidence for Paleolithic plant consumption during the African Middle Stone Age has led scientists to study residues and use-wear on flaked stone tools. Past work has established lithic function through multiple lines of evidence and the spatial breakdown of use-wear and microscopic traces on tool surfaces. This paper focuses on the quantitative analysis of starch assemblages and the botanical identification of grains from flake and core tools to learn about human ecology of carbohydrate use around the Niassa woodlands, in the Mozambican Rift. The processing of starchy plant parts is deduced from the occurrence of starch assemblages that presumably got attached to stone tool surfaces by actions associated with extractive or culinary activities. Specifically, we investigate starch grains from stone tools recently excavated in northern Mozambique at the site of Mikuyu; which presumably spans the middle to late Pleistocene and represents similar sites found along the Malawi/Niassa corridor that links East, Southern, and Central Africa. Starch was extracted and processed with a diverse tool kit consisting of scrapers, cores, points, flakes, and other kinds of tools. The microbotanical data suggests consumption of seeds, legumes, caryopses, piths, underground storage organs, nuts, and mesocarps from more than a dozen families. Our data suggest a great antiquity for starch use in Africa as well as an expanded diet and intensification.

Tying new knots in synthetic biology

Recent years have seen the emergence of synthetic biology, which encompasses the engineering of living organisms as well as the implementation of biological behavior in non-living substrates. Many of these engineered systems have harnessed the diverse toolkit of proteins, genes, and cellular processes that nature offers. While these efforts have been fruitful, they have also illustrated the difficulty associated with programming highly complex functions by tapping into cellular processes. Another set of efforts has focused on building circuits, performing computation, and constructing nanoscale machines using nucleic acids. Zhang et al., 2007, Science 318, 1121-1125 and Yin et al., 2008, Nature 451, 318-322 recently demonstrated flexible approaches for the modular construction of such biochemical devices exclusively using DNA. These approaches have exciting implications both for engineering living cells and for mimicking life-like behavior at the nanoscale.

NARAC: an emergency response resource for predicting the atmospheric dispersion and assessing the consequences of airborne radionuclides

The National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) serves as a national resource for the United States, providing tools and services to quickly predict the environmental contamination and health effects caused by airborne radionuclides, and to provide scientifically based guidance to emergency managers for the protection of human life. NARAC's scientists have developed a diverse tool kit of numerical modeling capabilities to respond to different types of release events, distance scales (local, regional, continental, and global), and response times.

Practicing what we preach: Using professional degree principles to improve HRIR and management teaching

Many of the central principles of professional degrees taught to HRIR and business school students—putting theory into practice, knowing your customers, benchmarking against best practices, and using diverse toolkits for problem solving—are equally valid for the practice of teaching HRIR and business courses. Learning theory needs to be put into practice in the professional classroom, instructors must understand students and their diverse learning styles, teaching practices should be benchmarked against best practices, and instructors need to develop teaching toolkits for creating effective courses. As teachers of professional students, we should practice what we preach.

DIVERSE: A Framework for Building Extensible and Reconfigurable Device-Independent Virtual Environments and Distributed Asynchronous Simulations

We present DIVERSE, a highly modular collection of complimentary software packages designed to facilitate the creation of device-independent virtual environments and distributed asynchronous simulations. DIVERSE is free/open source software, containing both end-user programs and C++ application programming interfaces (APIs). DPF is the DIVERSE graphics interface to OpenGL Performer. A program using the DPF API can run without modification on platforms ranging from fully immersive systems such as CAVEs to generic desktop workstations. The DIVERSE toolkit (DTK) contains all the nongraphical components of DIVERSE, such as networking utilities, hardware device access, and navigational techniques. It introduces a software implementation of networks of replicated noncoherent shared memory. It also introduces a method that seamlessly extends hardware drivers into interprocess and Internet hardware services. We will describe the design of DIVERSE and present a specific example of how it is being used to aid researchers.

Tools to Get Food: The Subsistants of Tasmanian Aborigines and Tanzanian Chimpanzees Compared

Tools used to get food are compared between wild chimpanzees in western Tanzania and aboriginal Tasmanians at the time of European contact. Systematic qualitative and quantitative comparison is enabled by use of Oswalt's taxonomy of subsistence technology. The results show surprising similarity in the number of items in the tool kit, raw materials used, proportion of tools made versus those used unchanged, extent of complexity, type of prey, etc. Key contrasts also emerge: only human tools have more than one type of component and are made using other tools. Overall, however, the gap between the most technically diverse nonhuman tool kit and the simplest human material culture seems narrow.