Description: This paper discusses Mechanical and Energy Engineering curriculum. Abstract: The continuing expansion of the new College of Engineering at the University of North Texas (UNT) has created an opportunity to establish a new Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering and an excellent occasion for the establishment of innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to engineering education. The explicit addition of Energy to the Mechanical Engineering curriculum is a new model of engineering education that parallels the innovations of our current Learning to Learn (L2L) project oriented concept course with the addition of innovative approaches for mechanical engineering and emphasis on energy engineering education. The new Mechanical and Energy Engineering (MEE) baccalaureate-level program will provide the intellectual foundation for successful career preparation and lifelong learning for the students. This innovative curriculum has been designed with a system-level approach to ME-based design., on the fundamentals of undergraduate level energy engineering within the mechanical engineering discipline, and will provide experiential-oriented approaches for the better understanding of classical mechanical engineering principles. It will also provide a new interdisciplinary ME curriculum approach to the most important energy technology areas. We are going to present the curriculum and discuss components of the program from freshman to to senior ...

Description: This paper discusses Action research. Abstract: Action research is the inquiry part of a Professional Development School (PDS) model that all UNT elementary education, pre-service teacher/student interns complete with mentor teachers during student teaching. Approximately 300 projects were completed across four years in the Denton PDS. The 300 projects were examined to determine the trends in action research. Due to the qualitative nature of the study, there were no hypotheses, only assumptions that there were trends. The method used to examine the projects employed qualitative analysis techniques using the electronic program NVIVO. The results indicated that there were trends in questions that tended toward behavioral and transition issues in the classroom. The major research conclusion is that the Denton PDS follows the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) PDS Standards in the categories of "At Standard" and "Leading" in the area of action research implementation.

Description: This paper discusses the "Adopt-A-Molecule" project. Abstract: Adopt-A-Molecule was a 9-week long, two-part term project, undertaken by students enrolled in the first of the 2-semester sequence in organic chemistry (Fall 2009). This newly developed project was an attempt to increase students' interest in organic chemistry by giving them semester-long opportunities to actively explore a range of organic compounds and their varied applications in the real world. Several substances commonly found in food, medicines, personal care products, sports equipment, etc, were selected for this project. At the beginning of the semester, each student was assigned one of these substances, which they "adopted" for the term. During the first 5 weeks, prompted by a series of questions to guide their inquiry, students gathered, and reported weekly, information regarding various properties of their adopted molecule. Many of the questions paralleled the topics under discussion in class. The following week, each student created a "Molecule Profile" that included all the previously gathered information, along with the other interesting facts that they had uncovered. A sample profile was shown briefly in class, but no template was provided, and students were encouraged to use their creativity to build visually appealing profiles. The student-generated profiles were then ...

Description: Abstract: This paper describes an algorithm for open text shallow semantic parsing. The algorithm relies on a frame dataset (FrameNet) and a semantic network (WordNet), to identify semantic relations between words in open text, as well as shallow semantic features associated with concepts in the text. Parsing semantic structures allows semantic units and constituents to be accessed and processed in a more meaningful way than syntactic parsing, moving the automation of understanding natural language text to a higher level.

Description: This paper analyzes the persistence of referenced web resources with memento. Abstract: In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the reference URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45% (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28% of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.