Eastern Oregon University

Quantitative accountability has become a widespread rationale for how organizations ought to operate in the twenty-first century. However, we know little about how the people who craft and implement such policies learn this rationale. How do future policy professionals learn quantitative accountability? How do the people responsible for organizational accountability learn it, and learn to do it? To answer these questions, we draw from a two-year ethnography of a cohort of students at a highly regarded Masters of Public Affairs (MPA) program. We find that, instead of directly debating forms of organizational control such as accountability, students learn accountability indirectly through an emphasis on the quantitative techniques that facilitate accountability. MPA students are primed into a quantitative view of their future careers, acquire quantitative "language" and "tools," and are socialized into accountability in ways that are both tacit and tangible, even as the appropriateness of accountability itself is largely unquestioned.

Structurally and functionally complex technologies were a defining element of Late Pleistocene societies, but physical examples of them remain extremely rare in the archaeological record because most were made from perishable raw materials. The sparse material record of those myriad technologies limits our ability to formulate nuanced models about this critical period in human history. We present radiocarbon, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry, and other taxonomic identification data from two of the largest Late Pleistocene perishable assemblages in the world, Cougar Mountain Cave and Paisley Caves, Oregon, US. These data include 66 radiocarbon dates on 55 items made from 15 different plant and animal taxa, including the oldest known physical remains of sewn hide. We provide data on eyed bone needles from four regional sites, showing that they are among the finest bone needles made in the Pleistocene. Our study illuminates the complex interplay of culture, climate, and technology in the Pleistocene.

Sophisticated cyber-physical threats are often complex and unpredictable, making them difficult for grid operators to accurately detect and quickly mitigate. Responding to these threats demands cognitive flexibility, where operators can adapt behavior and decision-making in response to changing circumstances beyond routine operating conditions. This paper investigates cognitive flexibility and operator performance through a two-stage experimental study on cyber-physical threats. Three hypotheses were proposed: (1) whether cyber-attack scenarios, exhibiting task-reversal characteristics, increase operator errors and solution times; (2) whether physiological measures, such as eye-tracking and skin response metrics, characterize operator performance during cyber-physical events; and (3) whether cyber decision-support tools improve operator performance. These hypotheses were validated on (a) a custom energy management system and (b) a real-time hardware-in-the-loop cyber-power digital twin testbed with 40 participants, including professional power system operators and students with a power systems background.

Objective: The purpose of this conceptual manuscript is to extend the results of a series of studies by examining an unexpected observation in our work in community college Career Technical Education (CTE) courses. We offer a multi-disciplinary theoretical critique that we believe has important implications for postsecondary literacy scholars as well as community college and CTE scholars. Method: From research literature, we deduced that in community college CTE, professional fields including criminal justice, automotive, nursing, and horticulture have historically been positioned as non-academic and diminutively characterized as “vocational.” In our recent observational, interview, and survey research, we identified a range of complex literacy practices, modalities, and text types within CTE areas. Results: More directly, we observed non-print artifacts being used in ways that were analogous to reading and comprehending traditionally more valued “academic” print texts. Our observations, offered here anecdotally, aim to introduce these types of artifacts, which we refer to as entexts, toward advancing scholarly re-conceptualization and revaluing of the literacy practices within CTE areas. Conclusions: The theoretical model shared in this manuscript demands additional research as our findings extend the parameters of the New Literacies to engage with a fuller understanding of multimodal literacy via entexting as found regularly on the other side of a community college campus (in CTE contexts).