Jose Cruz

This paper describes a one-day workshop format for introducing ethics into the engineering curriculum prepared at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). It responds to the ethics criteria newly integrated into the accreditation process by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). It also employs an ethics across the curriculum (EAC) approach; engineers identify the ethical issues, write cases that dramatize these issues, and then develop exercises making use of these cases that are specially tailored to mainstream engineering classes. The different activities and strategies employed in this workshop are set forth. Specific references are made to the cases and exercises developed as a result of these workshops. The paper ends by summarizing the different assessments made of the workshop by addressing the following questions: how did it contribute to the overall ABET effort at UPRM; could other universities benefit from a similar activity; and how did the participants evaluate the workshop?

Academic dishonesty is a major problem and is thus a highly relevant area of inquiry. Considerable research has shown that key traits from the Big Five model of personality are associated with various forms of anti-social behaviour. To date, however, relatively little research interest has been devoted to study the relationship between personality traits and plagiarism. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and the inclination to commit plagiarism by undergraduate students. The main conclusion is that the inclination to plagiarize is negatively associated with Conscientiousness and Agreeableness traits. Neuroticism was not found to be related to the inclination to plagiarize. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded.

Esta investigación implementó un modelo multicomponente para promover competencias prosociales y prevenir la violencia escolar. Se desarrolló en once escuelas primarias marginadas en Sonora y Chiapas. Se utilizó un protocolo mixto, la fase cuantitativa se efectuó mediante un cuasiexperimento; la cualitativa recurrió a la investigación-acción participativa. Algunos resultados muestran un aumento en la práctica de competencias prosociales en los participantes; el índice de prosociabilidad estudiantil aumentó en ambas ciudades, y hubo una reducción en la violencia escolar. Las estrategias incidieron en el mantenimiento de climas escolares de cordialidad, mayor participación y cohesión, desarrollo de la empatía, asertividad, mejor manejo de emociones y de resolución pacífica de conflictos, lo que en suma coadyuvó a la mejora del aprovechamiento educativo y al aumento de redes de amistad.

Arguably, STEM undergraduate education has narrowed student engagement with the social, ethical, and global. Our paper argues that disengagement is caused by a failure of moral imagination. We propose socio-technical analysis as the cornerstone to a more inclusive approach to STEM education. It promotes four activities: (1) zooming in on technologies by describing their structure, function, and embedded values; (2) zooming out to the surrounding socio-technical system which constrains and enables the technology’s functioning; (3) moving back-and-forth through Appropriate Technology to assess the fit of the technology to its socio-technical surroundings; and (4) using the capability approach to finish the (re)engagement process. We then look at graduate and undergraduate student work that has successfully used our framework to combat disengagement and conclude by discussing materials we have used to assess student engagement.

Colwyn Williamson (Notre Dame J. Formal Log. 13:497–500, 1972) develops a comparison between propositional and syllogistic logic. He outlines an interpretation of the traditional square of opposition in terms of propositional logic, that is, the statements corresponding to the corners of the traditional square can be represented with propositional logic operators. His goal is to present a twofold square that preserves the truth conditions of the relationships between the formulas, and define other set of formulas that complete the traditional square to outline an octagon of opposition. We present two octahedra inspired in these squares. The octahedra hold the relations of the traditional square of opposition and also keep (and with some restrictions, extend) the equipollence and immediate inference rules.

Knowledge is central to the modern economy and society. Indeed, the knowledge society has transformed the concept of knowledge and is more and more aware of the need to overcome the lack of knowledge when has to make options or address its problems and dilemmas. One’s knowledge is less based on exact facts and more on hypotheses, perceptions or indications. Even when we use new computational artefacts and novel methodologies for problem solving, like the use of Group Decision Support Systems , the question of incomplete information is in most of the situations marginalized. On the other hand, common sense tells us that when a decision is made it is impossible to have a perception of all the information involved and the nature of its intrinsic quality. Therefore, something has to be made in terms of the information available and the process of its evaluation. It is under this framework that a Multi-valued Extended Logic Programming language will be used for knowledge representation and reasoning, leading to a model that embodies the Quality-of-Information and its quantification, along the several stages of the decision-making process. In this way, it is possible to provide a measure of the value of the QoI that supports the decision itself. This model will be here presented in the context of a GDSS for VirtualECare, a system aimed at sustaining online healthcare services