US President's Council Research Articles

Mentorship During College Transition Predicts Academic Self-Efficacy and Sense of Belonging Among STEM Students

Mentorship During College Transition Predicts Academic Self-Efficacy and Sense of Belonging Among STEM Students MaryBeth Apriceno (bio), Sheri R. Levy (bio), and Bonita London (bio) The demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates has increased significantly over the last decade. Because of the insufficient number of STEM graduates, this demand has not been met, resulting in a significant shortage of STEM workers in the US (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012). By 2025, the US is projected to have over 2 million unfilled STEM jobs. This shortage is even more pronounced among groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in STEM, for example, women, African Americans, and Latinxs (National Science Foundation, 2018). Meanwhile, diversity in STEM companies has been shown to relate to greater company earnings, productivity, and perceptions of inclusive work culture (President's Council, 2012). It has become increasingly clear that a key contributor to this shortage is the difficulty in retaining college students in STEM majors. Chen (2013) reported that 48% of college students majoring in a STEM field switch to a non-STEM major or dropped out before completing their degrees. STEM majors have a higher attrition rate than non-STEM majors, and the attrition rate is even higher for underrepresented students in STEM programs (Wilson et al., 2012). The first year of college has been identified as a critical period when attrition in STEM typically occurs (Chen, 2013), highlighting the need to study this period to understand why. Indeed, the transition to college has generally been emphasized as a significant life phase in which goals and doubts are paramount and have great influence on how students [End Page 643] negotiate academic and personal stressors in the short term and long term (Ruble & Seidman, 1996). Analyzing data from the World Health Organization's World Mental Health International College Student Initiative, which included more than 14,000 students from 19 colleges, Auerbach and colleagues (2018) found that more than one third of firstyear college students reported symptoms of mental illness severe enough to meet diagnosis criteria as put forth by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, with the most common disorders reported being major depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, researchers have estimated that only 15% of students seek counseling during their first year of college (Auerbach et al., 2018). During this educational transition, students are more likely to compare their performance to that of their peers, making them sensitive to perceived underperformance; underrepresented minorities pursuing STEM majors may be even more vulnerable (London, Rosenthal, Levy, & Lobel, 2011). Thus, attention to and appraisal of one's performance may be more likely to impact students' academic self-efficacy at this critical juncture. The transition to college also exposes first-year students to new environments, relationships, and academic challenges that influence their sense of belonging (Ahlqvist, London, & Rosenthal, 2013). Feelings of not fitting in (i.e., low sense of belonging) have been shown to predict disengagement, poor academic performance, and dropping out of school among first-year STEM students (Ahlqvist et al., 2013; London et al., 2011). It is timely and crucial to identify factors that can reduce attrition among STEM majors at the start of college. Findings from a small segment of the literature spotlight a possible key buffer against attrition: the availability and quality of mentors and mentoring relationships. Mentors are relevant adults who provide guidance and advice and serve as models for success in their field (Blake-Beard, Bayne, Crosby, & Muller, 2011). Previous research has shown that college students with mentors earn higher GPAs (Campbell & Campbell, 1997) and are less likely to drop out (Wilson et al., 2012) than students without mentors. Our prior work found that exposure to role models in STEM fields leads to greater interest in pursuing a STEM career (Rosenthal, Levy, London, Lobel, & Bazile, 2013). With higher rates of STEM attrition during the transition to college, when academic self-efficacy and sense of belonging are particularly vulnerable, early mentorship (i.e., at the start of the first year) may be the most effective strategy to retain students in STEM programs, particularly underrepresented minorities. Many mentoring relationships occur as a result of informal relationships that...

Analysis of dynamic capabilities for spectrum sharing in the citizens broadband radio service

This paper seeks to identify and analyze the sources of value creation and capture by key stakeholders in the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) three tier spectrum sharing framework introduced by the US President's Council of Advanced Science & Technology. More flexible and dynamic use of the 3.5 GHz spectrum aims to increase the efficiency of spectrum use in delivering fast growing and converging mobile broadband and media services while paving the way to innovations in technology and business models. In this paper, we focus on key stakeholders' capability to deal with combined internal and external resources and capabilities in doing business, referred to as dynamic capability. Spectrum sharing, introducing a rapid change in the technology and business environments, requires dynamic capabilities from spectrum offering, spectrum utilization, and spectrum management perspectives. We focus on defining key CBRS functional domains and identifying their key antecedents, elements, and outcomes. The analysis highlights the key role of the regulator in creating a sharing framework with incentives for all the key stakeholders, with different operational and business requirements, and enabling scaling ecosystem. Increased system dynamics in spectrum sharing will introduce a need for big data analytics, near real time network management capabilities and low cost third tier general authorized access radios, leveraging dominant technology ecosystems. This study provides viewpoints for stakeholders about additional ingredients and actions, which may be relevant to promote spectrum sharing in the form of the CBRS. The concept of dynamic capabilities was found useful to analyze the sources of competitive advantage regarding CBRS spectrum sharing.

