Elizabethtown College

Engineering education and training often focus on convergent thinking processes to guide decisions using formal and analytical methods. However, divergent thinking processes such as considering multiple options, are necessary before making a choice, providing opportunities for improved approaches and innovative outcomes. Divergent thinking promotes flexibility through considering broader and more diverse perspectives and navigating ambiguity present in real world engineering projects. However, while divergent thinking is critical to engineering work, it receives little emphasis and understanding. Thus, our study focused on identifying facilitators and barriers to students' divergent thinking in project experiences. We interviewed 20 mechanical engineering undergraduate and high school students about their divergent exploration during extended engineering projects. We used two different narrative inquiry methods to understand intersecting barriers and facilitators and provide in-depth examples of participants' perspectives navigating divergent thinking in specific engineering contexts and structures. Our findings identify various crucial factors, notably project structure and requirements, organizational culture, and mentorship direction (authority and guidance) as impediments and promoters of divergent thinking in engineering student projects. The findings inform pedagogical approaches and engineering education structures and environments to foster divergent thought, challenging what engineering work can include, how engineering work is conducted, and who participates in engineering.

Hutterites are a communitarian Anabaptist group whose members live in collective, usually agriculturally based, “colonies” in the western United States and Canada. A 2024 Hutterite-published directory provides information for all 544 colonies then in existence and shows a total population of 58,392. The colony and population data are presented here both geographically and in terms of Hutterite affiliations. Using data on the number of colonies in 2009, a 15-year comparison reveals a 12.6% growth in colonies during that time, with variation among the affiliations. Declining Hutterite birthrates are among the factors that explain the lower rates of growth than found among some other Plain Anabaptist groups.

In this work we introduce a novel application of Large Language Models (LLMs) towards the classification of malicious Windows Portable Executable (WinPE) files. Rather than fine-tuning an LLM based on the raw binary of the samples serving as the corpus, in this case we leverage our in depth knowledge of the underlying structure of the WinPE format to apply a two phased approach to translate each file into human readable format. For our studies we focus on the header portion of the files in order to reduce the required time for the fine-tuning process, performing Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) applying a QLoRA adapter to a light-weight baseline model. In addition, we deploy our fine-tuned model according to Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles. The model is containerized, with constraints applied in terms of the amount of CPU, memory, and networking resources that are available. In addition, the model is deployed as a virtualized LLM (vLLM) adhering to a server-client architecture. We benchmark the fine-tuned model against the SoReL-20M dataset and compare results in terms of both accuracy, including the macro-averaged F1 score, and latency, including the Time-to-First-Token (TTFT). By fine-tuning the model to understand the language of the Windows Portable Executable format, we demonstrate a significant improvement in macro-averaged F1 score, up to an absolute difference of 50 percentage points over generic LLMs, while maintaining comparable latency.

U.S. households held $122 trillion in financial assets at the start of 2024, yet little is known about how household financial satisfaction shapes corporate risk taking. We argue that Satisfaction with Household Finance (SWHF) increases CEOs' risk tolerance through home life imprinting, where personal financial skills transfer to corporate decisions, and through normative contagion, as widespread satisfaction fosters optimistic social norms. Using World Values Survey data and 204,545 firm year observations across 37 countries, and applying OLS and two stage least squares regressions, we find that higher SWHF boosts investment and risk taking and helps firms withstand credit constraints and uncertainty, while during the 2007 to 2009 crisis it is associated with more cautious behavior. Results are robust to controls for happiness, trust, cultural norms, alternative risk proxies, and instrumental variable tests. Our study positions household financial well-being as a new behavioral driver of corporate risk taking.

There is no abstract for a Centers for Plain Community Reserach feature.