Engaging and Authentic Education Practices

This chapter is an argument for and celebration of lessons learned during the pandemic of 2020 toward the end of designing authentic and engaging learning experiences across education systems. In the forced shift to online and multimodal learning, educators and students experienced challenges of access, equity, and low engagement. However, there is an opportunity to extrapolate the lessons of 2020 for the betterment of education into the future. This chapter describes lessons pertaining to planning and collaboration, classroom environment, humanized online practices, as well as empowering pedagogy. The chapter concludes with three practical application examples for further thought and inspiration. The pandemic year can be one to survive and never think about again or, with the proper perspective, education's greatest learning moment.

The Future of Water: Technology, Challenges, and Islamic Perspective

In all parts of the world, water is rapidly becoming an emerging issue. Mature technologies had been established in the water treatment process to overcome the issue. However, the water treatment technology advance does not mean it is not faced with its issues. In fact, it still leaves many problems for humans due to both technical issues and management problems. Understanding the water treatment process's proper perspective is required to achieve sustainable and equitable development for Muslim countries. In the other hand, Islam endeavors comprehensive guidelines on all aspects of human life and manages water resources. This mini-review article will give a brief explanation of some excellent technologies of water treatment and challenges associated with the advancing control over their beneficiation. Therefore, an Islamic perspective will be addressed to emphasize how Islamic-based policy and management can take a leading solution to overcome the fundamental problem for the future of water for the benefit of human life.

The First Two Total Cystectomies – A brief history of failed-successes

Objectives Radical cystectomy is a complex surgery for bladder cancer which has undergone progressive changes for a century. The originators of the procedure required pioneering innovation and their biographies place the challenges of radical cystectomy in proper perspective Methods English and German textbooks and secondary sources Results Bernard Bardenheuer (1839-1913) and Karl Pawlik (1849-1914) performed the world’s first two cystectomies for bladder cancer, overcoming challenges of contemporary anesthesia, vascular control, and renal drainage. Conclusions The originators of radical cystectomy illustrate that true advances in surgery require bold innovation and forward thinking but also that the limitations of contemporary technology must be overcome.

Unsupervised Clustering for Optimal Locality Detection

Data science is the most sought over domain in today's world and has been known for its accurate decision-making capabilities, delivering recommendations that have the best profits and much more. The demand for this analysis is the growing technology and population that opens a new dimension of demands leading to the world crisis in every sector. Clustering is the part that helps in making these decisions more accurate and has been evolving through time. Impacts of neighborhoods and localities for businesses are often marked by many factors. To understand the factors and outline them to the proper perspective, through this research the authors performed perspective data cleaning, wrangling, visualization to understand the factors and cluster them for a much prospective decision-making process.

On Entropy, Information, and Conservation of Information

The term entropy is used in different meanings in different contexts, sometimes in contradictory ways, resulting in misunderstandings and confusion. The root cause of the problem is the close resemblance of the defining mathematical expressions of entropy in statistical thermodynamics and information in the communications field, also called entropy, differing only by a constant factor with the unit ‘J/K’ in thermodynamics and ‘bits’ in the information theory. The thermodynamic property entropy is closely associated with the physical quantities of thermal energy and temperature, while the entropy used in the communications field is a mathematical abstraction based on probabilities of messages. The terms information and entropy are often used interchangeably in several branches of sciences. This practice gives rise to the phrase conservation of entropy in the sense of conservation of information, which is in contradiction to the fundamental increase of entropy principle in thermodynamics as an expression of the second law. The aim of this paper is to clarify matters and eliminate confusion by putting things into their rightful places within their domains. The notion of conservation of information is also put into a proper perspective.

An advance in transfer line chilldown heat transfer of cryogenic propellants in microgravity using microfilm coating for enabling deep space exploration

The extension of human space exploration from a low earth orbit to a high earth orbit, then to Moon, Mars, and possibly asteroids is NASA’s biggest challenge for the new millennium. Integral to this mission is the effective, sufficient, and reliable supply of cryogenic propellant fluids. Therefore, highly energy-efficient thermal-fluid management breakthrough concepts to conserve and minimize the cryogen consumption have become the focus of research and development, especially for the deep space mission to mars. Here we introduce such a concept and demonstrate its feasibility in parabolic flights under a simulated space microgravity condition. We show that by coating the inner surface of a cryogenic propellant transfer pipe with low-thermal conductivity microfilms, the quenching efficiency can be increased up to 176% over that of the traditional bare-surface pipe for the thermal management process of chilling down the transfer pipe. To put this into proper perspective, the much higher efficiency translates into a 65% savings in propellant consumption.

Systems consolidation, transformation and reorganization: Multiple Trace Theory, Trace Transformation Theory and their Competitors

We review the literature on systems consolidation by providing a brief history of the field to place the current research in proper perspective. We cover the literature on both humans and non-humans, which are highly related despite the differences in techniques and tasks that are used. We argue that understanding the interactions between hippocampus and neocortex (and other structures) that underlie systems consolidation, depend on appreciating the close correspondence between psychological and neural representations of memory, as postulated by Multiple Trace Theory and Trace Transformation Theory. We end by evaluating different theories of systems consolidation in light of the evidence we reviewed and suggest that the concept of systems consolidation, with its central concern with the time-limited role the hippocampus plays in memory, may have outlived its usefulness. We suggest replacing it with a program of research on the psychological processes and neural mechanisms that underlie changes in memory across the lifetime – a natural history of memory change.

Frege on intuition and objecthood in projective geometry

In recent years, several scholars have been investigating Frege’s mathematical background, especially in geometry, in order to put his general views on mathematics and logic into proper perspective. In this article I want to continue this line of research and study Frege’s views on geometry in their own right by focussing on his views on a field which occupied center stage in nineteenth century geometry, namely, projective geometry.

Quantum Fourier Operators and Their Application

The application of the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) within the field of quantum computation has been manifold. Shor’s algorithm, phase estimation and computing discrete logarithms are but a few classic examples of its use. These initial blueprints for quantum algorithms have sparked a cascade of tantalizing solutions to problems considered to be intractable on a classical computer. Therefore, two main threads of research have unfolded. First, novel applications and algorithms involving the QFT are continually being developed. Second, improvements in the algorithmic complexity of the QFT are also a sought after commodity. In this work, we review the structure of the QFT and its implementation. In order to put these concepts in their proper perspective, we provide a brief overview of quantum computation. Finally, we provide a permutation structure for putting the QFT within the context of universal computation.