A cosmic Ray Muon Experiment: a Way to Teach Standard Model of Particles at Community Colleges

This experiment is an example of research for early undergraduate students and of its benefits and challenges as an accessible strategy for community colleges, in the spirit of the report on improving undergraduate STEM education from the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The goals of this project include measuring average low- energy muon flux, day/night flux difference, time dilation, energy spectra of electrons and muons in arbitrary units, muon decay curve, average lifetime of muons. From the lifetime data we calculate the weak coupling constant gw, electric charge e and the Higgs energy density.

From Therapy and Enhancement to Assistive Technologies: An Attempt to Clarify the Role of the Sports Physician

Sports physicians are continuously confronted with new biotechnological innovations. This applies not only to doping in sports, but to all kinds of so-called enhancement methods. One fundamental problem regarding the sports physician's self-image consists in a blurred distinction between therapeutic treatment and non-therapeutic performance enhancement. After a brief inventory of the sports physician's work environment I reject as insufficient the attempts to resolve the conflict of the sports physician by making it a classificatory problem. Followed by a critical assessment of some ideas from the US President's Council on Bioethics, the formulation of ethical codes and attempts regarding a moral topography, it is argued that the sports physician's conflict cannot be resolved by the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Instead, we also have to consider the possibility that the therapy-based paradigm of medicine cannot do justice to the challenges of the continuously increasing technical manipulability of the human body and even our cognitive functions as well. At the same time we should not adhere to transhumanist ideas, because non-therapeutic interventions require clear criteria. Based on assistive technologies an alternative framework can be sketched that allows for the integration of therapeutic and non-therapeutic purposes. After a thorough definition of standards and criteria, the role of the sports physician might be defined as that of an assistant for enhancement. Yet the process of defining such an alternative framework is a societal and political task that cannot be accomplished by the sports physicians themselves. Until these questions are answered sports physicians continue to find themselves in a structural dilemma that they partially can come to terms with through personal integrity.

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR DEATH: A PARTING OF THE WAYS

Most organized religions have indicated a level of support for organ donation including the diagnosis of death by the brain criterion. Organ donation is seen as a gift of love and fits within a communitarian ethos that most religions embrace. The acceptance of the determination of death by the brain criterion, where it has been explained, is reconciled with religious views of soul and body by using a notion of integration. Because the soul may be seen as that which integrates the human body, in the absence of any other signs of human functioning, loss of integration is considered to be an indication that soul and body have separated. To some extent this view would seem to be informed by an Aristotelian notion of the soul, but it fits well enough with religious notions of the person continuing after death. There have been several developments internationally that indicate that the acceptance of so-called 'brain death' by organized religions has been challenged by new developments including the acceptance of a lesser standard than loss of all brain function and a rejection by the US President's Council on Bioethics of the notion of loss of integration as an explanation of death by the brain criterion.

The US President's Council on Bioethics: modeling a thicker knowledge politics

This article argues that the “thicker” moral inquiry modeled by the US President's Council on Bioethics is a significant and valuable innovation in knowledge politics. It first distinguishes two kinds of knowledge politics – active deciding vs. thinking and talking. The focus here is on the latter. The article then introduces some relevant historical background. Next, it indicates how prior bioethics committees in the US practised a “thin” version of knowledge politics that both reflected and consolidated typical ways of thinking and talking about biomedical technology. The article then argues that, because of the non-neutrality of technology, a thin knowledge politics is neither sufficient nor necessary for liberal democratic governments concerned to understand and manage emerging technologies. The last section uses a Council report to illustrate the benefits of a thicker knowledge politics.

Stem Cells through Stem Beliefs: The Co-production of Biotechnological Pluralism

In the last decade human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have emerged as prominent scientific and political objects. Their potential for regenerative medicine and the intersection with early human life spurred both great excitement and considerable ethical worries. Partially as a response to this controversy, the search for ethically unproblematic sources of hESCs became a priority. This paper analyses two paradigmatic examples of this search that emerged within the US President's Council on Bioethics (PCB). The first is altered nuclear transfer (ANT), a proposal aimed at modifying the cloning protocol to generate life forms useful for hESC harvesting but incapable of further development. From its inception to the contested implementation by leading scientists, ANT displays the intimate co-production of the scientific and the social: moral norms become encoded in genetic designs, enabling the mutual reinforcement of biotechnological rationalities and political commitments to science and social cohesion. The second example is the attempt to define embryo death in order to equate hESC harvesting to organ transplantation. Also in this case, again in a poignant display of co-production, the social design of brain death is re-enacted in the scientific quest for molecular markers of embryo death. In both cases the mutual adaptation of moral norms and epistemic practices generates biological artefacts as technological solutions to political controversies. This heralds a great intimacy between the scientific and political tasks of making sense of life. This in turn has implications for the pluralistic development of biotechnologically mature societies.

POTENTIALITY AND HUMAN EMBRYOS

Consideration of the potentiality of human embryos to develop characteristics of personhood, such as intellect and will, has figured prominently in arguments against abortion and the use of human embryos for research. In particular, such consideration was the basis for the call of the US President's Council on Bioethics for a moratorium on stem cell research on human embryos. In this paper, I critique the concept of potentiality invoked by the Council and offer an alternative account. In contrast to the Council's view that an embryo's potentiality is determined by definition and is not affected by external conditions that may prevent certain possibilities from ever being realized, I propose an empirically grounded account of potentiality that involves an assessment of the physical and decisional conditions that may restrict an embryo's possibilities. In my view, some human embryos lack the potentiality to become a person that other human embryos have. Assuming for the sake of argument that the potential to become a person gives a being special moral status, it follows that some human embryos lack this status. This argument is then used to support Gene Outka's suggestion that it is morally permissible to experiment on 'spare' frozen embryos that are destined to be destroyed.

Manipulating your mind

The Decade of the Brain, proclaimed by US President George Bush in 1990, passed without making much of an obvious impact. But it did in fact produce considerable scientific advances in neuro‐biology, giving scientists an exponentially increasing knowledge of how the brain works and the means to manipulate biochemical processes within and between nerve cells. This knowledge is slowly trickling down to society as well, be it in the pharmaceutical industry, to parents concerned about their child's performance in school, to students looking for chemical helpers to pass their exams, or to military researchers who have an obvious interest in keeping soldiers awake and alert. > Unlike the many claimed applications of genetics… diagnostic and therapeutic products from neurobiological research are already available The ability to fiddle with the brain with ever‐increasing effectiveness has also created critical questions about how to use this knowledge. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future , Leon Kass, Chairman of the US President's Council on Bioethics, and Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at the Open University, UK, are the most prominent and outspoken critics of the use of psychopharmaceuticals and other neurological techniques to analyse and interfere with human mental capabilities. Their concerns have also grasped the attention of neurobiologists, ethicists, philosophers and the lay public, who are all slowly realising the enormous potential of modern neuroscience. “People closely identify themselves with their brains, they don't with their genes,” said Arthur L. Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. ![][1] Although these debates started in the late 1990s, it took the general public a bit longer to take notice— The New York Times and The Economist did not pick up on the issue until 2002. “There is a great amount of information about the brain but no one's paying attention to the ethics,” … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Embryonic Persons in the Cloning and Stem Cell Debates

Public policy debates such as we find in the Untied Nations, the Singapore Bioethics Advisory Committee, and the US President's Council on Bioethics reflect behind-the-scenes theological debates. Although religious spokespersons agree nearly universally that human reproductive cloning should be banned; moral ambivalence rises when confronting human embryonic stem cell research. Rather than focus on beneficence (medical benefits), religious bioethicists focus on nonmalificence (embryo protection). The Vatican claim that stem cell research should be banned because it destroys embryos appears at first to rely upon ensoulment at conception; but a closer analysis shows that the Vatican position relies upon genetic uniqueness. Appeal to genetic uniqueness is inadequate for Christian anthropology; what needs to be added is a relational and proleptic understanding of human dignity.

96/05553 Institutions for global environmental change. The US President's Council on Sustainable Development

Microwave-assisted pyrolysis (MAP) of lignocellulosic biomass is a technique that could potentially be used to produce and upgrade renewable energy carriers. However, there is no available information about the formation of dioxins and other organic pollutants in MAP treatment of woody biomass. In this study, MAP experiments were conducted in lab-scale using virgin softwood, bark, and impregnated wood as feedstocks. The non-condensable gas, liquid (fractionated into aqueous and oil phases), and char fractions generated during pyrolysis were collected and analysed for polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), dibenzofurans (PCDFs) and naphthalenes (PCNs). The concentrations of PCDDs, PCDFs and PCNs in the pyrolysis products ranged from 0.52 to 43.7 ng kg−1. All investigated compound groups were most abundant in the oil fraction, accounting for up to 68% (w/w) of the total concentrations. The highest PCDD, PCDF and PCN concentrations were found from the pyrolysis of bark, which has relatively high contents of chlorine and mineral matter, followed by impregnated wood, which contains organic and metal-based preservatives. The homologue profiles of all three compound groups were dominated by the less chlorinated homologues. The homologue abundance decreased as the degree of chlorination increased. This trend was observed for all three feedstocks.

The US President's Council On Sustainable Development

President Clinton came into office in January 1993 on a wave of environmental euphoria. His Vice President, Al Gore, was already known for his sympathetic environmental and social views. In June of that year, President Clinton called on 25 executives from business, environmental and government organizations to give him a plan for prosperity for the 21st century. He asked for a far-sighted and bold strategy that would spur a type of economic growth that would benefit current and future generations without harming the Earth's natural resources or biological systems — in other words a plan for sustainable development. And although the outlook for the environment has dimmed since the election by a US Congress bent on making deep cuts in environmental and social programmes, the bipartisan Council is preparing to issue its report. Due early this year, the report is expected to contain scores of recommendations on wide-range of issues. Some will advocate changes to existing laws or institutions. Others will call for new laws and new institutions. The primary hope for the report, though, is that it will spearhead a national debate on how to advance prosperity and equity while safeguarding the environment. The report aims to provide a new framework for a new century.